Lai

A name originally applied to a variety of poems by medieval French writers in the latter twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.

Some lais were lyric, but most of them were short narratives written in octosyllabic couplets.

Marie de France, who wrote in the French language although probably in England at the court of King Henry II, composed a number of notable poems of this sort; they are called "Breton lais" because their narratives are drawn for the most part from Arthurian and other Celtic legends. ("Breton" refers to Brittany, which was a Celtic part of France)

The Anglicized term Breton lay was applied in the fourteenth century to English poems written on the model of the narratives of Marie de France; they included Sir Orfeo, the Lay of Launfal, and Chaucer's "The Franklin's Tale."

Later still, lay was used by

English poets simply as a synonym for song, or as an archaic word for a fairly

short narrative poem (for example by Sir Walter Scott in his Lay of the Last

Minstrel, 1805).