Middle English Literature (1066-1500)

In the autumn of 1066 a Norman duke won a battle on the Sussex coast, and the people who ruled England began to speak a different language. For the next three centuries the royal court used French, the Church and the schools used Latin, and English lived on as the speech of farmers, workers and townspeople. It had no official standing and no standard form. Each region wrote it as it sounded.

Yet this was the age in which English literature found its voice. The language lost most of its old word endings, took in thousands of French words, and became lighter and easier to bend. By 1400 a London civil servant named Geoffrey Chaucer was writing verse that readers still enjoy today. Around him, an unknown poet in the north-west Midlands told how a green giant rode into King Arthur's hall at Christmas. A dreamer in the west Midlands saw the whole of English society gathered in one field. A woman shut in a cell at Norwich wrote down her visions of divine love.

The period closed with a change in technology. In 1476 William Caxton set up a printing press at Westminster, and in 1485 he printed the tales of King Arthur. Books were no longer slow to copy and rare to own. English had come through conquest, plague and rebellion, and it was ready for a new age.

The world of this age

Political life

William of Normandy defeated King Harold at Hastings on 14 October 1066 and was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. He gave English land to his Norman followers, and in 1086 his officials carried out a great survey of the kingdom, recorded in Domesday Book. The new rulers were French-speaking lords who also held land across the Channel, and that link drew England into long wars with France.

Royal power was tested at home as well. In 1215 the barons forced King John to accept Magna Carta, which limited what a king could demand. The Hundred Years' War began in 1337 and lasted until 1453. English armies won famous victories at Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415, but the taxes that paid for the war brought anger. In 1381 villagers in Essex refused to pay a poll tax, and thousands of rebels marched on London. The king, Richard II, was only fourteen. He met the Kentish leader Wat Tyler at Smithfield on 15 June, and Tyler was killed there. The promises made to the rebels were broken, but the poll tax was dropped.

The crown itself passed uneasily. In 1399 Richard II was removed by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, who became Henry IV. From 1455 rival branches of the royal family fought the Wars of the Roses. They are usually said to have ended on 22 August 1485, when Henry Tudor defeated and killed Richard III at Bosworth Field. He became Henry VII, and a new dynasty began.

Social life

English society was built in layers. The king gave land to great lords, the lords gave land to knights, and each held it in return for service in war. At the bottom were the peasants, many of them villeins, who worked their lord's fields, paid dues in labour and goods, and could not leave the manor freely. In the towns, craftsmen and merchants joined guilds that controlled training, prices and quality.

The ideal man of the upper class was the knight: brave, loyal and polite. Stories about knights taught a code called chivalry and a fashion called courtly love, in which a knight served a noble lady with devotion, often from a distance. Most women worked on the land, in the home or in small trades, though a few, like the merchant's daughter Margery Kempe, travelled far on pilgrimage. The universities at Oxford and Cambridge took shape in this age and trained the clerks and priests who made up most of the educated class.

Economic life

Wool was England's main wealth. Flocks grazed on the hills, and the wool was sold to the cloth towns of Flanders. The king taxed it at the ports, which is why Chaucer, as controller of customs in London from 1374, spent his working days checking wool, skins and leather. Most people, however, lived by farming, and the manor was the basic unit of country life.

In the summer of 1348 the Black Death reached England by sea from France. Estimates of the death toll vary, but it may have killed as many as half of the people. Whole villages were emptied. Workers became scarce, and the survivors could ask for higher wages. Lords and the government tried to hold wages down by law, and that angered the poor. Historians often see this long quarrel as one root of the revolt of 1381. In the longer run, many peasants gained more freedom and better pay.

Religion

The Catholic Church shaped daily life, and its language was Latin. Parish priests, monks, nuns and friars were part of every community. Pilgrimage was a popular form of devotion, and Canterbury drew crowds to the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in his cathedral in 1170. The poets of the age knew the Church well and often laughed at its failings, especially greedy friars and sellers of pardons.

