Middle English Literature

Middle English literature is the literature written in English between the Norman Conquest and the arrival of printing and the Renaissance — roughly 1150 to 1500. In these centuries English, which after 1066 had sunk to the language of peasants and servants beneath a French-speaking aristocracy and a Latin-writing Church, slowly rose again, swollen with thousands of French and Latin words, to become the language of a king’s court, of Parliament, of law and of some of the finest poetry in Europe. Its towering figure is Geoffrey Chaucer, “the father of English poetry”, whose The Canterbury Tales is the first great comic masterpiece in English. But the period also produced the anonymous poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, William Langland’s visionary Piers Plowman, the first book by a woman in English (Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love), the first autobiography in English (The Book of Margery Kempe), the great cycles of mystery plays, and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the definitive English telling of King Arthur.

Middle English is readable with some effort. Chaucer’s General Prologue begins:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

(“When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root…”). Spelling is unfixed, final -e is often pronounced, and many words have shifted meaning, but the grammar is recognisably ours.

Historical background

The Norman Conquest of 1066 created a three-language society. French (Anglo-Norman) was the language of the king, the nobility and the law courts; Latin the language of the Church, scholarship and record; English the language of the overwhelming majority, but rarely written. For a century and more, English literature survives mainly in religious instruction for those who knew no French or Latin — sermons, saints’ lives, guides for anchoresses (Ancrene Wisse, c. 1225).

Then the balance shifted. In 1204 King John lost Normandy, and the English nobility gradually became English. The Hundred Years’ War with France (1337–1453) made French the enemy’s tongue. The Black Death of 1348–50 killed perhaps a third to a half of the population, raised the value of labour and shook the social order; the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 marched on London. In 1362 the Statute of Pleading ordered that lawsuits be conducted in English. By the end of the century King Henry IV (1399) became the first king since the Conquest whose mother tongue was English. The fourteenth century also saw John Wycliffe and his followers (the Lollards) translate the whole Bible into English (c. 1382–95), against the Church’s resistance.

It was in this ferment that three great poets appeared at once.

Two kinds of poetry

Middle English poets had two traditions to draw on.

The French tradition of rhymed, syllable-counted verse — octosyllabic couplets, rhyme royal stanzas — and the genres of French courtly literature: the romance, the dream vision, the fabliau (a bawdy comic tale), the allegory of love (The Romance of the Rose). Chaucer, who began by translating French and Italian, wrote in this manner and invented the iambic pentameter couplet, the line that would carry English poetry from Shakespeare to Wordsworth.

The native alliterative tradition, descended from Old English, which underwent an Alliterative Revival in the north and west midlands in the later fourteenth century. Its poets wrote long, unrhymed lines with four stresses bound by alliteration, in regional dialects full of Norse and Old English words that London readers found strange. Chaucer’s Parson, a southerner, says: “I am a Southren man, / I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre” — “I can’t tell a story in alliteration.”

The three great poets

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) — courtier, diplomat, customs official, a Londoner who had been to Italy and read Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. His Troilus and Criseyde is a tragic romance of love and betrayal in the Trojan War, often called the first great English novel in verse; his unfinished Canterbury Tales gathers thirty pilgrims of every class at the Tabard Inn in Southwark and lets them tell stories on the way to Canterbury — knightly romance, bawdy fabliau, saint’s life, beast fable, sermon — each tale coloured by its teller. In the General Prologue’s gallery of portraits, from the gentle Knight to the cynical Pardoner and the much-married Wife of Bath, Chaucer created the first great cast of individualised characters in English. See Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales.

The Gawain-poet (or Pearl-poet) — an anonymous contemporary from the north-west midlands (Cheshire or Staffordshire), whose four poems survive in one small manuscript (British Library, Cotton Nero A.x). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest Arthurian romance in English: at Christmas in Camelot a gigantic green knight rides into the hall and offers a “game” — anyone may strike him with his axe if he can return the blow in a year and a day. Gawain beheads him; the knight picks up his head, which speaks, and rides away. A year later Gawain sets out to keep his word, is lodged in a castle whose lord proposes another game — exchanging each day’s winnings — while the lord’s wife tempts Gawain three times in his bed. The poem is a test of chivalry, courtesy and chastity, of the code of truth symbolised by the pentangle on Gawain’s shield, and it ends with Gawain’s shamed recognition that he loved his life too much. Pearl is an exquisitely intricate dream vision in which a grieving father sees his dead infant daughter, now a queen of heaven, across a river he cannot cross. Cleanness and Patience (a witty retelling of Jonah) complete the manuscript.

