PERIOD II. THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD. A.D. 1066 TO ABOUT 1350 [Footnote:
Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' the best-known work of fiction dealing with any part of
this period, is interesting, but as a picture of life at the end of the
twelfth century is very misleading. The date assigned to his 'Betrothed,'
one of his less important, novels, is about the same.]
THE NORMANS. The Normans who conquered England were originally members of
the same stock as the 'Danes' who had harried and conquered it in the
preceding centuries--the ancestors of both were bands of Baltic and North
Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in different directions; and a
little farther back the Normans were close cousins, in the general Germanic
family, of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The exploits of this whole race of
Norse sea-kings make one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of
medieval Europe. In the ninth and tenth centuries they mercilessly ravaged
all the coasts not only of the West but of all Europe from the Rhine to the
Adriatic. 'From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us!' was a
regular part of the litany of the unhappy French. They settled Iceland and
Greenland and prematurely discovered America; they established themselves
as the ruling aristocracy in Russia, and as the imperial body-guard and
chief bulwark of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople; and in the
eleventh century they conquered southern Italy and Sicily, whence in the
first crusade they pressed on with unabated vigor to Asia Minor. Those
bands of them with whom we are here concerned, and who became known
distinctively as Normans, fastened themselves as settlers, early in the
eleventh century, on the northern shore of France, and in return for their
acceptance of Christianity and acknowledgment of the nominal feudal
sovereignty of the French king were recognized as rightful possessors of
the large province which thus came to bear the name of Normandy. Here by
intermarriage with the native women they rapidly developed into a race
which while retaining all their original courage and enterprise took on
also, together with the French language, the French intellectual brilliancy
and flexibility and in manners became the chief exponent of medieval
chivalry.
The different elements contributed to the modern English character by the
latest stocks which have been united in it have been indicated by Matthew
Arnold in a famous passage ('On the Study of Celtic Literature'): 'The
Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has steadiness as its main
basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for
its excellence. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis,
with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness and
insolence for its defect.' The Germanic (Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish') element
explains, then, why uneducated Englishmen of all times have been
thick-headed, unpleasantly self-assertive, and unimaginative, but sturdy
fighters; and the Norman strain why upper-class Englishmen have been
self-contained, inclined to snobbishness, but vigorously aggressive and
persevering, among the best conquerors, organizers, and administrators in
the history of the world.
SOCIAL RESULTS OF THE CONQUEST. In most respects, or all, the Norman
conquest accomplished precisely that racial rejuvenation of which, as we
have seen, Anglo-Saxon England stood in need. For the Normans brought with
them from France the zest for joy and beauty and dignified and stately
ceremony in which the Anglo-Saxon temperament was poor--they brought the
love of light-hearted song and chivalrous sports, of rich clothing, of
finely-painted manuscripts, of noble architecture in cathedrals and
palaces, of formal religious ritual, and of the pomp and display of all
elaborate pageantry. In the outcome they largely reshaped the heavy mass of
Anglo-Saxon life into forms of grace and beauty and brightened its duller
surface with varied and brilliant colors. For the Anglo-Saxons themselves,
however, the Conquest meant at first little else than that bitterest and
most complete of all national disasters, hopeless subjection to a
tyrannical and contemptuous foe. The Normans were not heathen, as the
'Danes' had been, and they were too few in number to wish to supplant the
conquered people; but they imposed themselves, both politically and
socially, as stern and absolute masters. King William confirmed in their
possessions the few Saxon nobles and lesser land-owners who accepted his
rule and did not later revolt; but both pledges and interest compelled him
to bestow most of the estates of the kingdom, together with the widows of
their former holders, on his own nobles and the great motley throng of
turbulent fighters who had made up his invading army. In the lordships and
manors, therefore, and likewise in the great places of the Church, were
established knights and nobles, the secular ones holding in feudal tenure
from the king or his immediate great vassals, and each supported in turn by
Norman men-at-arms; and to them were subjected as serfs, workers bound to
the land, the greater part of the Saxon population. As visible signs of the
changed order appeared here and there throughout the country massive and
gloomy castles of stone, and in the larger cities, in place of the simple
Anglo-Saxon churches, cathedrals lofty and magnificent beyond all
Anglo-Saxon dreams. What sufferings, at the worst, the Normans inflicted on
the Saxons is indicated in a famous passage of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,'
an entry seventy years subsequent to the Conquest, of which the least
distressing part may be thus paraphrased:
'They filled the land full of castles. [Footnote: This was only during a
period of anarchy. For the most part the nobles lived in manor-houses, very
rude according to our ideas. See Train's 'Social England,' I, 536 ff.] They
compelled the wretched men of the land to build their castles and wore them
out with hard labor. When the castles were made they filled them with
devils and evil men. Then they took all those whom they thought to have any
property, both by night and by day, both men and women, and put them in
prison for gold and silver, and tormented them with tortures that cannot be
told; for never were any martyrs so tormented as these were.'
