In contrast to the hurly-burly of the pageant wagons in the medieval street plays, in the 21st century we might tend initially to think of accessing a text as a solitary experience, even though many public stagings of texts still occur (like cinema-goers’ experiences, for instance). In the Middle Ages, textual access could also include the effort of an individual reader, who might generally have articulated the words of the text out loud. This seems to have been the norm for the solo reader.
Nevertheless, the audience of a text—whether private or public, silent or noisy—is asked to engage with that text, to identify with or mull over the contents of the work. This is not to suggest that all textual participants have the same experience, even in the setting of a single public performance. Any individual’s reception of a text depends on many different factors including their position in the audience, or the audibility of speaker, and the knowledge, understanding, and concentration that the listener-viewer brings to bear on the experience. Authors also employ particular tactics to encourage the formation of a collective response and build a common frame of reference. The opening lines of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, written down in c.1010 (in the manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv), insist on a pre-existing body of shared knowledge among the imagined audience:
Hwæt, we Gardena in geardagum,
Listen, we heard of the Spear-Danes in olden days,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
of the glory of the people’s kings,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
how the princes performed courageous deeds.
In this opening to the poem, the performer (perhaps in dramatic mode in the hall of a noble person) encourages unity among his listeners by the use of the pronoun ‘we’ and the claim that everyone has ‘heard’ about the Spear-Danes already; everyone shares these events in tribal history and legend. In its 3,182 lines, the poem creates a world that focuses on three major encounters between Beowulf and ferocious monsters. The ethos that pervades the poem, both in the choice of vocabulary and in the narrative it constructs, is the Germanic Heroic Code of loyalty, bravery, heroism, and the giving and receiving of treasure by lord and thane (or warrior). These opening lines establish this code, anticipating the potential audience’s participation. All of this is effectively implied by ‘we’.
Beyond Beowulf and other works about the heroic individual’s role in society, it is also very common to encounter the rhetoric of inclusion when the author seeks to bring the intended audience into the text. Authors will seek agreement to win the reader or audience member over, and perhaps win promotion, acclaim, or patronage at the same time. In this, the success of a text was partly dependent on the space of performance: the appropriateness of the venue mattered. The ambience of a provincial lord’s hall might have made the dramatic rehearsal of battle-song a moment of group glory; or conversely, an elegy, lamenting the loss of a recently deceased person, could inspire some truly moving moments for the individual or group.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s elegiac Book of the Duchess was written in or just after 1369, for Henry III’s son, John of Gaunt. It commemorates John’s young wife, Blanche, who had died of the plague, though the cause is not mentioned in this formal poem. Notably, this work comes at a critical moment in the history of literary production in England, as Chaucer chose very deliberately to write his first major poem for the royal court in English, not French, which had been the language of prestige and status since the late 11th century. While the poem is a public statement of sorrow, read to an assembled group of sympathetic nobles, it is also moving and delicate, drawing inspiration from earlier writers, like the classical Latin author, Ovid, and Chaucer’s contemporary, Guillaume de Machaut, a French poet.
In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer maintains the balance between courtly decorum and personal elegy by casting the poem as a dream vision, in which the poet meets and converses with the mournful Black Knight (representing John of Gaunt), who reveals the death of his ‘lady swete, | That was so fair, so fresh, so fre’. Through the remembrance of falling in love, and the articulation of Blanche’s sweetness and nobility, the poem becomes a celebration of love, a small consolation for substantial loss, presumably delivered within the courtly context where Blanche was most well known.
A much earlier eulogistic poem praising the achievements of a well-known figure is the early and lengthy Irish Elegy for St Columba (Amra Choluim Chille), composed by St Dallan in the 6th century, though it only survives in manuscripts from the 12th century. It was read out to an assembly of Irish lords, which we learn from the author’s declaration about his motivation: that he wishes to attain heaven through the work’s public performance, and hopes, too, to promote the patronage of poets in Ireland (see Box 5). This poem is partly self-reflexive, calling attention to its own performative wonder by lauding the miraculous voice of the saint that could resound far and wide:
Son a gotha Coluim Cille
The sound of Colum Cille’s voice,
mór a binne húas cech cléir:
great was its sweetness above every company:
co cend cóic cét déc céimmend
as far away as fifteen hundred paces,
aidblib réimmend ed ba réil.
a vastness of courses, it was clear.
