Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

One of the strange things was that the French lyrical examples affected the English in two opposite ways. As foreign verse, and as belonging especially to those who were acquainted with courts and good society, it had the attraction which fashionable and stylish things generally have for those who are a little behind the fashion. It was the newest and most brilliant thing; the English did all they could to make it their own whether by composing in French themselves or by copying the French style in English words. But besides this fashionable and courtly value of French poetry, there was another mode in which it appealed to the English. Much of it was closely related not to the courts but to popular country festivals which were frequent also in towns, like the games and dances to celebrate the coming of May. French poetry was associated with games of that sort, and along with games of that sort it came to England. The English were hit on both sides. French poetry was more genteel in some things, more popular and jovial in others, than anything then current in England. Thus the same foreign mode of composition which gave a new courtly ideal to the English helped also very greatly to quicken their popular life. While the distinction between courtly and popular is nowhere more important than in medieval literature, it is often very hard to make it definite in particular cases, just for this reason. It is not as if there were a popular native layer, English in character and origin, with a courtly foreign French layer above it. What is popular in Middle English literature is just as much French as English; while, on the other hand, what is native, like the alliterative verse, is as often as not used for ambitious works. Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the poem of the Morte Arthure are certainly not ‘popular’ in the sense of ‘uneducated’ or ‘simple’ or anything of that kind, and though they are written in the old native verse they are not intended for the people who had no education and could not speak French.

The great manifestation of French influence in the common life of the Middle Ages was through the fashion of the dance which generally went by the name of Carole. The carole—music, verse and dance altogether—spread as a fashion all over Europe in the twelfth century; and there is nothing which so effectively marks the change from the earlier to the later Middle Ages. It is in fact a great part of the change, with all that is implied in it; which may be explained in the following way.

The carole was a dance accompanied by a song, the song being divided between a leader and the rest of the chorus; the leader sang the successive new lines, while the rest of the dancers holding hands in a ring all joined in the refrain. Now this was the fashion most in favour in all gentle houses through the Middle Ages, and it was largely through this that the French type of lyric was transported to so many countries and languages. French lyric poetry was part of a graceful diversion for winter evenings in a castle or for summer afternoons in the castle garden. But it was also thoroughly and immediately available for all the parish. In its origin it was popular in the widest sense—not restricted to any one rank or class; and though it was adopted and elaborated in the stately homes of England and other countries it could not lose its original character. Every one could understand it and enjoy it; so it became the favourite thing at popular festivals, as well as at the Christmas entertainments in the great hall. Particularly, it was a favourite custom to dance and sing in this way on the vigils or eves of Saints’ days, when people assembled from some distance at the church where the day was to be observed. Dancing-parties were frequent at these ‘wakes’; they were often held in the churchyard. There are many stories to show how they were discouraged by the clergy, and how deplorable was their vanity: but those moral examples also prove how well established the custom was; some of them also from their date show how quickly it had spread. The best is in Giraldus Cambrensis, ‘Gerald the Welshman’, a most amusing writer, who is unfortunately little read, as he wrote in Latin. In his Gemma Ecclesiastica he has a chapter against the custom of using churches and churchyards for songs and dances. As an illustration, he tells the story of a wake in a churchyard, somewhere in the diocese of Worcester, which was kept up all night long, the dancers repeating one refrain over and over; so that the priest who had this refrain in his ears all night could not get rid of it in the morning, but repeated it at the Mass—saying (instead of Dominus vobiscum) ‘Sweet Heart, have pity!’ Giraldus, writing in Latin, quotes the English verse: Swete lemman, thin arè. Are, later ore, means ‘mercy’ or ‘grace’, and the refrain is of the same sort as is found, much later, in the lyric poetry of the time of Edward I. Giraldus wrote in the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry II, and it is plain from what he tells that the French fashion was already in full swing and as thoroughly naturalized among the English as the Waltz or the Lancers in the nineteenth century. The same sort of evidence comes from Denmark about the same time as Giraldus; ring-dances were equally a trouble and vexation to religious teachers there—for, strangely, the dances seem everywhere to have been drawn to churches and monasteries, through the custom of keeping religious wakes in a cheerful manner. Europe was held together in this common vanity, and it was through the caroles and similar amusements that the poetical art of France came to be dominant all over the North, affecting the popular and unpretending poets no less than those of greater ambition and conceit.

The word ‘Court’ and its derivations are frequently used by medieval and early modern writers with a special reference to poetry. The courts of kings and great nobles were naturally associated with the ideas of polite education; those men ‘that has used court and dwelled therein can Frankis and Latin’, says Richard Rolle of Hampole in the fourteenth century; the ‘courtly maker’ is an Elizabethan name for the accomplished poet, and similar terms are used in other languages to express the same meaning. This ‘courtly’ ideal was not properly realized in England till the time of Chaucer and Gower; and a general view of the subject easily leads one to think of the English language as struggling in the course of three centuries to get rid of its homeliness, its rustic and parochial qualities. This period, from about 1100 to 1400, closes in the full attainment of the desired end. Chaucer and Gower are unimpeachable as ‘courtly makers’, and their success in this way also implies the establishment of their language as pure English; the competition of dialects is ended by the victory of the East Midland language which Chaucer and Gower used. The ‘courtly poets’ make it impossible in England to use any language for poetry except their own.