THE UNION OF THE RACES AND LANGUAGES. LATIN, FRENCH, AND ENGLISH. That
their own race and identity were destined to be absorbed in those of the
Anglo-Saxons could never have occurred to any of the Normans who stood with
William at Hastings, and scarcely to any of their children. Yet this result
was predetermined by the stubborn tenacity and numerical superiority of the
conquered people and by the easy adaptability of the Norman temperament.
Racially, and to a less extent socially, intermarriage did its work, and
that within a very few generations. Little by little, also, Norman contempt
and Saxon hatred were softened into tolerance, and at last even into a
sentiment of national unity. This sentiment was finally to be confirmed by
the loss of Normandy and other French possessions of the Norman-English
kings in the thirteenth century, a loss which transformed England from a
province of the Norman Continental empire and of a foreign nobility into an
independent country, and further by the wars ('The Hundred Years' War')
which England-Norman nobility and Saxon yeomen fighting together--carried
on in France in the fourteenth century.
In language and literature the most general immediate result of the
Conquest was to make of England a trilingual country, where Latin, French,
and Anglo-Saxon were spoken separately side by side. With Latin, the tongue
of the Church and of scholars, the Norman clergy were much more thoroughly
familiar than the Saxon priests had been; and the introduction of the
richer Latin culture resulted, in the latter half of the twelfth century,
at the court of Henry II, in a brilliant outburst of Latin literature. In
England, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, Latin long continued to
be the language of religious and learned writing--down to the sixteenth
century or even later. French, that dialect of it which was spoken by the
Normans--Anglo-French (English-French) it has naturally come to be
called--was of course introduced by the Conquest as the language of the
governing and upper social class, and in it also during the next three or
four centuries a considerable body of literature was produced. Anglo-Saxon,
which we may now term English, remained inevitably as the language of the
subject race, but their literature was at first crushed down into
insignificance. Ballads celebrating the resistance of scattered Saxons to
their oppressors no doubt circulated widely on the lips of the people, but
English writing of the more formal sorts, almost absolutely ceased for more
than a century, to make a new beginning about the year 1200. In the
interval the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' is the only important document, and
even this, continued at the monastery of Peterboro, comes to an end in
1154, in the midst of the terrible anarchy of Stephen's reign.
