Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

Arthur, however, was not the proper hero of the romantic tales, either in their shorter, more popular form or in the elaborate work of the courtly school. In many of the lais he is never mentioned; in most of the romances, long or short, early or late, he has nothing to do except to preside over the feast, at Christmas or Whitsuntide, and wait for adventures. So he is represented in the English poem of Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght. The stories are told not about King Arthur, but about Gawain or Perceval, Lancelot or Pelleas or Pellenore.

The great exception to this general rule is the history of Arthur which was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the twelfth century as part of his Latin history of Britain. This history of Arthur was of course translated wherever Geoffrey was translated, and sometimes it was picked out for separate treatment, as by the remarkable author of the Morte Arthure, one of the best of the alliterative poems. Arthur had long been known in Britain as a great leader against the Saxon invaders; Geoffrey of Monmouth took up and developed this idea in his own way, making Arthur a successful opponent not of the Saxons merely but of Rome; a conqueror of kingdoms, himself an emperor before whom the power of Rome was humbled. In consequence of which the ‘Saxons’ came to think of their country as Britain, and to make Arthur their national hero, in the same way as Charlemagne was the national hero in France. Arthur also, like Charlemagne, came to be generally respected all over Christendom, in Norway and Iceland, as well as Italy and Greece. Speaking generally, whenever Arthur is a great conquering hero like Alexander or Charlemagne this idea of him is due to Geoffrey of Monmouth; the stories where he only appears as holding a court and sending out champions are stories that have come from popular tradition, or are imitations of such stories. But there are some exceptions. For one thing, Geoffrey’s representation of Arthur is not merely a composition after the model of Alexander the Great or Charlemagne; the story of Arthur’s fall at the hands of his nephew is traditional. And when Layamon a ‘Saxon’ turned the French rhyming version of Geoffrey into English—Layamon’s Brut—he added a number of things which are neither in the Latin nor the French, but obtained by Layamon himself independently, somehow or other, from the Welsh. Layamon lived on the banks of the Severn, and very probably he may have done the same kind of note-taking in Wales or among Welsh acquaintances as was done by Walter Map a little earlier. Layamon’s additions are of great worth; he tells the story of the passing of Arthur, and it is from Layamon, ultimately, that all the later versions—Malory’s and Tennyson’s—are derived.

None of the English authors can compete with the French poets as elegant writers dealing with contemporary manners. But apart from that kind of work almost every variety of interest may be found in the English stories. There are two, King Horn and Havelok the Dane, which appear to be founded on national English traditions coming down from the time of the Danish wars. King Horn is remarkable for its metre—short rhyming couplets, but not in the regular eight-syllable lines which were imitated from the French. The verse appears to be an adaptation of the old native English measure, fitted with regular rhymes. Rhyme was used in continental German poetry, and in Icelandic, and occasionally in Anglo-Saxon, before there were any French examples to follow; and King Horn is one thing surviving to show how the English story-tellers might have got on if they had not paid so much attention to the French authorities in rhyme. The story of Havelok belongs to the town of Grimsby particularly and to the Danelaw, the district of England occupied by Danish settlers. The name Havelok is the Danish, or rather the Norwegian, Anlaf or Olaf, and the story seems to be a tradition in which two historical Olafs have been confused—one the Olaf who was defeated at the battle of Brunanburh, the other the Olaf who won the battle of Maldon—Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway. Havelok, the English story, is worth reading as a good specimen of popular English poetry in the thirteenth century, a story where the subject and the scene are English, where the manners are not too fine, and where the hero, a king’s son disinherited and unrecognized, lives as a servant for a long time and so gives the author a chance of describing common life and uncourtly manners. And he does this very well, particularly in the athletic sports where Havelok distinguishes himself—an excellent piece to compare with the funeral games which used to be a necessary part of every regular epic poem. Horn and Havelok, though they belong to England, are scarcely to be reckoned as part of the ‘matter of Britain’, at least as that was understood by the French author who used the term. There are other stories which will not go easily into that or into either of the two other divisions. One of these is the story of Floris and Blanchefleur, which was turned into English in the thirteenth century—one of the oldest among the rhyming romances. This is one of the many stories that came from the East. It is the history of two young lovers who are separated for a time—a very well known and favourite type of story. This is the regular plot in the Greek prose romances, such as that of Heliodorus which was so much admired after the Renaissance. This story of Floris and Blanchefleur, however, does not come from Greece, but from the same source as the Arabian Nights. Those famous stories, the Thousand and One Nights, were not known in Europe till the beginning of the eighteenth century, but many things of the same sort had made their way in the Middle Ages into France, and this was the best of them all. It is found in German and Dutch, as well as in English; also in Swedish and Danish, in the same kind of short couplets—showing how widely the fashions of literature were prescribed by France among all the Teutonic races.

How various the styles of romance might be is shown by two poems which are both found in the famous Auchinleck manuscript in Edinburgh, Sir Orfeo and Sir Tristrem. The stories are two of the best known in the world. Sir Orfeo is Orpheus. But this version of Orpheus and Eurydice is not a translation from anything classical; it is far further from any classical original than even the very free and distinctly ‘Gothic’ rendering of Jason and Medea at the beginning of the old French tale of Troy. The story of Orpheus has passed through popular tradition before it turns into Sir Orfeo. It shows how readily folk-lore will take a suggestion from book-learning, and how easily it will make a classical fable into the likeness of a Breton lay. Orfeo was a king, and also a good harper:

He hath a queen full fair of price

That is clepèd Dame Erodys.

One day in May Queen Erodys slept in her orchard, and when she awoke was overcome with affliction because of a dream—a king had appeared to her, with a thousand knights and fifty ladies, riding on snow-white steeds.

The king had a crown on his head

It was no silver, ne gold red,

All it was of precious stone,