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English literature
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The later Middle English and early
Renaissance periods
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Sir Thomas Malory
"King
Arthur and of his Noble Knights"
"Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight"
Knowles
James
"The Legends of King Arthur"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV
Illustrations
by Lancelot Speed
William Langland
Geoffrey Chaucer
"The Canterbury Tales"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV
John Gower
Thomas Hoccleve
John Lydgate
Robert Henryson
William Dunbar
Osbern Bokenam
Howard Pyle
"The Merry
Adventures of Robin Hood"
PART
I,
PART II
Margery Kempe
John Wycliffe
William Tyndale
Ranulf Higden
Sir John Mandeville
John Capgrave
Sir John Fortescue
John Skelton
"Everyman"
Alexander Barclay
Stephen Hawes
Sir Thomas Elyot
Roger Ascham
Henry Medwall
Thomas More
"Utopia"
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Henry
Howard, earl of
Surrey
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One of the most important factors in the nature and
development of English literature between about 1350 and
1550 was the peculiar linguistic situation in England at the
beginning of the period. Among the small minority of the
population that could be regarded as literate, bilingualism
and even trilingualism were common. Insofar as it was
considered a serious literary medium at all, English was
obliged to compete on uneven terms with Latin and with the
Anglo-Norman dialect of French widely used in England at the
time. Moreover, extreme dialectal diversity within English
itself made it difficult for vernacular writings,
irrespective of their literary pretensions, to circulate
very far outside their immediate areas of composition, a
disadvantage not suffered by writings in Anglo-Norman and
Latin. Literary culture managed to survive and in fact to
flourish in the face of such potentially crushing factors as
the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death (1347–51),
chronic external and internal military conflicts in the form
of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, and
serious social, political, and religious unrest, as evinced
in the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) and the rise of Lollardism
(centred on the religious teachings of John Wycliffe). All
the more remarkable, then, was the literary and linguistic
revolution that took place in England between about 1350 and
1400 and that was slowly and soberly consolidated over the
subsequent 150 years.
Later Middle English poetry
The revival of alliterative
poetry
The most puzzling episode in the development of later
Middle English literature is the apparently sudden
reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th
century. Debate continues as to whether the group of long,
serious, and sometimes learned poems written between about
1350 and the first decade of the 15th century should be
regarded as an “alliterative revival” or rather as the late
flowering of a largely lost native tradition stretching back
to the Old English period. The earliest examples of the
phenomenon, William of Palerne and Winner and Waster, are
both datable to the 1350s, but neither poem exhibits to the
full all the characteristics of the slightly later poems
central to the movement. William of Palerne, condescendingly
commissioned by a nobleman for the benefit of “them that
know no French,” is a homely paraphrase of a courtly
Continental romance, the only poem in the group to take love
as its central theme. The poet’s technical competence in
handling the difficult syntax and diction of the
alliterative style is not, however, to be compared with that
of Winner and Waster’s author, who exhibits full mastery of
the form, particularly in descriptions of setting and
spectacle. This poem’s topical concern with social satire
links it primarily with another, less formal body of
alliterative verse, of which William Langland’s Piers
Plowman was the principal representative and exemplar.
Indeed, Winner and Waster, with its sense of social
commitment and occasional apocalyptic gesture, may well have
served as a source of inspiration for Langland himself.
The term alliterative revival should not be taken to
imply a return to the principles of classical Old English
versification. The authors of the later 14th-century
alliterative poems either inherited or developed their own
conventions, which resemble those of the Old English
tradition in only the most general way. The syntax and
particularly the diction of later Middle English
alliterative verse were also distinctive, and the search for
alliterating phrases and constructions led to the extensive
use of archaic, technical, and dialectal words. Hunts,
feasts, battles, storms, and landscapes were described with
a brilliant concretion of detail rarely paralleled since,
while the abler poets also contrived subtle modulations of
the staple verse-paragraph to accommodate dialogue,
discourse, and argument. Among the poems central to the
movement were three pieces dealing with the life and legends
of Alexander the Great, the massive Destruction of Troy, and
the Siege of Jerusalem. The fact that all of these derived
from various Latin sources suggests that the anonymous poets
were likely to have been clerics with a strong, if bookish,
historical sense of their romance “matters.” The “matter of
Britain” was represented by an outstanding composition, the
alliterative Morte Arthure, an epic portrayal of King
Arthur’s conquests in Europe and his eventual fall, which
combined a strong narrative thrust with considerable density
and subtlety of diction. A gathering sense of inevitable
transitoriness gradually tempers the virile realization of
heroic idealism, and it is not surprising to find that the
poem was later used by
Sir Thomas Malory as a source for his
prose account of the
Arthurian legend,
Le Morte Darthur
(completed c. 1470).
Sir Thomas Malory
"King
Arthur and of his Noble Knights"
flourished c. 1470
English writer whose identity remains
uncertain but whose name is famous as that of
the author of Le Morte Darthur, the first prose
account in English of the rise and fall of the
legendary king Arthur and the fellowship of the
Round Table.
Even in the 16th century Malory’s identity
was unknown, although there was a tradition that
he was a Welshman. In the colophon to Le Morte
Darthur the author, calling himself “Syr Thomas
Maleore knyght,” says that he finished the work
in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV
(i.e., March 4, 1469–March 3, 1470) and adds a
prayer for “good delyueraunce” from prison. The
only known knight at this time with a name like
Maleore was Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in
the parish of Monks Kirby, Warwickshire. This
Malory was jailed on various occasions during
the period 1450–60, but it is not recorded that
he was in prison about 1470, when the colophon
was written.
A “Thomas Malorie (or Malarie), knight” was
excluded from four general pardons granted by
Edward IV to the Lancastrians in 1468 and 1470.
This Malorie, who may have been Malory of
Newbold Revell, was probably the author of Le
Morte Darthur.
According to Sir William Dugdale’s
Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), Malory of
Newbold Revell served in the train of Richard
Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, at the siege of
Calais (presumably 1436, but possibly 1414); was
knight of the shire in 1445; and died on March
14, 1471. He was buried in the Chapel of St.
Francis at Grey Friars, near Newgate. (He had
been imprisoned in Newgate in 1460.)
Malory completed Le Morte Darthur about 1470;
it was printed by William Caxton in 1485. The
only extant manuscript that predates Caxton’s
edition is in the British Library, London. It
retells the adventures of the knights of the
Round Table in chronological sequence from the
birth of Arthur. Based on French romances,
Malory’s account differs from his models in its
emphasis on the brotherhood of the knights
rather than on courtly love and on the conflicts
of loyalty (brought about by the adultery of
Lancelot and Guinevere) that finally destroy the
fellowship.
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Arthurian legend
Malory
Thomas
"King
Arthur and of his Noble Knights"
the body of stories and medieval romances,
known as the matter of Britain, centring on the
legendary king Arthur. Medieval writers,
especially the French, variously treated stories
of Arthur’s birth, the adventures of his
knights, and the adulterous love between his
knight Sir Lancelot and his queen, Guinevere.
This last situation and the quest for the Holy
Grail (the vessel used by Christ at the Last
Supper and given to Joseph of Arimathea) brought
about the dissolution of the knightly
fellowship, the death of Arthur, and the
destruction of his kingdom.
Stories about Arthur and his court had been
popular in Wales before the 11th century;
European fame came through Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38),
celebrating a glorious and triumphant king who
defeated a Roman army in eastern France but was
mortally wounded in battle during a rebellion at
home led by his nephew Mordred. Some features of
Geoffrey’s story were marvelous fabrications,
and certain features of the Celtic stories were
adapted to suit feudal times. The concept of
Arthur as a world conqueror was clearly inspired
by legends surrounding great leaders such as
Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Later
writers, notably Wace of Jersey and Lawamon,
filled out certain details, especially in
connection with Arthur’s knightly fellowship
(the Knights of the Round Table).
Using Celtic sources, Chrétien de Troyes in
the late 12th century made Arthur the ruler of a
realm of marvels in five romances of adventure.
He also introduced the themes of the Grail and
the love of Lancelot and Guinevere into
Arthurian legend. Prose romances of the 13th
century explored these major themes further. An
early prose romance centring on Lancelot seems
to have become the kernel of a cyclic work known
as the Prose Lancelot, or Vulgate cycle (c.
1225).
The Lancelot theme was connected with the
Grail story through Lancelot’s son, the pure
knight Sir Galahad, who achieved the vision of
God through the Grail as fully as is possible in
this life, whereas Sir Lancelot was impeded in
his progress along the mystic way because of his
adultery with Guinevere. Another branch of the
Vulgate cycle was based on a very early
13th-century verse romance, the Merlin, by
Robert de Boron, that had told of Arthur’s birth
and childhood and his winning of the crown by
drawing a magic sword (see Excalibur) from a
stone. The writer of the Vulgate cycle turned
this into prose, adding a pseudo-historical
narrative dealing with Arthur’s military
exploits. A final branch of the Vulgate cycle
contained an account of Arthur’s Roman campaign
and war with Mordred, to which was added a story
of Lancelot’s renewed adultery with Guinevere
and the disastrous war between Lancelot and Sir
Gawain that ensued. A later prose romance, known
as the post-Vulgate Grail romance (c. 1240),
combined Arthurian legend with material from the
Tristan romance.
The legend told in the Vulgate cycle and
post-Vulgate romance was transmitted to
English-speaking readers in Thomas Malory’s late
15th-century prose Le Morte Darthur. At the same
time, there was renewed interest in Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia, and the fictitious kings of
Britain became more or less incorporated with
official national mythology. The legend remained
alive during the 17th century, though interest
in it was by then confined to England. Of merely
antiquarian interest during the 18th century, it
again figured in literature during Victorian
times, notably in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of
the King. In the 20th century an American poet,
Edwin Arlington Robinson, wrote an Arthurian
trilogy, and the American novelist Thomas Berger
wrote Arthur Rex (1978). In England T.H. White
retold the stories in a series of novels
collected as The Once and Future King (1958).
His work was the basis for Camelot (1960), a
musical by Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe; a
film, also called Camelot (1967), was derived
from the musical. Numerous other films have been
based on the Arthurian legend, notably John
Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and the satirical
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
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Tapestry by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)
The Attainment of the Holy Grail by Sir Gallahad and Sir
Percival
The alliterative movement would today be regarded as a
curious but inconsiderable episode were it not for four
other poems now generally attributed to a single anonymous
author: the chivalric romance
Sir Gawayne and the Grene
Knight, two homiletic poems called Patience and Purity (or
Cleanness), and an elegiac dream vision known as Pearl, all
miraculously preserved in a single manuscript dated about
1400. The poet of Sir Gawayne far exceeded the other
alliterative writers in his mastery of form and style, and,
though he wrote ultimately as a moralist, human warmth and
sympathy (often taking comic form) are also close to the
heart of his work. Patience relates the biblical story of
Jonah as a human comedy of petulance and irascibility set
off against God’s benign forbearance. Purity imaginatively
re-creates several monitory narratives of human impurity and
its consequences in a spectacular display of poetic skill:
the Flood, the destruction of Sodom, and Belshazzar’s Feast.
The poet’s principal achievement, however, was Sir Gawayne,
in which he used the conventional apparatus of chivalric
romance to engage in a serious exploration of moral conduct
in the face of the unknown. The hero, Gawain, a questing
knight of Arthur’s court, embodies a combination of the
noblest chivalric and spiritual aspirations of the age, but,
instead of triumphing in the conventional way, he fails when
tested (albeit rather unfairly) by mysterious supernatural
powers. No paraphrase can hope to recapture the imaginative
resources displayed in the telling of the story and the
structuring of the poem as a work of art. Pearl stands
somewhat aside from the alliterative movement proper. In
common with a number of other poems of the period, it was
composed in stanzaic form, with alliteration used for
ornamental effect. Technically, it is one of the most
complex poems in the language, an attempt to work in words
an analogy to the jeweler’s art. The jeweler-poet is
vouchsafed a heavenly vision in which he sees his pearl, the
discreet symbol used in the poem for a lost infant daughter
who has died to become a bride of Christ. She offers
theological consolation for his grief, expounding the way of
salvation and the place of human life in a transcendental
and extra-temporal view of things.
"Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight"
Middle English alliterative poem of unknown
authorship, dating from the second half of the
14th century (perhaps 1375). It is a chivalric
romance that tells a tale of enchantment in an
Arthurian setting. Its hero, Sir Gawayne
(Gawain), is presented as a devout but humanly
imperfect Christian who wins a test of arms,
resists temptation by a lord’s wife, but
succumbs to an offer of invulnerability.
The poem is technically brilliant. Its
alliterative lines (some 2,500) are broken up
into irregular stanzas by short rhyming
passages; they are tautly constructed, and the
vocabulary is astonishingly rich—influenced by
French in the scenes at court but strengthened
by many dialect words, often of Scandinavian
origin, that belonged to northwest England. The
blend of sophisticated atmosphere, psychological
depth, and vivid language produces an effect
superior to that found in any other work of the
time.
Preserved in the same manuscript with Sir
Gawayne were three other poems, now generally
accepted as the work of its author. These are
two alliterative poems of moral teaching,
Patience and Purity, and an intricate elegiac
poem, Pearl. The author of Sir Gawayne and the
other poems is frequently referred to as “the
Pearl Poet.”
Gawain
hero of Arthurian legend and romance.
A nephew and loyal supporter of King Arthur,
Gawain appeared in the earliest Arthurian
literature as a model of knightly perfection,
against whom all other knights were measured. In
the 12th-century Historia regum Britanniae, by
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gawain (or Walgainus) was
Arthur’s ambassador to Rome; his name (spelled “Galvaginus”)
is carved against one of the figures on the
12th-century archivolt of Modena cathedral in
Italy. In the verse romances of Chrétien de
Troyes in the 12th century, he was never a hero
but always a leading character who displayed
outstanding prowess, which was, however,
surpassed by that of Lancelot (who was inspired
by the power of courtly love) and by that of the
Grail-winner Perceval (who received spiritual
inspiration).