It must not be supposed, notwithstanding, that the Normans, however much
they despised the English language and literature, made any effort to
destroy it. On the other hand, gradual union of the two languages was no
less inevitable than that of the races themselves. From, the very first the
need of communication, with their subjects must have rendered it necessary
for the Normans to acquire some knowledge of the English language; and the
children of mixed parentage of course learned it from their mothers. The
use of French continued in the upper strata of society, in the few
children's schools that existed, and in the law courts, for something like
three centuries, maintaining itself so long partly because French was then
the polite language of Western Europe. But the dead pressure of English was
increasingly strong, and by the end of the fourteenth century and of
Chaucer's life French had chiefly given way to it even at Court. [Footnote:
For details see O. F. Emerson's 'History of the English Language,' chapter
4; and T. B. Lounsbury's 'History of the English Language.'] As we have
already implied, however, the English which triumphed was in fact
English-French--English was enabled to triumph partly because it had now
largely absorbed the French. For the first one hundred or one hundred and
fifty years, it seems, the two languages remained for the most part pretty
clearly distinct, but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English,
abandoning its first aloofness, rapidly took into itself a large part of
the French (originally Latin) vocabulary; and under the influence of the
French it carried much farther the process of dropping its own
comparatively complicated grammatical inflections--a process which had
already gained much momentum even before the Conquest. This absorption of
the French was most fortunate for English. To the Anglo-Saxon
vocabulary--vigorous, but harsh, limited in extent, and lacking in fine
discriminations and power of abstract expression, was now added nearly the
whole wealth of French, with its fullness, flexibility, and grace. As a
direct consequence the resulting language, modern English, is the richest
and most varied instrument of expression ever developed at any time by any
race.
THE RESULT FOR POETRY. For poetry the fusion meant even more than for
prose. The metrical system, which begins to appear in the thirteenth
century and comes to perfection a century and a half later in Chaucer's
poems combined what may fairly be called the better features of both the
systems from which it was compounded. We have seen that Anglo-Saxon verse
depended on regular stress of a definite number of quantitatively long
syllables in each line and on alliteration; that it allowed much variation
in the number of unstressed syllables; and that it was without rime. French
verse, on the other hand, had rime (or assonance) and carefully preserved
identity in the total number of syllables in corresponding lines, but it
was uncertain as regarded the number of clearly stressed ones. The derived
English system adopted from the French (1) rime and (2) identical
line-length, and retained from the Anglo-Saxon (3) regularity of stress.
(4) It largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon regard for quantity and (5) it
retained alliteration not as a basic principle but as an (extremely useful)
subordinate device. This metrical system, thus shaped, has provided the
indispensable formal basis for making English poetry admittedly the
greatest in the modern world.
THE ENGLISH DIALECTS. The study of the literature of the period is further
complicated by the division of English into dialects. The Norman Conquest
put a stop to the progress of the West-Saxon dialect toward complete
supremacy, restoring the dialects of the other parts of the island to their
former positions of equal authority. The actual result was the development
of three groups of dialects, the Southern, Midland (divided into East and
West) and Northern, all differing among themselves in forms and even in
vocabulary. Literary activity when it recommenced was about equally
distributed among the three, and for three centuries it was doubtful which
of them would finally win the first place. In the outcome success fell to
the East Midland dialect, partly through the influence of London, which
under the Norman kings replaced Winchester as the capital city and seat of
the Court and Parliament, and partly through the influence of the two
Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which gradually grew up during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries and attracted students from all parts of
the country. This victory of the East Midland form was marked by, though it
was not in any large degree due to, the appearance in the fourteenth
century of the first great modern English poet, Chaucer. To the present
day, however, the three dialects, and subdivisions of them, are easily
distinguishable in colloquial use; the common idiom of such regions as
Yorkshire and Cornwall is decidedly different from that of London or indeed
any other part of the country.
THE ENGLISH LITERATURE AS A PART OF GENERAL MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN LITERATURE.
One of the most striking general facts in the later Middle Ages is the
uniformity of life in many of its aspects throughout all Western Europe.
[Footnote: Differences are clearly presented in Charles Reade's novel, 'The
Cloister and the Hearth,' though this deals with the period following that
with which we are here concerned.] It was only during this period that the
modern nations, acquiring national consciousness, began definitely to shape
themselves out of the chaos which had followed the fall of the Roman
Empire. The Roman Church, firmly established in every corner of every land,
was the actual inheritor of much of the unifying power of the Roman
government, and the feudal system everywhere gave to society the same
political organization and ideals. In a truer sense, perhaps, than at any
later time, Western Europe was one great brotherhood, thinking much the
same thoughts, speaking in part the same speech, and actuated by the same
beliefs. At least, the literature of the period, largely composed and
copied by the great army of monks, exhibits everywhere a thorough
uniformity in types and ideas.
