Chaucer, who suffers when read in extracts, is not represented in this
book, although without him fourteenth-century literature is a body
without a head. But in the choice of literary forms and subjects, I have
aimed at illustrating the variety of interest that is to be found in the
writings of lesser men.
It may be asked whether the choice of specimens gives a true idea of the
taste and accomplishment of the age. This issue is raised by Professor
Carleton Brown's Afterword in the second volume of his _Register of
Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse_, a book that will be to
generations of investigators a model of unselfish research. There he
emphasizes the popularity of long poems, and especially of long didactic
poems, as evidenced by the relatively great number of manuscript copies
that survive. _The Prick of Conscience_ leads with ninety-nine
manuscripts, against sixty-nine of _The Canterbury Tales_, and
forty-seven of _Piers Plowman_. What is to be said of a book that,
impoverished by the exclusion of Chaucer, passes by also the most
popular poem of his century?
I would rest an apology on the conditions under which manuscript copies
came into being and survived; and begin with Michael of Northgate as he
brings his _Ayenbyte_ to an end in the October of 1340, before the short
days and the numbing cold should come to make writing a pain. The book
has no elegance that would commend it to special care, for Dan Michael
is a dry practical man, as indifferent to the graces of style as to the
luxury of silky vellum and miniatures stiff with gold and colour. But
from his cell it goes into the library of his monastery—a library well
ordered and well catalogued, and (as if to guarantee security) boasting
the continuous possession of books that Gregory the Great gave to the
first missionaries. We know its place exactly—the fourth shelf of
press XVI. And there it remained safe until the days of intelligent
private collectors, passing finally with the Arundel library to the
British Museum. The course was not often so smooth, for of two dozen
manuscripts left by Michael to St. Augustine's, Dr. James, in the year
1903, could identify only four survivors in as many different libraries.
But the example is enough to illustrate a proposition that will not
easily be refuted:—the chances of an English mediaeval manuscript
surviving greatly depend on its eligibility for a place in the library
of a religious house, since these are the chief sources of the
manuscripts that have come down to us.
The attitude of the Church towards the vernacular literature of the
later Middle Ages did not differ materially from her attitude towards
the classics in earlier times, though the classics had always the
greater dignity. Literary composition as a pure art was not encouraged.
Entertainment for its own sake was discountenanced. The religious houses
were to be centres of piety and learning; and if English were admitted
at all in the strongholds of Latin and French, a work of unadorned
edification like _The Prick of Conscience_ would make very suitable
reading for those who craved relaxation from severer studies. There
were, of course, individuals among the professed religious who indulged
a taste for more worldly literature; but the surviving catalogues of
libraries that were formed under the eye of authority show a marked
discrimination in favour of didactic works.
In England the private libraries of fourteenth-century laymen were
relatively insignificant. But Guy, Earl of Warwick, in 1315 left an
exceptionally rich collection to the Abbey of Bordesley, which failed to
conserve the legacy. The list was first printed in Todd's _Illustrations
of Gower and Chaucer_ (1810),[19] and (among devotional works and lives
of saints that merge into religious romances like _Joseph of Arimathea
and the Graal_, _Titus and Vespasian_, and _Constantine_) it includes
most of the famous names of popular history:—Lancelot, Arthur and
Modred; Charlemagne, Doon of Mayence, Aimery of Narbonne, Girard de
Vienne, William of Orange, Thibaut of Arraby, Doon of Nanteuil, Guy of
Nanteuil, William Longespée, Fierebras; with two Alexander romances, a
_Troy Book_, a _Brut_; the love story of _Amadas e Idoine_; the romance
_de Guy e de la Reygne 'tut enterement'_; a book of physic and surgery;
and a miscellany—_un petit rouge livere en lequel sount contenuz mous
diverses choses_. Yet even a patron so well disposed to secular poems
did little to perpetuate the manuscripts of English verse. His education
enabled him to draw from the fountain head, and most of his books were
French.