As the Grail theme began to emerge as an
important element of Arthurian romance, in the
great prose romances of the 13th century known
as the Vulgate cycle, Gawain was no longer seen
as the ideal knight. In the Queste del Saint
Graal, especially, he was unable to perceive the
spiritual significance of the Grail, refused to
seek divine aid through the sacraments, relied
on his own prowess, and failed utterly in the
quest. This deterioration of character was even
more marked in later romances, such as the prose
Tristan, in which a number of episodes depict
him as treacherous and brutal to women. These
darker aspects of his character were transmitted
to English-speaking readers in Sir Thomas
Malory’s late 15th-century prose work Le Morte
Darthur.
In Middle English poetry, however, Gawain was
generally regarded as a brave and loyal knight.
Perhaps his most important single adventure was
that described in a fine, anonymous 14th-century
poem, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, which
tells the much older story of a beheading
challenge.
In early Welsh literature, including the
Mabinogion and a Welsh translation of Geoffrey’s
Historia, Gawain appears as Gwalchmei. In
several of the romances and in Malory, Gawain’s
strength waxed and waned with the sun, raising
the possibility of a connection with a Celtic
solar deity.
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Knowles
James
"The Legends of King Arthur"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV
Illustrations
by Lancelot Speed
Sir James Knowles (1831 – 13 February 1908) was an
English architect and editor.
Life
He was born in London, the son of architect James Thomas Knowles and
himself trained in architecture at University College and in Italy. He
designed amongst other buildings, three churches in Clapham, Lord
Tennyson's house at Aldworth, the Thatched House Club, the Leicester
Square garden (as restored at the expense of Baron Albert Grant), and
Albert Mansions, Victoria Street, Westminster. However, his preferences
led him simultaneously into a literary career.
In 1860 he published The Story of King Arthur. In 1866 he
was introduced to Alfred Lord Tennyson, and later agreed to design his
new house, Aldworth on condition there was no fee; this led to a close
friendship, Knowles assisting Tennyson in business matters, and among
other things helping to design scenery for The Cup, when Henry Irving
produced that play in 1880.
Knowles became intimate with a
number of the most interesting men of the day, and in 1869, with
Tennyson's cooperation, he founded the Metaphysical Society, the object
of which was to attempt some intellectual rapprochement between religion
and science by getting the leading representatives of faith and unfaith
to meet and exchange views. Members included Tennyson, Gladstone,
W.K.Clifford, W. G. Ward, John Morley, Cardinal Manning, Archbishop
Thomson, T. H. Huxley, Arthur Balfour, Leslie Stephen, and Sir William
Gull. The society formed the nucleus of the distinguished list of
contributors who supported Knowles in his capacity as an editor.
In 1870 he succeeded Dean Alford
as editor of the Contemporary Review, but left it in 1877 owing to the
objection of the proprietors to the insertion of articles (by
W.K.Clifford notably) attacking Theism and founded the Nineteenth
Century (to the title of which, in 1901, were added the words And
After). Both periodicals became very influential under him, and formed
the type of the new sort of monthly review which came to occupy the
place formerly held by the quarterlies. Inter alia it was prominent in
checking the Channel Tunnel project, by publishing a protest signed by
many distinguished men in 1882. In 1904 he received the honour of
knighthood. He was a considerable collector of works of art. He was
married twice, (1) in 1860 to Jane Borradaile, (2) in 1865 to Isabel
Hewlett. He died at Brighton and was buried with his father at West
Norwood Cemetery.
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The alliterative movement was primarily confined to poets
writing in northern and northwestern England, who showed
little regard for courtly, London-based literary
developments. It is likely that alliterative poetry, under
aristocratic patronage, filled a gap in the literary life of
the provinces caused by the decline of Anglo-Norman in the
latter half of the 14th century. Alliterative poetry was not
unknown in London and the southeast, but it penetrated those
areas in a modified form and in poems that dealt with
different subject matter.
William Langland’s long alliterative poem Piers Plowman
begins with a vision of the world seen from the Malvern
Hills in Worcestershire, where, tradition has it, the poet
was born and brought up and where he would have been open to
the influence of the alliterative movement. If what he tells
about himself in the poem is true (and there is no other
source of information), he later lived obscurely in London
as an unbeneficed cleric. Langland wrote in the unrhymed
alliterative mode, but he modified it in such a way as to
make it more accessible to a wider audience by treating the
metre more loosely and avoiding the arcane diction of the
provincial poets. His poem exists in at least three and
possibly four versions: A, Piers Plowman in its short early
form, dating from the 1360s; B, a major revision and
extension of A made in the late 1370s; C (1380s), a less
“literary” version of B, apparently intended to bring its
doctrinal issues into clearer focus; and Z, a conjectured
version that calls into question the dating for A, B, and C.
The poem takes the form of a series of dream visions dealing
with the social and spiritual predicament of late
14th-century England against a sombre apocalyptic backdrop.
Realistic and allegorical elements are mingled in a
phantasmagoric way, and both the poetic medium and the
structure are frequently subverted by the writer’s spiritual
and didactic impulses. Passages of involuted theological
reasoning mingle with scatological satire, and moments of
sublime religious feeling appear alongside forthright
political comment. This makes it a work of the utmost
difficulty, defiant of categorization, but at the same time
Langland never fails to convince the reader of the
passionate integrity of his writing. His bitter attacks on
political and ecclesiastical corruption (especially among
the friars) quickly struck chords with his contemporaries.
Among minor poems in the same vein are Mum and the
Sothsegger (c. 1399–1406) and a Lollard piece called Pierce
the Ploughman’s Creed (c. 1395). In the 16th century, Piers
Plowman was issued as a printed book and was used for
apologetic purposes by the early Protestants.
William Langland
born c.
1330
died c. 1400
presumed author of one of the greatest examples
of Middle English alliterative poetry, generally
known as Piers Plowman, an
allegorical work with a complex variety of
religious themes. One of the major achievements
of Piers Plowman is that it translates the
language and conceptions of the cloister into
symbols and images that could be understood by
the layman. In general, the language of the poem
is simple and colloquial, but some of the
author’s imagery is powerful and direct.
There were originally thought to be three
versions of Piers Plowman: the A version of the
text, which was the earliest, followed by the B
and C versions that consisted of revisions and
further amplifications of the major themes of A.
However, a fourth version, called Z, has been
suggested and the order of issue questioned. The
version described here is from the B text, which
consists of (1) a prologue and seven passus
(divisions) concerned primarily with the life of
man in society, the dangers of Meed (love of
gain), and manifestations of the seven capital
sins; and (2) 13 passus ostensibly dealing with
the lives of Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best; in
effect, with the growth of the individual
Christian in self-knowledge, grace, and charity.
In its
general structure the poem mirrors the
complexity of the themes with which it deals,
particularly in the recurring concepts of
Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best, all in the end seen
as embodied in Christ. They are usually
identified with the active, contemplative, and
“mixed” religious life, but the allegory of the
poem is often susceptible to more than one
interpretation, and some critics have related it
to the traditional exegetical way of
interpreting the Scriptures historically,
allegorically, anagogically, and topologically.
Little
is known of Langland’s life: he is thought to
have been born somewhere in the region of the
Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and if he is
to be identified with the “dreamer” of the poem,
he may have been educated at the Benedictine
school in Great Malvern. References in the poem
suggest that he knew London and Westminster as
well as Shropshire, and he may have been a
cleric in minor orders in London.
Langland
clearly had a deep knowledge of medieval
theology and was fully committed to all the
implications of Christian doctrine. He was
interested in the asceticism of St. Bernard of
Clairvaux, and his comments on the defects of
churchmen and the religious in his day are
nonetheless concomitant with his orthodoxy.
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Courtly poetry
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Courtly love
in the later Middle Ages, a highly
conventionalized code that prescribed the
behaviour of ladies and their lovers. Amour
courtois also provided the theme of an extensive
courtly medieval literature that began with the
troubadour poetry of Aquitaine and Provence in
southern France toward the end of the 11th
century. It constituted a revolution in thought
and feeling, the effects of which are still
apparent in Western culture.
The courtly lover existed to serve his lady.
His love was invariably adulterous, marriage at
that time being usually the result of business
interest or the seal of a power alliance.
Ultimately the lover saw himself as serving the
all-powerful god of love and worshipping his
lady-saint. Faithlessness was the mortal sin.
The philosophy found little precedent in
other, older cultures. Conditions in the castle
civilization of 11th-century southern France,
however, were favourable to a change of attitude
toward women. Castles themselves housed many
men, few women; poets, wishing to idealize
physical passion, looked beyond the marriage
state. The Roman poet Ovid undoubtedly provided
inspiration in the developing concept of courtly
love. His Ars amatoria had pictured a lover as
the slave of passion—sighing, trembling, growing
pale and sleepless, even dying for love. The
Ovidian lover’s adoration was calculated to win
sensual rewards; the courtly lover, however,
while displaying the same outward signs of
passion, was fired by respect for his lady. This
idealistic outlook may be explained partly by
contemporary religious devotions, both orthodox
and heretical, especially regarding the Virgin
Mary, and partly by France’s exposure to Arab
mystical philosophy (gained through contacts
with Islām during the Crusades), which embodied
concepts of love—as a delightful disease, as
demanding of faithful service—that were to
characterize courtly love.
Courtly love may therefore be regarded as the
complex product of numerous factors—social,
erotic, religious, and philosophical. The idea
spread swiftly across Europe, and a decisive
influence in this transmission was Eleanor of
Aquitaine, wife first to Louis VII of France and
then to Henry II of England, who inspired some
of the best poetry of Bernard de Ventadour,
among the last (12th century) and finest of
troubadour poets. Her daughter Marie of
Champagne encouraged the composition of Chrétien
de Troyes’s Lancelot (Le Chevalier de la
charrette), a courtly romance whose hero obeys
every imperious (and unreasonable) demand of the
heroine. Soon afterward the doctrine was
“codified” in a three-book treatise by André le
Chapelain. In the 13th century a long
allegorical poem, the Roman de la rose,
expressed the concept of a lover suspended
between happiness and despair.
Courtly love soon pervaded the literatures of
Europe. The German minnesinger lyrics and court
epics such as Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan
und Isolde (c. 1210) are evidence of its power.
Italian poetry embodied the courtly ideals as
early as the 12th century, and during the 14th
century their essence was distilled in Francesco
Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura. But perhaps more
significantly, Dante had earlier managed to fuse
courtly love and mystical vision: his Beatrice
was, in life, his earthly inspiration; in La
divina commedia she became his spiritual guide
to the mysteries of Paradise. Courtly love was
also a vital influential force on most medieval
literature in England, but there it came to be
adopted as part of the courtship ritual leading
to marriage. This development, discussed in C.S.
Lewis’ Allegory of Love (rev. ed., 1951), became
more pronounced in later romances.
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Apart from a few late and minor reappearances in
Scotland and the northwest of England, the alliterative
movement was over before the first quarter of the 15th
century had passed. The other major strand in the
development of English poetry from roughly 1350 proved much
more durable. The cultivation and refinement of human
sentiment with respect to love, already present in earlier
14th-century writings such as the Harley Lyrics, took firm
root in English court culture during the reign of Richard II
(1377–99). English began to displace Anglo-Norman as the
language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and
signs of royal and noble patronage for English vernacular
writers became evident. These processes undoubtedly created
some of the conditions in which a writer of Chaucer’s
interests and temperament might flourish, but they were
encouraged and given direction by his genius in establishing
English as a literary language.
Chaucer and Gower
Ezra
Winter, Canterbury tales mural (1939), Library of Congress
John Adams Building, Washington, D.C
Geoffrey Chaucer,
a Londoner of bourgeois origins, was at various times a
courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant. His poetry
frequently (but not always unironically) reflects the views
and values associated with the term courtly. It is in some
ways not easy to account for his decision to write in
English, and it is not surprising that his earliest
substantial poems, the Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) and the
House of Fame (1370s), were heavily indebted to the
fashionable French courtly love poetry of the time. Also of
French origin was the octosyllabic couplet used in these
poems. Chaucer’s abandonment of this engaging but ultimately
jejune metre in favour of a 10-syllable line (specifically,
iambic pentameter) was a portentous moment for English
poetry. His mastery of it was first revealed in stanzaic
form, notably the seven-line stanza (rhyme royal) of the
Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382) and Troilus and Criseyde (c.
1385), and later was extended in the decasyllabic couplets
of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women (1380s) and
large parts of
The
Canterbury Tales
(c. 1387–1400).
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
"The Canterbury Tales"
(PART
I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV)
born c. 1342/43, London?, Eng.
died Oct. 25, 1400, London
the outstanding English poet before
Shakespeare and “the first finder of our
language.” His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one
of the greatest poetic works in English. He also
contributed importantly in the second half of
the 14th century to the management of public
affairs as courtier, diplomat, and civil
servant. In that career he was trusted and aided
by three successive kings—Edward III, Richard
II, and Henry IV. But it is his avocation—the
writing of poetry—for which he is remembered.
Perhaps the chief characteristics of
Chaucer’s works are their variety in subject
matter, genre, tone, and style and in the
complexities presented concerning the human
pursuit of a sensible existence. Yet his
writings also consistently reflect an
all-pervasive humour combined with serious and
tolerant consideration of important
philosophical questions. From his writings
Chaucer emerges as poet of love, both earthly
and divine, whose presentations range from
lustful cuckoldry to spiritual union with God.
Thereby, they regularly lead the reader to
speculation about man’s relation both to his
fellows and to his Maker, while simultaneously
providing delightfully entertaining views of the
frailties and follies, as well as the nobility,
of mankind.
Forebears and early years
Chaucer’s forebears for at least four
generations were middle-class English people
whose connection with London and the court had
steadily increased. John Chaucer, his father,
was an important London vintner and a deputy to
the king’s butler; in 1338 he was a member of
Edward III’s expedition to Antwerp, in Flanders,
now part of Belgium, and he owned property in
Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, and in
London. He died in 1366 or 1367 at age 53. The
name Chaucer is derived from the French word
chaussier, meaning a maker of footwear. The
family’s financial success derived from wine and
leather.