But the distinction between ‘courtly’ and ‘vulgar’, ‘popular’, or whatever the other term may be, is not very easy to fix. The history of the carole is an example of this difficulty. The carole flourishes among the gentry and it is a favourite amusement as well among the common people. ‘Courtly’ ideas, suggestions, phrases, might have a circulation in country places, and be turned to literary effect by authors who had no special attachment to good society. A hundred years before Chaucer there may be found in the poem of The Owl and the Nightingale, written in the language of Dorset, a kind of good-humoured ironical satire which is very like Chaucer’s own. This is the most modern in tone of all the thirteenth-century poems, but there are many others in which the rustic, or popular, and the ‘courtly’ elements are curiously and often very pleasantly mixed.

In fact, for many purposes even of literary history and criticism the medieval distinction between ‘courtly’ and popular may be neglected. There is always a difficulty in finding out what is meant by ‘the People’. One has only to remember Chaucer’s Pilgrims to understand this, and to realize how absurd is any fixed line of division between ranks, with regard to their literary taste. The most attentive listener and the most critical among the Canterbury Pilgrims is the Host of the Tabard. There was ‘culture’ in the Borough as well as in Westminster. The Franklin who apologizes for his want of rhetorical skill—he had never read Tullius or Cicero—tells one of the ‘Breton lays’, a story elegantly planned and finished, of the best French type; and the Wife of Bath, after the story of her own life, repeats another romance of the same school as the Franklin’s Tale. The average ‘reading public’ of Chaucer’s time could understand a great many different varieties of verse and prose.

But while the difference between ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ is often hard to determine in particular cases, it is none the less important and significant in medieval history. It implies the chivalrous ideal—the self-conscious withdrawal and separation of the gentle folk from all the rest, not merely through birth and rank and the fashion of their armour, but through their ways of thinking, and especially through their theory of love. The devotion of the true knight to his lady—the motive of all the books of chivalry—began to be the favourite subject in the twelfth century; it was studied and meditated in all manner of ways, and it is this that gives its character to all the most original, as well as to the most artificial, poetry of the later Middle Ages. The spirit and the poetical art of the different nations may be estimated according to the mode in which they appropriated those ideas. For the ideas of this religion of chivalrous love were literary and artistic ideas; they went along with poetical ambitions and fresh poetical invention—they led to the poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Spenser, not as ideas and inspirations simply, but through their employment of definite poetical forms of expression, which were developed by successive generations of poets.

Stories of true love do not belong peculiarly to the age of chivalrous romance. The greatest of them all, the story of Sigurd and Brynhild, has come down from an older world. The early books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus are full of romantic themes. ‘A mutual love arose between Hedin and Hilda, the daughter of Hogne, a maiden of most eminent renown. For though they had not yet seen one another, each had been kindled by the other’s glory. But when they had a chance of beholding one another, neither could look away; so steadfast was the love that made their eyes linger’. This passage (quoted from Oliver Elton’s translation) is one of the things which were collected by Saxo from Danish tradition; it is quite independent of anything chivalrous, in the special sense of that word. Again, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, the story of Dido, or of Pyramus and Thisbe, may serve as a reminder how impossible it is to separate ‘romantic’ from ‘classical’ literature. A great part of medieval romance is nothing but a translation into medieval forms, into French couplets, of the passion of Medea or of Dido. Even in the fresh discovery which made the ideal of the ‘courtly’ schools, namely, the lover’s worship of his lady as divine, there is something traceable to the Latin poets. But it was a fresh discovery, for all that, a new mode of thought, whatever its source might be. The devotion of Dante to Beatrice, of Petrarch to Laura, is different from anything in classical poetry, or in the earlier Middle Ages. It is first in Provençal lyric verse that something like their ideas may be found; both Dante and Petrarch acknowledge their debt to the Provençal poets.

Those ideas can be expressed in lyric poetry; not so well in narrative. They are too vague for narrative, and too general; they are the utterance of any true lover, his pride and his humility, his belief that all the joy and grace of the world, and of Heaven also, are included in the worshipful lady. There is also along with this religion a firm belief that it is not intended for the vulgar; and as the ideas and motives are noble so must the poetry be, in every respect. The refinement of the idea requires a corresponding beauty of form; and the lyric poets of Provence and their imitators in Germany, the Minnesingers, were great inventors of new stanzas and, it should be remembered, of the tunes that accompanied them. It was not allowable for one poet to take another poet’s stanza. The new spirit of devotion in love-poetry produced an enormous variety of lyrical measures, which are still musical, and some of them still current, to this day.

It was an artificial kind of poetry, in different senses of the term. It was consciously artistic, and ambitious; based upon science—the science of music—and deliberately planned so as to make the best effect. The poets were competitors—sometimes in actual competition for a prize, as in the famous scene at the Wartburg, which comes in Tannhäuser, or as at a modern Welsh eisteddfod; the fame of a poet could not be gained without the finest technical skill, and the prize was often given for technical skill, rather than for anything else. Besides this, the ideas themselves were conventional; the poet’s amatory religion was often assumed; he chose a lady to whom he offered his poetical homage. The fiction was well understood, and was highly appreciated as an honour, when the poetry was successful. For example, the following may be taken from the Lives of the Troubadours—