We of the twentieth century should not allow ourselves to think vaguely of
the Middle Ages as a benighted or shadowy period when life and the people
who constituted it had scarcely anything in common with ourselves. In
reality the men of the Middle Ages were moved by the same emotions and
impulses as our own, and their lives presented the same incongruous mixture
of nobility and baseness. Yet it is true that the externals of their
existence were strikingly different from those of more recent times. In
society the feudal system--lords with their serfs, towns struggling for
municipal independence, kings and nobles doing, peaceably or with violence,
very much what they pleased; a constant condition of public or private war;
cities walled as a matter of course for protection against bands of robbers
or hostile armies; the country still largely covered with forests,
wildernesses, and fens; roads infested with brigands and so bad that travel
was scarcely possible except on horseback; in private life, most of the
modern comforts unknown, and the houses, even of the wealthy, so filthy and
uncomfortable that all classes regularly, almost necessarily, spent most of
the daylight hours in the open air; in industry no coal, factories, or
large machinery, but in the towns guilds of workmen each turning out by
hand his slow product of single articles; almost no education except for
priests and monks, almost no conceptions of genuine science or history, but
instead the abstract system of scholastic logic and philosophy, highly
ingenious but highly fantastic; in religion no outward freedom of thought
except for a few courageous spirits, but the arbitrary dictates of a
despotic hierarchy, insisting on an ironbound creed which the remorseless
process of time was steadily rendering more and more inadequate--this
offers some slight suggestion of the conditions of life for several
centuries, ending with the period with which we are now concerned.
In medieval literature likewise the modern student encounters much which
seems at first sight grotesque. One of the most conspicuous examples is the
pervasive use of allegory. The men of the Middle Ages often wrote, as we
do, in direct terms and of simple things, but when they wished to rise
above the commonplace they turned with a frequency which to-day appears
astonishing to the devices of abstract personification and veiled meanings.
No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction
with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability
to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of
somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by
the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism
all the details of the Bible narratives. But from whatever cause, the
tendency hardened into a ruling convention; thousands upon thousands of
medieval manuscripts seem to declare that the world is a mirage of shadowy
forms, or that it exists merely to body forth remote and highly surprising
ideas.
Of all these countless allegories none was reiterated with more unwearied
persistence than that of the Seven Deadly Sins (those sins which in the
doctrine of the Church lead to spiritual death because they are wilfully
committed). These sins are: Covetousness, Unchastity, Anger, Gluttony,
Envy, Sloth, and, chief of all, Pride, the earliest of all, through which
Lucifer was moved to his fatal rebellion against God, whence spring all
human ills. Each of the seven, however, was interpreted as including so
many related offences that among them they embraced nearly the whole range
of possible wickedness. Personified, the Seven Sins in themselves almost
dominate medieval literature, a sort of shadowy evil pantheon. Moral and
religious questions could scarcely be discussed without regard to them; and
they maintain their commanding place even as late as in Spenser's 'Faerie
Queene,' at the very end of the sixteenth century. To the Seven Sins were
commonly opposed, but with much less emphasis, the Seven Cardinal Virtues,
Faith, Hope, Charity (Love), Prudence, Temperance, Chastity, and Fortitude.
Again, almost as prominent as the Seven Sins was the figure of Fortune with
her revolving wheel, a goddess whom the violent vicissitudes and tragedies
of life led the men of the Middle Ages, in spite of their Christianity, to
bring over from classical literature and virtually to accept as a real
divinity, with almost absolute control in human affairs. In the seventeenth
century Shakspere's plays are full of allusions to her, but so for that
matter is the everyday talk of all of us in the twentieth century.
LITERATURE IN THE THREE LANGUAGES. It is not to the purpose in a study like
the present to give special attention to the literature written in England
in Latin and French; we can speak only briefly of that composed in English.
