Part 1

[Transcriber's Note: This text has words or letters enclosed in caret brackets < > that were added by the author to complete the manuscript; corrupt readings retained in the text are indicated in the original by daggers ††. #Bold# text has been marked by #; _underscores_ have been used to indicate _italic_ fonts; an emphasis by font change of single letters within an _it~a~lic_ context has been indicated by ~. For transcription of unusual letters and errata see the Transcriber's Note at the end. Original spelling variants and punctuation have not been standardized. The companion volume, _A Middle English Vocabulary, designed for use with SISAM's Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose_, by J. R. R. Tolkien is available at PG #43737.]

Fourteenth Century

VERSE & PROSE

edited by

KENNETH SISAM

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

M D CCCC XXI

Oxford University Press _London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai_ Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

PRINTED IN ENGLAND.

CONTENTS

PAGE

MAP viii INTRODUCTION ix

I. ROBERT MANNYNG OF BRUNNE'S HANDLYNG SYNNE 1 The Dancers of Colbek 4 II. SIR ORFEO 13 III. MICHAEL OF NORTHGATE'S AYENBYTE OF INWYT 32 How Mercy increases Temporal Goods 33 IV. RICHARD ROLLE OF HAMPOLE 36 A. Love is Life 37 B. The Nature of the Bee 41 C. The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost 42 V. SIR GAWAYNE AND THE GRENE KNIGHT 44 The Testing of Sir Gawayne 46 VI. THE PEARL, ll. 361-612 57 VII. THE GEST HYSTORIALE OF THE DESTRUCTION OF TROY 68 Prologue 69 The XXXI Book: Of the Passage of the Grekys fro Troy 72 VIII. PIERS PLOWMAN 76 A. From the B-Text, Passus VI 78 B. From the C-Text, Passus VI 89 IX. MANDEVILLE'S TRAVELS 94 Ethiopia.—Of Diamonds 96 Beyond Cathay 100 Epilogue 104 X. JOHN BARBOUR'S BRUCE 107 An Assault on Berwick (1319) 108 XI. JOHN WICLIF 115 A. The Translation of the Bible 117 B. Of Feigned Contemplative Life 119 XII. JOHN GOWER 129 A. Ceix and Alceone 131 B. Adrian and Bardus 137 XIII. JOHN OF TREVISA'S TRANSLATION OF HIGDEN'S POLYCHRONICON 145 A. The Marvels of Britain 146 B. The Languages of Britain 148 XIV. POLITICAL PIECES 151 A. On the Scots, by Minot 152 B. The Taking of Calais, by Minot 153 C. On the Death of Edward III 157 D. John Ball's Letter to the Peasants of Essex 160 E. On the Year 1390-1 161 XV. MISCELLANEOUS PIECES IN VERSE 162 A. Now Springs the Spray 163 B. Spring 164 C. Alysoun 165 D. The Irish Dancer 166 E. The Maid of the Moor 167 F. The Virgin's Song 167 G. Judas 168 H. The Blacksmiths 169 I. Rats Away 170 XVI. THE YORK PLAY 'HARROWING OF HELL' 171 XVII. THE TOWNELEY PLAY OF NOAH 185

NOTES 204 APPENDIX: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 265

INTRODUCTION

I

Two periods of our early history promise most for the future of English literature—the end of the seventh with the eighth century; the end of the twelfth century with the thirteenth.

In the first a flourishing vernacular poetry is secondary in importance to the intellectual accomplishment of men like Bede and Alcuin (to name only the greatest and the last of a line of scholars and teachers) who, drawing their inspiration from Ireland and still more from Italy direct, made all the knowledge of the time their own, and learned to move easily in the disciplined forms of Latin prose.

During the second the impulse again came from without. In twelfth-century France the creative imagination was set free. In England, which from the beginning of the tenth century had depended more and more on France for guidance, the nobles, clergy, and entertainers, in whose hands lay the fortunes of literature, had a community of interest with their French compeers that has never since been approached. So England shared early in the break with tradition; and during the thirteenth century the native stock is almost hidden by the brilliant growth of a new graft.

Every activity of the mind was quickened. A luxuriant invention of forms distinguished the Gothic style in architecture. All the decorative arts showed a parallel enrichment. Oxford (at least to insular eyes) was beginning to rival Paris in learning, and to contribute to the over-production of clerks which at first extended the province of the Church, and finally, by breaking the bounds set between ecclesiastics and laymen, played an important part in the secularization of letters. The friars, whose foundation was the last great reform of the mediaeval Church, were at the height of their good fame; and one of them, the Franciscan Roger Bacon, by his work in philosophy, criticism, and physical science, raised the name of English thinkers to an eminence unattained since Bede. If among the older monastic orders feverish and sometimes extravagant reforms are symptoms of decline, the richness of Latin chronicles like those of Matthew Paris of St. Albans is evidence that in some of the great abbeys the monks were still learned and eloquent. Nor was Latin the only medium in which educated Englishmen were at home. They wrote French familiarly, and to some extent repaid their debt to France by transcribing and preserving Continental compositions that would else have perished.