William Langland (c. 1330–c. 1386), about whom almost nothing is known except what the poem tells us, spent his life writing and rewriting Piers Plowman (three versions, A, B and C). It is a sprawling series of dream visions. The dreamer, Will, falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and sees “a fair field full of folk” — all of society, between the tower of Truth and the dungeon of Wrong — and sets out to find how to live well, “Do-well, Do-better and Do-best”. He meets allegorical figures (Lady Meed — bribery — Conscience, Reason, Hunger) and the humble ploughman Piers, who becomes an image of Christ. It is an angry, searching, compassionate poem about poverty, corruption in Church and state, and salvation; the rebels of 1381 quoted it.

John Gower (c. 1330–1408), Chaucer’s friend, wrote the long Confessio Amantis (“The Lover’s Confession”) in English as well as works in French and Latin — a reminder that this was still a trilingual culture.

Mystics and the first women writers

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were an age of English mysticism. Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing — which teaches that God cannot be grasped by thought, only reached by a “naked intent” of love piercing the cloud between us and him — wrote guides to contemplative prayer in English.

Julian of Norwich (1343–after 1416), an anchoress walled into a cell beside St Julian’s church in Norwich, received a series of sixteen visions during a near-fatal illness in 1373 and spent twenty years meditating on them. Her Revelations of Divine Love is the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. It speaks of God as mother as well as father, of sin as “behovely” (necessary, fitting), and gives the most famous line in English mysticism: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” — a line T. S. Eliot set at the heart of Four Quartets.

Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after 1438), a brewer’s wife from King’s Lynn who bore fourteen children, then devoted herself to God, went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago, and wept so loudly and continually that fellow pilgrims abandoned her, dictated The Book of Margery Kempe — the first autobiography in English, referring to herself as “this creature”. The only manuscript was rediscovered in a country house in 1934.

Drama

Medieval English drama grew out of the Church. In the great towns — York, Chester, Wakefield, Coventry — trade guilds performed mystery plays (from mystère, a craft) on wagons in the streets at the feast of Corpus Christi: whole cycles of short plays telling the history of the world from Creation to Doomsday. The shipwrights played Noah building the Ark; the bakers, the Last Supper. The plays mix piety and broad comedy — Noah’s wife refuses to board the Ark and boxes his ears; in the brilliant Second Shepherds’ Play of the Wakefield Master, a sheep-stealer hides a lamb in a cradle and pretends it is his baby, in comic parody of the Nativity that follows.

Morality plays dramatise the struggle for the soul through allegorical figures. The finest, Everyman (c. 1500), shows Death summoning Everyman to his reckoning; he asks his friends Fellowship, Kindred and Goods to go with him, and all refuse; only Good Deeds will accompany him to the grave. Its stark power still works on stage.

Romance, lyric and Malory

The romance was the great popular genre: tales of knights, love and marvels — Havelok the Dane, King Horn, Sir Orfeo (the Orpheus myth turned into a Breton fairy tale with a happy ending). Hundreds of short lyrics survive, religious and secular — “Sumer is icumen in, / Lhude sing cuccu!” (c. 1260), “I sing of a maiden that is makeles”, the Corpus Christi Carol.

At the end of the period, Sir Thomas Malory — a knight from Warwickshire who seems to have spent much of his life in prison for violence, theft and rape — compiled Le Morte Darthur (finished 1469–70), a great prose retelling of the whole Arthurian legend from French and English sources: the sword in the stone, the Round Table, Lancelot and Guinevere, the quest for the Holy Grail, the treachery of Mordred and the death of Arthur. William Caxton, who set up the first printing press in England at Westminster in 1476, printed it in 1485, as well as The Canterbury Tales. Printing fixed the language of London as standard English and closed the medieval period.

The language changes

Middle English was transformed by contact. About ten thousand French words entered English between 1066 and 1500 — the language of government (parliament, crown, tax), law (judge, jury, crime), religion (prayer, saint), fashion and food. The famous pairs show the social split: the Anglo-Saxon herdsman kept the cow, swine and sheep; the Norman lord ate beef (bœuf), pork (porc) and mutton (mouton). Grammatical endings wore away, word order became fixed. After Chaucer’s death came the Great Vowel Shift (c. 1400–1700), which changed the pronunciation of long vowels and is why English spelling, fixed by printers before the shift was complete, matches its sounds so poorly.

Legacy

Chaucer was hailed by his successors as the founder of English poetry; Dryden called him “the father of English poetry” and said of the Canterbury pilgrims, “here is God’s plenty.” Gawain was unknown until the nineteenth century and became a modern favourite through translations by Tolkien, Simon Armitage and others. The Arthurian legend, as Malory shaped it, passed to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and countless films. The mystery plays were revived in York in 1951 and are performed again today.

In conversation

• “God’s plenty” — Dryden’s phrase for the Canterbury pilgrims, now used for any rich, varied abundance of human types.
• “All shall be well” — Julian of Norwich’s words of hope against all appearances.
• “Everyman” — from the morality play — the ordinary person, the universal human being.