But in fact when the English had made its new beginning, about the year
1200, the same general forms flourished in all three languages, so that
what is said in general of the English applies almost as much to the other
two as well.
RELIGIOUS LITERATURE. We may virtually divide all the literature of the
period, roughly, into (1) Religious and (2) Secular. But it must be
observed that religious writings were far more important as literature
during the Middle Ages than in more recent times, and the separation
between religious and secular less distinct than at present. The forms of
the religious literature were largely the same as in the previous period.
There were songs, many of them addressed to the Virgin, some not only
beautiful in their sincere and tender devotion, speaking for the finer
spirits in an age of crudeness and violence, but occasionally beautiful as
poetry. There were paraphrases of many parts of the Bible, lives of saints,
in both verse and prose, and various other miscellaneous work. Perhaps
worthy of special mention among single productions is the 'Cursor Mundi'
(Surveyor of the World), an early fourteenth century poem of twenty-four
thousand lines ('Paradise Lost' has less than eleven thousand), relating
universal history from the beginning, on the basis of the Biblical
narrative. Most important of all for their promise of the future, there
were the germs of the modern drama in the form of the Church plays; but to
these we shall give special attention in a later chapter.
SECULAR LITERATURE. In secular literature the variety was greater than in
religious. We may begin by transcribing one or two of the songs, which,
though not as numerous then as in some later periods, show that the great
tradition of English secular lyric poetry reaches back from our own time to
that of the Anglo-Saxons without a break. The best known of all is the
'Cuckoo Song,' of the thirteenth century, intended to be sung in harmony by
four voices:
Sumer is icumen in;
Lhudè sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wdè nu.
Sing, cuccu!
Awè bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calvè cu.
Bulluc sterteth, buckè verteth;
Murie sing, cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singès thu, cuccu;
Ne swik thu never nu.
Summer is come in; loud sing, cuckoo! Grows the seed and blooms the mead
[meadow] and buds the wood anew. Sing, cuckoo! The ewe bleats for the lamb,
lows for the calf the cow. The bullock gambols, the buck leaps; merrily
sing, cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou, cuckoo; cease thou never
now.
The next is the first stanza of 'Alysoun' ('Fair Alice'):
Bytuenè Mersh ant Averil,
When spray beginnth to springè,
The lútel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to syngè.
Ieh libbe in love-longingè
For semlokest of allè thingè;
He may me blissè bringè;
Icham in hire baundoun.
An hendy hap ichabbe ybent;
Iehot from hevene it is me sent;
From allè wymmen mi love is lent
Ant lyht on Alysoun.
Between March and April, When the sprout begins to spring, The little bird
has her desire In her tongue to sing. I live in love-longing For the
fairest of all things; She may bring me bliss; I am at her mercy. A lucky
lot I have secured; I think from heaven it is sent me; From all women my
love is turned And is lighted on Alysoun.
There were also political and satirical songs and miscellaneous poems of
various sorts, among them certain 'Bestiaries,' accounts of the supposed
habits of animals, generally drawn originally from classical tradition, and
most of them highly fantastic and allegorized in the interests of morality
and religion. There was an abundance of extremely realistic coarse tales,
hardly belonging to literature, in both prose and verse. The popular
ballads of the fourteenth century we must reserve for later consideration.
Most numerous of all the prose works, perhaps, were the Chronicles, which
were produced generally in the monasteries and chiefly in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, the greater part in Latin, some in French, and a few
in rude English verse. Many of them were mere annals like the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, but some were the lifelong works of men with genuine historical
vision. Some dealt merely with the history of England, or a part of it,
others with that of the entire world as it was known to medieval Europe.
The majority will never be withdrawn from the obscurity of the manuscripts
on which the patient care of their authors inscribed them; others have been
printed in full and serve as the main basis for our knowledge of the events
of the period.
