Apart from a few brief fragments, the first English writings after the Conquest are the Brut of Layamon (about 1200), based on the Brut of Wace; and the Ormulum, a collection of metrical homilies attributed to Orm or Ormin, an
Augustine monk. Next in importance come the rhyming chroniclers Robert of Gloucester (time of Henry III, Edward I) and Robert of Brunne or Mannyng (died 1340), other writers being Dan Michel of Northgate (Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340); Richard Rolle of Hampole (Pricke of Conscience, 1340); Laurence Minot (author of eleven military ballads; died 1352); and several works of uncertain authorship, including the Ancren Riwle (? Richard Poor, died 1237), The Owl and the Nightingale (? Nicholas of Guildford), The Land of Cockayne (? Michael of Kildare), the song against the King of Almaigne, and a dialogue between the Body and the Soul. To this pre-Chaucerian period belong also several English translations of French romances—Horn, Tristrem, Alisaunder, Havelok, and others. Between the beginning and middle of the fourteenth century the English speech had entered upon a new phase of development in the absorption of Norman-French words. A rapid expansion of the literature followed, having as the foremost figure that of Chaucer (1340-1400), who, writing at first under French influences, and then under Italian, became in the end the most representative English writer of the time. Contemporary with him was the satirist William Langland or Langley (1332-1400), the indefatigable John Gower (1325-1408), and the Scot John Barbour (1316-95). In prose the name of John Wycliffe (1324-84) is pre-eminent, the English version of Mandeville's Travels being apparently of later date.
The period from the time of Chaucer to the appearance of Spenser, that is, from the end of the fourteenth to near the end of the sixteenth century, is a very barren one in English literature, in part probably owing to foreign and domestic wars, the struggle of the people towards political power, and the religious controversies preceding and attending the Reformation. The immediate successors of Chaucer, Occleve (1370-1454) and Lydgate (died 1460), were neither men of genius, and the centre of poetic creation was for the time transferred to Scotland, where James I (1394-1437) headed the list which comprises Andrew de Wyntoun (fifteenth century), Henry the Minstrel or Blind Harry (died after 1492), Robert Henryson (died before 1508), William Dunbar (1460-1520), Gavin Douglas (1474-1522), and Sir David Lyndsay (1490-1557). In England the literature was chiefly polemical, the only noteworthy prose prior to that of More being that of Reginald Pecock (1390-1460); Sir John Fortescue (1395-1485); the Paston Letters (1422-1505), which are, however, much more interesting for their subject matter than their style; and Malory's Morte d'Arthur (completed 1469-70); the only noteworthy verse, that of John Skelton (1460-1529).
It was now that several events of European importance combined to stimulate life and enlarge the mental horizon—the invention of printing, or rather of movable types, the promulgation of the Copernican system of astronomy, the discovery of America, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. The Renaissance spread from Florence to England by means of such men as Colet, Linacre, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (1480-1535), the last noteworthy as at the head of a new race of historians. Important contributions to the prose of the time were the Tyndale New Testament, printed in 1525, and the Coverdale Bible (1535). The first signs of an artistic advance in poetic literature are to be found in Wyatt (1503-42) and Surrey (1516-47), who nationalized the sonnet; Surrey was also a pioneer in the use of blank verse. The drama, too, had by this time reached a fairly high stage of development. The mystery and miracle plays, after the adoption of the vernacular in the fourteenth century, passed from the hands of the clergy into those of the laity, and both stage and drama underwent a rapid secularization. The morality began to embody matters of religious and political controversy, historical characters mingled with the personification of abstract qualities, real characters from contemporary life were introduced, and at length farces on the French model were constructed, the Interludes of John Heywood (died 1565) being the most important examples. To Nicholas Udall (1504-56) the first genuine comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, was due, this being shortly afterwards followed by John Still's Gammer Gurton's Needle (1566). The first tragedy, the Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc of Sackville (died 1608) and Norton (died 1600), was performed in 1561, and the first prose play, the Supposes of Gascoigne (died 1577) in 1566. Gascoigne and Sackville were noteworthy amongst the earlier Elizabethans apart from their plays; but the figures which bulk most largely are those of Sidney (1554-86) and Spenser (1552-99). In drama Lyly, Peele, Greene, Nash, and Marlowe (1564-93) are the chief immediate precursors of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Marlowe alone, however, being at all comparable with the great master. Contemporary and later dramatic writers were Ben Jonson (1573-1637), the second great Elizabethan dramatist, Middleton (died 1627), Marston (better known as a satirist), Chapman (1557-1634), Thomas Heywood, Dekker (died 1639), Webster (seventeenth century), Ford (1586-1639), Beaumont (1586-1616) and Fletcher (1576-1625), and Massinger (1584-1640). The minor poets include Michael Drayton (1563-1631), Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), John Davies (1570-1626), John Donne (1573-1631), Giles Fletcher (1580-1623), and Phineas Fletcher (1584-1650), Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). In Elizabethan
