Latin Victorine sequences may have been influential in developing the tail-rhyme stanza, but it is a tremendous leap from Latin hymnody to secular romance, even for a poet familiar with both traditions. A more immediate context for the genesis of the Middle English tail-rhyme romance was the much more varied and flexible tradition of tail-rhyme poetry that developed in Anglo-Norman and earlier Middle English literature. A better understanding of this may help to solve the mystery of why the authors of the first Middle English tail-rhyme romances decided to reject the metrical forms previously employed for romance or chanson de geste in favour of the tail-rhyme stanza. This chapter surveys as comprehensively as possible the vernacular tradition of tail-rhyme composition in England from its beginnings in the twelfth century – when the texts concerned are Anglo-Norman – to roughly the first quarter of the fourteenth century, by which time Middle English is beginning to overtake Anglo-Norman as the vernacular of choice for composition and the tail-rhyme romance has come into existence. I cite the precise stanza form for each poem discussed in this chapter not because it the most interesting thing about that poem, but because it will enable readers to see more clearly the development towards the kinds of tail-rhyme stanza that become standard in Middle English poetry generally, and the tail-rhyme romance tradition in particular.

The fact that emerges most strongly from this survey of the earlier tail-rhyme poetry of England is that this type of stanza seems to have been associated, as in continental French poetry, with material that is spiritually or morally instructive, whether directly so or obliquely through satire.