The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful Dream of the Rood, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only, and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of Judith, however, is certainly much later; and the Exodus, though early, seems to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on [Cædmon] and [Cynewulf], to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.
The Riddles (q.v.) of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very curious Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn may be regarded as belonging to the same class.
The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary poetry is the group of dramatic monologues—The Banished Wife’s Complaint, The Husband’s Message, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer. The date of these compositions is uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This, however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short pieces—Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer—which have something of a lyric character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure and the use of the refrain. Wulf and Eadwacer, indeed, exhibits a still further development in the same direction, the monotony of the long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its extent and variety.
While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was written much earlier. The English laws of Æthelberht of Kent, though it is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died A.D. 604), or even in that of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the 12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (q.v.) is probably founded partly on prose annals of pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual guides.
Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, St Gregory’s Pastoral Care and his Dialogues (the latter rendered by Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all (not excepting the secular History of Orosius) essentially religious in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the Pastoral Care, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted in the Orosius, and in the free rendering and amplification of the Consolation of Boethius and of the Soliloquies of Augustine, Alfred appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws (preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see [Anglo-Saxon Chronicle]), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from Latin and of homilies and saints’ lives, the substance of which is derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it has therefore for us little importance except from the philological point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the writings of Ælfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels, though executed in Ælfric’s time (about 1000), is by other hands. The sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical value.
From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic manual of the science of the time—chronology, astronomy, arithmetic, metre, rhetoric and ethics—by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or two formulas of incantations in Irish.
Two famous works of fiction, the romance of Apollonius of Tyre and the Letter of Alexander, which in their Latin form had much influence on the later literature of Europe, were Englished in the 11th century with considerable skill. To the same period belongs the curious tract on The Wonders of the East. In these works, and some minor productions of the time, we see that the minds of Englishmen were beginning to find interest in other than religious subjects.
The crowding of the English monasteries by foreigners, which was one of the results of the Norman Conquest, brought about a rapid arrest of the development of the vernacular literature. It was not long before the boys trained in the monastic schools ceased to learn to read and write their native tongue, and learned instead to read and write French. The effects of this change are visible in the rapid alteration of the literary language. The artificial tradition of grammatical correctness lost its hold; the archaic literary vocabulary fell into disuse; and those who wrote English at all wrote as they spoke, using more and more an extemporized phonetic spelling based largely on French analogies. The 12th century is a brilliant period in the history of Anglo-Latin literature, and many works of merit were written in French (see [Anglo-Norman]). But vernacular literature is scanty and of little originality. The Peterborough Chronicle, it is true, was continued till 1154, and its later portions, while markedly exemplifying the changes in the language, contain some really admirable writing. But it is substantially correct to say that from this point until the age of Chaucer vernacular prose served no other purpose than that of popular religious edification. For light on the intellectual life of the nation during this period we must look mainly to the works written in Latin. The homilies of the 12th century are partly modernized transcripts from Ælfric and other older writers, partly translations from French and Latin; the remainder is mostly commonplace in substance and clumsy in expression. At the beginning of the 13th century the Ancren Riwle (q.v.), a book of counsel for nuns, shows true literary genius, and is singularly interesting in its substance and spirit; but notwithstanding the author’s remarkable mastery of English expression, his culture was evidently French rather than English. Some minor religious prose works of the same period are not without merit. But these examples had no literary following. In the early 14th century the writings of Richard Rolle and his school attained great popularity. The profound influence which they exercised on later religious thought, and on the development of prose style, has seldom been adequately recognized. The Ayenbite of Inwyt (see [Michel, Dan]), a wretchedly unintelligent translation (finished in 1340) from Frère Lorens’s Somme des vices et des vertus, is valuable to the student of language, but otherwise worthless.
