Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

Thus French poetry wakened up the sleepy countries, and gave new ideas to the wakeful; it brought the Teutonic and Romance nations to agree and, what was much more important, to produce new works of their own which might be original in all sorts of ways while still keeping within the limits of the French tradition. Compared with this, all later literary revolutions are secondary and partial changes. The most widely influential writers of later ages—e.g. Petrarch and Voltaire—had the ground prepared for them in this medieval epoch, and do nothing to alter the general conditions which were then established—the intercommunication among the whole laity of Europe with regard to questions of taste.

It seems probable that the Normans had a good deal to do as agents in this revolution. They were in relation with many different people. They had Bretons on their borders in Normandy; they conquered England, and then they touched upon the Welsh; they were fond of pilgrimages; they settled in Apulia and Sicily, where they had dealings with Greeks and Saracens as well as Italians.

It is a curious thing that early in the twelfth century names are found in Italy which certainly come from the romances of King Arthur—the name Galvano, e.g. which is the same as Gawain. However it was brought there, this name may be taken for a sign of the process that was going on everywhere—the conversion of Europe to fashions which were prescribed in France.

The narrative poetry in which the French excelled was of different kinds. An old French poet, in an epic on Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons, has given a classification which is well known, dividing the stories according to the historical matter which they employ. There are three ‘matters’, he says, and no more than three, which a story-teller may take up—the matter of France, the matter of Britain, the matter of Rome the Great. The old poet is right in naming these as at any rate the chief groups; since ‘Rome the Great’ might be made to take in whatever would not go into the other two divisions, there is nothing much wrong in his refusal to make a fourth class. The ‘matter of France’ includes all the subjects of the old French national epics—such as Roncevaux, or the song of Roland; Reynold of Montalban, or the Four Sons of Aymon; Ferabras; Ogier the Dane. The matter of Britain includes all the body of the Arthurian legend, as well as the separate stories commonly called Breton lays (like Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale). The matter of Rome is not only Roman history, but the whole of classical antiquity. The story of Troy, of course, is rightly part of Roman history, and so is the Romance of Eneas. But under Rome the Great there fall other stories which have much slighter connexion with Rome—such as the story of Thebes, or of Alexander.

Many of those subjects were of course well known and popular before the French poets took them up. The romantic story of Alexander might, in part at any rate, have been familiar to Alfred the Great; he brings the Egyptian king ‘Nectanebus the wizard’ into his translation of Orosius—Nectanebus, who is the father of Alexander in the apocryphal book from which the romances were derived. But it was not till the French poets turned the story of Alexander into verse that it really made much impression outside of France. The tale of Troy was widely read, in various authors—Ovid and Virgil, and an abstract of the Iliad, and in the apocryphal prose books of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan, who were supposed to have been at the seat of war, and therefore to be better witnesses than Homer. These were used and translated some times apart from any French suggestion. But it was the French Roman de Troie, written in the twelfth century, which spread the story everywhere—the source of innumerable Troy Books in all languages, and of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troilus.

The ‘matter of Britain’ also was generally made known through the works of French authors. There are exceptions; the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth was written in Latin. But even this found its way into English by means of a French translation; the Brut of Layamon, a long poem in irregular alliterative verse, is adapted from a French rhyming translation of Geoffrey’s History. The English romances of Sir Perceval, Sir Gawain and other knights are founded on French poems.

There is an important distinction between the ‘matter of France’ and the ‘matters’ of Britain and Rome; this distinction belongs more properly to the history of French literature, but it ought not to be neglected here. The ‘matter of France’, which is exemplified in the song of Roland, belongs to an earlier time, and was made into French poetry earlier than the other subjects. The poems about Charlemagne and his peers, and others of the same sort, are sometimes called the old French epics; the French name for them is chansons de geste. Those epics have not only a different matter but a different form from the French Arthurian romances and the French Roman de Troie. What is of more importance for English poetry, there is generally a different tone and sentiment. They are older, stronger, more heroic, more like Beowulf or the Maldon poem; the romances of the ‘matter of Britain’, on the other hand, are the fashionable novels of the twelfth century; their subjects are really taken from contemporary polite society. They are long love-stories, and their motive chiefly is to represent the fortunes, and, above all, the sentiments of true lovers. Roughly speaking, the ‘matter of France’ is action, the ‘matter of Britain’ is sentiment. The ‘matter of Rome’ is mixed; for while the Roman de Troie (with the love-story of Troilus, and with courteous modern manners throughout) is like the romances of Lancelot and Tristram, Alexander, in the French versions, is a hero like those of the national epics, and is celebrated in the same manner as Charlemagne.

