Judged by what survives, the literary output of the first half of the
fourteenth century was small in quantity; though it must be remembered
that, unlike the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries which made a fresh
start and depended almost entirely on their own production, the
fourteenth inherited and enjoyed a good stock of verse, to which the new
compositions are a supplement.
Our first impression of this new material is negative and disappointing.
The production of rimed romances falls off: their plots become
increasingly absurd and mechanical; the action, so swift in the early
forms, moves sluggishly through a maze of decorative descriptions; and
their style at its best has the pretty inanity of _Sir Thopas_. The
succession of merry tales—such as _Dame Siriz_, or _The Fox and the
Wolf_[4] where Reynard, Isengrim, and Chauntecleer make their first bow
in English—is broken until the appearance of the _Canterbury Tales_
themselves. To find secular lyrics we must turn to the very beginning
or the very end of the century, and Chaucer himself does not recover the
fresh gaiety of the earlier time.
[Foot-note 4: Both are in Bodleian MS. Digby 86 (about 1280), and are
accessible in G. H. McKnight's _Middle English Humorous Tales_, Boston
1913.]
The decline of these characteristic thirteenth-century types becomes
less surprising when we notice that literature has changed camps. The
South, more especially the South-West, is now almost silent: the North
and the North-West reach their literary period. Minot and Rolle are
Northerners, Wiclif is a Yorkshireman by birth, the York and Towneley
Miracle cycles are both from the North, and with Barbour the literature
of the Scots dialect begins; Robert Mannyng belongs to the North-East
Midlands; while _Sir Gawayne_, _The Pearl_, and _The Destruction of
Troy_ represent the North-West. This predominance in the present volume
rests on no mere chance of selection, since the Northern (Egerton)
version of _Mandeville_ might have been preferred to the Cotton; and if
the number of extracts were to be increased, the texts that first come
to mind—_Cursor Mundi_ (about 1300),[5] _Prick of Conscience_ (about
1340), _Morte Arthure_ (about 1360), the Chester Plays—are Northern and
North-Western.
[Foot-note 5: Early English Text Society, ed. R. Morris. Unless other
editions are mentioned, the longer works which are not represented by
specimens may be read among the Early English Texts.]
It is impossible to give more than a partial explanation of the change
in the area of production. But as the kinds of poetry that declined
early in the fourteenth century are those that owed most to French
influence, it is reasonable to assume that in the South the impulse that
produced them had spent its force. The same pause is observable at the
same time in France, where it coincides with the transition from oral
poetry to more reflective compositions written for the eye of a reader.
It is the pause between the passing of the minstrels and the coming of
men of letters.
Such changes were felt first in the centres of government, learning, and
commerce, whence ideas and fashions spread very slowly to the country
districts. At this time the North, and above all the North-West, was the
backward quarter of England, thinly populated and in great part
uncultivated. An industrial age had not yet dotted it with inland
cities; and while America was still unknown the western havens were
neglected.[6] In these old-fashioned parts the age of minstrel poetry
was prolonged, and the wave of inspiration from France, though it came
late, stirred the North and North-West after the South had relapsed into
mediocrity or silence.
[Foot-note 6: See p. 150.]
So, about the middle of the century, imaginative poetry found a new home
in the West-Midlands. As before, poets turned to French for their
subjects, and often contented themselves with free adaptation of French
romances. They accepted such literary conventions as the Vision, which
was borrowed from the _Roman de la Rose_ to be the frame of _Wynnere and
Wastoure_ (1352)[7] and _The Parlement of the Thre Ages_,[8] before it
was used in _Piers Plowman_ and _The Pearl_ and by Chaucer. But time and
distance had weakened the French influence, and the new school of poets
did not catch, as the Southern poets did, the form and spirit of their
models.
[Foot-note 7: Ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, Oxford 1920.]
[Foot-note 8: Ed. Gollancz, Oxford 1915.]
They preferred the unrimed alliterative verse, which from pre-Conquest
days must have lived on in the remote Western counties without a written
record; and for a generation rime is overshadowed. The suddenness and
importance of this revival in a time otherwise barren of poetry will
appear from a list of the principal alliterative poems that are commonly
assigned to the third quarter of the century:—_Wynnere and Wastoure_,
_The Parlement of the Thre Ages_, _Joseph of Arimathie_ (the first
English Graal romance), _William of Palerne_, _Piers Plowman_ (A-text),
_Patience_, _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_, _The Destruction of
Troy_, _Morte Arthure_.