Although c. 1340 is customarily given as
Chaucer’s birth date, 1342 or 1343 is probably a
closer guess. No information exists concerning
his early education, although doubtless he would
have been as fluent in French as in the Middle
English of his time. He also became competent in
Latin and Italian. His writings show his close
familiarity with many important books of his
time and of earlier times.
Chaucer first appears in the records in 1357,
as a member of the household of Elizabeth,
countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, third son of
Edward III. Geoffrey’s father presumably had
been able to place him among the group of young
men and women serving in that royal household, a
customary arrangement whereby families who could
do so provided their children with opportunity
for the necessary courtly education and
connections to advance their careers. By 1359
Chaucer was a member of Edward III’s army in
France and was captured during the unsuccessful
siege of Reims. The king contributed to his
ransom, and Chaucer served as messenger from
Calais to England during the peace negotiations
of 1360. Chaucer does not appear in any
contemporary record during 1361–65. He was
probably in the king’s service, but he may have
been studying law—not unusual preparation for
public service, then as now—since a 16th-century
report implies that, while so engaged, he was
fined for beating a Franciscan friar in a London
street. On February 22, 1366, the king of
Navarre issued a certificate of safe-conduct for
Chaucer, three companions, and their servants to
enter Spain. This occasion is the first of a
number of diplomatic missions to the continent
of Europe over the succeeding 10 years, and the
wording of the document suggests that here
Chaucer served as “chief of mission.”
By 1366 Chaucer had married. Probably his
wife was Philippa Pan, who had been in the
service of the countess of Ulster and entered
the service of Philippa of Hainaut, queen
consort of Edward III, when Elizabeth died in
1363. In 1366 Philippa Chaucer received an
annuity, and later annuities were frequently
paid to her through her husband. These and other
facts indicate that Chaucer married well.
In 1367 Chaucer received an annuity for life
as yeoman of the king, and in the next year he
was listed among the king’s esquires. Such
officers lived at court and performed staff
duties of considerable importance. In 1368
Chaucer was abroad on a diplomatic mission, and
in 1369 he was on military service in France.
Also in 1369 he and his wife were official
mourners for the death of Queen Philippa.
Obviously, Chaucer’s career was prospering, and
his first important poem—Book of the
Duchess—seems further evidence of his connection
with persons in high places.
That poem of more than 1,300 lines, probably
written in late 1369 or early 1370, is an elegy
for Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, John of
Gaunt’s first wife, who died of plague in
September 1369. Chaucer’s close relationship
with John, which continued through most of his
life, may have commenced as early as Christmas
1357 when they, both about the same age, were
present at the countess of Ulster’s residence in
Yorkshire. For this first of his important
poems, Chaucer used the dream-vision form, a
genre made popular by the highly influential
13th-century French poem of courtly love, the
Roman de la rose. Chaucer translated that poem,
at least in part, probably as one of his first
literary efforts, and he borrowed from it
throughout his poetic career. The Duchess is
also indebted to contemporary French poetry and
to Ovid, Chaucer’s favourite Roman poet. Nothing
in these borrowings, however, will account for
his originality in combining dream-vision with
elegy and eulogy of Blanche with consolation for
John. Also noteworthy here—as it increasingly
became in his later poetry—is the tactful and
subtle use of a first-person narrator, who both
is and is not the poet himself. The device had
obvious advantages for the minor courtier
delivering such a poem orally before the
high-ranking court group. In addition, the
Duchess foreshadows Chaucer’s skill at
presenting the rhythms of natural conversation
within the confines of Middle English verse and
at creating realistic characters within courtly
poetic conventions. Also, Chaucer here begins,
with the Black Knight’s account of his love for
Good Fair White, his career as a love poet,
examining in late medieval fashion the important
philosophic and religious questions concerning
the human condition as they relate to both
temporal and eternal aspects of love.
Diplomat and civil servant
During the decade of the 1370s, Chaucer was
at various times on diplomatic missions in
Flanders, France, and Italy. Probably his first
Italian journey (December 1372 to May 1373) was
for negotiations with the Genoese concerning an
English port for their commerce, and with the
Florentines concerning loans for Edward III. His
next Italian journey occupied May 28 to
September 19, 1378, when he was a member of a
mission to Milan concerning military matters.
Several times during the 1370s, Chaucer and his
wife received generous monetary grants from the
king and from John of Gaunt. On May 10, 1374, he
obtained rent-free a dwelling above Aldgate, in
London, and on June 8 of that year he was
appointed comptroller of the customs and subsidy
of wools, skins, and tanned hides for the Port
of London. Now, for the first time, Chaucer had
a position away from the court, and he and his
wife had a home of their own, about a 10-minute
walk from his office. In 1375 he was granted two
wardships, which paid well, and in 1376 he
received a sizable sum from a fine. When Richard
II became king in June 1377, he confirmed
Chaucer’s comptrollership and, later, the
annuities granted by Edward III to both Geoffrey
and Philippa. Certainly during the 1370s fortune
smiled upon the Chaucers.
So much responsibility and activity in public
matters appears to have left Chaucer little time
for writing during this decade. The great
literary event for him was that, during his
missions to Italy, he encountered the work of
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which was later
to have profound influence upon his own writing.
Chaucer’s most important work of the 1370s was
Hous of Fame, a poem of more than 2,000 lines,
also in dream-vision form. In some ways it is a
failure—it is unfinished, its theme is unclear,
and the diversity of its parts seems to
overshadow any unity of purpose—but it gives
considerable evidence of Chaucer’s advancing
skill as a poet. The eight-syllable metre is
handled with great flexibility; the light,
bantering, somewhat ironic tone—later to become
one of Chaucer’s chief effects—is established;
and a wide variety of subject matter is
included. Further, the later mastery in creation
of memorable characters is here foreshadowed by
the marvelous golden eagle who carries the
frightened narrator, “Geoffrey,” high above the
Earth to the houses of Fame and Rumour, so that
as a reward for his writing and studying he can
learn “tydings” to make into love poems. Here,
too, Chaucer’s standard picture of his own
fictional character emerges: the poet, somewhat
dull-witted, dedicated to writing about love but
without successful personal experience of it.
The comedy of the poem reaches its high point
when the pedantic eagle delivers for Geoffrey’s
edification a learned lecture on the properties
of sound. In addition to its comic aspects,
however, the poem seems to convey a serious
note: like all earthly things, fame is
transitory and capricious.
The middle years: political and personal
anxieties
In a deed of May 1, 1380, one Cecily
Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from legal action,
“both of my rape and of any other matter or
cause.” Rape (raptus) could at the time mean
either sexual assault or abduction; scholars
have not been able to establish which meaning
applies here, but, in either case, the release
suggests that Chaucer was not guilty as charged.
He continued to work at the Customs House and in
1382 was additionally appointed comptroller of
the petty customs for wine and other
merchandise, but in October 1386 his dwelling in
London was leased to another man, and in
December of that year successors were named for
both of his comptrollerships in the customs;
whether he resigned or was removed from office
is not clear. Between 1382 and 1386 he had
arranged for deputies—permanent in two instances
and temporary in others—in his work at the
customs. In October 1385 he was appointed a
justice of the peace for Kent, and in August
1386 he became knight of the shire for Kent, to
attend Parliament in October. Further, in 1385
he probably moved to Greenwich, then in Kent, to
live. These circumstances suggest that, for some
time before 1386, he was planning to move from
London and to leave the Customs House. Philippa
Chaucer apparently died in 1387; if she had
suffered poor health for some time previously,
that situation could have influenced a decision
to move. On the other hand, political
circumstances during this period were not
favourable for Chaucer and may have caused his
removal. By 1386 a baronial group led by Thomas
of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, had bested
both Richard II and John of Gaunt—with whose
parties Chaucer had long been associated—and
usurped the king’s authority and administration.
Numerous other officeholders—like Chaucer,
appointed by the king—were discharged, and
Chaucer may have suffered similarly. Perhaps the
best view of the matter is that Chaucer saw
which way the political wind was blowing and
began early to prepare to move when the
necessity arrived.
The period 1386–89 was clearly difficult for
Chaucer. Although he was reappointed justice of
the peace for 1387, he was not returned to
Parliament after 1386. In 1387 he was granted
protection for a year to go to Calais, in
France, but seems not to have gone, perhaps
because of his wife’s death. In 1388 a series of
suits against him for debts began, and he sold
his royal pension for a lump sum. Also, from
February 3 to June 4, 1388, the Merciless
Parliament, controlled by the barons, caused
many leading members of the court party—some of
them Chaucer’s close friends—to be executed. In
May 1389, however, the 23-year-old King Richard
II regained control, ousted his enemies, and
began appointing his supporters to office.
Almost certainly, Chaucer owed his next public
office to that political change. On July 12,
1389, he was appointed clerk of the king’s
works, with executive responsibility for repair
and maintenance of royal buildings, such as the
Tower of London and Westminster Palace, and with
a comfortable salary.
Although political events of the 1380s, from
the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 through the
Merciless Parliament of 1388, must have kept
Chaucer steadily anxious, he produced a sizable
body of writings during this decade, some of
very high order. Surprisingly, these works do
not in any way reflect the tense political
scene. Indeed, one is tempted to speculate that
during this period Chaucer turned to his reading
and writing as escape from the difficulties of
his public life. The Parlement of Foules, a poem
of 699 lines, is a dream-vision for St.
Valentine’s Day, making use of the myth that
each year on that day the birds gathered before
the goddess Nature to choose their mates.
Beneath its playfully humorous tone, it seems to
examine the value of various kinds of love
within the context of “common profit” as set
forth in the introductory abstract from the
Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio) of
Cicero. The narrator searches unsuccessfully for
an answer and concludes that he must continue
his search in other books. For this poem Chaucer
also borrowed extensively from Boccaccio and
Dante, but the lively bird debate from which the
poem takes its title is for the most part
original. The poem has often been taken as
connected with events at court, particularly the
marriage in 1382 of Richard II and Anne of
Bohemia. But no such connection has ever been
firmly established. The Parlement is clearly the
best of Chaucer’s earlier works.
The Consolation of Philosophy, written by the
Roman philosopher Boethius (early 6th century),
a Christian, was one of the most influential of
medieval books. Its discussion of free will,
God’s foreknowledge, destiny, fortune, and true
and false happiness—in effect, all aspects of
the manner in which the right-minded individual
should direct his thinking and action to gain
eternal salvation—had a deep and lasting effect
upon Chaucer’s thought and art. His prose
translation of the Consolation is carefully
done, and in his next poem—Troilus and
Criseyde—the influence of Boethius’s book is
pervasive. Chaucer took the basic plot for this
8,239-line poem from Boccaccio’s Filostrato.
Some critics consider Troilus and Criseyde
Chaucer’s finest work, greater even than the far
more widely read Canterbury Tales. But the two
works are so different that comparative
evaluation seems fruitless. The state of the
surviving manuscripts of Troilus shows Chaucer’s
detailed effort in revising this poem. Against
the background of the legendary Trojan War, the
love story of Troilus, son of the Trojan king
Priam, and Criseyde, widowed daughter of the
deserter priest Calkas, is recounted. The poem
moves in leisurely fashion, with introspection
and much of what would now be called
psychological insight dominating many sections.
Aided by Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus, Troilus and
Criseyde are united in love about halfway
through the poem; but then she is sent to join
her father in the Greek camp outside Troy.
Despite her promise to return, she gives her
love to the Greek Diomede, and Troilus, left in
despair, is killed in the war. These events are
interspersed with Boethian discussion of free
will and determinism. At the end of the poem,
when Troilus’s soul rises into the heavens, the
folly of complete immersion in sexual love is
viewed in relation to the eternal love of God.
The effect of the poem is controlled throughout
by the direct comments of the narrator, whose
sympathy for the lovers—especially for
Criseyde—is ever present.
Also in the 1380s Chaucer produced his fourth
and final dream-vision poem, The Legend of Good
Women, which is not a success. It presents a
Prologue, existing in two versions, and nine
stories. In the Prologue the god of love is
angry because Chaucer had earlier written about
so many women who betrayed men. As penance,
Chaucer must now write about good women. The
Prologue is noteworthy for the delightful humour
of the narrator’s self-mockery and for the
passages in praise of books and of the spring.
The stories—concerning such women of antiquity
as Cleopatra, Dido, and Lucrece—are brief and
rather mechanical, with the betrayal of women by
wicked men as a regular theme; as a result, the
whole becomes more a legend of bad men than of
good women. Perhaps the most important fact
about the Legend, however, is that it shows
Chaucer structuring a long poem as a collection
of stories within a framework. Seemingly the
static nature of the framing device for the
Legend and the repetitive aspect of the series
of stories with a single theme led him to give
up this attempt as a poor job. But the failure
here must have contributed to his brilliant
choice, probably about this same time, of a
pilgrimage as the framing device for the stories
in The Canterbury Tales.
Last years and The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s service as clerk of the king’s
works lasted only from July 1389 to June 1391.
During that tenure he was robbed several times
and once beaten, sufficient reason for seeking a
change of jobs. In June 1391 he was appointed
subforester of the king’s park in North
Petherton, Somerset, an office that he held
until his death. He retained his home in Kent
and continued in favour at court, receiving
royal grants and gifts during 1393–97. The
records show his close relationship during
1395–96 with John of Gaunt’s son, the earl of
Derby, later King Henry IV. When John died in
February 1399, King Richard confiscated John’s
Lancastrian inheritance; then in May he set
forth to crush the Irish revolt. In so doing, he
left his country ready to rebel. Henry, exiled
in 1398 but now duke of Lancaster, returned to
England to claim his rights. The people flocked
to him, and he was crowned on September 30,
1399. He confirmed Chaucer’s grants from Richard
II and in October added an additional generous
annuity. In December 1399 Chaucer took a lease
on a house in the garden of Westminster Abbey.
