the B-lines heptasyllabic (seven syllables). Vernacular success Tail rhyme was taken up by poets composing in Old French and especially in the Anglo-Norman French spoken by some in England in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. The poems surviving in tail rhyme suggest associations between the form and high-minded moral or devotional material. A later twelfth-century poet known only as "Beneit" composed an extended French hagiography of Thomas Becket, La Vie de Thomas Becket, in AABAAB stanzas. The Distichs of Cato were translated into Anglo-Norman tail rhyme verse twice, independently, in the twelfth century. Various kinds of tail rhyme were also deployed by the Franciscan friar Nicholas Bozon, who wrote in Anglo-Norman early in the fourteenth century. It has been suggested that the Franciscans might have had a particular attachment to tail rhyme. Early Middle English verse incorporated tail rhyme under the influence of Anglo-Norman. Tail rhyme is used in the thirteenth-century Proverbs of Hendyng. The chronicle of Peter Langtoft reports and quotes various tail rhyme popular songs on historical events in both Middle English and Anglo-Norman. Tail rhyme appears repeatedly in the Harley Lyrics, which are preserved in a manuscript from the first half of the fourteenth century but might in some cases have earlier origins. William of Shoreham deployed tail rhyme in some of his early fourteenth-century instructive poetry. A rare exception to the generally moral or devotional cast of earlier tail rhyme verse occurs in the thirteenth-century Middle English fabliau Dame Sirith. Narrative use In the fourteenth century, Middle English narrative romances particularly adopted tail rhyme, in an association between form and genre that occurred uniquely in English. Though a majority of surviving tail rhyme poems in Middle English are not romances, about a third of the surviving Middle English romances are in tail rhyme, giving the tail rhyme family of verse forms parity with rhyming couplets as the two most favoured approaches to writing Middle English romance. A non-exhaustive list of examples includes The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and part of Beves of Hamtoun in six-line tail rhyme stanzas; one version of the Middle English Octavian, in what would go on to be called the "Burns stanza"; Sir Amadace, Sir Gowther Sir Isumbras, The King of Tars and one version of Ipomadon in twelve-line tail rhyme stanzas; and Sir Degrevant and, as noted above, Sir Perceval of Galles in sixteen-line stanzas. Geoffrey Chaucer