THE ROMANCES. But the chief form of secular literature during the period,
beginning in the middle of the twelfth century, was the romance, especially
the metrical (verse) romance. The typical romances were the literary
expression of chivalry. They were composed by the professional minstrels,
some of whom, as in Anglo-Saxon times, were richly supported and rewarded
by kings and nobles, while others still wandered about the country, always
welcome in the manor-houses. There, like Scott's Last Minstrel, they
recited their sometimes almost endless works from memory, in the great
halls or in the ladies' bowers, to the accompaniment of occasional strains
on their harps. For two or three centuries the romances were to the lords
and ladies, and to the wealthier citizens of the towns, much what novels
are to the reading public of our own day. By far the greater part of the
romances current in England were written in French, whether by Normans or
by French natives of the English provinces in France, and the English ones
which have been preserved are mostly translations or imitations of French
originals. The romances are extreme representatives of the whole class of
literature of all times to which they have given the name. Frankly
abandoning in the main the world of reality, they carry into that of
idealized and glamorous fancy the chief interests of the medieval lords and
ladies, namely, knightly exploits in war, and lovemaking. Love in the
romances, also, retains all its courtly affectations, together with that
worship of woman by man which in the twelfth century was exalted into a
sentimental art by the poets of wealthy and luxurious Provence in Southern
France. Side by side, again, with war and love, appears in the romances
medieval religion, likewise conventionalized and childishly superstitious,
but in some inadequate degree a mitigator of cruelty and a restrainer of
lawless passion. Artistically, in some respects or all, the greater part of
the romances are crude and immature. Their usual main or only purpose is to
hold attention by successions of marvellous adventures, natural or
supernatural; of structure, therefore, they are often destitute; the
characters are ordinarily mere types; and motivation is little considered.
There were, however, exceptional authors, genuine artists, masters of meter
and narrative, possessed by a true feeling for beauty; and in some of the
romances the psychological analysis of love, in particular, is subtile and
powerful, the direct precursor of one of the main developments in modern
fiction.
The romances may very roughly be grouped into four great classes. First in
time, perhaps, come those which are derived from the earlier French epics
and in which love, if it appears at all, is subordinated to the military
exploits of Charlemagne and his twelve peers in their wars against the
Saracens. Second are the romances which, battered salvage from a greater
past, retell in strangely altered romantic fashion the great stories of
classical antiquity, mainly the achievements of Alexander the Great and the
tragic fortunes of Troy. Third come the Arthurian romances, and fourth
those scattering miscellaneous ones which do not belong to the other
classes, dealing, most of them, with native English heroes. Of these, two,
'King Horn' and 'Havelok,' spring direct from the common people and in both
substance and expression reflect the hard reality of their lives, while
'Guy of Warwick' and 'Bevis of Hampton,' which are among the best known but
most tedious of all the list, belong, in their original form, to the upper
classes.
Of all the romances the Arthurian are by far the most important. They
belong peculiarly to English literature, because they are based on
traditions of British history, but they have assumed a very prominent place
in the literature of the whole western world. Rich in varied characters and
incidents to which a universal significance could be attached, in their own
time they were the most popular works of their class; and living on
vigorously after the others were forgotten, they have continued to form one
of the chief quarries of literary material and one of the chief sources of
inspiration for modern poets and romancers. It seems well worth while,
therefore, to outline briefly their literary history.
The period in which their scene is nominally laid is that of the
Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain. Of the actual historical events of
this period extremely little is known, and even the capital question
whether such a person as Arthur ever really existed can never receive a
definite answer. The only contemporary writer of the least importance is
the Briton (priest or monk), Gildas, who in a violent Latin pamphlet of
about the year 550 ('The Destruction and Conquest of Britain') denounces
his countrymen for their sins and urges them to unite against the Saxons;
and Gildas gives only the slightest sketch of what had actually happened.
He tells how a British king (to whom later tradition assigns the name
Vortigern) invited in the Anglo-Saxons as allies against the troublesome
northern Scots and Picts, and how the Anglo-Saxons, victorious against
these tribes, soon turned in furious conquest against the Britons
themselves, until, under a certain Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man 'of Roman
race,' the Britons successfully defended themselves and at last in the
battle of Mount Badon checked the Saxon advance.