But in October of the following year he died. He
was buried in the Abbey, a signal honour for a
commoner.
Chaucer’s great literary accomplishment of
the 1390s was The Canterbury Tales. In it a
group of about 30 pilgrims gather at the Tabard
Inn in Southwark, across the Thames from London,
and agree to engage in a storytelling contest as
they travel on horseback to the shrine of Thomas
ŕ Becket in Canterbury, Kent, and back. Harry
Bailly, host of the Tabard, serves as master of
ceremonies for the contest. The pilgrims are
introduced by vivid brief sketches in the
General Prologue. Interspersed between the 24
tales told by the pilgrims are short dramatic
scenes presenting lively exchanges, called links
and usually involving the host and one or more
of the pilgrims. Chaucer did not complete the
full plan for his book: the return journey from
Canterbury is not included, and some of the
pilgrims do not tell stories. Further, the
surviving manuscripts leave room for doubt at
some points as to Chaucer’s intent for arranging
the material. The work is nevertheless
sufficiently complete to be considered a unified
book rather than a collection of unfinished
fragments. Use of a pilgrimage as a framing
device for the collection of stories enabled
Chaucer to bring together people from many walks
of life: knight, prioress, monk; merchant, man
of law, franklin, scholarly clerk; miller,
reeve, pardoner; wife of Bath and many others.
Also, the pilgrimage and the storytelling
contest allowed presentation of a highly varied
collection of literary genres: courtly romance,
racy fabliau, saint’s life, allegorical tale,
beast fable, medieval sermon, alchemical
account, and, at times, mixtures of these
genres. Because of this structure, the sketches,
the links, and the tales all fuse as complex
presentations of the pilgrims, while at the same
time the tales present remarkable examples of
short stories in verse, plus two expositions in
prose. In addition, the pilgrimage, combining a
fundamentally religious purpose with its secular
aspect of vacation in the spring, made possible
extended consideration of the relationship
between the pleasures and vices of this world
and the spiritual aspirations for the next, that
seeming dichotomy with which Chaucer, like
Boethius and many other medieval writers, was so
steadily concerned.
For this crowning glory of his 30 years of
literary composition, Chaucer used his wide and
deep study of medieval books of many sorts and
his acute observation of daily life at many
levels. He also employed his detailed knowledge
of medieval astrology and subsidiary sciences as
they were thought to influence and dictate human
behaviour. Over the whole expanse of this
intricate dramatic narrative, he presides as
Chaucer the poet, Chaucer the civil servant, and
Chaucer the pilgrim: somewhat slow-witted in his
pose and always intrigued by human frailty but
always questioning the complexity of the human
condition and always seeing both the humour and
the tragedy in that condition. At the end, in
the Retractation with which The Canterbury Tales
closes, Chaucer as poet and pilgrim states his
conclusion that the concern for this world fades
into insignificance before the prospect for the
next; in view of the admonitions in The Parson’s
Tale, he asks forgiveness for his writings that
concern “worldly vanities” and remembrance for
his translation of the Consolation and his other
works of morality and religious devotion. On
that note he ends his finest work and his career
as poet.
Descendants and posthumous reputation
Information concerning Chaucer’s children is
not fully clear. The probability is that he and
Philippa had two sons and two daughters. One
son, Thomas Chaucer, who died in 1434, owned
large tracts of land and held important offices
in the 1420s, including the forestership of
North Petherton. He later leased Chaucer’s house
in Westminster, and his twice-widowed daughter
Alice became duchess of Suffolk. In 1391 Chaucer
had written Treatise on the Astrolabe for
“little Lewis,” probably his younger son, then
10 years old. Elizabeth “Chaucy,” probably the
poet’s daughter, was a nun at Barking in 1381. A
second probable daughter, Agnes Chaucer, was a
lady-in-waiting at Henry IV’s coronation in
1399. The records lend some support to
speculation that John of Gaunt fathered one or
more of these children. Chaucer seems to have
had no descendants living after the 15th
century.
For Chaucer’s writings the subsequent record
is clearer. His contemporaries praised his
artistry, and a “school” of 15th-century
Chaucerians imitated his poetry. Over the
succeeding centuries, his poems, particularly
The Canterbury Tales, have been widely read,
translated into modern English, and, since about
the middle of the 19th century, the number of
scholars and critics who devote themselves to
the study and teaching of his life and works has
steadily increased.
R.M. Lumiansky
|
Though Chaucer wrote a number of moral and amatory
lyrics, which were imitated by his 15th-century followers,
his major achievements were in the field of narrative
poetry. The early influence of French courtly love poetry
(notably the Roman de la Rose, which he translated) gave way
to an interest in Italian literature. Chaucer was acquainted
with Dante’s writings and took a story from Petrarch for the
substance of The Clerk’s Tale. Two of his major poems,
Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale, were based,
respectively, on the Filostrato and the Teseida of
Boccaccio. The Troilus, Chaucer’s single most ambitious
poem, is a moving story of love gained and betrayed set
against the background of the Trojan War. As well as being a
poem of profound human sympathy and insight, it also has a
marked philosophical dimension derived from Chaucer’s
reading of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, a work
that he also translated in prose. His consummate skill in
narrative art, however, was most fully displayed in The
Canterbury Tales, an unfinished series of stories purporting
to be told by a group of pilgrims journeying from London to
the shrine of St. Thomas Becket and back. The illusion that
the individual pilgrims (rather than Chaucer himself) tell
their tales gave him an unprecedented freedom of authorial
stance, which enabled him to explore the rich fictive
potentialities of a number of genres: pious legend (in The
Man of Law’s Tale and The Prioress’s Tale), fabliau (The
Shipman’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, and The Reeve’s Tale),
chivalric romance (The Knight’s Tale), popular romance
(parodied in Chaucer’s “own” Tale of Sir Thopas), beast
fable (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and The Manciple’s Tale), and
more—what the poet
John Dryden later summed up as “God’s
plenty.”
A recurrent concern in Chaucer’s writings is the refined
and sophisticated cultivation of love, commonly described by
the modern expression courtly love. A French term of
Chaucer’s time, fine amour, gives a more authentic
description of the phenomenon; Chaucer’s friend John Gower
translated it as “fine loving” in his long poem Confessio
amantis (begun c. 1386). The Confessio runs to some 33,000
lines in octosyllabic couplets and takes the form of a
collection of exemplary tales placed within the framework of
a lover’s confession to a priest of Venus. Gower provides a
contrast to Chaucer in that the sober and earnest moral
intent behind Gower’s writing is always clear, whereas
Chaucer can be noncommittal and evasive. On the other hand,
though Gower’s verse is generally fluent and pleasing to
read, it has a thin homogeneity of texture that cannot
compare with the colour and range found in the language of
his great contemporary. Gower was undoubtedly extremely
learned by lay standards, and many Classical myths
(especially those deriving from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) make
the first of their numerous appearances in English
literature in the Confessio. Gower was also deeply concerned
with the moral and social condition of contemporary society,
and he dealt with it in two weighty compositions in French
and Latin, respectively: the Mirour de l’omme (c. 1374–78;
The Mirror of Mankind) and Vox clamantis (c. 1385; The Voice
of One Crying).
John Gower
born 1330?
died 1408, London?
medieval English poet in the tradition of
courtly love and moral allegory, whose
reputation once matched that of his contemporary
and friend Geoffrey Chaucer, and who strongly
influenced the writing of other poets of his
day. After the 16th century his popularity
waned, and interest in him did not revive until
the middle of the 20th century.
It is thought from Gower’s language that he
was of Kentish origin, though his family may
have come from Yorkshire, and he was clearly a
man of some wealth. Allusions in his poetry and
other documents, however, indicate that he knew
London well and was probably a court official.
At one point, he professed acquaintance with
Richard II, and in 1399 he was granted two pipes
(casks) of wine a year for life by Henry IV as a
reward for complimentary references in one of
his poems. In 1397, living as a layman in the
priory of St. Mary Overie, Southwark, London,
Gower married Agnes Groundolf, who survived him.
In 1400 Gower described himself as “senex et
cecus” (“old and blind”), and on Oct. 24, 1408,
his will was proved; he left bequests to the
Southwark priory, where he is buried.
Gower’s three major works are in French,
English, and Latin, and he also wrote a series
of French balades intended for the English
court. The Speculum meditantis, or Mirour de
l’omme, in French, is composed of 12-line
stanzas and opens impressively with a
description of the devil’s marriage to the seven
daughters of sin; continuing with the marriage
of reason and the seven virtues, it ends with a
searing examination of the sins of English
society just before the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381: the denunciatory tone is relieved at the
very end by a long hymn to the Virgin.
Gower’s major Latin poem, the Vox clamantis,
owes much to Ovid; it is essentially a homily,
being in part a criticism of the three estates
of society, in part a mirror for a prince, in
elegiac form. The poet’s political doctrines are
traditional, but he uses the Latin language with
fluency and elegance.
Gower’s English poems include In Praise of
Peace, in which he pleads urgently with the king
to avoid the horrors of war, but his greatest
English work is the Confessio amantis,
essentially a collection of exemplary tales of
love, whereby Venus’ priest, Genius, instructs
the poet, Amans, in the art of both courtly and
Christian love. The stories are chiefly adapted
from classical and medieval sources and are told
with a tenderness and the restrained narrative
art that constitute Gower’s main appeal today.
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Poetry after
Chaucer and Gower
Courtly poetry
The numerous 15th-century followers of
Chaucer continued
to treat the conventional range of courtly and moralizing
topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The
canon of Chaucer’s works began to accumulate delightful but
apocryphal trifles such as The Flower and the Leaf and The
Assembly of Ladies (both c. 1475), the former, like a
surprising quantity of 15th-century verse of this type,
purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the
ardent but endlessly frustrated lover and the irresistible
but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th
century, vernacular literacy was spreading rapidly among
both men and women of the laity, with the influence of
French courtly love poetry remaining strong. Aristocratic
and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans
(captured at Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la
Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros (translator of
Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were
widely read and imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois
circles well into the 16th century.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal
and aristocratic patronage, and the active seeking of
patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century
literary scene. Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who
probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his disciple,
dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an
earlier work of the same name, to the future king Henry V.
Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally
yield unexpected glimpses of his daily and private lives,
they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s
aspiration to be Chaucer’s successor was rapidly
overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary
merit, by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at
the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate, too, was greatly
stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished
patronage and produced as a result a number of very long
pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and
Life of Our Lady to Henry V and his Fall of Princes
(1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum
illustrium) to Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He
also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner (The
Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but
his imitation of the master’s style was rarely successful.
Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate
elements in his diction. Their own painfully polysyllabic
style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was
widely imitated for more than a century. In sum, the major
15th-century English poets were generally undistinguished as
successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but
independent extension of his achievement, one must look to
the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson,
and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in
15th-century literary life, but the typical concerns shown
by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of
religious, moral, historical, and didactic writing, much of
it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn out
to have had their own local patrons, often among the country
gentry. East Anglia may be said to have produced a minor
school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and
John Metham, among others also active during the middle of
the century. Some of the most moving and accomplished verse
of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and
carols (songs with a refrain) on conventional subjects such
as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The
author of some distinctive poems in this mode was John
Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by
the alliterative movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin
Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem
I sing of a maiden that is makeless [matchless].
Thomas Hoccleve
born
1368/69, London
died c. 1450?, Southwick, Eng.
English poet, contemporary and imitator of
Chaucer, whose work has little literary merit
but much value as social history.
What little is known of Hoccleve’s life must be
gathered mainly from his works. At age 18 or 19
he obtained a clerkship in the privy seal office
in London, which he retained intermittently for
about 35 years. His earliest dated poem, a
translation of Christine de Pisan’s L’Épistre au
dieu d’amours, appeared in 1402 as “The Letter
of Cupid.” His poem La Mâle Rčgle (1406; “The
Male Regimen”) presents a vivid picture of the
delights of a bachelor’s evening amusements in
the taverns and cookshops of Westminster.
Hoccleve married in about 1411.
In 1411
he produced The Regement of Princes, or De
regimine principum, culled from a 13th-century
work of the same name, for Henry, Prince of
Wales. A tedious homily, it contains a touching
accolade to Chaucer, whose portrait Hoccleve had
painted on the manuscript to ensure that his
appearance would not be forgotten. In his later
years Hoccleve turned from the ballads addressed
to his many patrons to serious religious verse
and to recording the ills of the day in a
literal-minded manner that presents a clear
picture of the time. His most interesting work,
La Mâle Rčgle, contains some realistic
descriptions of London life.
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John Lydgate
born c.
1370, Lidgate, Suffolk, Eng.
died c. 1450, Bury St. Edmunds?
English poet, known principally for long
moralistic and devotional works.
In his Testament Lydgate says that while still a
boy he became a novice in the Benedictine abbey
of Bury St. Edmunds, where he became a priest in
1397. He spent some time in London and Paris;
but from 1415 he was mainly at Bury, except
during 1421–32 when he was prior of Hatfield
Broad Oak in Essex.
Lydgate
had few peers in his sheer productiveness;
145,000 lines of his verse survive. His only
prose work, The Serpent of Division (1422), an
account of Julius Caesar, is brief. His poems
vary from vast narratives such as The Troy Book
and The Falle of Princis to occasional poems of
a few lines. Of the longer poems, one translated
from the French, the allegory Reason and
Sensuality (c. 1408) on the theme of chastity,
contains fresh and charming descriptions of
nature, in well-handled couplets. The Troy Book,
begun in 1412 at the command of the prince of
Wales, later Henry V, and finished in 1421, is a
rendering of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia
troiana. It was followed by The Siege of Thebes,
in which the main story is drawn from a lost
French romance, embellished by features from
Boccaccio.
