The Brut of Layamon represents typically the transition period, when alliteration and end-rime were struggling for the mastery in English verse. Schipper points out that we find in the poem four kinds of lines:
1. Simple alliterative lines in more or less strict adherence to the old rules.
2. Lines combining alliteration and rime or alliteration and assonance.
3. Lines showing rime or assonance, without alliteration.
4. Four-stress lines with neither rime nor alliteration.
The present specimen shows the preference for alliteration; that on p. 127, below, represents the introduction of rime.
In a somer seson . whan soft was the sonne,
I shope me in shroudes . as I a shepe were,
In habite as an heremite . unholy of workes,
Went wyde in this world . wondres to here.
Ac on a May mornynge . on Malverne hulles
Me byfel a ferly . of fairy me thouȝte;
I was wery forwandred . and went me to reste
Under a brode banke . bi a bornes side,
And as I lay and lened . and loked in the wateres,
I slombred in a slepyng . it sweyved so merye.
(William Langland (?): Piers the Plowman, Prologue, ll. 1-10. B-text. Fourteenth century.)
Piers the Plowman represents the revival of the alliterative long line, with fairly strict adherence to the old rules, by contemporaries of Chaucer, in the fourteenth century. For this verse, see further in Part Two, pp. [155], [156].