LAYAMON'S "BRUT".
Thanks to Geoffrey, at last, some time about 1200-1220, came an English
poet, Layamon, a true poet (now and then), whose work reminds us
occasionally at once of the Greeks whom he had never read, of masters
whom he did not know; and of the things most romantic in the verses of
the last great poet of England. Layamon, the author of "The Brut," had
no ambition; he had no hope of gain; the king and the courtiers would
never hear of him.
Layamon was an English priest in a quiet country parish, not far from
the Welsh Border, at Ernley, near Radestone, on the Severn, as he tells
us. Yet the new French culture had reached him and inspired him; he
gave it to Englishmen in their own English language and he is therefore
readable: is more than a mere name. It "came into his mind" to tell
the history of England, in verse, and he says that he travelled far
to get the books of Bede (in Anglo-Saxon), "the fair Austin and St.
Albin," in Latin, and the book made in French by a French clerk, Master
Wace, "who well could write". "Lovingly he beheld these books," but, in
fact, he only used one of them, namely Wace's _French_ version (1155)
of Geoffrey of Monmouth's romance. Wace had altered Geoffrey as he
pleased, and Layamon took the same liberty with Wace; his book is twice
as long as that of the French clerk; he also inserted many things not
to be found in the text of Wace as now printed, but derived partly from
still unprinted manuscripts of Wace, partly from other sources; perhaps
from Welsh legends known to this priest who dwelt beside the Severn.
Wace added to Geoffrey's account of Arthur, the story wherever he found
it, of "The Table Round," so shaped that the knights could not quarrel
about the highest place. Layamon adds that the Fairy ladies came to
Arthur's birth--as in a very old belief, found in ancient Greece and
ancient Egypt--and that they later carried him away to Avalon, there to
be healed of his wounds.
He calls the fairy Queen "Argante," possibly a French corruption of
a Breton name. His account of the birth of the enchanter Merlin, "No
man's son," is romance itself. Merlin's mother, who had become a nun,
knew not who was her child's father, only that in her dreams there came
to her "the fairest thing that ever was born, as it were a tall knight,
all dight in gold. This thing glided before me and glistened with gold.
Oft me it kissed, and oft embraced."
What can be more romantic than this tale of the golden shadow of love
that glides through the darkling bower--told by a nun with bowed head,
shamefast! We are reminded of the lines in which Io, in Æschylus, tells
of the shadowy approaches of Zeus, the king of gods; and the voice that
spoke to her in dreams.
The Greeks had another such tale of the gold that fell in the tower of
Danaë before the birth of Perseus. The origin of Layamon's story may be
in some ancient Celtic myth of the loves of gods and mortal women, and
of Merlin, son of a god.
From his shadowy nameless father, Merlin received his gift of prophecy,
and, from the first, foretold the Passing of Arthur.
In Layamon's poem we find what does not occur in the older Anglo-Saxon
poems, such as "Beowulf," the use of similes in the manner of Homer,
whose warriors charge like lions, hungry, and beaten on by wind and
snow. Thus, too, in Layamon's verse,
"Up caught Arthur his shield, before his breast, and he 'gan to rush as
doth the howling wolf when he cometh from the wood, flecked with snow,
and thinketh to seize what beasts he will."
Arthur defeats the Saxons, and drives them from the ford of the river,
through the deep marshland,
"And as the wild crane in the fen, when the falcons follow him through
air, and he wearies in his flight, but the hounds meet him in the
reeds; as _he_ can find no safety whether in field or flood, even so
the Saxons were smitten in ford and field, and went blindly wandering."
These similes give clear, vivid pictures of life in fen and forest, and
enliven the poem in the true epic way, and Layamon gives, perhaps, the
first English picture of an English fox-hunt. In his poem, Guinevere
does not love Launcelot, but the traitor Modred, and when Modred is
defeated by her husband, Arthur, she flies to Caerleon, where "she
hooded her and made her a nun," and her end is unknown.