At the time alliterative verse was fitted to become the medium of
popular literature. Prose would not serve, because its literary life
depends on books and readers. Up to the end of the century (if we
exclude sermons and religious or technical treatises, where practical
considerations reinforced a Latin tradition) the function of prose in
English literature is to translate Latin or French prose;[9] and even
this narrow province is sometimes invaded by verse. Yet it was not easy
to write verse that depended on number of syllables, quantity, or rime.
The fall of inflexions brought confusion on syllabic metres; there were
great changes in the quantity and quality of vowels; and these
disturbances affected the dialects unevenly.[10] It must have been hard
enough for a poet to make rules for himself: but popularity involved the
recital of his work by all kinds of men in all kinds of English, when
the rimes would be broken and the rhythm lost. It is perhaps unfair to
call Michael of Northgate's doggerel (p. 33) to witness the misfortunes
of rimed metres. But the text of _Sir Orfeo_ from the Auchinleck
manuscript shows how often Englishmen who were nearly contemporary with
the composer had lost the tune of his verses. The more fortunate makers
of alliterative poems, whose work depended on the stable yet elastic
frame of stress and initial consonants, possessed a master-key to the
dialects.
[Foot-note 9: Chaucer's prose rendering of the _Metra_ of Boethius is an
apparent exception, but Jean de Meung's French prose version lay before
him.]
[Foot-note 10: See the Appendix.]
Adaptability made easier the diffusion of alliterative verse: but its
revival was not due to a deliberate choice on practical grounds. It was
a phase of a larger movement, which may be described as a weakening of
foreign and learned influences, and a recovery of the native stock. And
the metrical form is only the most obvious of the old-fashioned elements
that reappeared. In spirit, too, the authors of the alliterative school
have many points of kinship with the Old English poets. They are more
moderate than enthusiastic. Left to themselves, their imaginations move
most easily among sombre shapes and in sombre tones. They have not the
intellectual brilliance and the wit of the French poets; and when they
laugh—which is not often—the lightness of the thirteenth century is
rarer than the rough note of the comic scenes in the Towneley plays. It
is hard to say how much the associations and aptitudes of the verse
react on its content: but _Sumer is icumen in_, which is the essence of
thirteenth-century poetry, is barely conceivable in Old English, where
even the cuckoo's note sounded melancholy; and it would come oddly from
the poets of the middle fourteenth century, who have learned from the
French _trouvères_ the convention of spring, with sunshine, flowers, and
singing birds, but seem unable to put away completely the memory of
winter and rough weather.
In the last quarter of the century the tide of foreign influence runs
strong again; and the work of Gower and Chaucer discloses radical
changes in the conditions of literature which are the more important
because they are permanent. The literary centre swings back to the
capital—London now instead of Winchester—which henceforth provides the
models for authors of any pretensions throughout England and across the
Scottish border. In Chaucer we have for the first time a layman, writing
in English for secular purposes, who from the range and quality of his
work may fairly claim to be ranked among men of letters. The strictly
clerical writers had been content to follow the Scriptures, the Fathers
and commentators, the service books and legendaries; and Chaucer does
not neglect their tradition.[11] The minstrels had exploited a popular
taste for merry tales 'that sownen into synne'; and he borrowed so
gladly from them that many have doubted his repentance.[12] But his
models are men of letters:—the Latin poets headed by Ovid, who was
Gower's favourite too; French writers, from the satirical Jean de Meung
to makers of studied 'balades, roundels, virelayes' like Machaut and
Deschamps; and the greater Italian group—Boccaccio, Petrarch, and
Dante. Keeping such company, he was bound to reject the rusticity of the
alliterative school, and the middle way followed by those who added a
tag of rime at the end of a rimeless series (as in _Sir Gawayne_), or
invented stanzas in which alliteration remains, but is subservient to
rime (as in _The Pearl_ and the York plays). After his day, even for
Northerners who wish to write well, there will be no more '_rum-ram-ruf_
by lettre'.[13]
[Foot-note 11:
And for to speke of other holynesse,
He hath in prose translated Boece,
And of the Wrechede Engendrynge of Mankynde
As man may in pope Innocent ifynde,
And made the Lyfe also of Seynt Cecile;
He made also, gon ys a grete while,
Origenes upon the Maudeleyne.
(_Legend of Good Women_, Prologue A, ll. 424 ff.)]
[Foot-note 12: _Parson's Tale_, at the end.]
[Foot-note 13: _Prologue to Parson's Tale_, l. 43.]