Apart from all these activities, the manifestations of a new spirit in English vernacular works are so important, and the break with the past is so sharp, that the late twelfth century and the thirteenth would be chosen with more justice than Chaucer's time as the starting-point for a study of modern literature.

Then romance was established in English, whether we use the word to mean the imaginative searching of dark places, or in the more general sense of story-telling unhampered by a too strict regard for facts. Nothing is more remarkable in pre-Conquest works than the Anglo-Saxon's dislike of exaggeration and his devotion to plain matter of fact. Here is the account of the whales in the far North that King Alfred received from Ohthere (a Norseman, of course, but it is indifferent):—'they are eight and forty ells long, and the biggest fifty ells long'. Compare with this parsimony the full-blooded description of the griffins in _Mandeville_:—'But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong, þanne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere þan an hundred egles suche as we han amonges vs, &c.', and you have a rough measure of the progress of fiction.

To take pleasure in stories is not a privilege reserved for favoured generations: but special conditions had transformed this pleasure into a passion. When Edward I became King in 1272, Western Europe had enjoyed a long period of internal peace, during which national hatreds burnt low. The breaking down of barriers between Bretons and French, Welsh and English, brought into the main stream of European literature the Celtic vein of idealism and delicate fancy. At the universities, in the Crusades, in the pilgrimages to Rome or Compostella, the nations mingled, each bringing from home some contribution to the common stock of stories; each gaining new experiences of the outside world, fusing them, and repeating them with embellishments. To those who stayed at home came the minstrels in the heyday of their craft—they were freemen of every Christian land who reported whatever was marvellous or amusing—and at second hand the colours of the rediscovered world seemed no less brave. It was an age greedy for entertainment that fed a rich sense of comedy on the jostling life around it; and to serve its ideals called up the great men of the past—Orpheus opening the way to fairyland, the heroes of the Trojan war, Alexander; Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Merlin the enchanter; Charlemagne with his peers—or won back from the shadows not Eurydice alone, but Helen and Criseyde, Guinevere and Ysolde, Rymenhild and Blauncheflour.

While she still claimed to direct public taste, the Church could not be indifferent to the spread of romance. A policy of uniform repression was no longer possible. Her real power to suppress books was ineffective to bind busy tongues and minds; popular movements were assured of a measure of practical tolerance when order competed with order and church with church for the goodwill of the people; and even if the problem had been well defined, a disciplined attitude unvarying throughout all the divisions of the Church was not to be expected when her mantle covered clerks ranging in character from the strictest ascetic to that older Falstaff who passed under the name of Golias and found his own Muse in the tavern,—

_Tales versus facio quale vinum bibo; Nihil possum scribere nisi sumpto cibo; Nihil valet penitus quod ieiunus scribo,— Nasonem post calices carmine praeibo!_

So it came about that while some of the clergy denounced all minstrels as 'ministers of Satan', others made a truce with the more honest among them, and helped them to add to their repertories the lives of saints. Officially 'trifles and trotevales' were still censured: but it seemed good to mould the _chansons de geste_ to pious uses,[1] and to purify the court of King Arthur, which popularity had led into dissolute ways, by introducing the quest of the Graal. And if Rolle preached sound doctrine when he ranked among the Sins of the Mouth 'to syng seculere sanges and lufe þam', their style and music were not despised as baits to catch the ears of the frivolous: when a singer began

Ase y me rod þis ender dai By grene wode to seche play, Mid herte y þohte al on a may, Suetest of alle þinge,—

the lover of secular songs would be tempted to listen; but he would stay to hear a song of the Joys of the Virgin, to whose cult the period owes its best devotional poetry.

[Foot-note 1: For illustrations from Old French, see _Les Légendes Épiques_ by Professor Joseph Bédier, 4 vols., Paris 1907-, a book that maintains the easy pre-eminence of the French school in the appreciation of mediaeval literature.]

