IV
Chaucer, who suffers when read in extracts, is not represented in this book, although without him fourteenth-century literature is a body without a head. But in the choice of literary forms and subjects, I have aimed at illustrating the variety of interest that is to be found in the writings of lesser men.
It may be asked whether the choice of specimens gives a true idea of the taste and accomplishment of the age. This issue is raised by Professor Carleton Brown's Afterword in the second volume of his Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse, a book that will be to generations of investigators a model of unselfish research. There he emphasizes the popularity of long poems, and especially of long didactic poems, as evidenced by the relatively great number of manuscript copies that survive. The Prick of Conscience leads with ninety-nine manuscripts, against sixty-nine of The Canterbury Tales, and forty-seven of Piers Plowman. What is to be said of a book that, impoverished by the exclusion of Chaucer, passes by also the most popular poem of his century?
I would rest an apology on the conditions under which manuscript copies came into being and survived; and begin with Michael of Northgate as he brings his Ayenbyte to an end in the October of 1340, before the short days and the numbing cold should come to make writing a pain. The book has no elegance that would commend it to special care, for Dan Michael is a dry practical man, as indifferent to the graces of style as to the luxury of silky vellum and miniatures stiff with gold and colour. But from his cell it goes into the library of his monastery—a library well ordered and well catalogued, and (as if to guarantee security) boasting the continuous possession of books that Gregory the Great gave to the first missionaries. We know its place exactly—the fourth shelf of press XVI. And there it remained safe until the days of intelligent private collectors, passing finally with the Arundel library to the British Museum. The course was not often so smooth, for of two dozen manuscripts left by Michael to St. Augustine's, Dr. James, in the year 1903, could identify only four survivors in as many different libraries. But the example is enough to illustrate a proposition that will not easily be refuted:—the chances of an English mediaeval manuscript surviving greatly depend on its eligibility for a place in the library of a religious house, since these are the chief sources of the manuscripts that have come down to us.
The attitude of the Church towards the vernacular literature of the later Middle Ages did not differ materially from her attitude towards the classics in earlier times, though the classics had always the greater dignity. Literary composition as a pure art was not encouraged. Entertainment for its own sake was discountenanced. The religious houses were to be centres of piety and learning; and if English were admitted at all in the strongholds of Latin and French, a work of unadorned edification like The Prick of Conscience would make very suitable reading for those who craved relaxation from severer studies. There were, of course, individuals among the professed religious who indulged a taste for more worldly literature; but the surviving catalogues of libraries that were formed under the eye of authority show a marked discrimination in favour of didactic works.
In England the private libraries of fourteenth-century laymen were relatively insignificant. But Guy, Earl of Warwick, in 1315 left an exceptionally rich collection to the Abbey of Bordesley, which failed to conserve the legacy. The list was first printed in Todd's Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer (1810),[19] and (among devotional works and lives of saints that merge into religious romances like Joseph of Arimathea and the Graal, Titus and Vespasian, and Constantine) it includes most of the famous names of popular history:—Lancelot, Arthur and Modred; Charlemagne, Doon of Mayence, Aimery of Narbonne, Girard de Vienne, William of Orange, Thibaut of Arraby, Doon of Nanteuil, Guy of Nanteuil, William Longespée, Fierebras; with two Alexander romances, a Troy Book, a Brut; the love story of Amadas e Idoine; the romance de Guy e de la Reygne 'tut enterement'; a book of physic and surgery; and a miscellany—un petit rouge livere en lequel sount contenuz mous diverses choses. Yet even a patron so well disposed to secular poems did little to perpetuate the manuscripts of English verse. His education enabled him to draw from the fountain head, and most of his books were French.
[19] p. 161.
Neither in the libraries of the monasteries, nor in the libraries of the great nobles, should we expect to find a true mirror of popular taste. The majority of the people knew no language but English; and the relative scarcity of books of every kind, which even among the educated classes made the hearers far outnumber the readers, was at once a cause and a symptom of illiteracy: the majority of the people could not read. This leads to a generalization that is cardinal for every branch of criticism:—up to Chaucer's day, the greater the popularity of an English poem, the less important becomes the manuscript as a means of early transmission. The text, which would have been comparatively safe in the keeping of scribe, book, and reader, passes to the uncertain guardianship of memorizer, reciter, and listener; so that sometimes it is wholly lost, and sometimes it suffers as much change in a generation as would a classical text in a thousand years. Already Robert Mannyng laments the mutilation of Sir Tristrem by the 'sayers' (who could hardly be expected to avoid faults of improvisation and omission in the recitation of so long a poem from memory);[20] and his regret would have been keener if he could have looked ahead another hundred years to see how the texts of the verse romances paid the price of popularity by the loss of crisp phrases and fresh images, and the intrusion of every mode of triteness.
