or MANNING, or DE BRUNNE, Robert, one of the English rhyming chroniclers who flourished at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, was born at Brunne, or Bourne, in Lincolnshire. He graduated at Cambridge, and lived as a Gilbertine canon, first at Sempringham, and afterwards at Sixhill, two priories in his native county. His first work was a free paraphrase into English rhyme of the Manuel des Peches (Manual of Sins), a work of William de Waddington, in which the seven deadly sins are displayed in their most uninviting aspect by the aid of moral precepts and legendary tales. Another work of Mannyng was the Meditations of the Soyer of our Lorde Jesu, and also of his Passion and eke of the Peynes of hya Swete Modyr Mayden Margye, a metrical translation of Bonaventura's prose treatise De Cena et Passione Domini, et Pienis S. Mariae Virginis. His chief translation, however, was his rhyming chronicle of England, in two parts. The former part, treating of that period of English history between the landing of the Trojans and the death of the Welsh Prince Cadwalader in 689, is translated from Wake's Brut d'Angleterre, and, like the original, is in the romance couplets of eight syllables. The latter part, which continues the history down to the death of Edward I., is taken from Peter de Langtoft's French Chronicle, and is translated into the Alexandrines of the original. This part has been published by Hearne under the title of Peter Langtoft's Chronicle, 2 vols. 8vo, Oxford, 1725. The first part is still in manuscript. Mannyng gives indications in his works of retiring industry; but a facility in rhyming was the sole poetical faculty that he possessed. He is supposed by Hearne, but for no satisfactory reason, to be the author of the metrical romance of Rycharde Cuer-de-Lyon.