Rather like the story of Cædmon the cowherd, whose sudden ability to sing was a sign of God’s grace, the story of Columba’s resounding voice told to an appreciative audience of nobles could hardly disadvantage the skilful poet. That this is the miracle, too—the capacity for the saint’s voice to be heard so widely—suggests the importance of oral dissemination to medieval culture throughout Britain and Ireland, the significance of the message being heard.
Irish literature in the native language and in Latin flourished from very early in the period: Ogham inscriptions survive; and Christian legends were transmitted into manuscripts from the 8th century, attesting to the highly literate culture of the Irish. Irish influence extended far beyond the island, because of Christian missionaries on the European continent and in northern and western Britain. Poetry and prose in Irish survive in quantity from the 12th century onwards, and a good deal of the material written down in the High Middle Ages can be dated earlier, giving important evidence for the foundational stories of the Irish kingdoms. These include the great cycles of legendary and mythological texts like the Cycles of the Kings and the Fenian Cycle.
A notable piece of Irish literature is the poem Pangur Bán, written in the 9th century by an Irish monk while he was in Reichenau Abbey in south Germany. The poet addresses his cat, Pangur Bán, praising the cat’s skill at catching mice and relating that skill to his own as a scribe, who turns ‘darkness into light’ through his work. This humorous poem highlights something of the diversity of Irish literature, with its substantial sustained corpus of Christian and secular poetry and prose.
But, more privately, the witticisms and stylistic complexity of a Latin verse satirizing the church might most profitably be transmitted to a group of trained and educated persons in the scholarly setting of the university or a monastic institution. One such set of texts, which are ‘goliardic’ (belonging to the genre of satirical poems aimed against the church, and written in the 12th and 13th centuries by itinerant scholars), exists in a manuscript anthology that probably belonged to a Benedictine monk, William of Winchester, in the 13th century—London, British Library, Harley 978 (fully digitized on the British Library website). Other literary works in this manuscript include a hunting tract, medical treatises, and the music and lyrics for a Middle English song, Sumer is icumen in, with its Latin counterpart, Perspice, Christicola (‘See, O Christ’).
The manuscript also contains the important French Lais and Fables of Marie de France, an author living and writing in England in the later 12th century. The Lais, dedicated by Marie to Henry II (d. 1189) are short Arthurian narratives about chivalric love—that is, the love of knights and their ladies, containing thematic conventions such as loyalty and betrayal, disguise and revelation, and the intervention of supernatural elements. Stories of these events, or aventures, were originally composed and performed musically by Breton minstrels. Marie’s intention in putting together these Lais, such as Lanval, Yonec, and Chevrefoil, as she declares in her Prologue, was to bring life to these ancient tales. Within this single manuscript context, then, while the diverse collection of entertaining, didactic, and instructive works suggest the book was specifically made for the interests of its individual owner or primary user, a number of texts seem to demand public and even courtly performance, indicating a multitude of possible contexts of textual delivery.
In the wonderfully entertaining and deeply humorous late 12th-century work, De nugis curialium (Trifles of Courtiers), Walter Map (d. 1209/10) regales his audience of like-minded male clerics at court with a treasure-trove of legend, historical narrative, and contemporary detail that represents the wide range of knowledge an educated person could acquire. Map was a well-connected churchman from the Marches of Wales, who studied at Paris and rose to become archdeacon of Oxford. His intention in writing De nugis was apparently to inspire and inform. He likens the assiduous reader, the ‘lover of wisdom’, to a busy bee that draws something from everything it lands upon. But not so the ungodly:
non sic: sed oderunt antequam audierint, vilipendunt antequam appendant, ut sicut in sordibus sunt sordescat adhuc. Solum ex hoc placeo quod vetusta loquor. Libetne tamen nuper actis aurem dare parumper?
not so: they hate before they have heard; they disparage before they deliberate, so that as they are filthy, they become filthier still. The only merit is that I tell of ancient things. Will you please, though, for a little while, give ear to a story of recent times?