I see in song, in sedgeyng tale
Of Erceldoun and of Kendale,
Non þam says as þai þam wroght,
And in þer sayng it semes noght.
Þat may þou here in Sir Tristrem—
Ouer gestes it has þe steem,
Ouer alle þat is or was,
If men it sayd as made Thomas:
But I here it no man so say,
Þat of som copple som is away.
(Chronicle, Prologue, ll. 93 ff.)
Robert blames the vanity of the reciters more than their memories, on the excellence of which Petrarch remarks in his account of the minstrels: Sunt homines non magni ingenii, magnae vero memoriae, magnaeque diligentiae (to Boccaccio, Rerum Senilium, Bk. v, ep. ii).
Of course manuscripts of the longer secular poems were made and used,—mean, stunted copies from which the travelling entertainer could refresh his memory or add to his stock of tales; fair closet copies that would enable well-to-do admirers to renew their pleasure when no skilled minstrel was by; and, occasionally, compact libraries of romance, like the Auchinleck manuscript, which must have been the treasure of some great household that enjoyed 'romanz-reding on þe bok'—the pastime that encouraged the rise of prose romances in the late Middle Ages. But as a means of circulation for popular verse, as distinct from learned verse and from prose, the book was of secondary importance in its own time, and was always subject to exceptional risks. The fates of three stories in different kinds, all demonstrably favourites in the fourteenth century, will be sufficient illustration: of Floris and Blauncheflour, one of the best of the early romances in the courtly style, several manuscripts survive, but when all are assembled the beginning of the story is still wanting; of Havelok, typical of the homely style, one imperfect copy and a few charred fragments of another are extant; of the Tale of Wade, that was dear to 'olde wydwes',[21] and yet considered worthy to entertain the noble Criseyde,[22] no text has come down. Evidently, to determine the relative popularity of the longer tales in verse we need not so much a catalogue of extant manuscripts, as a census, that cannot now be taken, of the repertories of the entertainers.
[21] Chaucer, Merchant's Tale, ll. 211 ff.
[22] Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Bk. iii, l. 614.
If the manuscript life of the longer secular poems was precarious, the chances of the short pieces—songs, ballads, jests, comic dialogues, lampoons—were still worse. Since they were composed for the day without thought of the future, and were no great charge on the ordinary memory, the chief motives for writing them down were absent; and no doubt the professional minstrel found that to secure his proprietary rights against competitors, he must be chary of giving copies of his best things. Many would never be put into writing; some were jotted down on perishable wax; but parchment, always too expensive for ephemeral verse, was reserved for special occasions. In France, in the thirteenth century, Henri d'Andeli adds a touch of dignity to his poem celebrating the memory of a distinguished patron by inscribing it on parchment instead of the wax tablets he used for lighter verses.[23] In England in 1305, a West-Country swashbuckler, whom fear of the statute against Trailebastouns kept in the greenwood, relieves his offended dignity by composing a poem half apologetic, half minatory, and chooses as the safest way of publication to write it on parchment and throw it in the high road:—
Cest rym fust fet al bois desouz vn lorer,
La chaunte merle, russinole, e crye l'esperuer.
Escrit estoit en parchemyn pur mout remenbrer,
Et gitté en haut chemyn, qe vm le dust trouer.[24]
These loose sheets or tiny rolls[25] rarely survive, and the preservation of their contents, as of pieces launched still more carelessly on the world, depends on the happy chance of inclusion in a miscellany; quotation in a larger work; or entry on a fly-leaf, margin, or similar space left blank in a book already written.
Et icil clers qui ce trova ...
Por ce qu'il est de verité,
Ne l'apele mie flablel,
Ne l'a pas escrit en tablel,
Ainz l'a escrit en parchamin:
Par bois, per plains et par chamins,
Par bors, par chateals, par citez
Vorra qu'il soit bien recitez.
(OEuvres, ed. A. Héron, Paris 1881, p. 40.)
[24] 'This rime was made in the wood beneath a bay-tree, where blackbird and nightingale sing and the sparrow-hawk cries. It was written on parchment for a record, and flung in the high road so that folk should find it.' The Political Songs of England, ed. T. Wright (London 1839), p. 236.
[25] A rare example of a roll made small for convenience of carrying is the British Museum Additional MS. 23986. It is about three inches wide and, in its imperfect state, twenty-two inches long, so that when rolled up it is not much bigger than one's finger. On the inside it contains a thirteenth-century Song of the Barons in French (T. Wright, Political Songs, 1839, pp. 59 ff.); on the outside, two scenes from a Middle English farce called Interludium de Clerico et Puella (Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, vol. ii, pp. 324 ff.) which, like so many happy experiments of the earlier time, appears to have no successor in the fourteenth century.