prose the prominent names are those of Roger Ascham (1515-68), John Lyly (1553-1606), Hooker (1554-1600), Raleigh (1552-1618), Bacon (1561-1626), the founder in some regards of modern scientific method, Burton (1576-1640), Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648), and Selden (1584-1654), with Overbury, Knolles, Holinshed, Stowe, Camden, Florio, and North. The issue of the Authorized Version of the Bible in 1611 may be said to close the prose list of the period, as it represents the finest flower of English prose.
After the death of James I the course of literature breaks up into three stages, the first from 1625 to 1640, in which the survivals from the Elizabethan Age slowly die away. The 'metaphysical poets', Cowley, Wither, Herbert, Crashaw, Habbington, and Quarles, and the cavalier poets, Suckling, Carew, Denham, all published poems before the close of this period, in which also Milton's early poems were composed, and the Comus and Lycidas published. The second stage (1640-60) was almost wholly given up to controversial prose, the Puritan revolution checking the production of pure literature. In this controversial prose of the time Milton was easily chief. With the Restoration a third stage was begun. Milton turned his new leisure to the composition of his great poems; the drama was revived, and Davenant and Dryden, with Otway, Southerne, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar in their first plays, and minor playwrights, are the most representative writers of the period. Butler established a genre in satire, and Marvell as a satirist in some respects anticipated Swift; Roscommon, Rochester, and Dorset contributed to the little poetry; while in prose we have Hobbes, Clarendon, Fuller, Sir Thomas Browne, Walton, Cotton, Pepys and Evelyn, John Bunyan, Locke, Sir William Temple, Owen Feltham, Sir Henry Wotton, James Harrington, and a crowd of theological writers, of whom the best known are Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, Robert Barclay, William Penn, George Fox, Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Bishop Pearson, Sherlock, South, Sprat, Cudworth, and Burnet. Other features of the last part of the seventeenth century were the immense advance in physical science under Boyle, Isaac Newton, Harvey, and others, and the rise of the newspaper press.
Dryden's death in 1700 marks the commencement of the so-called Augustan Age in English literature. During it, however, no greater poet appeared than Pope (1688-1744), in whom sagacity, wit, and fancy take the place of the highest poetic faculty, but who was a supreme artist within the formal limits of his conception of the art of poetry. Against these formal limits signs of reaction are apparent in the verse of Thomson (1700-48), Gray (1716-71), Collins (1720-59), Goldsmith (1728-74), and in the productions of Macpherson and Chatterton. The poets Prior (1664-1721), Gay (1688-1732), and Ambrose Phillips (1671-1749) inherit from the later seventeenth century, Gay being memorable in connection with English opera; and there are many minor poets—Garth, John Philips, Blackmore, Parnell, Dyer, Somerville, Green, Shenstone, Blair, Akenside, Falconer, Anstey, Beattie, Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson. It is in prose that the chief development of the eighteenth century is to be found. Defoe (1661-1731) and Swift (1667-1745) led the way in fiction and prose satire; Steele (1672-1729) and Addison (1672-1719), working on a suggestion of Defoe, established the periodical essay; Richardson (1689-1761), Fielding (1707-54), Smollett (1721-71), and Sterne raised the novel to sudden perfection. Goldsmith also falls into the fictional group as well as into that of the poets and of the essayists. Johnson (1709-84) exercised during the latter part of his life the power of a literary dictator, with Boswell (1740-95) as his 'Secretary of State'. The other chief prose writers were Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), Arbuthnot (1675-1735), Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Bolingbroke (1678-1751), Burke, the historians David Hume (1711-76), William Robertson (1721-93), Edward Gibbon (1737-94); the political writers Wilkes and 'Junius', the economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723-90); the philosophical writers Hume, Bentham (1749-1832), and Dugald Stewart (1753-1828); the scholars Bentley (1662-1742), Sir William Jones (1746-94), and Richard Porson (1759-1808); the theologians Atterbury, Butler (1692-1752), Warburton, and Paley; and some playwrights, of whom the most important was Sheridan, but who also included Rowe, John Home, Colley Cibber, Colman the elder, and Foote.