Some wanted deeper change. John Wyclif, a teacher at Oxford, argued that ordinary people should be able to read the Bible, and he criticised the wealth of the clergy. He died on the last day of 1384, but his followers, called Lollards, kept his ideas alive. An English Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate, appeared in the early 1380s, and a smoother revision followed about 1388. In the early fifteenth century Church leaders moved against the Lollards and their Bible. Alongside this protest, hermits and anchoresses lived in prayer and wrote guides for others.

Literature in this age

The language

No other period changed English so fast. The old system of word endings, which Old English used to show who did what, wore away. Nouns lost their grammatical gender, and word order became much more fixed, with the subject first, then the verb, then the object, as it is today.

French poured into the vocabulary. Roughly ten thousand French words entered English in these centuries, among them court, justice, prison, prayer and beauty. Latin words arrived through the Church and the schools. The result was an English with a rich stock of near-synonyms, such as kingly (English), royal (French) and regal (Latin).

There was no standard language. Scholars usually describe five main dialects: Northern, East Midland, West Midland, Southern and Kentish. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in a dialect of the north-west Midlands and Piers Plowman in the west Midlands. Chaucer wrote in the English of London, a form of East Midland.

The status of English rose slowly. By the late fourteenth century even many nobles were using it, and French was turning into a language learned at school. In 1362 the Pleading in English Act, often called the Statute of Pleading, ruled that court cases must be argued in English, though the records were still kept in Latin. Historians debate how much difference it made. In the early fifteenth century, under Henry V, the royal writing office, the Chancery, began to use a form of London English for official papers. This Chancery Standard, together with the printing press, helped to fix the written language. Around 1400 the long vowels also began to change in the Great Vowel Shift, which later set Chaucer's sounds apart from our own.

How the writing survived

Most Middle English writing survives only because someone copied it by hand. The Auchinleck Manuscript, made in London between 1330 and 1340, is one of the earliest large collections of English verse. Every text in it is English, and it holds romances such as Sir Orfeo. It seems to have been made for well-off readers who were not nobles, which shows that a new reading public was growing.

The poems of the Gawain poet survive in a single book, now called Cotton Nero A.x, made around 1400. If that one manuscript had been lost, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would be unknown. Piers Plowman had the opposite fate. More than fifty manuscripts of it survive, a sign of how widely it was read.

Print changed the picture. William Caxton, a London merchant who learned printing abroad, set up the first English press at Westminster in 1476 and printed more than a hundred titles. They included The Canterbury Tales, printed within a few years of the press opening, and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, finished on 31 July 1485.

Luck still mattered. In 1934 two famous finds were made. At Winchester College a teacher, Walter Oakeshott, found a manuscript of Malory that differed from Caxton's printed text. In the same year the only manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe turned up in the home of the Butler-Bowdon family. It lay in a cupboard among old papers and the family's table-tennis equipment.

Poetry

The first English poems after the Conquest still used old forms. Around 1200 a priest named Layamon, who lived at Areley Kings in Worcestershire, wrote the Brut, a poem of about 16,000 lines. It tells the legendary history of Britain, and it was the first work in English to tell the story of King Arthur. Layamon took his story from the French poet Wace. Another writer, Orm, produced the Ormulum, about 20,000 lines of unrhymed verse on the Gospel readings of the Mass. Its only manuscript is in his own hand.

Poets also tried lighter forms. The Owl and the Nightingale, 1,794 lines in rhyming couplets, is a debate between two birds. The nightingale stands for joy and the owl for gloom, and neither wins. Its date is uncertain, but it was probably written around 1200 or a little later. One short song survives with its music: "Sumer is icumen in", a six-part round of about 1260.

The most popular kind of story was the romance, a tale of knights, love and marvels. Romances came from France first, and English versions followed. King Horn and Havelok the Dane are early examples. Sir Orfeo retells the Greek story of Orpheus as a fairy tale in which the husband wins his wife back. The Arthurian stories, known as the Matter of Britain, were told again and again.