The power of the Church to mould the early growth of vernacular literature is so often manifested that there is a risk of underestimating the compromises and surrenders which are the signs of its wane. The figures of romance invaded the churches themselves, creeping into the carvings of the portals, along the choir-stalls, and into the historiated margins of the service books. Ecclesiastics collected and multiplied stories to adorn their sermons or illustrate their manuals of vices and virtues. In the lives of saints marvels accumulated until the word 'legend' became a synonym for an untrue tale. Though there are moments in the fourteenth century when the preponderance of the clerical over the secular element in literature seems as great as ever, by the end of the Middle Ages the trend of the conflict is plain. It is the Church that draws back to attend to her own defences, which the domestic growth of pious fictions has made everywhere vulnerable. But imaginative literature, growing always stronger and more confident, wins full secular liberty.

Emancipation from the bondage of fact, and to some extent from ecclesiastical censorship, coincided with the acquisition of a new freedom in the form of English poetry. Old English had a single metre—the long alliterative line without rime. It was best suited to narrative; it was unmusical in the sense that it could not be sung; it had marked proclivities towards rant and noise; and like blank verse it degenerated easily into mongrel prose.

Degeneration was far advanced in the eleventh century; and about the end of the twelfth some large-scale experiments show that writers were no longer content with the old medium. In _Layamon_, the last great poem in this metre before the fourteenth century, internal rime and assonance are common. Orm adopted the unrimed _septenarius_ from Latin, but counted his syllables so faithfully as to produce an intolerable monotony. Then French influence turned the scale swiftly and decisively in favour of rime, so that in the extant poetry of the thirteenth century alliteration is a secondary principle or a casual ornament, but never takes the place of rime.

The sudden and complete eclipse of a measure so firmly rooted in tradition is surprising enough; but the wealth and elaborateness of the new forms that replaced it are still more matter for wonder. It is natural to think of the poets before Chaucer as children learning their art slowly and painfully, and often stumbling on the way. Yet in this one point of metrical technique they seem to reach mastery at a bound.

That the development of verse forms took place outside of English is part of the explanation. Rimed verse had its origin in Church Latin. In the monastic schools the theory of classical and post-classical metres was a principal study; and the practical art of chant was indispensable for the proper conduct of the services. Under these favourable conditions technical development was rapid, so that in such an early example of the rimed stanza as the following, taken from a poem that Godescalc wrote in exile about the year 845,—

_Magis mihi, miserule, Flere libet, puerule, Plus plorare quam cantare Carmen tale iubes quale, Amor care. O, cur iubes canere?[2]—_

the arrangement of longer and shorter lines, the management of rime or assonance, and the studied grouping of consonant sounds, give rather the impression of too much than too little artifice.

[Foot-note 2: _Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini_, vol. iii (ed. L. Traube), p. 731.]

From Church Latin rime passed into French, and with the twelfth century entered on a new course of development at the hands of the _trouvères_ and the minstrels. The _trouvères_, or 'makers', studied versification and music as a profession, and competed in the weaving of ingenious patterns. Since their living depended on pleasing their audience, those minstrels who were not themselves composers spared no pains to sing or recite well the compositions of others; and good execution encouraged poets to try more difficult forms.

The varied results obtained in two such excellent schools of experience were offered to the English poets of the thirteenth century in exchange for the monotony of the long line; and their choice was unhesitating. In an age of lyrical poetry they learned to sing where before they could only declaim: and because the great age of craftsmanship had begun, the most intricate patterns pleased them best. Chaucer was perhaps not yet born when the over-elaboration of riming metres in English drew a protest from Robert Mannyng:[3] and when, after a period of hesitancy, rimed verse regained its prestige in Chaucer's prime, nameless writers again chose or invented complex stanza forms and sustained them throughout long poems. If _The Pearl_ stood alone it might be accounted a literary _tour de force_: the York and Towneley plays compel the conclusion that a high standard of metrical workmanship was appreciated by the common people.

[Foot-note 3:

If it were made in _ryme couwee_, Or in strangere, or _enterlacé_, Þat rede Inglis it ere inowe Þat couthe not haf coppled a kowe, Þat outhere in _couwee_ or in _baston_ Som suld haf ben fordon.

(_Chronicle_, Prologue, ll. 85 ff.)]

Thus far, by way of generalization and without the _caveats_ proper to a literary history, I have indicated some aspects of the preceding period that are important for an understanding of the fourteenth century. But it would be misleading to pass on without a word of reservation. There is reason to suppose that the extant texts from the thirteenth century give a truer reflection of the tastes of the upper classes, who were in closest contact with the French, than of the tastes of the people. But however this may be, they do not authorize us to speak for every part of the country. All the significant texts come from the East or the South—especially the western districts of the South, where an exceptional activity is perhaps to be connected with the old preference of the court for Winchester. In the North and the North-West a silence of five centuries is hardly broken.

II

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_.