[Foot-note 19: p. 161.]
Neither in the libraries of the monasteries, nor in the libraries of the
great nobles, should we expect to find a true mirror of popular taste.
The majority of the people knew no language but English; and the
relative scarcity of books of every kind, which even among the educated
classes made the hearers far outnumber the readers, was at once a cause
and a symptom of illiteracy: the majority of the people could not read.
This leads to a generalization that is cardinal for every branch of
criticism:—up to Chaucer's day, the greater the popularity of an
English poem, the less important becomes the manuscript as a means of
early transmission. The text, which would have been comparatively safe
in the keeping of scribe, book, and reader, passes to the uncertain
guardianship of memorizer, reciter, and listener; so that sometimes it
is wholly lost, and sometimes it suffers as much change in a generation
as would a classical text in a thousand years. Already Robert Mannyng
laments the mutilation of _Sir Tristrem_ by the 'sayers' (who could
hardly be expected to avoid faults of improvisation and omission in the
recitation of so long a poem from memory);[20] and his regret would
have been keener if he could have looked ahead another hundred years to
see how the texts of the verse romances paid the price of popularity by
the loss of crisp phrases and fresh images, and the intrusion of every
mode of triteness.
[Foot-note 20:
I see in song, in sedgeyng tale
Of Erceldoun and of Kendale,
Non þam says as þai þam wroght,
And in þer sayng it semes noght.
Þat may þou here in _Sir Tristrem_—
Ouer gestes it has þe steem,
Ouer alle þat is or was,
If men it sayd as made Thomas:
But I here it no man so say,
Þat of som copple som is away.
(_Chronicle_, Prologue, ll. 93 ff.)
Robert blames the vanity of the reciters more than their memories, on
the excellence of which Petrarch remarks in his account of the
minstrels: _Sunt homines non magni ingenii, magnae vero memoriae,
magnaeque diligentiae_ (to Boccaccio, _Rerum Senilium_, Bk. v, ep. ii).]
Of course manuscripts of the longer secular poems were made and
used,—mean, stunted copies from which the travelling entertainer could
refresh his memory or add to his stock of tales; fair closet copies that
would enable well-to-do admirers to renew their pleasure when no skilled
minstrel was by; and, occasionally, compact libraries of romance, like
the Auchinleck manuscript, which must have been the treasure of some
great household that enjoyed 'romanz-reding _on þe bok_'—the pastime
that encouraged the rise of prose romances in the late Middle Ages. But
as a means of circulation for popular verse, as distinct from learned
verse and from prose, the book was of secondary importance in its own
time, and was always subject to exceptional risks. The fates of three
stories in different kinds, all demonstrably favourites in the
fourteenth century, will be sufficient illustration: of _Floris and
Blauncheflour_, one of the best of the early romances in the courtly
style, several manuscripts survive, but when all are assembled the
beginning of the story is still wanting; of _Havelok_, typical of the
homely style, one imperfect copy and a few charred fragments of another
are extant; of the _Tale of Wade_, that was dear to 'olde wydwes',[21]
and yet considered worthy to entertain the noble Criseyde,[22] no text
has come down. Evidently, to determine the relative popularity of the
longer tales in verse we need not so much a catalogue of extant
manuscripts, as a census, that cannot now be taken, of the repertories
of the entertainers.
[Foot-note 21: Chaucer, _Merchant's Tale_, ll. 211 ff.]
[Foot-note 22: Chaucer, _Troilus and Criseyde_, Bk. iii, l. 614.]