In the later fourteenth century the old unrhymed, alliterative verse came back in what is called the alliterative revival. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, about 2,530 lines in 101 stanzas, is its finest romance. The poet is unknown, and the same hand is credited with Pearl, a dream vision in which a grieving speaker meets a young girl who has died, and with Cleanness and Patience. Each stanza of Gawain ends in five short rhymed lines called the bob and wheel. The story opens at Camelot at Christmas, when a green giant challenges the court to a beheading game. Gawain cuts off his head, and the giant picks it up and tells Gawain to meet him in a year. On the way Gawain stays in a castle, where the lady tempts him and he hides a green girdle that she says will protect his life. At the Green Chapel the Green Knight swings his axe three times and leaves only a small cut, because Gawain kept the girdle. The knight is the lord of the castle. The poem tests the ideal of the perfect knight and finds that he is human.

William Langland's Piers Plowman belongs to the same alliterative tradition but has a different spirit. It is a dream vision. A dreamer named Will falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and sees a field full of folk, rich and poor, who stand for the whole of society. In later dreams he sees the seven deadly sins confess and meets an honest ploughman named Piers. He searches for the answer to how a man should live, which the poem calls Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best. Langland attacks corrupt clergy and the greed of the powerful. The poem exists in versions called A (1360s), B (late 1370s) and C (1380s). It also holds the earliest certain mention of Robin Hood tales, when the lazy priest Sloth admits that he knows rhymes of Robin Hood better than his prayers.

Geoffrey Chaucer and his followers

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London around 1343, the son of a wine merchant. As a young man he served as a page in a noble household, and in 1359 he was captured in France, where the king helped to pay his ransom. He later worked as a soldier, a diplomat who visited Italy, controller of wool customs in London from 1374, and Clerk of the King's Works from 1389. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in what later became Poets' Corner.

His poetry is often divided into three phases. In the first he followed French models. The Book of the Duchess mourns Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1368. In the second he learned from Italian writers such as Boccaccio. The Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde, a long love story set in the Trojan War and written in rhyme royal, belong here. In the third he turned to English life, and the result was The Canterbury Tales. He also translated Boethius and wrote a Treatise on the Astrolabe for his young son.

The Canterbury Tales, begun about 1387, is a frame story. About thirty pilgrims meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark on their way to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Their host, Harry Bailly, suggests that each of them should tell tales on the road, and that the best storyteller should win a free supper. Chaucer planned four tales from each pilgrim, two on the way there and two on the way back. He finished only 24, and some of those are incomplete. The General Prologue gives a sharp portrait of each traveller, from the Knight to the Miller, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. The tales that follow come in every style: a noble romance, a rude comic story called a fabliau, a beast fable, a sermon in prose. Most are in rhyming couplets of ten syllables, and Chaucer is usually credited with bringing both this couplet and the rhyme royal stanza into English poetry.

Chaucer's friend John Gower wrote in French, Latin and English. His English poem Confessio Amantis, of about 33,000 lines, tells love stories to teach about the seven deadly sins. In the fifteenth century Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate praised Chaucer as their master. In Scotland, Robert Henryson wrote The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel to Troilus, and William Dunbar wrote the Lament for the Makaris, a poem on the death of poets.

Prose

English prose grew later than English verse and began with religious writing. The Ancrene Wisse, from the early thirteenth century, is a guide for women who chose to live shut away in prayer, called anchoresses. In the fourteenth century Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote guides to prayer for lay readers.

Two women left unusual books. In May 1373, at the age of thirty, Julian of Norwich fell seriously ill and received sixteen visions, which she described in Revelations of Divine Love. She wrote a short account first and a longer one years later. Hers is the earliest surviving book in English known to be written by a woman. Margery Kempe, a merchant's daughter from King's Lynn, had fourteen children, then devoted herself to religion, travelled to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago, and was accused of heresy but cleared. She dictated her life to scribes, and The Book of Margery Kempe is the earliest known autobiography in English.

Not all prose was devout. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, written in French about 1356 and soon translated into English, describes a journey through the East, with monsters and marvels. The narrator claims to be an English knight, but the real author is unknown. The Paston Letters, written by a Norfolk family in the fifteenth century, show everyday life, lawsuits and the Wars of the Roses from the inside.