Lydgate
admired the work of Chaucer intensely and
imitated his versification. In 1426 Lydgate
translated Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Le
Pčlerinage de la vie humaine as The Pilgrimage
of the Life of Man, a stern allegory; between
1431 and 1438 he was occupied with The Falle of
Princis, translated into Chaucerian rhyme royal
from a French version of Boccaccio’s work. He
also wrote love allegories such as The Complaint
of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass,
saints’ lives, versions of Aesop’s fables, many
poems commissioned for special occasions, and
both religious and secular lyrics.
His work
is uneven in quality, and the proportion of good
poetry is small. Yet with all his faults,
Lydgate at his best wrote graceful and telling
lines. His reputation long equalled Chaucer’s,
and his work exercised immense influence for
nearly a century.
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Robert Henryson
born
1420/30?
died c. 1506
Scottish poet, the finest of early fabulists in
Britain. He is described on some early title
pages as schoolmaster of Dunfermline—probably at
the Benedictine abbey school—and he appears
among the dead poets in William Dunbar’s Lament
for the Makaris, which was printed about 1508.
Henryson’s longest work is The Morall Fabillis
of Esope the Phrygian, Compylit in Eloquent &
Ornate Scottis, a version of 13 fables based
mainly on John Lydgate and William Caxton and
running to more than 400 seven-line stanzas. The
collection has a prologue, and each tale is
adorned with a moralitas. Its virtue lies in the
freshness of the narrative, in the sly humour
and sympathy of Henryson’s animal
characterization, and in his miniatures of the
Scottish countryside.
In The
Testament of Cresseid, a narrative and
“complaint” in 86 stanzas, Henryson completes
the story of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
giving a grim and tragic account of the
faithless heroine’s rejection by her lover
Diomede and her decline into prostitution. The
Testament is more than a splendid piece of
rhetorical craftsmanship; blended with
Henryson’s unwavering concern for justice are an
aesthetic attraction to the repulsive and
grotesque and a refined sense of the variance of
human love.
Among
the shorter poems ascribed to Henryson are the
lovely Orpheus and Eurydice, based on Boethius
and akin to the Testament in mood and style; a
pastourelle, Robene and Makyne, in which a
traditional French genre assimilates the speech
and humour of the Scottish peasantry; and a
number of fine moral narratives and meditations.
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William Dunbar
born
1460/65, Scotland
died before 1530
Middle Scots poet attached to the court of James
IV who was the dominant figure among the
Scottish Chaucerians (see makar) in the golden
age of Scottish poetry.
He was probably of the family of the earls of
Dunbar and March and may have received an M.A.
degree from St. Andrews in 1479. It is believed
that he was a Franciscan novice and travelled to
England and France in the King’s service. In
1501 he was certainly in England, probably in
connection with the arrangements for the
marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, which
took place in 1503. In 1500 he was granted a
pension of Ł10 by the King. By 1504 he was in
priest’s orders, and in 1510 he received, as a
mark of royal esteem, a pension of Ł80. In 1511
he accompanied the Queen to Aberdeen and
celebrated in the verse “Blyth Aberdeen” the
entertainments provided by that city. After the
King’s death at the Battle of Flodden (1513), he
evidently received the benefice for which he had
so often asked in verse, as there is no record
of his pension after 1513.
With few
exceptions the more than 100 poems attributed to
Dunbar are short and occasional, written out of
personal moods or events at court. They range
from the grossest satire to hymns of religious
exaltation. Of his longer works, some are
courtly Chaucerian pieces like the dream
allegory The Goldyn Targe, which wears its
allegory very lightly and charms with
descriptive imagery. The Thrissill and the Rois
is a nuptial song celebrating the marriage of
James IV and Margaret Tudor.
In a
quite different vein, the alliterative Flyting
of Dunbar and Kennedie is a virtuoso
demonstration of personal abuse directed against
his professional rival Walter Kennedy, who is,
incidentally, mentioned with affection in The
Lament for the Makaris, Dunbar’s reminiscence of
dead poets. Dunbar’s most celebrated and
shocking satire is the alliterative Tretis of
the tua mariit Wemen and the Wedo (“Treatise of
the Two Married Women and the Widow”).
Dunbar’s
versatility was astonishing. He was at ease in
hymn and satire, morality and obscene comedy,
panegyric and begging complaint, elegy and
lampoon. His poetic vocabulary ranged through
several levels, and he moved freely from one to
another for satiric effect. He wrote with
uncommon frankness and wit, manipulating old
themes and forms with imagination and
originality. Like other Scots poets after
him—notably Robert Burns—he was a vigorously
creative traditionalist. In artistry and range,
though not in humanity, he was the finest of
Scotland’s poets.
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Osbern Bokenam
born
Oct. 6, 1393?, Old Buckenham?, Norfolk, Eng.
died c. 1447
English
poet and friar best known as the author of a
verse collection entitled Legends of Holy Women.
Little
is known of Bokenam’s life. He traveled often to
Italy, living for several years in Venice and
later making pilgrimages to Rome and other
cities. He made his home, however, in an
Augustinian convent in Suffolk. At least two
works in addition to the legends have been
attributed to Bokenam.
The work
on which his reputation stands is an
approximately 10,000-line poem written in the
Middle English Suffolk dialect. It consists of
three stanza forms—a 10-syllable rhymed couplet,
ottava rima, and a seven-line alternately rhymed
stanza—in which Bokenam relates the legends of
12 women saints (Agatha, Agnes, Anne, Cecilia,
Christina, Dorothy, Elizabeth of Hungary, Faith,
Katherine of Alexandria, Lucy, Margaret, and
Mary Magdalene) and of the 11,000 virgins of the
legend of Saint Ursula. The prologues to the
individual legends are more lively than the
legends themselves, which are closely translated
from Latin originals. The first of the legends,
of St. Margaret, was written for Bokenam’s
friend Thomas Burgh, and some of the other
legends were dedicated to noblewomen of
Bokenam’s acquaintance. The only surviving copy
of the manuscript is in the British Library.
Bokenam
was familiar with the poetry of John Lydgate and
is thought to have been inspired by Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, but his chief
source was the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) of
Jacobus de Voragine.
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Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the
best popular and secular verse of the period, outside the
courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in
a form called tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain
and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes; Sir
Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant.
Humorous and lewd songs, versified tales, folk songs,
ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much
of what is extant is fortuitous. The manuscript known as the
Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such
material, may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the
late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a number
of popular romances of the type satirized long before by
Chaucer in Sir Thopas, the Percy manuscript also contains a
number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent
of medieval origin of the poems collected in Francis J.
Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is
debatable. Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly
were known in the 15th century, and the characteristic
laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads
is also to be seen in the enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol,
preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather
different vein, is The Nut-Brown Maid, an expertly managed
dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Robin Hood
"The Merry
Adventures of Robin Hood" (PART
I,
PART II)
legendary outlaw hero of a series of English
ballads, some of which date from at least as
early as the 14th century. Robin Hood was a
rebel, and many of the most striking episodes in
the tales about him show him and his companions
robbing and killing representatives of authority
and giving the gains to the poor. Their most
frequent enemy was the Sheriff of Nottingham, a
local agent of the central government (though
internal evidence from the early ballads makes
it clear that the action took place chiefly in
south Yorkshire, not in Nottinghamshire). Other
enemies included wealthy ecclesiastical
landowners. Robin treated women, the poor, and
people of humble status with courtesy. A good
deal of the impetus for his revolt against
authority stemmed from popular resentment over
those laws of the forest that restricted hunting
rights. The early ballads, especially, reveal
the cruelty that was an inescapable part of
medieval life.
Numerous
attempts have been made to prove that there was
a historical Robin Hood, though references to
the legend by medieval writers make it clear
that the ballads themselves were the only
evidence for his existence available to them. A
popular modern belief that he was of the time of
Richard I probably stems from a “pedigree”
fabricated by an 18th-century antiquary, William
Stukeley. None of the various claims identifying
Robin Hood with a particular historical figure
has gained much support, and the outlaw’s
existence may never have been anything but
legendary.
The
authentic Robin Hood ballads were the poetic
expression of popular aspirations in the north
of England during a turbulent era of baronial
rebellions and agrarian discontent, which
culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The
theme of the free but persecuted outlaw enjoying
the forbidden hunting of the forest and
outwitting or killing the forces of law and
order naturally appealed to the common people.
Although
many of the best-known Robin Hood ballads are
postmedieval, there is a core that can be
confidently attributed to the medieval period.
These are Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood
and Guy of Gisborne, Robin Hood and the Potter,
and the Lytyll Geste of Robin Hode. During the
16th century and later, the essential character
of the legend was distorted by a suggestion that
Robin was a fallen nobleman, and playwrights,
eagerly adopting this new element, increased the
romantic appeal of the stories but deprived them
of their social bite. Postmedieval ballads
(which gave Robin a companion, Maid Marian) also
lost most of their vitality and poetic value,
doubtless as a result of losing the original
social impulse that brought them into existence.
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Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories
already mentioned is political verse, of which a good deal
was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and
often crudely propagandist, especially during the Wars of
the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol shows
that it was already possible to strike the
characteristically English note of insular patriotism soon
after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English
Policy (c. 1436) on another typically English theme of a
related kind:
“Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty,
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition
in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that
detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for example, continued
to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and
circumstances. But sudden and brilliant imaginative
phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead
came steady growth in the composition of religious prose of
various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in
any quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober,
analytical, but nonetheless impressive kind of contemplative
or mystical prose, represented by
Walter Hilton’s
Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors
of these pieces certainly knew the more rugged and fervent
writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor
Richard
Rolle, and to some extent they reacted against what they saw
as excesses in the style and content of his work. It is of
particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was
continued into the 15th century, though in very different
ways, by two women writers,
Julian of Norwich and
Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of
letters, underwent a series of mystical experiences in 1373
about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine
Love, one of the foremost works of English spirituality by
the standards of any age. Rather different religious
experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery
Kempe (c. 1432–36), the extraordinary autobiographical
record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The
nature and status of its spiritual content remain
controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding
interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in
prose involved the translation of Continental Latin texts. A
major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval
English books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life
of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s translation of
the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St.
Bonaventure. Love’s work was particularly valued by the
church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical
tendencies of the Lollards, who espoused the teachings of
John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement generated
a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing,
though as the Lollards soon came under threat of death by
burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of
English works have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and
the first English translation of the Bible to Wycliffe’s
disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for
these attributions. The Lollard Bible, which exists in a
crude early form and in a more impressive later version
(supposedly Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of
being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced William
Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in
1525, and, through Tyndale, the King James Version (1611).
Margery Kempe
born c.
1373
died c. 1440
English religious mystic whose autobiography is
one of the earliest in English literature.
The daughter of a mayor of Lynn, she married
John Kempe in 1393 and bore 14 children before
beginning a series of pilgrimages to Jerusalem,
Rome, Germany, and Spain in 1414. Her
descriptions of her travels and her religious
ecstasies, which often included “boystous”
crying spells, are narrated in an unaffected
prose style that uses such contemporary
expressions as “thou wost no more what thou
blaberest than Balamis asse.” Apparently
illiterate, she dictated her Book of Margery
Kempe to two clerks from about 1432 to about
1436. It was first published (modernized) in
1936 and in Middle English in 1940.
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John Wycliffe
born c.
1330, Yorkshire, England
died December 31, 1384, Lutterworth,
Leicestershire
English
theologian, philosopher, church reformer, and
promoter of the first complete translation of
the Bible into English. He was one of the
forerunners of the Protestant Reformation. The
politico-ecclesiastical theories that he
developed required the church to give up its
worldly possessions, and in 1378 he began a
systematic attack on the beliefs and practices
of the church. The Lollards, a heretical group,
propagated his controversial views.
Early
life and career
Wycliffe was born in the North Riding of
Yorkshire and received his formal education at
the University of Oxford, where his name has
been associated with three colleges, Queen’s,
Merton, and Balliol, but with some uncertainty.
He became a regent master in arts at Balliol in
1360 and was appointed master of the college,
but he resigned in 1361 to become vicar of
Fillingham, the college’s choicest living, or
church post. There is some doubt as to whether
or not he became soon afterward warden of
Canterbury Hall, a house for secular (pastoral)
and regular (monastic) clergy; but there was a
petition from the university to the pope in 1362
to “provide” for him, and he was given a prebend
(a stipend) at Aust in the church of
Westbury-on-Trym. He drew his prebend while
residing elsewhere, a practice he condemned in
others. In 1363 and 1368 he was granted
permission from the bishop of Lincoln to absent
himself from Fillingham in order to study at
Oxford, though in 1368 he exchanged Fillingham
for Ludgershall, a parish nearer the university.
He became a bachelor of divinity about 1369 and
a doctor of divinity in 1372.
Political activities and theories
On April 7, 1374, Edward III appointed
Wycliffe to the rectory of Lutterworth in place
of Ludgershall, and about this time the
theologian began to show an interest in
politics. He received a royal commission to the
deputation sent to discuss with the papal
representatives at Brugge the outstanding
differences between England and Rome, such as
papal taxes and appointments to church posts. In
this work, Wycliffe showed himself to be both a
patriot and a king’s man.
He
complemented this activity with his political
treatises on divine and civil dominion (De
dominio divino libri tres and Tractatus de
civili dominio), in which he argued men
exercised “dominion” (the word is used of
possession and authority) straight from God and
that if they were in a state of mortal sin, then
their dominion was in appearance only. The
righteous alone could properly have dominion,
even if they were not free to assert it. He then
proceeded to say that, as the church was in sin,
it ought to give up its possessions and return
to evangelical poverty. Such disendowment was,
in his view, to be carried out by the state, and
particularly by the king. These
politico-ecclesiastical theories, devised with
ingenuity and written up at inordinate length,
may be criticized as the work of a theorizer
with a limited sense of what was possible in the
real world. Exhibiting an ingenuousness and lack
of worldly wisdom, he became a tool in the hands
of John of Gaunt (1340–99), Duke of Lancaster
and a younger son of Edward III, who, from
motives less scrupulous than those of Wycliffe,
was opposed to the wealth and power of the
clergy.
