II
Judged by what survives, the literary output of the first half of the fourteenth century was small in quantity; though it must be remembered that, unlike the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries which made a fresh start and depended almost entirely on their own production, the fourteenth inherited and enjoyed a good stock of verse, to which the new compositions are a supplement.
Our first impression of this new material is negative and disappointing. The production of rimed romances falls off: their plots become increasingly absurd and mechanical; the action, so swift in the early forms, moves sluggishly through a maze of decorative descriptions; and their style at its best has the pretty inanity of Sir Thopas. The succession of merry tales—such as Dame Siriz, or The Fox and the Wolf[4] where Reynard, Isengrim, and Chauntecleer make their first bow in English—is broken until the appearance of the Canterbury Tales themselves. To find secular lyrics we must turn to the very beginning or the very end of the century, and Chaucer himself does not recover the fresh gaiety of the earlier time.
[4] Both are in Bodleian MS. Digby 86 (about 1280), and are accessible in G. H. McKnight's Middle English Humorous Tales, Boston 1913.
The decline of these characteristic thirteenth-century types becomes less surprising when we notice that literature has changed camps. The South, more especially the South-West, is now almost silent: the North and the North-West reach their literary period. Minot and Rolle are Northerners, Wiclif is a Yorkshireman by birth, the York and Towneley Miracle cycles are both from the North, and with Barbour the literature of the Scots dialect begins; Robert Mannyng belongs to the North-East Midlands; while Sir Gawayne, The Pearl, and The Destruction of Troy represent the North-West. This predominance in the present volume rests on no mere chance of selection, since the Northern (Egerton) version of Mandeville might have been preferred to the Cotton; and if the number of extracts were to be increased, the texts that first come to mind—Cursor Mundi (about 1300),[5] Prick of Conscience (about 1340), Morte Arthure (about 1360), the Chester Plays—are Northern and North-Western.
[5] Early English Text Society, ed. R. Morris. Unless other editions are mentioned, the longer works which are not represented by specimens may be read among the Early English Texts.
It is impossible to give more than a partial explanation of the change in the area of production. But as the kinds of poetry that declined early in the fourteenth century are those that owed most to French influence, it is reasonable to assume that in the South the impulse that produced them had spent its force. The same pause is observable at the same time in France, where it coincides with the transition from oral poetry to more reflective compositions written for the eye of a reader. It is the pause between the passing of the minstrels and the coming of men of letters.
Such changes were felt first in the centres of government, learning, and commerce, whence ideas and fashions spread very slowly to the country districts. At this time the North, and above all the North-West, was the backward quarter of England, thinly populated and in great part uncultivated. An industrial age had not yet dotted it with inland cities; and while America was still unknown the western havens were neglected.[6] In these old-fashioned parts the age of minstrel poetry was prolonged, and the wave of inspiration from France, though it came late, stirred the North and North-West after the South had relapsed into mediocrity or silence.
[6] See p. 150.
So, about the middle of the century, imaginative poetry found a new home in the West-Midlands. As before, poets turned to French for their subjects, and often contented themselves with free adaptation of French romances. They accepted such literary conventions as the Vision, which was borrowed from the Roman de la Rose to be the frame of Wynnere and Wastoure (1352)[7] and The Parlement of the Thre Ages,[8] before it was used in Piers Plowman and The Pearl and by Chaucer. But time and distance had weakened the French influence, and the new school of poets did not catch, as the Southern poets did, the form and spirit of their models.
[7] Ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, Oxford 1920.
[8] Ed. Gollancz, Oxford 1915.
They preferred the unrimed alliterative verse, which from pre-Conquest days must have lived on in the remote Western counties without a written record; and for a generation rime is overshadowed. The suddenness and importance of this revival in a time otherwise barren of poetry will appear from a list of the principal alliterative poems that are commonly assigned to the third quarter of the century:—Wynnere and Wastoure, The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Joseph of Arimathie (the first English Graal romance), William of Palerne, Piers Plowman (A-text), Patience, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, The Destruction of Troy, Morte Arthure.