Next in order after Gildas, but not until about the year 800, appears a
strangely jumbled document, last edited by a certain Nennius, and entitled
'Historia Britonum' (The History of the Britons), which adds to Gildas'
outline traditions, natural and supernatural, which had meanwhile been
growing up among the Britons (Welsh). It supplies the names of the earliest
Saxon leaders, Hengist and Horsa (who also figure in the 'Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle'), and narrates at length their treacherous dealings with
Vortigern. Among other stories we find that of Vortigern's tower, where
Gildas' Ambrosius appears as a boy of supernatural nature, destined to
develop in the romances into the great magician Merlin. In Nennius' book
occurs also the earliest mention of Arthur, who, in a comparatively sober
passage, is said, some time after the days of Vortigern, to have 'fought
against the Saxons, together with the kings of the Britons, but he himself
was leader in the battles.' A list, also, is given of his twelve victories,
ending with Mount Badon. It is impossible to decide whether there is really
any truth in this account of Nennius, or whether it springs wholly from the
imagination of the Britons, attempting to solace themselves for their
national overthrow; but it allows us to believe if we choose that sometime
in the early sixth century there was a British leader of the name of
Arthur, who by military genius rose to high command and for a while beat
back the Saxon hordes. At most, however, it should be clearly realized,
Arthur was probably only a local leader in some limited region, and, far
from filling the splendid place which he occupies in the later romances,
was but the hard-pressed captain of a few thousand barbarous and half-armed
warriors.
For three hundred years longer the traditions about Arthur continued to
develop among the Welsh people. The most important change which took place
was Arthur's elevation to the position of chief hero of the British (Welsh)
race and the subordination to him, as his followers, of all the other
native heroes, most of whom had originally been gods. To Arthur himself
certain divine attributes were added, such as his possession of magic
weapons, among them the sword Excalibur. It also came to be passionately
believed among the Welsh that he was not really dead but would some day
return from the mysterious Other World to which he had withdrawn and
reconquer the island for his people. It was not until the twelfth century
that these Arthurian traditions, the cherished heritage of the Welsh and
their cousins, the Bretons across the English Channel in France, were
suddenly adopted as the property of all Western Europe, so that Arthur
became a universal Christian hero. This remarkable transformation, no doubt
in some degree inevitable, was actually brought about chiefly through the
instrumentality of a single man, a certain English archdeacon of Welsh
descent, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey, a literary and ecclesiastical
adventurer looking about for a means of making himself famous, put forth
about the year 1136, in Latin, a 'History of the Britons' from the earliest
times to the seventh century, in which, imitating the form of the serious
chronicles, he combined in cleverly impudent fashion all the adaptable
miscellaneous material, fictitious, legendary, or traditional, which he
found at hand. In dealing with Arthur, Geoffrey greatly enlarges on Gildas
and Nennius; in part, no doubt, from his own invention, in part, perhaps,
from Welsh tradition. He provides Arthur with a father, King Uther, makes
of Arthur's wars against the Saxons only his youthful exploits, relates at
length how Arthur conquered almost all of Western Europe, and adds to the
earlier story the figures of Merlin, Guenevere, Modred, Gawain, Kay, and
Bedivere. What is not least important, he gives to Arthur's reign much of
the atmosphere of feudal chivalry which was that of the ruling class of his
own age.
Geoffrey may or may not have intended his astonishing story to be seriously
accepted, but in fact it was received with almost universal credence. For
centuries it was incorporated in outline or in excerpts into almost all the
sober chronicles, and what is of much more importance for literature, it
was taken up and rehandled in various fashions by very numerous romancers.