Wycliffe
preached acceptably in London in support of
moderate disendowment, but the alliance with
Gaunt led to the displeasure of his
ecclesiastical superiors, and he was summoned to
appear before them in February 1377. The
proceedings broke up in disorder, and Wycliffe
retired unmolested and uncondemned. That year
saw Wycliffe at the height of his popularity and
influence. Parliament and the king consulted him
as to whether or not it was lawful to keep back
treasure of the kingdom from Rome, and Wycliffe
replied that it was. In May Pope Gregory XI
issued five bulls against him, denouncing his
theories and calling for his arrest. The call
went unanswered, and Oxford refused to condemn
its outstanding scholar. Wycliffe’s last
political appearance was in the autumn of 1378
when, after Gaunt’s men killed an insubordinate
squire who had taken refuge in Westminster
Abbey, he pleaded for the crown before
Parliament against the right of sanctuary.
Wycliffe defended the action on the ground that
the king’s servants might lawfully invade
sanctuaries to bring criminals to justice.
Wycliffe’s attack on the church
He returned to Lutterworth and, from the
seclusion of his study, began a systematic
attack on the beliefs and practices of the
church. Theologically, this was facilitated by a
strong predestinarianism that enabled him to
believe in the “invisible” church of the elect,
constituted of those predestined to be saved,
rather than in the “visible” church of Rome—that
is, in the organized, institutional church of
his day. But his chief target was the doctrine
of transubstantiation—that the substance of the
bread and wine used in the Eucharist is changed
into the body and blood of Christ. As a Realist
philosopher—believing that universal concepts
have a real existence—he attacked it because, in
the annihilation of the substance of bread and
wine, the cessation of being was involved. He
then proceeded on a broader front and condemned
the doctrine as idolatrous and unscriptural. He
sought to replace it with a doctrine of
remanence (remaining)—“This is very bread after
the consecration”—combined with an assertion of
the Real Presence in a noncorporeal form.
Meanwhile, he pressed his attack
ecclesiastically. The pope, the cardinals, the
clergy in remunerative secular employment, the
monks, and the friars were all castigated in
language that was bitter even for 14th-century
religious controversy. For this exercise,
Wycliffe was well equipped. His restless,
probing mind was complemented by a quick temper
and a sustained capacity for invective. Few
writers have damned their opponents’ opinions
and sometimes, it would appear, the opponents
themselves, more comprehensively.
Yet most
scholars agree that Wycliffe was a virtuous man.
Proud and mistaken as he sometimes was, he gives
an overall impression of sincerity. Disappointed
as he may have been over his failure to receive
desirable church posts, his attack on the church
was not simply born of anger. It carried the
marks of moral earnestness and a genuine desire
for reform. He set himself up against the
greatest organization on earth because he
sincerely believed that organization was wrong,
and if he said so in abusive terms he had the
grace to confess it. Neither must his
ingenuousness be forgotten. There was nothing
calculated about the way in which he published
his opinions on the Eucharist, and the fact that
he was not calculating cost him—in all
probability—the support of John of Gaunt and of
not a few friends at Oxford. He could afford to
lose neither.
Translation of the Bible
From August 1380 until the summer of 1381,
Wycliffe was in his rooms at Queen’s College,
busy with his plans for a translation of the
Bible and an order of Poor Preachers who would
take Bible truth to the people. (His mind was
too much shaped by Scholasticism, the medieval
system of learning, to do the latter himself.)
There were two translations made at his
instigation, one more idiomatic than the other.
The most likely explanation of his considerable
toil is that the Bible became a necessity in his
theories to replace the discredited authority of
the church and to make the law of God available
to every man who could read. This, allied to a
belief in the effectiveness of preaching, led to
the formation of the Lollards. The precise
extent to which Wycliffe was involved in the
creation of the Lollards is uncertain. What is
beyond doubt is that they propagated his
controversial views.
In 1381,
the year when Wycliffe finally retired to
Lutterworth, the discontent of the labouring
classes erupted in the Peasants’ Revolt. His
social teaching was not a significant cause of
the uprising because it was known only to the
learned, but there is no doubt where his
sympathies lay. He had a constant affection for
the deserving poor. The archbishop of
Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, was murdered in
the revolt, and his successor, William Courtenay
(1347–96), a more vigorous man, moved against
Wycliffe. Many of his works were condemned at
the synod held at Blackfriars, London, in May
1382; and at Oxford his followers capitulated,
and all his writings were banned. That year,
Wycliffe suffered his first stroke at
Lutterworth; but he continued to write
prolifically until he died from a further stroke
in December 1384.
Assessment
It is no wonder that such a controversial
figure produced—and still produces—a wide
variety of reactions. The monks and friars
retaliated, immediately and fiercely, against
his denunciations of them, but such criticism
grew less as the Reformation approached. Most of
Wycliffe’s post-Reformation, Protestant
biographers see him as the first Reformer,
fighting almost alone the hosts of medieval
wickedness. There has now been a reaction to
this, and some modern scholars have attacked
this view as the delusion of uncritical
admirers. The question “Which is the real John
Wycliffe?” is almost certainly unanswerable
after 600 years.
The Rev. John Stacey
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William Tyndale
born c.
1490–94, near Gloucestershire, Eng.
died Oct. 6, 1536, Vilvoorde, near Brussels,
Brabant
English
biblical translator, humanist, and Protestant
martyr.
Tyndale was educated at the University of Oxford
and became an instructor at the University of
Cambridge, where, in 1521, he fell in with a
group of humanist scholars meeting at the White
Horse Inn. Tyndale became convinced that the
Bible alone should determine the practices and
doctrines of the church and that every believer
should be able to read the Bible in his own
language.
After
church authorities in England prevented him from
translating the Bible there, he went to Germany
in 1524, receiving financial support from
wealthy London merchants. His New Testament
translation was completed in July 1525 and
printed at Cologne and, when Catholic
authorities suppressed it, at Worms. The first
copies reached England in 1526. Tyndale then
began work on an Old Testament translation but
was captured in Antwerp before it was completed;
he was executed at Vilvoorde in 1536.
At the
time of his death, several thousand copies of
his New Testament had been printed; however,
only one intact copy remains today at London’s
British Library. The first vernacular English
text of any part of the Bible to be so
published, Tyndale’s version became the basis
for most subsequent English translations,
beginning with the King James Version of 1611.
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Secular prose
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came
into prominence in the last quarter of the 14th century,
though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match
that of the religious tradition. Chaucer’s Tale of Melibeus
and his two astronomical translations, the Treatise on the
Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively
modest endeavours beside the massive efforts of John of
Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and
Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On
the Properties of Things”), an encyclopaedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely
read secular prose work of the period is likely to have been
The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on
his journeys through Asia. Though the work now is believed
to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the
occasionally arch style of its author were popular with the
English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose
as a respectable medium for serious writings of various
kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more
manuscripts than any other medieval English work and was
instrumental in fostering a new sense of national identity.
John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and
Sir John
Fortescue’s On the Governance of England (c. 1470) were part
of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language
of everyday speech, like that found in the chance survivals
of private letters of the period. Best known and most
numerous among letters are those of the Paston family of
Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire.
More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were the
religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton,
whose aureate translation of the Bibliotheca historica of
Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic
exuberance of his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose
writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s cycle of Arthurian legends
(Malory
Thomas
"King
Arthur and of his Noble Knights"),
which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton
when he printed his edition in 1485. There is still
uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who described
himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture
of chivalric nostalgia and tragic feeling with which he
imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of
writing on Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry
eludes easy definition, and the degree to which the effects
he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his
part is debatable. Much of Le Morte Darthur was translated
from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery
as he went along. At the same time, he cast narrative and
dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English
prose that matched the nobility of both the characters and
the theme.
Merlin reads his prohecies to King Vortigern.
British Library MS Cotton Claudius B VII f.224,
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetiae Merlini.
Ranulf Higden
born c. 1280, western England
died March 12, 1364, Chester, Cheshire
English monk and chronicler remembered for his
Polychronicon, a compilation of
much of the knowledge of his age.
After taking monastic vows in 1299, Higden
entered the Abbey of St. Werburgh, a Benedictine
community in Chester. His Polychronicon was a
universal history from the Creation to his own
times. Modeling his seven books on the seven
days of Creation, he gave an account of world
geography and a universal history of the world,
based on a compilation from about 40 sources.
Higden himself carried the work down to the
1340s; continuators worked on the Polychronicon
during the reign of Richard II (1377–99).
Although
marred by recordings of miracles and
supernatural events, the work provides a
significant indication of 14th-century
historical, geographic, and scientific
knowledge. Higden wrote many other works, all
theological.
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Sir John Mandeville
flourished 14th century
purported author of a collection of travelers’
tales from around the world, The Voyage and
Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight,
generally known as The Travels of Sir John
Mandeville. The tales are selections from the
narratives of genuine travelers, embellished
with Mandeville’s additions and described as his
own adventures.
The actual author of the tales remains as
uncertain as the existence of the English knight
Sir John Mandeville himself. The book originated
in French about 1356–57 and was soon translated
into many languages, an English version
appearing about 1375. The narrator Mandeville
identifies himself as a knight of St. Albans.
Incapacitated by arthritic gout, he has
undertaken to stave off boredom by writing of
his travels, which began on Michaelmas Day
(September 29) 1322, and from which he returned
in 1356. The 14th-century chronicler Jean
d’Outremeuse of Ličge claimed that he knew the
book’s true author, a local physician named Jean
de Bourgogne, and scholars afterward speculated
that d’Outremeuse himself wrote the book. Modern
historical research debunked the d’Outremeuse
tradition but has yielded few more positive
conclusions, and the actual author of the
Travels remains unknown.
It is
not certain whether the book’s true author ever
traveled at all, since he selected his materials
almost entirely from the encyclopaedias and
travel books available to him, including those
by William of Boldensele and Friar Odoric of
Pordenone. The author enriched these itineraries
with accounts of the history, customs,
religions, and legends of the regions visited,
culled from his remarkably wide reading,
transforming and enlivening the originals by his
literary skill and genuine creative imagination.
The lands that he describes include the realm of
Prester John, the land of darkness, and the
abode of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, all
legendary. Although in his time “Mandeville” was
famous as the greatest traveler of the Middle
Ages, in the ensuing age of exploration he lost
his reputation as a truthful narrator. His book,
notwithstanding, has always been popular and
remains extremely readable.
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John Capgrave
born
April 21, 1393, Lynn, Norfolk, Eng.
died Aug. 12, 1464, Lynn
historian, theologian, and hagiographer who
wrote an English Life of St. Katharine, vigorous
in its verse form and dramatically energetic in
its debate. His work illustrates well the
literary tastes and circumstances of his time.
Capgrave
became a priest, lectured in theology at Oxford
University, and later joined the Augustinian
order of hermits at Lynn, where he probably
became prior. He was provincial of his order in
England and made at least one journey to Rome,
the wonders of which are described in his Solace
of Pilgrims (ed. C.A. Mills, 1911).
Most of
his theological works seem to have been compiled
from other authors, or freely translated, and
consist of biblical commentaries, lectures,
sermons, treatises, and lives of saints. His
history in honour of Henry VI is of little
historical value, but the latter part of his
unfinished Chronicle of England is of some
interest. He wrote several lives of saints in
English, both in verse and in prose, but the
huge Latin collection of the lives of English
saints, the Nova Legenda Angliae, attributed to
him in the 16th century, was at most edited by
him.
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Sir John Fortescue
born c.
1385, Norris, Somerset, Eng.
died c. 1479, Ebrington, Gloucestershire
jurist,
notable for a legal treatise, De laudibus legum
Angliae (c. 1470; “In Praise of the Laws of
England”), written for the instruction of
Edward, prince of Wales, son of the deposed king
Henry VI of England. He also stated a moral
principle that remains basic to the
Anglo-American jury system: It is better that
the guilty escape than that the innocent be
punished.
Fortescue became chief justice of the King’s
Bench in 1442 and was knighted the following
year. After the defeat of Henry VI’s Lancastrian
army at Towton, Yorkshire (March 29, 1461), he
fled with Henry to Scotland, where Fortescue
probably was appointed lord chancellor of the
exiled government. From 1463 to 1471 he lived in
France at the court of Henry’s queen, Margaret
of Anjou, where he helped to educate Prince
Edward to rule England in the event of a
Lancastrian restoration. Returning to England,
he was captured at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire,
during the final defeat of the Lancastrians (May
4, 1471), submitted to the Yorkist king Edward
IV, and was allowed to retire to his home.
Unusual
for its time, De laudibus depreciates the
Roman-derived civil law and eulogizes the
English constitution, statutes, and system of
legal education, while offering suggestions for
reform. It was probably the first book about law
written in a style so simple and lucid as to be
comprehensible to the layman.
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John Skelton
born c.
1460
died June 21, 1529, London
Tudor poet and satirist of both political and
religious subjects whose reputation as an
English poet of major importance was restored
only in the 20th century and whose individual
poetic style of short rhyming lines, based on
natural speech rhythms, has been given the name
of Skeltonics.
His place of birth and childhood is unknown. He
was educated at the University of Cambridge and
later achieved the status of “poet laureate” (a
degree in rhetoric) at Oxford, Leuven (Louvain)
in the Netherlands (now in Belgium), and
Cambridge. This success and also his skill at
translating ancient Greek and Roman authors led
to his appointment in 1488 first as court poet
to Henry VII and later, in addition, as
“scolemaster” to the Duke of York (later Henry
VIII). In 1498 Skelton took holy orders and in
1502, when Henry became heir to the throne and
the royal household was reorganized, he became
rector of Diss, in Norfolk, a position he held
until his death, though from 1512 he lived in
London. In about 1512 Henry VIII granted him the
title of orator regius, and in this capacity
Skelton became a forthright adviser to the King,
in court poems, on public issues, and on church
affairs.