At the time alliterative verse was fitted to become the medium of popular literature. Prose would not serve, because its literary life depends on books and readers. Up to the end of the century (if we exclude sermons and religious or technical treatises, where practical considerations reinforced a Latin tradition) the function of prose in English literature is to translate Latin or French prose;[9] and even this narrow province is sometimes invaded by verse. Yet it was not easy to write verse that depended on number of syllables, quantity, or rime. The fall of inflexions brought confusion on syllabic metres; there were great changes in the quantity and quality of vowels; and these disturbances affected the dialects unevenly.[10] It must have been hard enough for a poet to make rules for himself: but popularity involved the recital of his work by all kinds of men in all kinds of English, when the rimes would be broken and the rhythm lost. It is perhaps unfair to call Michael of Northgate's doggerel (p. 33) to witness the misfortunes of rimed metres. But the text of Sir Orfeo from the Auchinleck manuscript shows how often Englishmen who were nearly contemporary with the composer had lost the tune of his verses. The more fortunate makers of alliterative poems, whose work depended on the stable yet elastic frame of stress and initial consonants, possessed a master-key to the dialects.
[9] Chaucer's prose rendering of the Metra of Boethius is an apparent exception, but Jean de Meung's French prose version lay before him.
[10] See the Appendix.
Adaptability made easier the diffusion of alliterative verse: but its revival was not due to a deliberate choice on practical grounds. It was a phase of a larger movement, which may be described as a weakening of foreign and learned influences, and a recovery of the native stock. And the metrical form is only the most obvious of the old-fashioned elements that reappeared. In spirit, too, the authors of the alliterative school have many points of kinship with the Old English poets. They are more moderate than enthusiastic. Left to themselves, their imaginations move most easily among sombre shapes and in sombre tones. They have not the intellectual brilliance and the wit of the French poets; and when they laugh—which is not often—the lightness of the thirteenth century is rarer than the rough note of the comic scenes in the Towneley plays. It is hard to say how much the associations and aptitudes of the verse react on its content: but Sumer is icumen in, which is the essence of thirteenth-century poetry, is barely conceivable in Old English, where even the cuckoo's note sounded melancholy; and it would come oddly from the poets of the middle fourteenth century, who have learned from the French trouvères the convention of spring, with sunshine, flowers, and singing birds, but seem unable to put away completely the memory of winter and rough weather.
In the last quarter of the century the tide of foreign influence runs strong again; and the work of Gower and Chaucer discloses radical changes in the conditions of literature which are the more important because they are permanent. The literary centre swings back to the capital—London now instead of Winchester—which henceforth provides the models for authors of any pretensions throughout England and across the Scottish border. In Chaucer we have for the first time a layman, writing in English for secular purposes, who from the range and quality of his work may fairly claim to be ranked among men of letters. The strictly clerical writers had been content to follow the Scriptures, the Fathers and commentators, the service books and legendaries; and Chaucer does not neglect their tradition.[11] The minstrels had exploited a popular taste for merry tales 'that sownen into synne'; and he borrowed so gladly from them that many have doubted his repentance.[12] But his models are men of letters:—the Latin poets headed by Ovid, who was Gower's favourite too; French writers, from the satirical Jean de Meung to makers of studied 'balades, roundels, virelayes' like Machaut and Deschamps; and the greater Italian group—Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. Keeping such company, he was bound to reject the rusticity of the alliterative school, and the middle way followed by those who added a tag of rime at the end of a rimeless series (as in Sir Gawayne), or invented stanzas in which alliteration remains, but is subservient to rime (as in The Pearl and the York plays). After his day, even for Northerners who wish to write well, there will be no more 'rum-ram-ruf by lettre'.[13]
And for to speke of other holynesse,
He hath in prose translated Boece,
And of the Wrechede Engendrynge of Mankynde
As man may in pope Innocent ifynde,
And made the Lyfe also of Seynt Cecile;
He made also, gon ys a grete while,
Origenes upon the Maudeleyne.
(Legend of Good Women, Prologue A, ll. 424 ff.)
[12] Parson's Tale, at the end.
[13] Prologue to Parson's Tale, l. 43.