Up spake Byrhtwold, branished his ash- Here lies in his blood our leader and com

MIDDLE ENGLISH WRITERS

THE Norman conquest submerged rather than destroyed the West Saxon literary tradition. The ablest Englishmen of the next two centuries, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map, Giraldus Cambrensis, William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, wrote, not in English, but in Latin; and the Lais and Fables of Marie de France, the Tristan of Thomas, though presumably written in England, were written in French. The old alliterative technique, however, survives in some part in Layamon's Brut (1205) and once more emerges in the second half of the fourteenth century.

Continental Europe of the thirteenth century was a very different Europe from that which King Alfred had turned to for the means of enlightening his people. English as a vernacular, instead of being abreast of the times and ahead of any other vernacular, was now far behind. Trade had been extended; at the newly-founded universities, law, medicine, dialectic, theology could be studied in a wealth of new texts; the Friar movement was strong in both piety and learning; a brilliant neo-Latin literature had come into existence. In all this English scholars shared, but not immediately to the profit of vernacular English. By 1300 Northern France, Provence, Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland were in possession of their medieval literatures in their fullest glory, and Dante was about to begin his Divine Comedy.

English had no such body of achievement to show. Indeed, in comparison with foreign splendors, Middle English is always in danger of appearing derivative and shambling, an adaptation for a humble audience by writers distinctly of the second class. The thirteenth century, however, was by no means barren, as the twelfth had largely been, either in quantity or quality. The priest Layamon, at the beginning of the century, is a personality. His Brut, an account of the legendary kings of Britain, is an English poem. The Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1225), like the Brut, in the Southern dialect, handles the popular form of the debate with freedom and effectiveness. The first of the English romances, King Horn (c. 1250), owes more of its quality to the native heroic tradition than to courtly French romance. Havelok the Dane, also less French than the later romances, and The Debate of the Body and Soul, the best treatment of this common medieval theme in any language, belong around the year 1300. By 1350, in the North, Robert Minot had sung his fleering songs against the Scots, and the mystic Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole, had written religious prose and verse which was still read in the sixteenth century.

Chaucer, in the second half of the century, stands by no means alone. It is the period of Wicliffe, scholar as well as reforming preacher, the begetter of the first English version of the Scriptures. The successive rewritings of the great alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, painting no less the social evils of the day than the cure of them by means of right conduct and right belief, continue to appear throughout pretty much the whole of Chaucer's literary lifetime. In the North, Chaucer's contemporary, John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, makes romance out of Scottish history in his Bruce. In the Northwest, there is a vigorous alliterative revival, of which at once the strongest and the finest products are Gawain and the Green Knight, best of English romances, and The Pearl, most delicately imagined of English allegorical visions. Chaucer's personal friend Gower turns, after having written in Latin and in French, at last to English in his collection of tales, the Confessio Amantis.

All this suggests some of the considerations which must limit our view of Chaucer as the father of English poetry. There is a sense, however, in which he may properly be so characterized. Alone among contemporary English writers he was sensitively aware of the latest thing in French poetry and of the work of the great Italians, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. By introducing this literature to his countrymen he marked the way which English literature later, and all too slowly, was to follow. Beginning as an imitator of contemporary French love-poets, in the Book of the Duchess, he came more and more under the sway of the great Italians in the House of Fame, the Parliament of Birds, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Legend of Good Women. Although at no time forgetting his earliest French masters, he finally, in the Tales of Canterbury, developed a body of poetry genuinely English and his own. As a metrical innovator, notably in what was later called the heroic couplet, he again points the way. And as a revealer of his own engaging personality in the midst of a human comedy that is perennially fresh, he retains more of his original brightness than those contemporaries who for nearly two centuries were generally counted to be his peers.

In still another respect Chaucer stands fortunately in the line along which English was to develop. As a resident of the city of London, Chaucer wrote naturally in the dialect which, in part owing to the prestige of his work and Gower's, and in part owing to many other geographical and cultural reasons, was the dialect out of which Modern English was presently to develop. During Chaucer's lifetime, every man writes in his native local dialect. After his death, there After his death, there is no man who, whatever traces of local dialect may still cling to him, does not move a long way toward Chaucer's language. Lydgate and Hoccleve write Chaucerian English; King James I mingles it, not always perfectly understood, with his own Scottish. To be sure, the ability to handle metrically Chaucer's final e- the relic of the Old English inflectional system disappears with his immediate successors. With the disappearance of the final e Modern English is born. The diphthongization of some of the long vowels and the lifting of others, which mark the difference between an "English" and a "Continental" pronunciation, likewise begin to appear clearly in the fifteenth century.

The fifteenth century is usually accounted a barren period. It was too content to imitate Chaucer's achievement rather than his method. If it went to foreign literature, chiefly French, it went in the spirit of translator or adapter, not as Chaucer had done, as a creative artist in search of materials and methods. It carried on the work of the preceding centuries in adapting the romances, its most memorable success here being the prose of Malory's Morte Darthur, shedding a kind of sunset radiance upon the departing Middle Ages. Lydgate throughout the first half of the century laboriously reworked medieval themes. The Scottish Chaucerians, Henryson and Dunbar, did the same, but with more freshness and less prolixity. Such things, however, were much to the taste of the times, and later, too, as is shown by the titles which Caxton chose to feed his newly established printing press in a corner of Westminster Abbey. We may think of it as a time when people in towns flocked to miracle plays and everywhere lent a delighted ear to ballads of Robin Hood and other popular heroes or to a more sophisticated production like The Nutbrown Maid. Through this century, as through the centuries preceding, runs a rill of clear song, religious or amorous or both, which will be heard again at the courts of Henry VIII and his illustrious daughter. With Caxton, prose stirs into self-consciousness, gathering itself for the century of controversy and experiment, which will presently produce Tyndale's Bible and ultimately the prose of Bacon and Hooker, Raleigh and Sir Thomas Browne. In verse, with a shifting language and a love for ornament ill-applied to prosaic material, we must wait, in spite of hopeful beginnings by Surrey or by Sackville, for Spenser to recover Chaucerian sureness and Chaucerian variety and something besides.