Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

Unfortunately for the historian, there are scarcely any literary things remaining to show the progress of the transition. For a long time before and after 1100 there is a great scarcity of English productions. It is not till about 1200 that Middle English literature begins to be at all fully represented.

This scantiness is partly due, no doubt, to an actual disuse of English composition. But many written things must have perished, and in poetry there was certainly a large amount of verse current orally, whether it was ever written down or not. This is the inference drawn from the passages in the historian William of Malmesbury to which Macaulay refers in his preface to the Lays of Ancient Rome, and which Freeman has studied in his essay on The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early English History. The story of Hereward the Wake is extant in Latin; the story of Havelock the Dane and others were probably composed in English verse much earlier than the thirteenth century, and in much older forms than those which have come down to us.

There is a gap in the record of alliterative poetry which shows plainly that much has been lost. It is a curious history. Before the Norman conquest the old English verse had begun to go to pieces, in spite of such excellent late examples as the Maldon poem. About 1200 the alliterative verse, though it has still something of its original character, is terribly broken down. The verse of Layamon’s Brut is unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a most uncomfortable way. Then suddenly, as late as the middle of the fourteenth century, there begins a procession of magnificent alliterative poems, in regular verse—Sir Gawayne, the Morte Arthure, Piers Plowman; in regular verse, not exactly with the same rule as Beowulf, but with so much of the old rule as seemed to have been hopelessly lost for a century or two. What is the explanation of this revival, and this sudden great vogue of alliterative poetry? It cannot have been a new invention, or a reconstruction; it would not in that case have copied, as it sometimes does, the rhythm of the old English verse in a way which is unlike the ordinary rhythms of the fourteenth century. The only reasonable explanation is that somewhere in England there was a tradition of alliterative verse, keeping in the main to the old rules of rhythm as it kept something of the old vocabulary, and escaping the disease which affected the old verse elsewhere. The purer sort of verse must have been preserved for a few hundred years with hardly a trace of it among the existing documents to show what it was like till it breaks out ‘three-score thousand strong’ in the reign of Edward III.

In the Middle Ages, early and late, there was very free communication all over Christendom between people of different languages. Languages seem to have given much less trouble than they do nowadays. The general use of Latin, of course, made things easy for those who could speak it; but without Latin, people of different nations appear to have travelled over the world picking up foreign languages as they went along, and showing more interest in the poetry and stories of foreign countries than is generally found among modern tourists. Luther said of the people of Flanders that if you took a Fleming in a sack and carried him over France or Italy, he would manage to learn the tongues. This gift was useful to commercial travellers, and perhaps the Flemings had more of it than other people. But in all the nations there seems to have been something like this readiness, and in all it was used to translate the stories and adapt the poetry of other tongues. This intercourse was greatly quickened in the twelfth century through a number of causes, the principal cause being the extraordinary production of new poetry in France, or rather in the two regions, North and South, and the two languages, French and Provençal. Between these two languages, in the North and the South of what is now France, there was in the Middle Ages a kind of division of labour. The North took narrative poetry, the South took lyric; and French narrative and Provençal lyric poetry in the twelfth century between them made the beginning of modern literature for the whole of Europe.

In the earlier Middle Ages, before 1100, as in the later, the common language is Latin. Between the Latin authors of the earlier time—Gregory the Great, or Bede—and those of the later—Anselm, or Thomas Aquinas—there may be great differences, but there is no line of separation.

In the literature of the native tongues there is a line of division about 1100 more definite than any later epoch; it is made by the appearance of French poetry, bringing along with it an intellectual unity of Christendom which has never been shaken since.

The importance of this is that it meant a mutual understanding among the laity of Europe, equal to that which had so long obtained among the clergy, the learned men.

The year 1100, in which all Christendom is united, if not thoroughly and actively in all places, for the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, at any rate ideally by the thought of this common enterprise, is also a year from which may be dated the beginning of the common lay intelligence of Europe, that sympathy of understanding by which ideas of different sorts are taken up and diffused, outside of the professionally learned bodies. The year 1100 is a good date, because of the first Provençal poet, William, Count of Poitiers, who was living then; he went on the Crusade three years later. He is the first poet of modern Europe who definitely helps to set a fashion of poetry not only for his own people but for the imitation of foreigners. He is the first modern poet; he uses the kind of verse which every one uses now.

The triumph of French poetry in the twelfth century was the end of the old Teutonic world—an end which had been long preparing, though it came suddenly at last. Before that time there had been the sympathy and informal union among the Germanic nations out of which the old heroic poems had come; such community of ideas as allowed the Nibelung story to be treated in all the Germanic tongues from Austria to Iceland, and even in Greenland, the furthest outpost of the Northmen. But after the eleventh century there was nothing new to be got out of this. Here and there may be found a gleaner, like Saxo Grammaticus, getting together all that he can save out of the ancient heathendom, or like the Norwegian traveller about fifty years later, who collected North German ballads of Theodoric and other champions, and paraphrased them in Norwegian prose. The really great achievement of the older world in its last days was in the prose histories of Iceland, which had virtue enough in them to change the whole world, if they had only been known and understood; but they were written for domestic circulation, and even their own people scarcely knew how good they were. Germania was falling to pieces, the separate nations growing more and more stupid and drowsy.

The languages derived from Latin—commonly called the Romance languages—French and Provençal, Italian and so on—were long of declaring themselves. The Italian and Spanish dialects had to wait for the great French outburst before they could produce anything. French and Provençal, which are well in front of Spanish and Italian, have little of importance to show before 1100. But after that date there is such profusion that it is clear there had been a long time of experiment and preparation. The earlier French epics have been lost; the earliest known Provençal poet is already a master of verse, and must be indebted to many poetical ancestors whose names and poems have disappeared. Long before 1100 there must have been a common literary taste in France, fashions of poetry well understood and appreciated, a career open for youthful poets. In the twelfth century the social success of poetry in France was extended in different degrees over all Europe. In Italy and Spain the fashions were taken up; in Germany they conquered even more quickly and thoroughly; the Danes and Swedes and Norwegians learned their ballad measures from the French; even the Icelanders, the only Northern nation with a classical literature and with minds of their own, were caught in the same way.