The break in the continuity of literary tradition, induced by the Conquest, was no less complete with regard to poetry than with regard to prose. The poetry of the 13th and the latter part of the 12th century was uninfluenced by the written works of Old English poets, whose archaic diction had to a great extent become unintelligible. But there is no ground to suppose that the succession of popular singers and reciters was ever interrupted. In the north-west, indeed, the old recitative metre seems to have survived in oral tradition, with little more alteration than was rendered necessary by the changes in the language, until the middle of the 14th century, when it was again adopted by literary versifiers. In the south this metre had greatly degenerated in strictness before the Conquest, but, with gradually increasing laxity in the laws of alliteration and rhythm, it continued long in use. It is commonly believed, with great intrinsic probability but with scanty actual evidence, that in the Old English period there existed, beside the alliterative long line, other forms of verse adapted not for recitation but for singing, used in popular lyrics and ballads that were deemed too trivial for written record. The influence of native popular poetic tradition, whether in the form of recited or of sung verse, is clearly discernible in the earliest Middle English poems that have been preserved. But the authors of these poems were familiar with Latin, and probably spoke French as easily as their mother tongue; and there was no longer any literary convention to restrain them from adopting foreign metrical forms. The artless verses of the hermit Godric, who died in 1170, exhibit in their metre the combined influence of native rhythm and of that of Latin hymnology. The Proverbs of Alfred, written about 1200, is (like the later Proverbs of Hendyng) in style and substance a gnomic poem of the ancient Germanic type, containing maxims some of which may be of immemorial antiquity; and its rhythm is mainly of native origin. On the other hand, the solemn and touching meditation known as the Moral Ode, which is somewhat earlier in date, is in a metre derived from contemporary Latin verse—a line of seven accents, broken by a caesura, and with feminine end-rhymes. In the Ormulum (see [Orm]) this metre (known as the septenarius) appears without rhyme, and with a syllabic regularity previously without example in English verse, the line (or distich, as it may be called with almost equal propriety) having invariably fifteen syllables. In various modified forms, the septenarius was a favourite measure throughout the Middle English period. In the poetry of the 13th century the influence of French models is conspicuous. The many devotional lyrics, some of which, as the Luve Ron of Thomas of Hales, have great beauty, show this influence not only in their varied metrical form, but also in their peculiar mystical tenderness and fervour. The Story of Genesis and Exodus, the substance of which is taken from the Bible and Latin commentators, derives its metre chiefly from French. Its poetical merit is very small. The secular poetry also received a new impulse from France. The brilliant and sprightly dialogue of the Owl and Nightingale, which can hardly be dated later than about 1230, is a “contention” of the type familiar in French and Provençal literature. The “Gallic” type of humour may be seen in various other writings of this period, notably in the Land of Cockaigne, a vivacious satire on monastic self-indulgence, and in the fabliau of Dame Siviz, a story of Eastern origin, told with almost Chaucerian skill. Predominantly, though not exclusively French in metrical structure, are the charming love poems collected in a MS. (Harl. 2253) written about 1320 in Herefordshire, some of which (edited in T. Wright’s Specimens of Lyric Poetry) find a place in modern popular anthologies. It is noteworthy that they are accompanied by some French lyrics very similar in style. The same MS. contains, besides some religious poetry, a number of political songs of the time of Edward II. They are not quite the earliest examples of their kind; in the time of the Barons’ War the popular cause had had its singers in English as well as in French. Later, the victories of Edward III. down to the taking of Guisnes in 1352, were celebrated by the Yorkshireman Laurence Minot in alliterative verse with strophic arrangement and rhyme.
At the very beginning of the 13th century a new species of composition, the metrical chronicle, was introduced into English literature. The huge work of Layamon, a history (mainly legendary) of Britain from the time of the mythical Brutus till after the mission of Augustine, is a free rendering of the Norman-French Brut of Wace, with extensive additions from traditional sources. Its metre seems to be a degenerate survival of the Old English alliterative line, gradually modified in the course of the work by assimilation to the regular syllabic measure of the French original. Unquestionable evidence of the knowledge of the poem on the part of later writers is scarce, but distinct echoes of its diction appear in the chronicle ascribed to Robert of Gloucester, written in rhymed septenary measures about 1300. This work, founded in its earlier part on the Latin historians of the 12th century, is an independent historical source of some value for the events of the writer’s own times. The succession of versified histories of England was continued by Thomas Bek of Castleford in Yorkshire (whose work still awaits an editor), and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (Bourne, Lincolnshire). Mannyng’s chronicle, finished in 1338, is a translation, in its earlier part from Wace’s Brut, and in its later part from an Anglo-French chronicle (still extant) written by Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington.