Introduction: endings and beginnings

Medieval literature in Britain and Ireland spans over a thousand years from the Fall of Rome in c.410 ce to the shifting tides of the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries. This millennium-long period is marked by conversion, conquest, crusade, and cultural innovation, all of which dramatically influenced the literature that emerged, leaving us with a rich and fascinating textual legacy.

At the beginning of the 5th century, Rome fell to the attacking Visigoths sweeping down into Italy from the north. This heralded the gradual demise of one of the greatest empires in world history. The Roman Empire, which at its apogee extended from Northern England to Egypt and the Caspian Sea to the Iberian Peninsula, had become Christian in the 4th century under the emperor Constantine; where countries were subject to imperial rule, Christianity was declared the official religion. Within a century, though, Christianity was under pressure from polytheism, like the northern tribes’ veneration of Germanic and Norse gods, and within the next few centuries, Islam began its push across the southern and western Mediterranean.

Britain during these centuries was always at least partly Christian: after the Roman garrisons were called back to Rome in the early 5th century, those parts of Britain that had been under Roman rule remained essentially Christian, until the pagan Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, who came from modern day northern Germany, Denmark, and the Low Countries, displaced the indigenous Christian Celts. In the preceding 500 years, though, during its heyday, Rome and its citizens had produced a vast body of literature—both Christian and secular—whose influence has never really waned subsequently; moreover, the Empire had provided a social, military, and administrative coherence to much of Europe and the Mediterranean that is still evident in its material remains from Hadrian’s Wall to the ancient cities of Antioch and Marseilles. The decline of Rome effectively led to the fragmentation of Europe, during which time peoples migrated, new nation states were formed, and vernacular languages, like English, German, French, and Spanish eventually took on separate identities that were recorded in writing for the first time from the 7th to the 12th centuries.

The British Isles—that is, the modern Republic of Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the smaller islands all around the coast—have complex political and historical stories to tell. For Britain specifically, the centuries immediately following the decline of the Roman Empire gave rise to the countries now defined as Wales, Scotland, and England. During the 5th century, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, who had initially been invited to assist local kings in the Celts’ internecine wars, decided to stay and were joined by others. There was no peaceful rapprochement between these settlers and the Celts, who were pushed back from all parts of Britain to the western fringes of the island. They went on to form the dominant population of Wales (the term itself derived from ‘wealas’, Old English ‘wealh’ denoting a ‘foreigner, a Celt’), Cornwall, and Brittany.

The Anglo-Saxon invader-settlers formed a variety of kingdoms, and it was not until about the 10th century that England, as we now know it, was established (see Figure 1). Even then, from the late 8th century, there was also the tricky issue of the Vikings to deal with. These Norsemen first invaded in 793, but ultimately settled in the east and north of England, west Wales, eastern Ireland, and parts of Scotland. Indeed, Scotland itself also emerged from competing rivalries—here, chiefly among the Picts, the Scotti, and the English—and faced numerous other tumultuous events into the later Middle Ages.

1. Map of early Britain.

These territorial and political struggles for control in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland continued throughout the medieval period, too, though by the 11th century, the boundaries of the countries involved were well established. The Scandinavian Conquest under Cnut in 1016, and the Norman Conquest by William in October 1066, brought notable change to England’s government immediately, though the Norman settlement had, over time, a major impact on all areas of Britain and Ireland, and all facets of culture and society.

In these centuries, Britain and Ireland witnessed important innovation, from the establishment of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews, to the emergence of new religious orders, like the Cistercians and the Dominican and Franciscan Friars. Literacy and bureaucracy increased with each passing century, and urbanization brought about the development of a professional middle class. Trade and travel became more common as the decades progressed, and scholarly and international exchange was part of this process. Towards the end of the medieval period (which came earlier in continental Europe than in the British Isles), composing literature could be a profession for some, with notable authors like the Italians Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio making a particularly notable contribution to developing secularized literature. The gradual emergence of Parliament in England, and wholesale shifts in the economy, directly affected by catastrophic events like the Black Death in the 14th century, meant that society in the later Middle Ages had been dramatically altered from that of some 400 years earlier.

The Dark Ages

Medieval Literature is not solely born of a warrior-obsessed Dark Ages. Indeed, a ‘dark’ age suggests dimness, a hiatus in high culture, and a lack of accomplishment. Coined first by Italian Renaissance scholars, like Petrarch, to indicate the enlightenment brought about by the re-emergence of classical learning in their 14th- and 15th-century world, the metaphor of the ‘Dark Ages’ went on to be used, unhelpfully, to describe some or all of the period between the 5th and 15th centuries, when, it was thought, classical learning was subordinated—suppressed even. This is not an accurate view of the period; neither is the modern disparaging use of the word ‘medieval’ helpful. These unfavourable labels cannot be applied realistically to an entire millennium, nor do they represent the period and its peoples.

Considering the medieval period as a whole means being able to scan the immense variety and complexity of literary production in its fullness, a fullness that includes multiple languages (including Cornish, English, French, Irish, Latin, Old Norse, Welsh), many thousands of manuscripts and inscribed textual objects, and very different cultures of literacy. Manuscripts exist from the British Isles as early as the 7th century, but even these texts were pre-empted by runic, Ogham, and Pictish inscriptions on various artefacts. The runic alphabet, the Germanic fuþorc (named after the initial six characters), belonged to the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic tribes before the Anglo-Saxons settled on the island of Britain. This alphabet consisted of about thirty graphs shaped ideally for carving. Each of these both had its own meaning and represented a sound. Thus, þ, a character that was adopted into the Old English writing system, represented <th> and is called ‘thorn’, which means precisely that—‘thorn’. Another graph, ƿ, called wynn, was used in Old English writings to represent the modern graph <w>, and wynn itself means ‘joy’.

Runic writing was associated not only with literacy, but also a meditative sensibility, a wisdom that reflected the specialized access of only a very few people to reading and writing. To be able to read, and then to write, implied a high level of education that necessarily set those skilled in these arts apart from the vast majority of others. This is true in all literature cultures, including early Celtic societies in Wales, Ireland, the southwest of England, Scotland and the Isle of Man. There, Ogham script dating from about the 4th century onwards was used to record Irish and British texts in sequences of linear strokes or dots carved individually across and down a central vertical line. Some Ogham stones are, rather helpfully, bilingual and include Latin alongside the Ogham script, which helps as an interpretation aid. Most of these objects inscribe names of people together with some brief details about the land of these people or their lineage. People’s desire to leave some record of having existed here in this world is often the impetus for the earliest writings, as true in terms of inscription on stone and bone markers and objects as it is for fully-fledged ‘literature’ a few hundred years later.

Early literary issues

‘Literature’, derived from Latin ‘litteratura’ meaning ‘use, or systems, of writing’, is represented in its earliest British and Irish forms in these signs of the Ogham and Runic inscriptions. The function and meaning of many such inscriptions are mysterious, but no less ‘literary’ for that. One is a very famous 8th-century rectangular whalebone casket called the Franks Casket, discovered in the 19th century and now in the British Museum, though one panel is in Florence. On this box, illustrative scenes carved in relief are framed by lines of runes and roman letters.

Made in Northumbria, the Franks Casket raises issues that can illuminate the literary Middle Ages as a whole. The casket’s juxtaposition of the legendary Germanic smith, Weland, on the left-hand side of the front panel with the birth of Christ on the right might have reminded viewers of the conversion of some of the Germanic peoples from paganism to Christianity. This took place in parts of Northern Europe, beginning for the Anglo-Saxons at the end of the 6th century (remembering, though, that the British and Irish Celts had been Christian since the 4th century). From the perspective of the Franks Casket as a whole object, the runic and roman letters carved around the panels in a mixture of Old English and Latin show the richness, multilingualism, and complexity of this early literary culture.

On another scale, the Ruthwell Cross, made around 700 ce, is a monumental preaching cross, now preserved inside Ruthwell Church, near Dumfries in Scotland (see Figure 2). This area was originally part of Anglo-Saxon England in the early medieval period, and this cross has carved panels that show a combination of Christian and Germanic cultures, including Christ trampling the beasts, Mary Magdalene attending to Christ, Saints Anthony and Paul, and vine-scrolls. Runic and roman alphabet inscriptions frame some of these scenes, and a remarkable runic inscription is written around some panels, with words that herald the longer, 10th-century Old English poem about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection—The Dream of the Rood. These runes tell of a courageous Christ, ready to ascend the Cross to redeem mankind: ‘geredæ hinæ God almehttig | þa he walde of galgu gistiga | modig fore allæ men’ (‘God almighty stripped himself, | when he wanted to climb the Cross, | brave before all men’). On the Ruthwell Cross, we see the combination of image and word, Germanic rune and Christian subject, anonymous authors and artists, public communal text and demand for personal contemplation. These components illustrate aspects of literary production that remain throughout the medieval period, though in different combinations at different times.

This was a period of gradual change, then; of long-lived traditions like those around the pagan Germanic polytheistic religion coming into direct contact with the powerful Christian mission. Very few people were literate, but the letters familiar to those who were educated had prestige and power. Literary and artistic production in the Middle Ages was often the responsibility of monasteries and those associated with the church, but it is seldom known when or where a good number of the surviving texts and objects were made, or, indeed, by whom or for whom they were created. Authors are more often than not anonymous, the audiences unknowable, and inherited learning—‘auctoritee’ (‘authority’)—immensely significant. As a result, the literary remains we do have are almost always a challenge and can be quite difficult to interpret. Like the damaged Ruthwell Cross, many of the medieval texts that have been left to modern readers are incomplete or fragmentary; some exist only in copies made much later; some are known to have existed, but are now lost. But, that said, all is not lost; plenty of textual relics survive.

2. The Ruthwell Cross.

The big questions

From the beginnings of the medieval period, the same big questions that all of humanity asks play a major role in the composition of poetry, prose, and drama. Despite the foreignness of early languages, and the occasional distance created by social and political mores no longer seen in our contemporary world, the familiarity of the subject matter of medieval literature underpins much of the literary composition: the need to declare victory and praise those in power, to mourn loss, to enact laws; the desire to utter truths and acquire wisdom; the urge to express love or hatred.

Writers, from the unknown poet(s) of the Ruthwell Cross to the most famous of authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, in his magisterial 14th-century romance Troilus and Criseyde, showed through their literary creations that the things of this world are transient, mutable, uncertain, and that humans pass through this world in the blink of an eye. What, then, is life for? What purpose do humans serve? How can those in power seek to control those around them? How do we attain peace, salvation? How can we strive to live a meaningful life? Literature of the Middle Ages addresses these questions through a variety of genres in a multitude of languages and forms.

Box 1 Welsh literature

While very few early texts survive before c.1100, the evidence that does exist from later manuscripts suggests that the earliest works in Welsh, attributable to Taliesin and Aneirin, might be dated to the 6th century. Welsh authors wrote in Latin throughout the period: Gildas is the first known writer; and Nennius’ 9th-century Historia Brittonum (containing the primary reference to King Arthur), for example, provides initial evidence for a literary tradition in Wales. Welsh poems of the later 9th or early 10th centuries are recorded in the margins of a Latin verse version of the Gospels; and the remains of englynion (Welsh verse) also survive in the upper margin of a stunning manuscript of Augustine’s De Trinitate made in the 11th century.

After the 12th century, Welsh texts survive in many manuscripts. Welsh poetry flourished in the High Middle Ages, patronized, and also written, by princes and the gentry. Among the most famous poets are Dafydd ap Gwilym and Iolo Goch. Welsh prose in many genres exists, too, including prophecies, histories, lawcodes, and romances. Perhaps the most famous medieval work is the set of texts known as the Mabinogion, which relates the mythological history of the Celts.

For Siôn Cent, a 15th-century Welsh poet (see Box 1), life is concerned with appreciating how transitory all earthly things are and yet how glorious the heroes or infamous the sinners of the past. ‘Mae’r byd oll? Mawr bu dwyllwr’ he states (‘Where’s all the world? It’s been a deceiver’) in his poem, Hud a Lliw y Byd (The Illusion of this World). He asks of all the great subjects of literature: Where’s Adam? Where’s Arthur, Alexander, Guinevere, Vivien, Herod, Charlemagne, King Richard, Owain, Brutus?

Felly’r byd hwn, gwn ganwaith,

That’s this world, I know it well,

hud a lliw, nid gwiw ein gwaith.

magic and colour; our work’s of no avail.

For Siôn Cent, the only certainty and value to life is the maintenance of a keen eye on the afterlife, on learning to concentrate not on worldly goods and the acquisition of knowledge or splendour, but on being faithful and loyal to God. While this pervasive religious core that inspires so much of the literature produced in the Middle Ages can be tricky for modern readers, it should be considered one of the ways in which medieval people tried to understand and fathom their place in the world. The same desire to know the meaning of life and how we fit in with this world around us is yet an unbroken thread connecting all humanity. It is a desire expressed in riddles and elegies, sermons and morality plays, romances and histories, and it is to an explication of these that we now turn.