Little
of Skelton’s early work is known, but his
reputation was such that Desiderius Erasmus,
greatest figure in the northern Renaissance,
visiting England in 1499, referred to him as
“the incomparable light and glory of English
letters.” His most notable poem from his time at
court is Bowge of courte, a satire of the
disheartening experience of life at court; it
was not until his years at Diss that he
attempted his now characteristic Skeltonics. The
two major poems from this period are Phyllyp
Sparowe, ostensibly a lament for the death of a
young lady’s pet but also a lampoon of the
liturgical office for the dead; and Ware the
Hawke, an angry attack on an irreverent hunting
priest who had flown his hawk into Skelton’s
church. Skelton produced a group of court poems,
mostly satirical: A ballad of the Scottysshe
Kynge, a savage attack on the King’s enemies,
was written in 1513 after the Battle of Flodden;
and in the next year he entertained the court
with a series of “flyting” poems of mock abuse.
In 1516 he wrote the first secular morality play
in English, Magnyfycence, a political satire,
followed by The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge, a
portrayal of a drunken woman in an alehouse,
which, though popular, contributed largely to
Skelton’s later reputation as a “beastly” poet.
His three major political and clerical satires,
Speke Parrot (written 1521), Collyn Clout
(1522), and Why come ye nat to courte (1522),
were all directed against the mounting power of
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, both in church and in
state, and the dangers—as Skelton saw them—of
the new learning of the Humanists. Wolsey proved
too strong an opponent to attack further, and
Skelton turned to lyrical and allegorical themes
in his last poems, dedicating them all to the
Cardinal himself. Skelton’s reputation declined
rapidly in a 16th-century England predominantly
Protestant in religion and Italianate in poetic
style. A new appreciation of his qualities,
however, emerged in the 20th century.
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Middle English drama
Because the manuscripts of medieval
English plays were usually ephemeral performance scripts
rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived
from what once must have been a very large dramatic
literature. What little survives from before the 15th
century includes some bilingual fragments, indicating that
the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience.
From the late 14th century onward, two main dramatic genres
are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and
the morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic
dramas of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption of humankind,
based mostly on biblical narratives. They usually included a
selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of
Cain and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated
mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus Christ. They always
ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally
financed and performed by the craft guilds and staged on
wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts of the
cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an
unstated location in East Anglia (the so-called N-Town
plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry,
Newcastle, and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven,
but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an impressively
realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist
influenced by the alliterative style in verse. The Wakefield
cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed
to the anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’
Play is one of the masterpieces of medieval English
literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas
depicting the progress of a single character, representing
the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include
God and the Devil but usually consisted of personified
abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance,
Mercy, and so forth. A varied collection of the moralities
is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of Perseverance,
Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is
Everyman, an English rendering of a Dutch play on the
subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and
morality plays were frequently revived and performed into
the 21st century.
"Everyman"
Type of work: Drama
Author: Unknown
Type of plot: Moral allegory
Time of plot: Any time
Locale: Any place
Earliest extant version: 1508
An English morality play of the 15th century,
probably a version of a Dutch play, Elckerlyc. It
achieves a beautiful, simple solemnity in treating
allegorically the theme of death and the fate of the
human soul—of Everyman’s soul as he tries to justify
his time on earth. Though morality plays on the
whole failed to achieve the vigorous realism of the
Middle Ages’ scriptural drama, this short play
(about 900 lines) is more than an allegorical sermon
because vivid characterization gives it dramatic
energy. It is generally regarded as the finest of
the morality plays.
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The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th
century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a
process powerfully expedited by the introduction into
England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485)
that Henry Tudor acceded to the throne as Henry VII, and the
period from this time to the mid-16th century has been
called the transition from medieval to Renaissance in
English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from
15th-century Italian humanist sources, was an early essay in
the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his
rendering of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of
Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on contemporary
folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in
1506; published 1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an
allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as
a necessary accomplishment of the courtly knight or
gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate
in the new humanist writing of the 16th century, both in
discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named
the Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545;
“Lover of the Bow”] and The Schoolmaster [1570]) and in
drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism,
Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), was composed in Latin and appeared in an
English translation in 1551.
Alexander Barclay
born c. 1476
died June 10, 1552, Croydon, Surrey, Eng.
poet who won contemporary fame chiefly for his
adaptation of a popular German satire, Das
Narrenschiff, by Sebastian Brant,
which he called The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde
(first printed 1509).
Barclay, possibly of Scottish birth, was by 1509
a chaplain at the College of St. Mary Ottery,
Devon. He later became a Benedictine monk at Ely
and still later a Franciscan friar of
Canterbury. He presumably conformed to
Protestantism, however, for after the
Reformation he retained livings (benefices) in
Essex and Somerset held since 1546. In 1552 he
became rector of All Hallows, London.
Barclay
also wrote (probably while a monk at Ely) the
first formal eclogues in English, filled with
entertaining pictures of rural life.
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Stephen Hawes
flourished 1502–21
poet and courtier who served King Henry VII of
England and was a follower of the devotional
poet John Lydgate.
Hawes’s main work is a long allegorical poem,
The Passetyme of Pleasure, the chief theme of
which is the education and pilgrimage through
life of the knight Graunde Amoure. Completed in
1506, it was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509.
Another allegory by Hawes, The Example of Vertu,
is simpler and shorter. Though he shows at times
a finer quality of mind than Lydgate, Hawes is
not even Lydgate’s equal in technical
accomplishment, and little of his prolix,
repetitious verse is memorable.
Little
is known of Hawes’s life beyond the facts that
he was educated at the University of Oxford,
traveled in England, Scotland, and France, and
in 1502 was groom of the chamber to Henry VII.
He was alive in 1521, but his date of death is
unknown.
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Sir Thomas Elyot
born c. 1490
died March 26, 1546, Carleton, Cambridgeshire,
Eng.
English author and administrator, memorable for
his championship and use of English prose for
subjects then customarily treated in Latin. Both
as a philosopher and as a lexicographer, he
endeavoured to “augment our Englysshe tongue” as
a medium for ideas.
He was clerk to the Privy Council (1523–30) and
was knighted in 1530. A member of Sir Thomas
More’s circle, Elyot was suspected of being out
of sympathy with Henry VIII’s plan to divorce
Catherine of Aragon and probably owed his lack
of advancement to his friendship with More. In
1531 he published The Boke Named the Governour,
dedicated to the king, and that autumn went as
the king’s envoy to the court of the Holy Roman
emperor Charles V.
Elyot’s
very popular Governour, a plan for the
upbringing of gentlemen’s sons who were to bear
authority in the realm, was the first important
treatise on education in English and did much to
form the later English ideal of the gentleman.
His Castel of Helth was a popular regimen of
health that, written in the vernacular and by a
layman (although he had received some
instruction in medicine), incurred censure but
was widely read. His Dictionary, the first
English dictionary of Classical Latin, was
published in 1538. The aim of all Elyot’s works
was usefulness: he brought classics and Italian
authors to the general public through his
translations, he provided practical instruction
in his own writings, and he added many new words
to the English language.
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Roger Ascham
born
1515?, Kirby Wiske, near York, Eng.
died Dec. 30, 1568, London
British humanist, scholar, and writer, famous
for his prose style, his promotion of the
vernacular, and his theories of education.
As a boy of 14, Ascham entered the University of
Cambridge, where he earned his M.A. (1537) and
one year later was elected a fellow of St.
John’s and appointed reader in Greek. The new
Renaissance enthusiasm for the classics,
especially Greek, was at its height.
Ascham’s
Toxophilus (“Lover of the Bow”), written in the
form of a dialogue, was published in 1545 and
was the first book on archery in English. In the
preface Ascham showed the growing patriotic zeal
of the humanists by stating that he was writing
“Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue for
Englishe men.” He became Princess Elizabeth’s
tutor in Greek and Latin (1548–50), then served
as secretary to Sir Richard Morison (1550–52),
English ambassador to the Habsburg emperor
Charles V, traveling widely on the European
continent. Thereafter, he was appointed Latin
secretary to Queen Mary, a post he held until
her death in 1558. He continued in this position
for Queen Elizabeth I until his death. He served
her by composing her official letters to foreign
rulers and by helping her pursue the study of
Greek.
The
Scholemaster, written in simple, lucid English
prose and published posthumously in 1570, is
Ascham’s best-known book. It presents an
effective method of teaching Latin prose
composition, but its larger concerns are with
the psychology of learning, the education of the
whole person, and the ideal moral and
intellectual personality that education should
mold. His success in tutoring three females—Lady
Jane Grey, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth—has
led some to consider Ascham an early proponent
of education for girls.
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Henry Medwall
Fulgens and Lucrece
by Henry Medwall
born September 1461, Southwark, London, Eng.
died after 1501
author
remembered for his Fulgens and Lucrece,
the first known secular play in English.
Medwall was educated at Eton College and the
University of Cambridge and participated in
dramatic performances there. After 1485 he
worked as a lawyer and administrator in London,
eventually entering the employ of Cardinal John
Morton, archbishop of Canterbury. In 1492–1501
he held a sinecure, the rectory of Balynghem in
the English marches of Calais, France. His
career ended with Morton’s death in 1500, and
nothing is known of him after 1501.
Medwall’s dramatic works were written for the
entertainment of Morton and his guests. A
morality play, Nature, a good example of the
allegorical type of early drama, displays
Medwall’s talent for realistic dialogue and his
skill as a versifier. Fulgens and Lucrece is a
debate on the origins of true nobility,
enlivened by the interruptions of household
servants.
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Thomas More
"Utopia"
born Feb. 7, 1477, London, Eng.
died July 6, 1535, London; canonized May 19, 1935; feast day
June 22
also called Saint Thomas More humanist and statesman,
chancellor of England (1529–32), who was beheaded for
refusing to accept King Henry VIII as head of the Church of
England. He is recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic
church.
Early life and career.
Thomas—the eldest son of John More, a lawyer who was later
knighted and made a judge of the King's Bench—was educated
at one of London's best schools, St. Anthony's in
Threadneedle Street, and in the household of John Morton,
archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England. The
future cardinal, a shrewd judge of character, predicted that
the bright and winsome page would prove a “marvellous man.”
His interest sent the boy to the University of Oxford, where
More seems to have spent two years, mastering Latinand
undergoing a thorough drilling in formal logic.
About 1494 his father brought More back to London to study
the common law. In February 1496 he was admitted to
Lincoln's Inn, one of the four legal societies preparing for
admission to the bar. In 1501 More became an “utter
barrister,” a full member of the profession. Thanks to his
boundless curiosity and a prodigious capacity for work, he
managed, along with the law, to keep up his literary
pursuits. He read avidly from Holy Scripture, the Church
Fathers, and the classics and tried his hand at all literary
genres.
Although bowing to his father's decision that he should
become a lawyer, More was prepared to be disowned rather
than disobey God's will. To test his vocation to the
priesthood, he resided for about four years in the
Carthusian monastery adjoining Lincoln's Inn and shared as
much of the monks' way of life as was practicable. Although
attracted especially to the Franciscan order, More decided
that he would best serve God and his fellowmen as a lay
Christian. More, however, never discarded the habits of
early rising, prolonged prayer, fasting, and wearing the
hair shirt. God remained the centre of his life.
In late 1504 or early 1505, More married Joan Colt, the
eldest daughter of an Essex gentleman farmer. She was a
competent hostess for non-English visitors, such as the
Dutch Humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who was given permanent
rooms in the Old Barge on the Thames side in Bucklersbury in
the City of London, More's home for the firsttwo decades of
his married life. Erasmus wrote his Praise of Folly while
staying there.
The important negotiations More conducted in 1509 on behalf
of a number of London companies with the representative of
the Antwerp merchants confirmed his competence in trade
matters and his gifts as an interpreter and spokesman. From
September 1510 to July 1518, when he resigned to be fully in
the king's service, More was one of the two under sheriffs
of London, “the pack-horses of the City government.” He
endeared himself to the Londoners—as an impartial judge, a
disinterested consultant, and “the general patron of the
poor.”
More's domestic idyll came to a brutal end in the summer of
1511 with the death, perhaps in childbirth, of his wife. He
wasleft a widower with four children, and within weeks of
his first wife's death, he married Alice Middleton, the
widow of a London mercer. She was several years his senior
and had a daughter of her own; she did not bear More any
children.
More's History of King Richard III, written in Latin and in
English between about 1513 and 1518, is the first
masterpiece of English historiography. Though never
finished, it influenced succeeding historians. William
Shakespeare is indebted to More for his portrait of the
tyrant.
The “Utopia.” In May 1515 More was appointed to a delegation
to revise an Anglo-Flemish commercial treaty. The conference
was held at Brugge, with long intervals that More used to
visit other Belgian cities. He began in the Low Countries
and completed after his return to London his Utopia, which
was published at Louvain in December 1516. The book was an
immediate success with the audience for which More wrote it:
the Humanists and an elite group of public officials.
Utopia is a Greek name of More's coining, from ou-topos (“no
place”); a pun on eu-topos (“good place”) is suggested in a
prefatory poem. More's Utopia describes a pagan and
communist city-state in which the institutions and policies
are entirely governed by reason. The order and dignity of
such a state provided a notable contrast with the
unreasonable polity of Christian Europe, divided by
self-interest and greed for power and riches, which More
described in book i, written in England in 1516. The
description of Utopia is put in the mouth of a mysterious
traveler, Raphael Hythloday, in support of his argument that
communism is the only cure against egoism in private and
public life. Through dialogue More speaks in favour of the
mitigation of evil rather than its cure, human nature being
fallible. Among the topics discussed by More in Utopia were
penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism,
divorce, euthanasia, and women's rights. The resulting
demonstration of his learning, invention, and wit
established his reputation as one of the foremost Humanists.
Soon translated into most European languages, Utopia became
the ancestor of a new literary genre, the Utopian romance.