If the manuscript life of the longer secular poems was precarious, the
chances of the short pieces—songs, ballads, jests, comic dialogues,
lampoons—were still worse. Since they were composed for the day without
thought of the future, and were no great charge on the ordinary memory,
the chief motives for writing them down were absent; and no doubt the
professional minstrel found that to secure his proprietary rights
against competitors, he must be chary of giving copies of his best
things. Many would never be put into writing; some were jotted down
on perishable wax; but parchment, always too expensive for ephemeral
verse, was reserved for special occasions. In France, in the thirteenth
century, Henri d'Andeli adds a touch of dignity to his poem celebrating
the memory of a distinguished patron by inscribing it on parchment
instead of the wax tablets he used for lighter verses.[23] In England
in 1305, a West-Country swashbuckler, whom fear of the statute against
_Trailebastouns_ kept in the greenwood, relieves his offended dignity
by composing a poem half apologetic, half minatory, and chooses as the
safest way of publication to write it on parchment and throw it in the
high road:—
_Cest rym fust fet al bois desouz vn lorer,
La chaunte merle, russinole, e crye l'esperuer.
Escrit estoit en parchemyn pur mout remenbrer,
Et gitté en haut chemyn, qe vm le dust trouer.[24]_
These loose sheets or tiny rolls[25] rarely survive, and the
preservation of their contents, as of pieces launched still more
carelessly on the world, depends on the happy chance of inclusion in a
miscellany; quotation in a larger work; or entry on a fly-leaf, margin,
or similar space left blank in a book already written.
[Foot-note 23:
_Et icil clers qui ce trova ...
Por ce qu'il est de verité,
Ne l'apele mie flablel,
Ne l'a pas escrit en tablel,
Ainz l'a escrit en parchamin:
Par bois, per plains et par chamins,
Par bors, par chateals, par citez
Vorra qu'il soit bien recitez._
(_OEuvres_, ed. A. Héron, Paris 1881, p. 40.)]
[Foot-note 24: 'This rime was made in the wood beneath a bay-tree, where
blackbird and nightingale sing and the sparrow-hawk cries. It was
written on parchment for a record, and flung in the high road so that
folk should find it.' _The Political Songs of England_, ed. T. Wright
(London 1839), p. 236.]
[Foot-note 25: A rare example of a roll made small for convenience of
carrying is the British Museum Additional MS. 23986. It is about three
inches wide and, in its imperfect state, twenty-two inches long, so that
when rolled up it is not much bigger than one's finger. On the inside it
contains a thirteenth-century _Song of the Barons_ in French (T. Wright,
_Political Songs_, 1839, pp. 59 ff.); on the outside, two scenes from a
Middle English farce called _Interludium de Clerico et Puella_
(Chambers, _Mediaeval Stage_, vol. ii, pp. 324 ff.) which, like so many
happy experiments of the earlier time, appears to have no successor in
the fourteenth century.]
Most productive, though not very common in the fourteenth century, are
the miscellanies of short pieces—volumes like Earl Guy's 'little red
book containing many divers things'—in which early collectors noted
down the scraps that interested them. A codex of West-Country origin,
MS. Harley 2253 in the British Museum, preserves among French poems such
as the complaint of the _Trailebastoun_, a group of English songs that
includes _Lenten is Come_ and _Alysoun_. Most of its numbers are unique,
and the loss of this one volume would have swept away the best part of
our knowledge of the early Middle English secular lyrics.
Of survival by quotation there is an example in the history of the
Letter of Theodric, which lies behind Mannyng's tale of the Dancers of
Colbek; and the circumstances are worth lingering over both for the
number of by-paths they open to speculation, and for the glimpse they
give of Wilton in a century from which there are few records of the
nunnery outside the grim, tax-gatherer's entries of Domesday.