About twenty years after Geoffrey wrote, the French poet Wace, an English
subject, paraphrased his entire 'History' in vivid, fluent, and diffuse
verse. Wace imparts to the whole, in a thorough-going way, the manners of
chivalry, and adds, among other things, a mention of the Round Table, which
Geoffrey, somewhat chary of the supernatural, had chosen to omit, though it
was one of the early elements of the Welsh tradition. Other poets followed,
chief among them the delightful Chrêtien of Troyes, all writing mostly of
the exploits of single knights at Arthur's court, which they made over,
probably, from scattering tales of Welsh and Breton mythology. To declare
that most romantic heroes had been knights of Arthur's circle now became
almost a matter of course. Prose romances also appeared, vast formless
compilations, which gathered up into themselves story after story,
according to the fancy of each successive editor. Greatest of the additions
to the substance of the cycle was the story of the Holy Grail, originally
an altogether independent legend. Important changes necessarily developed.
Arthur himself, in many of the romances, was degraded from his position of
the bravest knight to be the inactive figurehead of a brilliant court; and
the only really historical element in the story, his struggle against the
Saxons, was thrust far into the background, while all the emphasis was laid
on the romantic achievements of the single knights.
LAGHAMON'S 'BRUT.' Thus it had come about that Arthur, originally the
national hero of the Welsh, and the deadly foe of the English, was adopted,
as a Christian champion, not only for one of the medieval Nine Worthies of
all history, but for the special glory of the English race itself. In that
light he figures in the first important work in which native English
reemerges after the Norman Conquest, the 'Brut' (Chronicle) wherein, about
the year 1200, Laghamon paraphrased Wace's paraphrase of Geoffrey.
[Footnote: Laghamon's name is generally written 'Layamon,' but this is
incorrect. The word 'Brut' comes from the name 'Brutus,' according to
Geoffrey a Trojan hero and eponymous founder of the British race. Standing
at the beginning of British (and English) history, his name came to be
applied to the whole of it, just as the first two Greek letters, alpha and
beta, have given the name to the alphabet.] Laghamon was a humble parish
priest in Worcestershire, and his thirty-two thousand half-lines, in which
he imperfectly follows the Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, are rather
crude; though they are by no means dull, rather are often strong with the
old-time Anglo-Saxon fighting spirit. In language also the poem is almost
purely Saxon; occasionally it admits the French device of rime, but it is
said to exhibit, all told, fewer than a hundred words of French origin.
Expanding throughout on Wace's version, Laghamon adds some minor features;
but English was not yet ready to take a place beside French and Latin with
the reading class, and the poem exercised no influence on the development
of the Arthurian story or on English literature.
SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. We can make special mention of only one
other romance, which all students should read in modern translation,
namely, 'Sir Gawain (pronounced Gaw'-wain) and the Green Knight.' This is
the brief and carefully constructed work of an unknown but very real poetic
artist, who lived a century and more later than Laghamon and probably a
little earlier than Chaucer. The story consists of two old folk-tales, here
finely united in the form of an Arthurian romance and so treated as to
bring out all the better side of knightly feeling, with which the author is
in charming sympathy. Like many other medieval writings, this one is
preserved by mere chance in a single manuscript, which contains also three
slightly shorter religious poems (of a thousand or two lines apiece), all
possibly by the same author as the romance. One of them in particular, 'The
Pearl,' is a narrative of much fine feeling, which may well have come from
so true a gentleman as he. The dialect is that of the Northwest Midland,
scarcely more intelligible to modern readers than Anglo-Saxon, but it
indicates that the author belonged to the same border region between
England and Wales from which came also Geoffrey of Monmouth and Laghamon, a
region where Saxon and Norman elements were mingled with Celtic fancy and
delicacy of temperament. The meter, also, is interesting--the Anglo-Saxon
unrimed alliterative verse, but divided into long stanzas of irregular
length, each ending in a 'bob' of five short riming lines.
'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' may very fittingly bring to a close our
hasty survey of the entire Norman-French period, a period mainly of
formation, which has left no literary work of great and permanent fame, but
in which, after all, there were some sincere and talented writers, who have
fallen into forgetfulness rather through the untoward accidents of time
than from lack of genuine merit in themselves.