By humorously derogating the ignorant, ungodly person, whose lack of willingness to learn is likened to being filthy, Map forms a desire in his audience to be more akin to the busy learner. In this request for his listener or reader to pay attention for a little longer, Map deftly creates a respondent who can only say ‘yes’, if they wish to be among the pursuers of wisdom. Such rhetoric consolidates the relationship between writer and listener-reader, a rhetoric that wittily sought the audience’s approval and compliance, a rhetoric that persuaded.
To a greater or lesser extent, all literature seeks to engage, inform, and persuade. In order to engage an audience, a literary work has to grab the audience’s attention and reveal something worth hearing. Literature can play a significant role in shaping an audience’s thoughts, ideas, and sense of itself, and throughout the Middle Ages among the most important genres was the chronicle or history. This form of writing was important from the early medieval period onwards, as exemplified by the Latin histories of Gildas or Bede, for example. Histories help to promote a sense of identity by focusing on specific events and people that are deemed the most significant for a nation or a group with common interests. Generally, a historian’s work is denoted by an effort to tell a form of the truth, though it is seldom the case that any writing is actually objective. In the Middle Ages, in particular, as scholars recognize and debate, there is often a blurring of the boundaries between truth and fiction, between factual prose and the imaginative reconstruction of events.
We can go back to the Anglo-Saxon period momentarily to see this exemplified in the earliest manuscript of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This work was begun in the late 9th century, and, through a number of manuscript witnesses, it tells the history of England from biblical times to the middle of the 12th century. It had a diverse audience of religious and lay people and its influence was wide-ranging, as we shall see. The Chronicle gives a year-by-year account of important events, though some years are blank, and most focus is on male religious figures, kings, and noblemen. Poems are occasionally embedded within the Chronicle, forming an integral part of the usually factual framework.
Among these is The Battle of Brunanburh, an alliterative poem which tells the story of King Athelstan’s glorious victory over the Vikings, the men of the north, and the Scots in 937. Revelling in the bloodshed of the battlefield, the poet makes out of Athelstan’s victory an event of national and historical significance resounding throughout the island. He directly links the glorious Athelstan with his Anglo-Saxon settler-ancestors who destroyed the (sinful, and thus divinely punished) Welsh and took control of large parts of the island:
Never was there a greater slaughter
of people killed on this island
by the sword’s edge, even up until now
or before this, of which the books of ancient scholars
tell us; that is since from the east
the Angles and Saxons arrived up
over the broad seas to seek Britain,
proud warriors, they overcame the Welsh,
noble warriors, eager for glory, they conquered the country.
Set within the context of the Chronicle’s prose annals, The Battle of Brunanburh is framed by the achievements of Athelstan’s reign in its entirety (924–40). This poem has distinctive nationalistic overtones, seeking to unite and to promote a sense of the shared triumphant destiny of the English in the 10th century. It certainly shows these 10th-century Anglo-Saxons were keenly aware of their historical past. Within the Chronicle, though, this past is intermingled with fiction, too, creating for these early medieval kings of England an ancestry that went back to the Bible, but via the mythical Woden, the mythical Beaw, Noah, and Adam.
Such ancient origins for the English kings not only validated their right to the throne, but also sacralized it: they ruled with a traceable inheritance of more than thirty generations to the original divinely created man. Obviously preposterous, such originary myths nevertheless bolstered the monarchy in turbulent times, and helped to consolidate the dynasty. Other originary myths encouraging a cohesive national or tribal identity and enhancing pride in the achievements and prowess of ancestors are produced throughout medieval Europe. Such stories were passed on orally for hundreds of years—memorized and retold: embellished, expanded, and eventually written down for posterity.
The Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), one version of which is written down in the 12th century Lebor Laignech (Book of Leinster), refers to very early Celtic society, via these multiple retellings over the centuries. It relates the story of an attempt by Queen Medb to acquire the famous Brown Bull of Cooley, so she can equal the possessions of her husband, King Ailill. There follows a complex sequence of events that pitch warriors of Medb’s kingdom of Connacht against other warriors from throughout Ireland. The bull is eventually acquired for Medb, but in the process some of the most heroic fighters from all sides are killed, including the Ulsterman Cú Chulainn—the greatest hero of them all, descended from a god. This heroic tale, like others from Irish and shared Scottish literature, and like stories from early England and Wales in the period, focuses a great deal on the customs and ways of life of a society that is far earlier than the date of the work’s survival in writing, suggesting how important to the Irish the transmission of this early culture was for their own sense of themselves and their history.
As the Middle Ages progressed, these national narratives develop into fuller histories from the 12th century onwards. This later period also sees the evolution of chivalric and historical romance, when heroes are knights who undertake tasks for the sake of love and pursue spiritual and personal growth through individual achievement. In the simplest terms, this is in contrast to the more social and communal ethos of the warrior in earlier heroic poetry and prose. Where, for example, Beowulf fights to save his entire nation from a fire-breathing dragon, in the late 14th-century courtly romance by Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, the two knightly protagonists fight for the hand of the beautiful Emelye. The Knight’s Tale is set in Athens in classical times (a ‘Matter of Rome’ romance) and is based on the Teseida, written by the Italian poet Boccaccio in c.1341. Chaucer’s lengthy narrative begins with the claim that the Tale is composed ‘as olde stories tellen us’ (‘as old histories tell us’), providing authenticity for his story and lending an air of truth to his fiction.
In a similar manner, medieval historians themselves recounted the deeds of kings and bishops in full narratives, fleshing out sparse factual detail with imagined dialogue, and stories of relevant legends and myths. Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (History of England), which ends with events in 1154, drew upon all manner of sources in its composition, including ecclesiastical documents, poetry, other chronicles, and saints’ lives. This amalgamation of different kinds of source materials of originally varying perspective and intended function illustrates something very interesting about medieval literature; namely, the permeability of genres and the flexibility of composition.
The 12th century thus saw the burgeoning of the romance, a major genre with multiple sub-genres, which quickly established itself as a favourite of the aristocracy, especially from the reign of Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. The courtly romance—with its attention to love, fellowship, loyalty, generosity, and piety of the chivalric knightly code—was cultivated by the French royalty and noble families in Britain and Ireland in the High Middle Ages, and provided a certain audience for narratives of knightly deeds and tales of pure love. Romance often used historical or pseudo-historical figures from real and imagined past cultures to demonstrate then-contemporary ideals, providing moral instruction through positive example and assisting in creating a sense of shared identity and shared values among the audience.
Romance protagonists demonstrated the aspirations of actual courtly life; and some of the greatest heroes in medieval literature emerge at this time, such as Lancelot, Gawain, Horn, and Guy of Warwick, and, the most inspiring of all heroes—King Arthur (all ‘Matter of Britain’ romance protagaonists). From the middle of the 12th century onwards, this appropriation of British historical figures into French, Latin, and English poetry and prose is part of a larger pattern of the recasting of history, legend, and myth into new narrative forms. These texts were read and understood in a broader cultural context of multilingualism, settlement, and regional or national interests. Surviving texts from legislation to charters and histories at this time suggest efforts to codify and structure new societies that were emerging as a result of conquest, most dramatically exemplified by the Normans’ Conquest of England in 1066, and their subsequent efforts to colonize the Irish and the Welsh. From the later 12th to the early 16th centuries, British and Irish societies embraced multilingualism, innovative forms of literary expression, new administrative processes, the foundation of chartered towns, the rise of the merchant classes, the institutionalization of the church and its methods of pastoral care, new religious orders, and the gradual development of complex literacies. Such was the transformation of later medieval culture.
In Wales, writing in Welsh in the 12th and 13th centuries was diverse, but much of it effectively created a sense of national identity, even while other languages were in use in Wales—from the Latin of churchmen and women, to the French of the nobility, and the English of many, particularly along the Marches. Rather like the emergence in 12th-century Ireland of some of the major manuscripts containing Irish texts, so too, in the same period of colonization by the Normans, Welsh works of literature, old and new, emulative and innovative, emerged in writing.