In the last great battle in the west, both hosts fall--it is a field
of the dead and dying. Arthur bears fifteen wounds. He is alone with
Constantine, to whom he entrusts his kingdom. "But I will pass to
Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the Queen, an elf
most beautiful, and she shall make my wounds all whole with draughts of
healing. And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom....
"Then came floating from the sea a little boat, and two women therein,
shaped wonderfully; and they took Arthur anon, and bore him to that
boat, and laid him softly down, and went their way. Bretons believe
that he liveth yet, and wonneth in Avalun, with the fairest Queens of
Faery."
Do we not already seem to hear the voice of Tennyson's weeping queens,
as the king floats into the night?
Romance has come to England, and from the mingling of races and
tongues--Celtic, French, English--an English poet has been born: a man
who sees with the eyes of imagination, and who can make us share his
visions of the golden shadow that was father of Merlin; of the wolf
with the snow caked on his matted hide as he rushes from the wood; of
the hawking party in the fens; of the battle by the tidal waters of the
west.
Layamon is full of promise of good things to come, as in his
description of Goneril and her husband, when she begins to grudge to
her father, King Lear, the expensive service of his forty knights;
while her husband feebly opposes her unnatural avarice. (The story
of Lear is also in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and is based on a common
folk-tale.)
Again, when Layamon's Arthur laughs over the slain Colgrem, "...Lie
there, now, Colgrem; high hadst thou climbed this hill, as if thou
wouldst win heaven, now shalt thou fare to hell, and there find thy
kinsfolk,..." we are carried back to the boasts over the dead that
Greeks and Trojans utter in the Iliad. But these great touches are rare
in the 30,000 lines of Layamon, the mass of his poem "is blank enough".
Layamon thought himself a chronicler in rhyme, a historian; in his book
he has many tales, not that of Arthur alone; he has dull passages in
plenty, none the less the good priest had many qualities of the great
poet.
The verse of Layamon is sometimes of the old Anglo-Saxon sort already
described, with alliteration and without rhyme; and in other parts
consists of rhyming couplets varying in length, all intermixed. A
rhyming couplet is
_Thet avere either other_
_luvede alse if brother_.
That ever either other
Loved as if brother.
In the words the tendency is to drop the old inflections, the language
is shaking off its original grammar and approaching modern English. In
the later of two manuscripts of the poem this tendency is much more
strong. Thus the older manuscript has
He wes a swithe aehte gume
And he streonde (begat) threo _snelle_ sunen.
The later copy has
He was a strong gome
And he streonede threo sones.
The word "snell" in the older version still survives in Scots,
"There cam a wind out o' the East
A sharp wind and a _snell_,"
_snell_ meaning "keen".
Ormulum.
Layamon was too great a poet to mingle sermons with his song. The
pulpit was his preaching place, he scarcely ever preaches in his poem.
On the other hand the worthy brother Ormin or Orm did nothing but
preach in his versified book "The Ormulum". He was an Augustinian canon
of the North Midlands who, about 1200, paraphrased the Gospels read on
each day, and the homily which followed, often drawn from Bede (for
Orm was not an advanced theologian), in a kind of blank verse. Nothing
could be more simply edifying to plain congregations, but edification
is not the aim of literature. Orm is best known for his determination
to have English properly pronounced. A vowel, in English is, and
was, sounded short before two consonants, and Orm was bent on making
the reader pronounce the vowels thus and not otherwise. He therefore
_wrote_ the two consonants after every short vowel, and explained
himself thus, the lines also give the metre of his verses:--
And whase wilenn shall thiss hoc
Efft others sithe writenn
Him bidde Icc thatt het write rihht
Swa summ thiss hoc him teachethh....
And tatt he loke wel thatt he
An bocstaff write twiyess
Eyywhaer thaes itt upo thiss boc
Iss written o thatt wise.
By using some Scots words we may translate this in the original metre.
And whasae willen shall this book
Another time be writing
Him do I bid that he write richt
Even as this book him teacheth.
And that he do look well that he
Ane letter writeth twice
Aye there where it upon this book
Is written in that wise.
The metre is very like that of the Scottish rhymed version of the
Psalms, though Orm (as in the second verse above) only uses rhyme by
accident. The "Ormulum" is not to be "read for human pleasure," though
it is interesting to students of the language and versification while
in a state of transition.