Most productive, though not very common in the fourteenth century, are the miscellanies of short pieces—volumes like Earl Guy's 'little red book containing many divers things'—in which early collectors noted down the scraps that interested them. A codex of West-Country origin, MS. Harley 2253 in the British Museum, preserves among French poems such as the complaint of the Trailebastoun, a group of English songs that includes Lenten is Come and Alysoun. Most of its numbers are unique, and the loss of this one volume would have swept away the best part of our knowledge of the early Middle English secular lyrics.
Of survival by quotation there is an example in the history of the Letter of Theodric, which lies behind Mannyng's tale of the Dancers of Colbek; and the circumstances are worth lingering over both for the number of by-paths they open to speculation, and for the glimpse they give of Wilton in a century from which there are few records of the nunnery outside the grim, tax-gatherer's entries of Domesday.
In the year before the Conquest, Theodric the foreigner, still racked by the curse that was laid on Bovo's company, made his way from the court of Edward the Confessor to the shrine of St. Edith. As he walked through the quiet valley to Wilton in the spring of the year, we may be sure the thought came to him that here at last was the spot where a man wearied with wandering from land to land, from shrine to shrine, might hope to be cured and to set up his rest. From the moment he reaches the abbey it is impossible not to admire his feeling for dramatic effect. By a paroxysm of quaking he terrifies the peasants; but to the weeping nuns he tells his story discreetly; and, lest a doubt should remain, produces from his scrip a letter in which St. Bruno, the great Pope Leo IX, vouches for all. It is notable that at this stage the convent appear to have taken no steps to record a story so marvellous and so well authenticated; and had Theodric continued his restless wandering we should know of him as little as is known of three others from the band of carollers, who had preceded him at Wilton with a similar story. But when he obtains leave to sleep beside the shrine of St. Edith, and in the morning of the great feast of Lady Day wakes up healed, exalting the fame of their patron saint who had lifted the curse where all the saints of Europe had failed, then, and then only, the convent order that an official record should be made, and the letter copied: Hec in presencia Brichtive ipsius loci abbatisse declarata et patriis litteris[26] sunt mandata. Henceforth it exists only as a chapter in the Acts of St. Edith, and as such it lay before Robert of Brunne. Of the other communities or private persons visited by Theodric (who, whether saint or faitour, certainly did not produce his letter for the first and last time at Wilton) none have preserved his memory. It would be hard to find a better example of the power of the clergy in early times to control the keys to posterity, or of the practical considerations which, quite apart from merit or curiosity, governed the preservation of legends.
[26] Patriis litteris according to Schröder and Gaston Paris means 'English language', but if it is not a mere flourish, it means rather the 'English script' in which the Latin letter was copied, as distinct from the foreign hand of Theodric's original letter. What 'English script' meant at Wilton in 1065 is a question of some delicacy. The spelling Folcpoldus for Folcwoldus in some later copies of the Wilton text must be due to confusion of p and Anglo-Saxon ƿ = w. This would be decisive for 'Anglo-Saxon script' if it occurred anywhere but in a proper name.
But it is the verses casually jotted down in unrelated books that bring home most vividly the slenderness of the thread of transmission. A student has committed Now Springs the Spray to solitary imprisonment between the joyless leaves of an old law book. The song of the Irish Dancer and The Maid of the Moor were scribbled, with some others from a minstrel's stock, on the fly-leaf of a manuscript now in the Bodleian. On a blank page of another a prudent man (who used vile ink, long since faded) has written the verses that banish rats, much as a modern householder might treasure up some annihilating prescription. To these waifs the chance of survival did not come twice, and to a number incalculable it never came.
It has been the purpose of this digression to bring the extant literature into perspective: not to raise useless regrets for what is lost, since we can learn only from what remains; nor to contest the value of statistics of surviving copies as a proof of circulation, provided the works compared are similar in length and kind, and are represented in enough manuscripts to make figures significant; nor yet to deny that didactic verse bulks large in the output of the fourteenth century: it could not be otherwise in an anxious age, when the scarcity of remains gives everything written in English a place in literary history, and when for almost everything verse was preferred to prose. It seemed better to redress the balance of chance by stealing from the end of the thirteenth century a few fragments that following generations would not forget, than to lend colour to the suggestion that ninety-nine of the men of Chaucer's century enjoyed The Prick of Conscience for every one that caught up the refrain of Now Springs the Spray, or danced through The Maid of the Moor, or sang the praises of Alison.