Middle English Literature. Medieval England

The Early Middle English period


Poetry

The Norman Conquest worked no immediate transformation on either the language or literature of the English. Older poetry continued to be copied during the last half of the 11th century; two poems of the early 12th century—“Durham,” which praises that city's cathedral and its relics, and “Instructions for Christians,” a didactic piece—show thatcorrect alliterative verse could be composed well after 1066. But even before the Conquest rhyme had begun to supplant rather than supplement alliteration in some poems, which continued to use the older four-stress line but the rhythms of which varied from the set types used in classical Old English verse. A post-Conquest example is “The Grave,” which contains several rhyming lines; a poem from theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle on the death of William the Conqueror, lamenting his cruelty and greed, has more rhyme than alliteration.

Influence of French poetry

By the end of the 12th century English poetry had been so heavily influenced by French models that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by Lawamon, a Worcestershire priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with rhymingcouplets while generally eschewing French vocabulary. The Brut mainly draws upon Wace's Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut (1155; based in turn upon Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, or History of the Kings of Britain), but in Lawamon's hands the Arthurian story takes on a Germanic and heroic flavour largely missing in Wace. The Brut exists in two manuscripts, one written shortly after 1200 andthe other some 50 years later. That the later version has been extensively modernized and somewhat abridged suggests the speed with which English language and literary tastes were changing in this period. The Proverbs of Alfred also were written in the late 12th century; these deliver conventional wisdom in a mixture of rhymed couplets and alliterative lines, and it is hardly likely that any ofthe material they contain actually originated with the king whose wisdom they celebrate. The early 13th-century Bestiary mixes alliterative lines, three- and four-stress couplets, and septenary lines, but the logic behind this mix is more obvious than in the Brut and the Proverbs, for the poet was imitating the varied metres of his Latin source. More regular in form than these poems is the anonymousPoema morale in septenary couplets, in which an old man delivers a dose of moral advice to his presumably younger audience.
By far the most brilliant poem of this period is The Owl and the Nightingale (written after 1189), an example of the popular debate genre. The two birds argue topics ranging from their hygienic habits, looks, and songs to marriage, prognostication, and the proper modes ofworship. The nightingale stands for the joyous aspects of life, the owl for the sombre; there is no clear winner, but the debate ends as the birds go off to state their cases to one Nicholas of Guildford, a wise man. The poem is learned in the clerical tradition but wears its learning lightly as the disputants speak in colloquial and sometimes earthy language. Like the Poema morale, The Owl and theNightingale is metrically regular (octosyllabic couplets), but it uses the French metre with an assurance that is astonishing in so early a poem.
 

Didactic poetry

The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems presenting biblical narrative, saints' lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French. The most idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum byOrm, an Augustinian canon in the north of England. Written in some 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets, the work is interesting mainly in that the manuscript that preserves it is Orm's autograph and shows his somewhat fussy (and ineffectual) efforts to reform and regularize English spelling. Other biblical paraphrases are Genesis and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph, and the...