Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

All through the time between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer one feels that the Court is what determines the character of poetry and prose. The English writers almost always have to bear in mind their inferiority to French, and it is possible to describe their efforts during three centuries (1100-1400) as generally directed towards the ideal of French poetry, a struggle to realize in English what had been already achieved in French, to make English literature polite.

In the history of the English romances this may be tested in various ways. To begin with, there is the fact that many writers living in England wrote French, and that some French romances, not among the worst, were composed in England. It can hardly be doubted that such was the case with the famous love-story of Amadas and Ydoine; it is certain that the romance of Ipomedon was composed by an Englishman, Hue de Rotelande. Those two works of fiction are, if not the noblest, at any rate among the most refined of their species; Amadas and Ydoine is as perfect a romance of true love as Amadis of Gaul in later days—a history which possibly derived the name of its hero from the earlier Amadas. Ipomedon is equally perfect in another way, being one of the most clever and successful specimens of the conventionally elegant work which was practised by imitative poets after the fashion had been established. There is no better romance to look at in order to see what things were thought important in the ‘school’, i.e. among the well-bred unoriginal writers who had learned the necessary style of verse, and who could turn out a showy piece of new work by copying the patterns they had before them. Both Ipomedon and Amadas and Ydoine are in the best possible style—the genteelest of tunes. The fact is clear, that in the twelfth century literary refinement was as possible in England as in France, so long as one used the French language.

It must not be supposed that everything written in French, whether in France or England, was courtly or refined. There is plenty of rough French written in England—some of it very good, too, like the prose story of Fulk Fitzwaryn, which many people would find much more lively than the genteel sentimental novels. But while French could be used for all purposes, polite or rude, English was long compelled to be rude and prevented from competing on equal terms with the language of those ‘who have used court’.

It is very interesting to see how the English translated and adapted the polite French poems, because the different examples show so many different degrees of ambition and capacity among the native English. In the style of the English romances—of which there are a great many varieties—one may read the history of the people; the romances bring one into relation with different types of mind and different stages of culture. What happened to Ipomedon is a good illustration. First there is the original French poem—a romantic tale in verse written in the regular French short couplets of octosyllabic lines—well and correctly written by a man of English birth. In this production Hue de Rotelande, the author, meant to do his best and to beat all other competitors. He had the right sort of talent for this—not for really original imagination, but for the kind of work that was most in fashion in his time. He did not, like some other poets, look for a subject or a groundwork in a Breton lay, or an Arabian story brought from the East by a traveller; instead of that he had read the most successful romances and he picked out of them, here and there, what suited him best for a new combination. He took, for example, the idea of the lover who falls in love with a lady he has never seen (an idea much older than the French romantic school, but that does not matter, for the present); he took the story of the proud lady won by faithful service; he took from one of the Arthurian romances another device which is older than any particular literature, the champion appearing, disguised in different colours, on three successive days. In Ipomedon, of course, the days are days of tournament, and the different disguises three several suits of armour. The scene of the story is Apulia and Calabria, chosen for no particular reason except perhaps to get away from the scene of the British romances. The hero’s name, Hippomedon, is Greek, like the names in the Romance of Thebes, like Palamon and Arcita, which are taken from the Greek names Palæmon and Archytas. Everything is borrowed, and nothing is used clumsily. Ipomedon is made according to a certain prescription, and it is made exactly in the terms of the prescription—a perfect example of the regular fashionable novel, well entitled to its place in any literary museum. This successful piece was turned into English in at least two versions. One of these imitates the original verse of Ipomedon, it is written in the ordinary short couplets. In every other respect it fails to represent the original. It leaves things out, and spoils the construction, and misses the point. It is one of our failures. The other version is much more intelligent and careful; the author really was doing as much as he could to render his original truly. But he fails in his choice of verse; he translates the French couplets of Ipomedon into a form of stanza, like that which Chaucer burlesques in Sir Thopas. It is a very good kind of stanza, and this anonymous English poet manages it well. But it is the wrong sort of measure for that kind of story. It is a dancing, capering measure, and ill suited to translate the French verse, which is quiet, sedate, and not emphatic. These two translations show how the English were apt to fail. Some of them were stupid, and some of them had the wrong sort of skill.

It may be an accident that the English who were so fond of translating from the French should (apparently) have taken so little from the chief French poet of the twelfth century. This was Chrestien de Troyes, who was in his day everything that Racine was five hundred years later; that is to say, he was the successful and accomplished master of all the subtleties of emotion, particularly of love, expressed in the newest, most engaging and captivating style—the perfect manner of good society. His fine narrative poems were thoroughly appreciated in Germany, where German was at that time the language of all the courts, and where the poets of the land were favoured and protected in the same way as poets in France and Provence. In English there is only one romance extant which is translated from Chrestien de Troyes; and the character of the translation is significant: it proves how greatly the circumstances and conditions of literature in England differed from those of France and Germany. The romance is Ywain and Gawain, a translation of Chrestien’s Yvain, otherwise called Le Chevalier au Lion. It is a good romance, and in style it is much closer to the original than either of the two versions of Ipomedon, lately mentioned; no other of the anonymous romances comes so near to the standard of Chaucer and Gower. It is good in manner; its short couplets (in the language of the North of England) reproduce very well the tone of French narrative verse. But the English writer is plainly unable to follow the French in all the effusive passages; he thinks the French is too long, and he cuts down the speeches. On the other hand (to show the difference between different countries), the German translator Hartmann von Aue, dealing with the same French poem, admires the same things as the French author, and spins out his translation to a greater length than the original. Another historical fact of the same sort is that the English seem to have neglected the Roman d’Eneas; while German historians note that it was a translation of this French poem, the Eneide of Heinrich van Valdeke, which first introduced the courteous literary form of romance into Germany. German poetry about the year 1200 was fully the equal of French, in the very qualities on which the French authors prided themselves. England was labouring far behind.

It is necessary to judge England in comparison with France, if the history of medieval poetry is to be written and studied at all. But the comparison ought not to be pressed so far as to obliterate all the genuine virtues of the English writers because they are not the same as the French. There is another consideration also which ought not to be left out. It is true that the most remarkable thing in the French romances was their ‘language of the heart’, their skill in rendering passion and emotion—their ‘sensibility’, to use an eighteenth-century name for the same sort of disposition. But this emotional skill, this ingenious use of passionate language in soliloquies and dialogues, was not the only attraction in the French romances. It was the most important thing at the time, and historically it is what gives those romances, of Chrestien de Troyes and others, their rank among the poetical ideas of the world. It was through their sensibility that they enchanted their own time, and this was the spirit which passed on from them to later generations through the prose romances of the fourteenth century, such as Amadis of Gaul, to those of the seventeenth century, such as the Grand Cyrus or Cassandra. To understand what the works of Chrestien de Troyes meant for his contemporaries one cannot do better than read the letters in which Dorothy Osborne speaks of her favourite characters in the later French prose romances, those ‘monstrous fictions’, as Scott called them, ‘which constituted the amusement of the young and the gay in the age of Charles II’. Writing to Sir William Temple she says: ‘Almanzor is as fresh in my memory as if I had visited his tomb but yesterday. . . . You will believe I had not been used to great afflictions when I made his story such an one to me as I cried an hour together for him, and was so angry with Alcidiana that for my life I could never love her after it’. Almanzor and Alcidiana, and the sorrows that so touched their gentle readers in the age of Louis XIV and Charles II, were the descendants of Chrestien de Troyes in a direct line; they represent what is enduring and inexhaustible in the spirit of the older polite literature in France. Sentiment in modern fiction can be traced back to Chrestien de Troyes. It is a fashion which was established then and has never been extinguished since; if there is to be any history of ideas at all, this is what has to be recorded as the principal influence in French literature in the twelfth century. But it was not everything, and it was not a simple thing. There are many varieties of sentiment, and besides sentiment there are many other interests in the old French romantic literature. The works of Chrestien de Troyes may be taken as examples again. In one, Cliges, there are few adventures; in Perceval (the story of the Grail), his last poem, the adventures are many and wonderful. In his Lancelot, the sentimental interest is managed in accordance with the rules of the Provençal poetry at its most refined and artificial height; but his story of Enid is in substance the same as Tennyson’s, a romance which does not need (like Chrestien’s Lancelot) any study of a special code of behaviour to explain the essence of it. The lovers here are husband and wife (quite against the Provençal rules), and the plot is pure comedy, a misunderstanding cleared away by the truth and faithfulness of the heroine.