The same may be said of a number of works in prose or verse which are
to be found by students in editions published by learned societies. It
is necessary to say something of them, because it is a kind of duty
to be aware of their existence, though few but specialists can be
enthusiastic over their merits, save in one or two cases. They show
how the language and the modes of versifying were going forward, and
becoming such as a great poet like Chaucer could improve; or, on the
other hand; language and verse were going backwards, deserting rhyme
and depending (as in Anglo-Saxon) on alliteration, or alliteration
mixed with rhyme.
Ancren Riwle.
Among the works of this period which were useful or pleasant in their
day, the longest book in prose is the "Ancren Riwle," or "Rule of
Anchoresses," ladies who were not exactly female solitaries, but lived
together religiously, each with her maid. The author, whoever he may
have been, bids them say, if any one inquires, that they are "of the
Order of St. James". There was no such Order, but St. James bids us
visit the widow and the orphan, and keep ourselves unspotted from
the world. _This_, says he, is true religion. The three ladies dwelt
together at Tarente in Dorset. The language is of the same period as
Layamon's "Brut," very early in the thirteenth century. The style
is simple and free from decoration, the dialect is that of western
England. The advice to the ladies is excellently pious; no severe
austerities are recommended, except silence at meals. An anchoress
"should not speak with any man often or long," and should have a
witness (probably out of ear-shot), even when she confesses, since
"the innocent are often belied for want of a witness". Flirting, and
belief in luck and in dreams and witchcraft, are severely reprobated.
Scepticism is attributed to intellectual pride. "Wear no iron" (James
IV wore an iron girdle under his clothes), "nor hair cloth, nor
hedgehog skins"; the ladies are not to flog themselves, unless their
confessor permits, and their shoes are to be thick and warm. The author
remarks that, God knows, he would rather set out on a voyage to Rome
than write his book over again: he may have feared that the ladies
would lose their copy.
Other religious books of the time are the "Poema Morale," in lines of
fourteen syllables ending in a double rhyme, as _lorè, morè, deedè,
redè_, and a new metrical paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus. The story
is told with some vivacity, in rhyming couplets of eight syllables.
The drempte pharaoh king a drem
That he stod by the flodes strem
And the then ut come VII neat
Everile wel swithe fet and gret,
And VII lene after the.
In places the metre of Coleridge's "Christabel," which was the model
of Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," is recognized in the casual
couplets, thus:--
For sextenè yer Joseph was old
Quane he was into Egypte sold.
But it is a far cry from this to
The feast was over in Branksome tower;
and the metre, when Scott's "Lay" appeared, seemed to be a novelty.
The Owl and the Nightingale.
in rhyming eight-syllable couplets, seems to have been written about
1250 (?). The theme is a _debate_, in the fashion of French poetry,
between the owl and the nightingale, as to the comparative merit of
their songs. The nightingale, deserting her art, rather feebly asserts
the moral influence of her own music, and attacks the owl in a very
personal strain of invective, reflecting on his want of good looks,
and on his taste in food. We are far indeed from Keats's "Ode to
the Nightingale", "If you are so great a teacher," replied the owl,
"why do you not sing to men in Ireland, Norway, and Galloway?" La
Fontaine might have made a witty poem on the dispute of the owl and the
nightingale, but the poet was not a wit, and made a poor use of his
opportunities. He is supposed, but not with certainty, to have been
Nicholas of Guildford, who is credited with being neglected by the
Bishop in the distribution of patronage.
The owl quotes the "Proverbs of King Alfred," of which there is a
thirteenth century collection in rhyme; there are also the "Proverbs
of Hendyng": the latter in stanzas of six lines each, the first two
rhyming with each other, as do the last two, while the third line
rhymes with the sixth: a very popular jingle.
Lyrics.
Far more interesting than these things, whether moral or religious,
are the rhyming songs, the voice of the English people, laymen, not
priests, the love lyrics (1300?), for example, one on Alison, beginning
Bytuene Mershe ant Averil
When spray biginneth to springe,
The lutel fowl hath hire wyll
On hyre lud to synge,
each stanza ending
From alle wymen mi loue is lent
Ant lyht on Alisoun.