Career as king's servant
On May 1, 1517, a mob of London apprentices attacked foreign
merchants in the city. More's role in quenching this
Evil-Mayday riot inspired a scene, attributed to
Shakespeare, in Sir Thomas More, a composite Elizabethan
play. More's success in the thorny negotiations with the
French at Calais and Boulogne (September to December 1517)
over suits born of the recent war made it harder for him to
dodge royal service. That year he became a member of the
king's council and from October was known as master of
requests. He resigned his City office in 1518. While
yielding to pressure, he embraced the chance of furthering
peace and reform. The lord chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, now
looked ready to implement some of the political ideas of the
Christian Humanists.
Between 1515 and 1520 More campaigned spiritedly for
Erasmus' religious and cultural program—Greek studies as the
key to a theology renewed by a return to the Bible and the
Church Fathers—in poems commending Erasmus' New Testament.
More's Latin poems were published in 1518 under one cover
between his Utopia and Erasmus' Epigrammata; they are
extremely varied in metre and matter, their main topics
being government, women, and death.
Erasmus offered his London friend as a model for the
intelligentsia of Europe in letters to the German Humanist
Ulrich von Hutten (1519); the Paris scholar Germain de Brie
(1520), with whom More had just engaged in a polemic; and
Guillaume Budé, whom More had met in June 1520 at the Field
of Cloth of Gold, the meeting ground, near Calais, between
Henry VIII and Francis I. According to Erasmus, simplicity
was More's mark in food and dress. He shrank from nothing
that imparted an innocent pleasure, even of a bodily kind.
He had a speaker's voice and a memory that served him well
for extempore rejoinders. “Born for friendship,” he could
extract delight from the dullest people or things. His
family affections were warm yet unobtrusive. He gave freely
and gladly, expecting no thanks. Amid his intense
professional activity, he found hours for prayer and for
supervising his domestic school. Most of his charges
weregirls, to whom he provided the most refined classical
and Christian education.
In 1520 and 1521 More took part in talks, at Calais and
Brugge, with the emperor Charles V and with the Hansa
merchants. In 1521 he was made undertreasurer and knighted.
His daughter Margaret married William Roper, a lawyer. For
Henry VIII's Defense of the Seven Sacraments, More acted as
“a sorter out and placer of the principal matters.” When
Martin Luther hit back, More vindicated the king in a
learned, though scurrilous, Responsio ad Lutherum (1523). In
addition to his routine duties at the Exchequer, More served
throughout these years as “Henry's intellectual courtier,”
secretary, and confidant. He welcomed foreign envoys,
delivered official speeches, drafted treaties, read the
dispatches exchanged between the king and Wolsey, and
answered in the king's name. Often he rode posthaste between
the cardinal's headquarters at Westminster and Henry's
various hunting residences. In April1523 More was elected
speaker of the House of Commons; while loyally striving to
secure the government's ends, he made a plea for truer
freedom of speech in Parliament. The universities—Oxford in
1524, Cambridge in 1525—made him their high steward.
By 1524 More had moved to Chelsea. The Great House he built
there bore the stamp of his philosophy, its gallery, chapel,
and library all geared toward studious and prayerful
seclusion. In 1525 he was promoted to chancellor of the
duchy of Lancaster, which put a large portion of northern
England under his judiciary and administrative control.
On More's return from an embassy to France in the summer of
1527, Henry VIII “laid the Bible open before him” as proof
that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to
produce a male heir, was void, even incestuous, because of
her previous marriage to Henry's late brother. More tried in
vain to share the king's scruples, but long study confirmed
his view that Catherine was the king's true wife. After
being commissioned in March 1528 by Bishop Tunstall of
London toread all heretical writings in the English language
in order to refute them for the sake of the unlearned, he
published seven books of polemics between 1529 and 1533—the
first and best being A Dialogue Concerning Heresies.
Years as chancellor of England.
Together with Tunstall, More attended the congress of
Cambrai at which peace was made between France and the Holy
Roman Empire in 1529. Though the Treaty of Cambrai
represented a rebuff to England and, more particularly, a
devastating reverse for Cardinal Wolsey's policies, More
managed to secure the inclusion of his country in the treaty
and the settlement of mutual debts. When Wolsey fell from
power, having failed in his foreign policy and in his
efforts to procure the annulment of the king's marriage to
Catherine, More succeeded him as lord chancellor on Oct. 26,
1529.
On Nov. 3, 1529, More opened the Parliament that was later
to forge the legal instruments for his death. As the king's
mouthpiece, More indicted Wolsey in his opening speech and,
in 1531, proclaimed the opinions of universities favourable
to the divorce; but he did not sign the letter of 1530 in
which England's nobles and prelates, including Wolsey,
pressured the pope to declare the first marriage void, and
he tried to resign in 1531, when the clergy acknowledged the
king as their supreme head, albeit with the clause “as far
as the law of Christ allows.”
More's longest book, The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, in
two volumes (1532 and 1533), centres on “what the churchis.”
To the stress of stooping for hours over his manuscript More
ascribed the sharp pain in his chest, perhaps angina, which
he invoked when begging Henry to free him from the yoke of
office. This was on May 16, 1532, the day when the governing
body (synod) of the church in England delivered tothe crown
the document by which they promised never to legislate or so
much as convene without royal assent, thus placing a
layperson at the head of the spiritual order.
More meanwhile continued his campaign for the old faith,
defending England's antiheresy laws and his own handling
ofheretics, both as magistrate and as writer, in two books
of 1533: the Apology and the Debellacyon. He also laughs
away the accusation of greed levelled by William Tyndale,
translator of parts of the first printed English Bible.
More's poverty was so notorious that the hierarchy collected
£5,000to recoup his polemical costs, but he refused this
grant lest it be construed as a bribe.
Indictment, trial, and execution
More's refusal to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, whom
Henry married after his divorce from Catherine in 1533,
marked him out for vengeance. Several charges of accepting
bribes recoiled on the heads of his accusers. In February
1534 More was included in a bill of attainder for alleged
complicity with Elizabeth Barton, who had uttered prophecies
against Henry's divorce, but he produced a letter in which
he had warned the nun against meddling in affairs of state.
He was summoned to appear before royal commissioners on
April 13 to assent under oath to the Act of Succession,
which declared the king's marriage with Catherine void and
that with Anne valid. This More was willing to do,
acknowledging that Anne was in fact anointed queen. But he
refused the oath as then administered because it entailed a
repudiation of papal supremacy. On April 17, 1534, he was
imprisoned in the Tower. More welcomed prison life. But for
his family responsibilities, he would have chosen for
himself “as strait a room and straiter too,” as he said to
his daughter Margaret, who after some time took the oath and
was then allowed to visit him. In prison, More wrote A
Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, a masterpiece of
Christian wisdom and of literature.
His trial took place on July 1, 1535. Richard Rich, the
solicitor general, a creature of Thomas Cromwell, the
unacknowledged head of the government, testified that the
prisoner had, in his presence, denied the king's title as
supreme head of the Church of England. Despite More's
scathing denial of this perjured evidence, the jury's
unanimous verdict was “guilty.” Before the sentence was
pronounced, More spoke “in discharge of his conscience.” The
unity of the church was the main motive of his martyrdom.
His second objection was that “no temporal manmay be head of
the spirituality.” Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, to which
he also referred as the cause for which they “sought his
blood,” had been the occasion for the assaults on the
church: among his judges were the new queen's father,
brother, and uncle.
More was sentenced to the traitor's death—“to be drawn,
hanged, and quartered”—which the king changed to beheading.
During five days of suspense, More prepared hissoul to meet
“the great spouse” and wrote a beautiful prayer and several
letters of farewell. He walked to the scaffold on Tower
Hill. “See me safe up,” he said to the lieutenant, “and for
my coming down let me shift for myself.” He told the
onlookers to witness that he was dying “in the faith and for
the faith of the Catholic Church, the king's good servant
and God's first.” He altered the ritual by blindfolding
himself, playing “a part of his own” even on this awful
stage.
The news of More's death shocked Europe. Erasmus mourned the
man he had so often praised, “whose soul was more pure than
any snow, whose genius was such that England never had and
never again will have its like.” The official image of More
as a traitor did not gain credence even in Protestant lands.
Assessment
Though the triumph of Anglicanism brought about a certain
eclipse of Thomas More, the publication of the state papers
restored a fuller and truer picture of More, preparing
public opinion for his beatification (1886). He was
canonized by Pius XI in May 1935. Though the man is greater
than the writer, and though nothing in his life “became him
like the leaving of it,” his “golden little book” Utopia has
earned him greater fame than the crown of martyrdom or the
million words of his English works.
Erasmus' phrase describing More as omnium horarum homowas
rendered later as “a man for all seasons” and was given
currency by Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons (1960).
Monuments to him have been placed in Westminster Hall, the
Tower of London, and the Chelsea Embankment, all in London.
In the words of the English Catholic apologist G.K.
Chesterton, More “may come to be counted the greatest
Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in
English History.”
The Rev. Germain P. Marc'hadour
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The most distinctive voice in
the poetry of the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to
Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range of
writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works
include a long play, Magnificence (1516), like his Bowge of
Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue;
intemperate satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and
Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and reflexive essays
on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot
(written 1521) and The Garland of Laurel (1523). The first
half of the 16th century was also a notable period for
courtly lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with
musical settings, such as those found in the Devonshire
Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the
“courtly makers” Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry
Howard, earl of
Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of their
writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive
achievements look to the future. Poems such as Wyatt’s They
flee from me and Whoso list to hunt vibrate with personal
feeling at odds with the medieval convention of anonymity,
while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid introduce blank
verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the
first time, providing an essential foundation for the
achievements of
Shakespeare and
John Milton.
Sir Thomas Wyatt
born 1503, Allington, near Maidstone, Kent,
Eng.
died Oct. 6, 1542, Sherborne, Dorset
poet who introduced the Italian sonnet and
terza rima verse form and the French rondeau
into English literature.
Wyatt was educated at St. John’s, Cambridge,
and became a member of the court circle of Henry
VIII, where he seems to have been popular and
admired for his attractive appearance and skill
in music, languages, and arms. During his
career, he served a number of diplomatic
missions and was knighted in 1537, but his fame
rests on his poetic achievements, particularly
his songs. His poems are unusual for their time
in carrying a strong sense of individuality.
They consist of Certayne Psalmes . . . drawen
into Englyshe meter (1549); three satires, and
Songes and Sonettes, published in Tottel’s
Miscellany (1557); and songs identified in
manuscript, published in 19th- and 20th-century
editions.
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Henry Howard, earl of
Surrey
born 1517, Hunsdon, Hertfordshire,
Eng.?
died Jan. 13, 1547, London
poet who, with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42),
introduced into England the styles and metres of
the Italian humanist poets and so laid the
foundation of a great age of English poetry.
The eldest son of Lord Thomas Howard, Henry
took the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey in
1524 when his father succeeded as 3rd Duke of
Norfolk. It was Surrey’s fate, because of his
birth and connections, to be involved (though
usually peripherally) in the jockeying for place
that accompanied Henry VIII’s policies. From
1530 until 1532 he lived at Windsor with his
father’s ward, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond,
who was the son of Henry VIII and his mistress
Elizabeth Blount. In 1532, after talk of
marriage with the princess Mary (daughter of
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon), he married
Lady Frances de Vere, the 14-year-old daughter
of the Earl of Oxford, but they did not live
together until 1535. Despite this marriage, an
alliance between him and the princess Mary was
still discussed. In 1533 Richmond married
Surrey’s sister Mary, but the two did not live
together because Mary preferred to stay in the
country. Richmond died three years later, under
suspicious circumstances.
Surrey was confined at Windsor (1537–39)
after being charged by the Seymours (high in
favour since the king’s marriage to Jane Seymour
in 1536) with having secretly favoured the Roman
Catholics in the rebellion of 1536. He had in
fact joined his father against the insurgents.
In 1540 he was a champion in court jousts, and
his prospects were further improved by the
marriage of his cousin Catherine Howard to the
king. He served in the campaign in Scotland in
1542 and in France and Flanders from 1543 to
1546. He acted as field marshal in 1545 but was
reprimanded for exposing himself unnecessarily
to danger.
Returning to England in 1546, he found the
king dying and his old enemies the Seymours
incensed by his interference in the projected
alliance between his sister Mary and Sir Thomas
Seymour, Jane’s brother; he made matters worse
by his assertion that the Howards were the
obvious regents for Prince Edward, Henry VIII’s
son by Jane Seymour. The Seymours, alarmed,
accused Surrey and his father of treason and
called his sister, the Duchess of Richmond, to
witness against him. She made the disastrous
admission that he was still a close adherent to
the Roman Catholic faith. Because Surrey’s
father, the Duke of Norfolk, had been considered
heir apparent if Henry VIII had had no issue,
the Seymours urged that the Howards were
planning to set Prince Edward aside and assume
the throne. Surrey defended himself unavailingly
and at the age of 30 was executed on Tower Hill.
His father was saved only because the king died
before he could be executed.
Most of Surrey’s poetry was probably written
during his confinement at Windsor; it was nearly
all first published in 1557, 10 years after his
death. He acknowledged Wyatt as a master and
followed him in adapting Italian forms to
English verse. He translated a number of
Petrarch’s sonnets already translated by Wyatt.
Surrey achieved a greater smoothness and
firmness, qualities that were to be important in
the evolution of the English sonnet. Surrey was
the first to develop the sonnet form used by
William Shakespeare.
In his other short poems he wrote not only on
the usual early Tudor themes of love and death
but also of life in London, of friendship, and
of youth. The love poems have little force
except when, in two “Complaint[s] of the absence
of her lover being upon the sea,” he wrote,
unusual for his period, from the woman’s point
of view.
The short poems were printed by Richard
Tottel in his Songes and Sonettes, Written by
the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late
Earle of Surrey and Other (1557; usually known
as Tottel’s Miscellany). “Other” included Wyatt,
and critics from George Puttenham onward have
coupled their names.
Surrey’s translation of Books II and IV of
the Aeneid, published in 1557 as Certain Bokes
of Virgiles Aenaeis, was the first use in
English of blank verse, a style adopted from
Italian verse.
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