In the year before the Conquest, Theodric the foreigner, still racked by
the curse that was laid on Bovo's company, made his way from the court
of Edward the Confessor to the shrine of St. Edith. As he walked through
the quiet valley to Wilton in the spring of the year, we may be sure the
thought came to him that here at last was the spot where a man wearied
with wandering from land to land, from shrine to shrine, might hope to
be cured and to set up his rest. From the moment he reaches the abbey it
is impossible not to admire his feeling for dramatic effect. By a
paroxysm of quaking he terrifies the peasants; but to the weeping nuns
he tells his story discreetly; and, lest a doubt should remain, produces
from his scrip a letter in which St. Bruno, the great Pope Leo IX,
vouches for all. It is notable that at this stage the convent appear to
have taken no steps to record a story so marvellous and so well
authenticated; and had Theodric continued his restless wandering we
should know of him as little as is known of three others from the band
of carollers, who had preceded him at Wilton with a similar story. But
when he obtains leave to sleep beside the shrine of St. Edith, and in
the morning of the great feast of Lady Day wakes up healed, exalting the
fame of their patron saint who had lifted the curse where all the saints
of Europe had failed, then, and then only, the convent order that an
official record should be made, and the letter copied: _Hec in presencia
Brichtive ipsius loci abbatisse declarata et patriis litteris[26] sunt
mandata_. Henceforth it exists only as a chapter in the Acts of St.
Edith, and as such it lay before Robert of Brunne. Of the other
communities or private persons visited by Theodric (who, whether saint
or _faitour_, certainly did not produce his letter for the first and
last time at Wilton) none have preserved his memory. It would be hard to
find a better example of the power of the clergy in early times to
control the keys to posterity, or of the practical considerations which,
quite apart from merit or curiosity, governed the preservation of
legends.
[Foot-note 26: _Patriis litteris_ according to Schröder and Gaston Paris
means 'English language', but if it is not a mere flourish, it means
rather the 'English script' in which the Latin letter was copied, as
distinct from the foreign hand of Theodric's original letter. What
'English script' meant at Wilton in 1065 is a question of some delicacy.
The spelling _Folcpoldus_ for _Folcwoldus_ in some later copies of the
Wilton text must be due to confusion of _p_ and Anglo-Saxon ƿ = _w_.
This would be decisive for 'Anglo-Saxon script' if it occurred
anywhere but in a proper name.]
But it is the verses casually jotted down in unrelated books that bring
home most vividly the slenderness of the thread of transmission. A
student has committed _Now Springs the Spray_ to solitary imprisonment
between the joyless leaves of an old law book. The song of the Irish
Dancer and _The Maid of the Moor_ were scribbled, with some others from
a minstrel's stock, on the fly-leaf of a manuscript now in the Bodleian.
On a blank page of another a prudent man (who used vile ink, long since
faded) has written the verses that banish rats, much as a modern
householder might treasure up some annihilating prescription. To these
waifs the chance of survival did not come twice, and to a number
incalculable it never came.
It has been the purpose of this digression to bring the extant
literature into perspective: not to raise useless regrets for what is
lost, since we can learn only from what remains; nor to contest the
value of statistics of surviving copies as a proof of circulation,
provided the works compared are similar in length and kind, and are
represented in enough manuscripts to make figures significant; nor yet
to deny that didactic verse bulks large in the output of the fourteenth
century: it could not be otherwise in an anxious age, when the scarcity
of remains gives everything written in English a place in literary
history, and when for almost everything verse was preferred to prose. It
seemed better to redress the balance of chance by stealing from the end
of the thirteenth century a few fragments that following generations
would not forget, than to lend colour to the suggestion that ninety-nine
of the men of Chaucer's century enjoyed _The Prick of Conscience_ for
every one that caught up the refrain of _Now Springs the Spray_, or
danced through _The Maid of the Moor_, or sang the praises of Alison.
V
However much a maker of excerpts may stretch his commission to give
variety, it is in vain if the reader will not do his part; for it lies
with him to find interest. Really no effective attack can be made on a
crust of such diversified hardness until the reader looks at his text as
a means of winning back something of the life of the past, and feels a
pleasure in the battle against vagueness.