This is the first sweet English love-song that has escaped the ruins of
time. Everyone knows by heart
Sumer is icumen in;
and
Blow, northerne wynd,
Send thou me my suetyng,
reminds us of
O gentle wind that bloweth south
From where my love repaireth.
There were all the sounds and scents of spring in the hearts and songs
of the poets:--
Lenten is come with love to toune,
With blosmen ant with briddes roune,
That all this blisse bryngeth.
This metre came to be used in telling stories in verse, a purpose
for which it is not well fitted. But truly English poetry, with rich
re-echoing rhymes and many forms of verse, is awake at last.
Political Songs..
To politics as well as to love and the delights of spring the Muse
of the people was alive. The popular hatred of Richard of Cornwall,
brother of Henry III, expressed itself thus after the battle of Lewes
(1264). The English is here but slightly modernized:--
Be thou lief, be thou loth, Sir Edward,
Thou shalt ride spurless on thy lyard
All the right way to Doverward
Shalt thou never more break forward,
Edward, thou did'st as a shreward,
Forsook thine uncle's lore,
Richard, though thou be ever trichard
Trick shalt thou never more.
(A lyard is a grey, spoken of a horse,
The Dinlay snaws were ne'er so white
As the lyart locks o' Harden's hair,
says the ballad of "Jamie Telfer".)
The English view of Wallace, the patriot knight of Scotland, cruelly
executed, is thus set forth:--
To warn all the gentlemen that be in Scotland
The Wallace was drawn, thereafter hanged,
Beheaded alive, his bowels burned,
The head to London Bridge was sent,
To abide
After Simon Frysel,
That was traitor and fickle
And known full wide.
(Frysel or Fraser; a later Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat of 1745, was
traitor and fickle enough.)
Robert of Gloucester.
By no means so lively, though useful in its day, is the very long
metrical chronicle (about 1300) of Robert of Gloucester, whether it
be by two hands or by one. One, at least, named Robert, was living at
the dates of a great Oxford town and gown row, which he describes, and
of the battle of Evesham (1265). He was fortunately not nearer than
a distance of thirty miles from that stricken field, and records his
own fear of a dense darkness which prevented the monks from reading
service in church. Robert dwelt in Gloucester, as his minute local
allusions prove. He began his chronicle by versifying the fabulous work
of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but put into it not a glimmer of the poetry of
Layamon. For the rest, till he reached his own time, he copied Henry of
Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, and "Lives of the Saints".
Robert's learned modern editor, Mr. Aldis Wright, outworn by all the
tediousness which the poet bestows on us, says "as literature, the book
is as worthless as twelve thousand lines of verse without one spark of
poetry can be". But Robert's praises of England, "a wel god loud," and
of English folk, so clean and handsome, have a sound spontaneous note
of patriotism, and there is a swing in what Mr. Wright cruelly styles
his "doggerel verse in ballad metre," which is not to be despised. To
be sure he has, without knowing it, several different sorts of verse,
and is nearly as irregular as Layamon himself, in his measures. His
readers would not be offended by these defects, and they learned from
him, with a great deal of inaccurate history, a sense of pride in their
country, and to speak English, though the nobles and gentry, he says,
spoke French.
Cursor Mundi.
A book in verse about twice as long as the lengthy
world-chronicle of Robert is the "Cursor Mundi," "the Over-Runner
of the World". The author, like the makers of many pretty lyrics
on religious subjects, perceived that people preferred songs to
sermons, and romance to homilies. To modernize his language
Men yearn jests to hear
And romances read in divers mannere.
He gives the themes of the romances, "Matter of Rome"--which
includes all antiquity, Troy, and Greece as well as Rome--"Matter
of Britain," the stories of Arthur and his Knights--and "Matter
of France," concerning Charlemagne, and his Twelve Peers. Nothing
is in fashion but love and lovers: but this poet will sing of Her
whose love never fails, namely Our Lady. He begins before Satan
and his angels fell, and goes on endlessly, yet, to his readers,
perhaps not tediously, for he enlivens the Biblical narrative
with legends to the full as fantastic as could be found in any
romance. There is the story of how Moses found, through a dream,
three wands that grew from three pips placed under Adam's tongue.