The ‘matter of France’ could not be popular in England as it was in its native country. But Charlemagne and Roland and his peers were well known everywhere, like Arthur and Alexander, and the ‘matter of France’ went to increase the stories told by English minstrels. It was from an English version, in the thirteenth century, that part of the long Norwegian prose history of Charlemagne was taken; a fact worth remembering, to illustrate the way in which the exportation of stories was carried on. Of course, the story of Charlemagne was not the same sort of thing in England or Norway that it was in France. The devotion to France which is so intense in the song of Roland was never meant to be shared by any foreigner. But Roland as a champion against the infidels was a hero everywhere. There are statues of him in Bremen and in Verona; and it is in Italy that the story is told of the simple man who was found weeping in the market-place; a professional story-teller had just come to the death of Roland and the poor man heard the news for the first time. A traveller in the Faroe Islands not long ago, asking in the bookshop at Thorshavn for some things in the Faroese language, was offered a ballad of Roncesvalles.

The favourite story everywhere was Sir Ferabras, because the centre of the plot is the encounter between Oliver the Paladin and Ferabras the Paynim champion. Every one could understand this, and in all countries the story became popular as a sound religious romance.

Naturally, the stories of action and adventure went further and were more widely appreciated than the cultivated sentimental romance. The English in the reign of Edward I or Edward III had often much difficulty in understanding what the French romantic school was driving at—particularly when it seemed to be driving round and round, spinning long monologues of afflicted damsels, or elegant conversations full of phrases between the knight and his lady. The difficulty was not unreasonable. If the French authors had been content to write about nothing but sentimental conversations and languishing lovers, then one would have known what to do. The man who is looking at the railway bookstall for a good detective story knows at once what to say when he is offered the Diary of a Soul. But the successful French novelists of the twelfth century appealed to both tastes, and dealt equally in sensation and sentiment; they did not often limit themselves to what was always their chief interest, the moods of lovers. They worked these into plots of adventure, mystery, fairy magic; the adventures were too good to be lost; so the less refined English readers, who were puzzled or wearied by sentimental conversations, were not able to do without the elegant romances. They read them; and they skipped. The skipping was done for them, generally, when the romances were translated into English; the English versions are shorter than the French in most cases where comparison is possible. As a general rule, the English took the adventurous sensational part of the French romances, and let the language of the heart alone. To this there are exceptions. In the first place it is not always true that the French romances are adventurous. Some of them are almost purely love-stories—sentiment from beginning to end. Further, it is proved that one of these, Amadas et Ydoine—a French romance written in England—was much liked in England by many whose proper language was English; there is no English version of it extant, and perhaps there never was one, but it was certainly well known outside the limited refined society for which it was composed. And again there may be found examples where the English adapter, instead of skipping, sets himself to wrestle with the original—saying to himself, ‘I will not be beaten by this culture; I will get to the end of it and lose nothing; it shall be made to go into the English language’. An example of this effort is the alliterative romance of William and the Werwolf, a work which does not fulfil the promise of its title in any satisfactory way. It spends enormous trouble over the sentimental passages of the original, turning them into the form worst suited to them, viz. the emphatic style of the alliterative poetry which is so good for battle pieces, satire, storms at sea, and generally everything except what it is here applied to. Part of the success of Chaucer and almost all the beauty of Gower may be said to be their mastery of French polite literature, and their power of expressing in English everything that could be said in French, with no loss of effect and no inferiority in manner. Gower ought to receive his due alongside of Chaucer as having accomplished what many English writers had attempted for two hundred years before him—the perfect adoption in English verse of everything remarkable in the style of French poetry.