The first step is to find out the verbal meaning. Strange words, that
force themselves on the attention and are easily found in dictionaries
and glossaries, try a careful reader less than groups of common
words—such lines as
_Þe fairest leuedi, for þe nones,
Þat miȝt gon on bodi and bones_ II 53-4
which, if literally transposed into modern English, are nonsense. Those
who think it is beneath the dignity of an intelligent reader to weigh
such gossamer should turn to Zupitza's commentary on the Fifteenth
Century Version of _Guy of Warwick_,[27] and see how a master among
editors of Middle English relishes every phrase, missing nothing, and
yet avoiding the opposite fault of pressing anything too hard. For these
tags, more or less emptied of meaning through common use, and ridiculous
by modern standards, have their importance in the economy of spoken
verse, where a good voice carried them off. They helped out the composer
in need of a rime; the reciter on his feet, compelled to improvise; and
the audience who, lacking the reader's privilege to linger over
close-packed lines, welcomed familiar turns that by diluting the sense
made it easier to receive.
[Foot-note 27: Early English Text Society, extra series, 1875-6.]
Repeated reading will bring out clearly the formal elements of
style—the management of rime and alliteration in verse, the grouping
and linking of clauses in prose, the cadences in both verse and prose:
and before the value of a word or phrase can be settled it is often
necessary to inquire how far its use was dictated by technical
conditions, compliance with which is sometimes ingenuous to the point of
crudity. Where a prose writer would be content with _Mathew sayth_, an
alliterative poet elaborates (VIII _a_ 234) into:
_Mathew with mannes face mouthed þise wordis_
and in such a context _mouthed_ cannot be pressed. The frequent oaths in
the speeches in _Piers Plowman_ are no more than counters in the
alliteration: being meaningless they are selected to prop up the verse,
just as the barrenest phrases in the poem _On the Death of Edward III_
owe their inclusion to the requirements of rime. Again, it will be
easier to acquiesce in a forced sense of _bende_ in
_On bent much baret bende_ V 47
when it is observed that rime and alliteration so limit the poet's
choice that no apter word could be used. Conversely, in the absence of
disturbing technical conditions, a reader who finds nonsense should
suspect his understanding of the text, or the soundness of the text,
before blaming the author.
When the sense expressed and the methods of expression have been
studied, it remains to examine the implications of the words—an endless
task and perhaps the most entertaining of all. Take as a routine example
the place where the Green Knight, preparing a third time to deliver his
blow, says to Gawayne—
_Halde þe now þe hyȝe hode þat Arþur þe raȝt,
And kepe þy kanel at þis kest, ȝif hit keuer may_ V 229 f.
A recent translator renders very freely:
'but yet thy hood up-pick,
Haply 'twill cover thy neck when I the buffet strike'—
though the etiquette of decapitation, and the delicacy of the stroke
that the Green Knight has in mind, require just the opposite
interpretation:—Gawayne's hood has become disarranged since he bared
his neck (V 188), and the Green Knight wants a clear view to make sure
of his aim. An observation of Gaston Paris on the Latin story of the
Dancers of Colbek will show how much an alert mind enriches the reading
of a text with precise detail. From the incident of Ave's arm he
concludes that the dancers did not form a closed ring, but a line with
Bovo leading (I 55) and Ave, as the last comer (I 43-54), at its end, so
that she had one arm free which her brother seized in his attempt to
drag her away (I 111 ff.).
Intensive reading should be combined with discursive. Intensive reading
cultivates the habit of noticing detail; and it is a sound rule of
textual criticism to interpret a composition first in the light of the
evidence contained within itself. For instance, the slight flicker in
the verse
_Sche most wiþ him no lenger abide_ II 330
should recall as surely as a cross-reference the earlier line
_No durst wiþ hir no leng abide_ II 84
and raise the question whether in both places in the original work the
comparative had not the older form _leng_. Discursive reading is a
safeguard against the dangers of a narrow experience, and especially
against the assumption that details of phrase, style, or thought are
peculiar to an author or composition, when in fact they are common to a
period or a kind. A course of both will enable the reader to cope with a
school of critics who rely on superficial resemblances to strip the mask
from anonymous authors and attach their works to some favoured name.
