Many of those subjects were of course well known and popular before the French poets took them up. The romantic story of Alexander might, in part at any rate, have been familiar to Alfred the Great; he brings the Egyptian king ‘Nectanebus the wizard’ into his translation of Orosius—Nectanebus, who is the father of Alexander in the apocryphal book from which the romances were derived. But it was not till the French poets turned the story of Alexander into verse that it really made much impression outside of France. The tale of Troy was widely read, in various authors—Ovid and Virgil, and an abstract of the _Iliad_, and in the apocryphal prose books of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan, who were supposed to have been at the seat of war, and therefore to be better witnesses than Homer. These were used and translated some times apart from any French suggestion. But it was the French _Roman de Troie_, written in the twelfth century, which spread the story everywhere—the source of innumerable Troy Books in all languages, and of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s _Troilus_.
The ‘matter of Britain’ also was generally made known through the works of French authors. There are exceptions; the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth was written in Latin. But even this found its way into English by means of a French translation; the _Brut_ of Layamon, a long poem in irregular alliterative verse, is adapted from a French rhyming translation of Geoffrey’s History. The English romances of Sir Perceval, Sir Gawain and other knights are founded on French poems.
There is an important distinction between the ‘matter of France’ and the ‘matters’ of Britain and Rome; this distinction belongs more properly to the history of French literature, but it ought not to be neglected here. The ‘matter of France’, which is exemplified in the song of Roland, belongs to an earlier time, and was made into French poetry earlier than the other subjects. The poems about Charlemagne and his peers, and others of the same sort, are sometimes called the old French epics; the French name for them is _chansons de geste_. Those epics have not only a different matter but a different form from the French Arthurian romances and the French _Roman de Troie_. What is of more importance for English poetry, there is generally a different tone and sentiment. They are older, stronger, more heroic, more like _Beowulf_ or the Maldon poem; the romances of the ‘matter of Britain’, on the other hand, are the fashionable novels of the twelfth century; their subjects are really taken from contemporary polite society. They are long love-stories, and their motive chiefly is to represent the fortunes, and, above all, the sentiments of true lovers. Roughly speaking, the ‘matter of France’ is action, the ‘matter of Britain’ is sentiment. The ‘matter of Rome’ is mixed; for while the _Roman de Troie_ (with the love-story of Troilus, and with courteous modern manners throughout) is like the romances of Lancelot and Tristram, Alexander, in the French versions, is a hero like those of the national epics, and is celebrated in the same manner as Charlemagne.