David, through another dream, found these wands in the grave of
Moses, which, like that of Arthur, "is a mystery to the world".
The wands turned ugly black Saracens into handsome white men:
the branches grew into a tree, and round that tree were thirty
circles of silver. The wood was made into the True Cross, and
Judas received the thirty pieces of silver. The most absurd tales
are told of the boyhood, by no means exemplary, of our Lord,
variegated by miracles not wholly beneficent.
Thus the "Cursor Mundi" may have been found amusing enough in
its day, when the ceaseless octosyllabic rhyming couplets were
not reckoned tedious (they are sometimes varied), and adventures
wholly unknown to the authors of the Gospels occur in every page.
Devotional Books.
Books more purely devotional are "The Ayenbite of Inwyt" ("The
Biting of Conscience") and "The Pricke of Conscience". The
former states itself to be written "in English of Kent," by "dan
Michelis of Northgate," and to be in the library of St. Austin's
of Canterbury. The author, or rather translator from a French
book of 1274, finished his writing in 1340. The author of "The
Ayenbite" classifies sins and virtues in the allegorical manner:
his moral advice, for example, as to the duty of giving alms
promptly, gladly, and without the discourtesies with which too
many accompany them, is excellent. But nothing, he says, is to be
given to minstrels, he "calls their harmless art a crime". The
dialect is uncouth and rather difficult.
"The Pricke of Conscience" is in octosyllabic rhyming couplets,
about 10,000 lines in all, and is the work of a singular person,
Richard Rolle, who, after being a wandering hermit, settled at
Hampole, and died in 1349. A Latin biographer of Richard states
that he was born at Thornton in the diocese of York, was well
educated by the care of his parents, was sent to Oxford by
Thomas Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made good progress
in his studies, especially in theology. In his nineteenth year
he left the temptations of Oxford, went home, and turned two
dresses of his sister's, one white, one gray, into what he
thought the appropriate costume of a hermit, covering his head
with his father's rain-hood. His sister fled from before him,
thinking him insane: he took Lady Dalton's seat in church, was
allowed to preach a sermon, and was kindly received by the
lady's husband, Sir John. In a cell provided by the knight he
had unspeakable raptures, and felt as if he were being burned by
a physical fire, which proved to be that of Divine love. Some
ladies found him writing at a great pace, while he simultaneously
discoursed to them for two hours. It seems to follow that either
his writing or his preaching was "automatic". He wrought some
miracles of healing, and he must have written rapidly indeed if
he produced all the works attributed to him, His prose treatises
of religion are as fervent as the Letters of Samuel Rutherford,
the Covenanter: his anecdotes of his own temptation by the
phantasm of "a full, fair young woman" who loved him dearly; and
of a repentant scholar, who wrote out a list of his own sins
which vanished from the paper, are interesting. He allows that
the brains of eagerly pious people sometimes "turn in their
heads," thereby causing empty hallucinations, and the hearing
of wonderful songs that are merely subjective impressions. This
strange being, with the ardour of Crashaw, had something of
Crashaw's poetic fire.
Minot.
The verses of Laurence Minot, celebrating events from 1333 to
1352 are of almost no literary merit. The Muse of Laurence is
the patriotic; he crows, for example, over the defeat of the
Scots by English archers at Halidon Hill, in 1333, but he merely
babbles in the vague, and does not give a single detail as to the
fighting. When he promises to tell of the battle of Bannockburn,
in place of doing that he glories in the recovery of Berwick by
Edward III.
The best praise we can give him is that he loved to celebrate the
victories of his countrymen; and had at his command many metres
that were ready for some better poet to use. It must also be
admitted that there are very few successes in our British essays
in patriotic poetry, and that an enemy of the Scots, as Minot
was, may be not impartially judged by a critic of that race.