Whether _Sir Gawayne_ and _The Destruction of Troy_ are from the same
hand is still seriously debated. Both are alliterative poems; but it is
impossible to read ten lines from each aloud without realizing the wide
gap that divides their rhythms. The differences of spirit are more
radical still. The facility of the author of _The Destruction_ is
attained at the cost of surrender to the metre. Given pens, ink, vellum,
and a good original, he could go on turning out respectable verses while
human strength endured. And because his meaning is all on the surface,
the work does not improve on better acquaintance. The author of _Sir
Gawayne_ is an artist who never ceases to struggle with a harsh medium.
He has the rare gift of visualizing every scene in his story: image
succeeds image, each so sharply drawn as to suggest that he had his
training in one of the schools of miniature-painting for which early
England was famous. It is this gift of the painter that, more than
likeness of dialect or juxtaposition in the manuscript, links _Sir
Gawayne_ with _The Pearl_.
It cannot be too strongly urged that the purpose of a worker in Middle
English should be nothing less than to read sensitively, with the
fullest possible understanding. Of such a purpose many _curricula_ give
no hint. Nor could it be deduced readily from the latest activities of
research, where the tendency is more and more to leave the main road
(which should be crowded if the study is to thrive) for side-tracks and
by-paths of side-tracks in which the sense of direction and proportion
is easily lost.
That much may be accomplished by specialists following a single line of
approach has been demonstrated by the philologists, who have burrowed
tirelessly to present new materials to a world which seldom rewards
their happiest elucidations with so much as a 'Well said, old mole!' The
student of literature (in the narrower modern sense of the word) brings
a new range of interests. He will be disappointed if he expects to find
a finished art, poised and sustained, in an age singularly afflicted
with growing pains; but there are compensations for any one who is
content to catch glimpses of promise, and—looking back and forward, and
aside to France—to take pleasure in tracing the rise and development of
literary forms and subjects. It is still not enough. The specialist in
language as a science, or in literature as an art, may find the Sixth
Passus of _Piers Plowman_ (VIII _a_) or the Wiclifite sermon (XI _b_) of
secondary interest. Yet both are primary documents, the one for the
history of society, the other for the history of religion.
There is no escape from a counsel of perfection:—whoever enters on a
course of mediaeval studies must reckon as a defect his lack of interest
in any side of the life of the Middle Ages; and must be deaf to those
who, like the fox in Aesop that had lost its tail, proclaim the benefits
of truncation. The range of knowledge and experience was then more than
in later times within the compass of a single mind and life. And so much
that is necessary to a full understanding has been lost that no possible
source of information should be shut out willingly. It is an exercise in
humility to call up in all its details some scene of early English life
(better a domestic scene than one of pageantry) and note how much is
blurred.
Every blur is a challenge. There are few familiar subjects in which a
beginner can sooner reach the limits of recorded knowledge. The great
scholars have found time to chart only a fraction of their discoveries;
and the greatest could not hope or wish for a day when the number of
quests worth the making would be appreciably less.
* * * * *
This book had its origin in a very different project. Professor Napier
had asked me to join him in producing for the use of language students a
volume of specimens from the Middle English dialects, with an apparatus
strictly linguistic. The work had not advanced beyond the choice of
texts when his death and my transfer to duties in which learning had no
part brought it to an end. When later the call came for a book that
would introduce newcomers to the fourteenth century, I was able to bring
into the changed plan his favourite passage from _Sir Gawayne_, and to
draw upon the notes of his lectures for its interpretation. It is a
small part of my debt to the generous and modest scholar whose mastery
of exact methods was an inspiration to his pupils.
* * * * *
I am obliged to the Early English Text Society and to the Clarendon
Press for permission to use extracts from certain of their publications;
to the librarians who have made their manuscripts available, or have
helped me to obtain facsimiles; to Mr. J. R. R. Tolkien who has
undertaken the preparation of the Glossary, the most exacting part of
the apparatus; and to Mr. Nichol Smith who has watched over the book
from its beginnings.