The greatest English prose work of the period is Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. Its author says he finished it in prison about 1469 or 1470, and scholars still argue about which man named Malory he was. He gathered the Arthurian stories from French and English sources into eight long tales. They cover the rise of Arthur, the quest for the Holy Grail, the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the fall of the Round Table. Caxton printed the book in 1485 and cut it into twenty-one books and 507 chapters.

Drama

English drama began in church. Short scenes about Easter and Christmas were acted as part of Latin services, and by the fourteenth century plays in English were being performed outdoors. The most important kind was the mystery play, a series of short plays on Bible history from the fall of the angels to the Last Judgment. These cycles were played in summer at the feast of Corpus Christi, on wagons called pageants, and each play was usually the work of a craft guild.

Four nearly complete cycles survive, from York, Chester, Wakefield and the group known as N-Town. The York cycle has 48 plays and was played from the mid-fourteenth century until 1569. The Wakefield, or Towneley, cycle has 32 plays, and its finest writer, called the Wakefield Master, is known for wit and satire. His Second Shepherds' Play shows a sheep thief, Mak, hiding a stolen lamb in a cradle as if it were a baby, before an angel announces the real birth of Christ.

The other great kind was the morality play, an allegory in which the hero stands for all mankind and is pulled between Vices and Virtues. The Castle of Perseverance, of about 1425, is the earliest surviving complete example, and Mankind, of about 1470, mixes sermon and comedy. The best known is Everyman. Death summons an ordinary man, his friend Fellowship refuses to go with him, and only Good Deeds will. It is generally taken to be a version of the Dutch play Elckerlijc of about 1495, and it reached print in English in the early sixteenth century.

Criticism and scholarship

Chaucer's reputation stayed high long after his death. In 1700, in the Preface to his Fables, Ancient and Modern, John Dryden called him the father of English poetry, and said of the pilgrims, "here is God's plenty". Dryden also thought Chaucer's lines were rough, because nobody then understood how Middle English had been pronounced.

Proper scholarship began in the nineteenth century. In 1864 F. J. Furnivall founded the Early English Text Society to print early texts that survived only in manuscript, and in 1868 he founded the Chaucer Society. Walter W. Skeat produced a three-text edition of Piers Plowman in 1886 and a six-volume Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1894, with a supplement in 1897. Matthew Arnold, in "The Study of Poetry" (1880), admired Chaucer's "liquid" diction but said he lacked the "high seriousness" of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton.

In the twentieth century C. S. Lewis's The Allegory of Love (1936) studied courtly love and allegory, and D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer (1962) argued that medieval writers should be read in the light of Christian teaching. Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989) brought questions of gender and desire to Chaucer. The standard edition today is The Riverside Chaucer (1987), edited by Larry D. Benson.

The finds of 1934 changed Malory studies. Eugène Vinaver edited the Winchester text in 1947. Later study of ink smudges on its pages showed that it had once been in Caxton's printing shop. For Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner argued in 2011 that the C version began to circulate before the B version, so the usual A, B, C order of the poem's history may be wrong.

How the age ends

The date 1500 is a convenience. Nothing in the language or the literature stopped on 1 January of that year. Still, several changes by then marked the end of the medieval pattern. Henry Tudor had been king since 1485, and the long civil wars were over. The printing press, introduced by Caxton in 1476 and carried on after his death by his helper Wynkyn de Worde, was making books cheaper and spreading one London form of English. The Great Vowel Shift was changing the sounds of the language, so that Chaucer's verse began to look rough to later readers.

Medieval forms did not vanish at once. The York plays went on until 1569, and the morality play helped to shape the drama of Shakespeare's time. Chaucer, Langland and Malory kept their readers. But the next age would bring new learning from Italy, the religious quarrel of the Reformation, and a new confidence in English as a language fit for the highest poetry. The writers of these four centuries had prepared the way. They had taken a language of farmers and made it a language of books.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning).
• William Caxton, Prologue to Eneydos (Westminster, 1490).
• John Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (London, 1700).
• Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry" (1880).
• Walter W. Skeat (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols and supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894-97).
• Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
• Eugène Vinaver (ed.), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947).
• C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
• D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).
• Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
• Lawrence Warner, The Lost History of "Piers Plowman" (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English