Further, although it is true that adventure is not the chief interest with Chrestien de Troyes and his followers, it is not true that it is neglected by them; and besides, although they were the most fashionable and most famous and successful authors of romance, they were not the only story-tellers nor was their method the only one available. There was a form of short story, commonly called lai and associated with Brittany, in which there was room for the same kind of matter as in many of the larger romances, but not for the same expression and effusion of sentiment. The best known are those of Marie de France, who dedicated her book of stories to King Henry of England (Henry II). One of the best of the English short romances, Sir Launfal, is taken from Marie de France; her stories have a beauty which was not at the time so enthralling as the charm of the longer stories, and which had nothing like the same influence on the literature of the future, but which now, for those who care to look at it, has much more freshness, partly because it is nearer to the fairy mythology of popular tradition. The longer romances are really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising. The shorter lais (like that of Sir Launfal) might be compared to the stories of Hans Christian Andersen; they are made in the same way. Like many of Andersen’s tales, they are borrowed from folk-lore; like them, again, they are not mere transcripts from an uneducated story-teller. They are ‘old wives’ tales’, but they are put into fresh literary form. This new form may occasionally interfere with something in the original traditional version, but it does not, either with Marie de France or with Andersen, add too much to the original. Curiously, there is an example in English, among the shorter rhyming romances, of a story which Andersen has told in his own way under the title of the Travelling Companion. The English Sir Amadace is unfortunately not one of the best of the short stories—not nearly as good as Sir Launfal—but still it shows how a common folk-lore plot, the story of the Grateful Dead, might be turned into literary form without losing all its original force and without being transformed into a mere vehicle for modern literary ambitions.

The relations between folk-lore and literature are forced on the attention when one is studying the Middle Ages, and perhaps most of all in dealing with this present subject, the romances of the age of chivalry. In Anglo-Saxon literature it is much less to the fore, probably not because there was little of it really, but because so little has been preserved. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a great stirring-up of popular mythology in a number of countries, so that it came to be noticed, and passed into scores of books, both in the form of plots for stories, and also in scientific remarks made by investigators and historians. Giraldus Cambrensis is full of folk-lore, and about the same time Walter Map (in his De Nugis Curialium) and Gervase of Tilbury (in his Otia Imperialia) were taking notes of the same sort. Both Giraldus and Walter Map were at home in Wales, and it was particularly in the relation between the Welsh and their neighbours that the study of folk-lore was encouraged; both the historical study, as in the works of these Latin authors just named, and the traffic in stories to be used for literary purposes in the vernacular languages whether French or English.

The ‘matter of Britain’ in the stories of Tristram, Gawain, Perceval and Lancelot came to be associated peculiarly with the courteous sentimental type of romance which had such vogue and such influence in the Middle Ages. But the value of this ‘matter’—the Celtic stories—was by no means exclusively connected with the ambitious literary art of Chrestien and others like him. Apart from form altogether, it counts for something that such a profusion of stories was sent abroad over all the nations. They were interesting and amusing, in whatever language they were told. They quickened up people’s imaginations and gave them something to think about, in the same way as the Italian novels which were so much read in the time of Shakespeare, or the trashy German novels in the time of Shelley.

It is much debated among historians whether it was from Wales or Brittany that these stories passed into general circulation. It seems most probable that the two Welsh countries on both sides of the Channel gave stories to their neighbours—to the Normans both in France and England, and to the English besides on the Welsh borders. It seems most probable at any rate that the French had not to wait for the Norman Conquest before they picked up any Celtic stories. The Arthurian names in Italy (mentioned already above, p. 50) are found too early, and the dates do not allow time for the stories to make their way, and find favour, and tempt people in Lombardy to call their children after Gawain instead of a patron saint. It is certain that both in Brittany—Little Britain—and in Wales King Arthur was a hero, whose return was to put all things right. It was to fulfil this prophecy that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s son was called Arthur, and a Provençal poet hails the child with these auspices: ‘Now the Bretons have got their Arthur’. Other writers speak commonly of the ‘Breton folly’—this hope of a deliverer was the Breton vanity, well known and laughed at by the more practical people across the border.