With the French Revolution, or a few years earlier, the modern movement in literature may be said to have commenced. The departure from the old traditions, traceable in Gray and Collins, was more clearly exhibited in the last years of the century in Cowper (1731-1800) and Burns (1759-96), and was developed and perfected in the hands of Blake (1757-1828), Bowles (1762-1850), and the 'Lake poets' Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), and Southey (1774-1843); but there were at first many survivals from the poetic manner of the seventeenth century, such as Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819), and Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). Amongst the earlier poets of the nineteenth century, also, were George Crabbe (1754-1832), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Hogg (1772-1835), Campbell (1777-1844), James Montgomery, Mrs. Hemans, Bryan Waller Procter ('Barry Cornwall'), Joanna Baillie, Robert
Montgomery. A more important group was that of Byron (1788-1824), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1796-1821), with which may be associated the names of Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Thomas Moore (1779-1852), and Landor (1775-1864). Among the earlier writers of fiction there were several women of note, such as Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and Jane Austen (1775-1817). The greatest name in fiction is unquestionably that of Scott. Other prose writers were Malthus, Hallam, James Mill, Southey, Hannah More, Cobbett, William Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, Lord Brougham. In the literature since 1830 poetry has included as its chief names those of Praed, Hood, Sidney Dobell, Gerald Massey, Charles Mackay, Philip James Bailey, William Allingham, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Coventry Patmore, the second Lord Lytton ('Owen Meredith'), Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, Dante G. Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, Wm. Morris, Lewis Morris, Jean Ingelow, Swinburne, and last and greatest, Tennyson and Browning. Among more modern English poets are Stephen Phillips (1868-1915), Francis Thompson (1860-1907), Sir William Watson (born 1858), John Davidson (1857-1909), and R. Kipling (born 1865). A brilliant list of nineteenth-century novelists includes Marryat, Michael Scott, the first Lord Lytton, Ainsworth, Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield), Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charlotte Brontë, Lover, Lever, Wilkie Collins, Mayne Reid, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Black, Thomas Hardy, R. D. Blackmore, George Meredith, R. L. Stevenson, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Craik (Miss Mulock), Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Yonge, and others. Towards the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a deepening interest in the drama, and the list of brilliant dramatists includes the names of Barrie, H. A. Jones, G. B. Shaw, Pinero, Granville Barker, and others. The tendency in the fiction of the twentieth century is a concrete and imaginative presentation of the social, ethical, and sentimental problems of the day. This tendency is clearly seen in the novels of John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells. To the historical and biographical list of the nineteenth century belong Macaulay, Buckle, Carlyle, Thirwall, Grote, Milman, Froude, Lecky, S. R. Gardiner, Kinglake, John Richard Green, E. A. Freeman, Stubbs, Dean Stanley, John Morley, Leslie Stephen. In science and philosophy among the chief writers of the nineteenth century have been Whewell, Sir W. Hamilton, Mansel, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Hugh Miller, Charles Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Max Müller, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Green.—Bibliography: Cambridge History of English Literature; Taine, History of English Literature; Saintsbury, Short History of English Literature; Chambers, Cyclopædia of English Literature.
English Architecture, Art, Church, Language, Literature, &c. See England.