It is to the post-Conquest period (1066–1200) that the Four Branches of the Mabinogi can be dated, as well as the Brut y Tywysogion (Chronicle of the Princes); and some of the greatest poetry in medieval Welsh. A family of court poets that flourished at this time were Meilyr Brydydd ap Mabon (1081–1137), his son Gwalchmai ap Meilyr, and his sons Meilyr ap Gwalchmai and Einion. All were the poets of princes, rewarded by their aristocratic patrons for the work that they created. In this, they are part of a larger group of poets known as Y Gogynfeirdd. Their concerns are praise of those whose courts they inhabit, concern for their own souls, appreciation of their country and the traditions in which they work, and the deliberate nurturing of a collective identity distinctively Welsh.
An author whose work illustrates the difficulties of using terms like ‘national’ or even ‘regional identity’ in this period is the Welsh-Norman eminent churchman and scholar Gerald of Wales, or Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1223). His two most famous Latin works are journeys through Wales and Ireland. In 1185, he accompanied Prince John (later King John) on an expedition to Ireland, which he then described in his Topographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland). The Itinerarium Cambriae (Itinerary through Wales), which he wrote in 1191, detailed his journey with Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, when they attempted to drum up support for the Third Crusade.
In these works, the dynamics of a mixed heritage, a climate of conquest, and the views of an erudite man about those less learned come to the fore. These are tempered by a keen wit and keen eye, and, in the case of writing on his own Welsh land and people, Gerald clearly does identify with some of what he sees some of the time. But he is also discerning in his literate sensibilities, sufficient to give us an insight into contemporary poetry and national literate cultures with their own modes of composing. It is perhaps at this time that the expression of difference begins to be analysed and confidently stated. Indeed, so significant are Gerald’s observations, since he makes important distinctions as well as comparisons, that it is worth giving the full flavour of what he has to say in the Itinerary Book I, Chapter xii:
In their narrative poems and their formal speeches [the Welsh] are so inventive and ingenious that they produce works of art when using their native tongue that are at once wonderful and very original, both in the words and the sentiments expressed. Thus one will find many poets in Wales, whom they call bards … They delight in alliteration in preference to any other rhetorical device, and especially the kind which links together the first letters or syllables of words … Here are two examples in Welsh:
Dychaun Dyu da dy unic.
God will provide comfort for the lonely man.
Erbyn dibuilh puilh paraut.
Guard yourself against evil desire.
Here are three in English:
God is togedere gamen and wisdom.
Entertainment and wisdom are good together.
Ne hat nocht al sor isaid, ne al sorghe atwite.
There is nothing to be had by uttering every sorrow, or blaming others for misfortune.
Betere is red thene rap, and liste thene lither streignthe.
Being prepared is better than haste and caution than misplaced strength.
… This device of alliteration does not occur in any other language that I know of as much as it is in English and Welsh. It is surprising, indeed, that French, which is so well adorned in other respects, should never make full use of this particular one, whereas other languages have so entirely adopted it. I cannot believe that the Welsh and the English, so different and antagonistic to each other, could ever have consciously agreed in the use of this rhetorical figure.
Gerald’s provision of this information in his Itinerary is useful and important in a number of ways. He demonstrates, first of all, his own high level of learning and literary understanding. Despite writing in Latin throughout all of his oeuvre, here, and elsewhere, he acknowledges the existence and value of the various major written vernaculars in play in his own lifetime: French, Welsh, English, and indeed, he talks about northern England, where the language was influenced by Danish and Norwegian. More than this, though, he makes explicit literary difference, as exemplified through language and style, a difference that can be drawn along national and regional lines. Part of what makes identity important here, then, is that we learn more about who we are by understanding who we are not.
Gerald explicitly wants his audience to see and understand the ways in which poetic traditions and rhetoric can be allied to national literary forms that, for the English and Welsh who are normally at odds, function through shared alliterative patterning. The English poetic style that he chooses to demonstrate is not the English that would dominate in the 13th century—verse that rhymed, influenced by the French tradition; but, rather, the English of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. And these are verse-lines, some extracted from larger works, that might most pertinently be thought of as somewhat proverbial, idiomatic, with a gnomic function; that is, they are embedded in popular literary culture, well-known universal truths—common sense, as we might think of it.
Literary identities forged through language, but also style of composition, retained great significance throughout the later medieval period, particularly because Britain and Ireland were not just multilingual, but, within that, multidialectal, too. In England after the 12th century, the native Old English language began to change dramatically, partly because of the influx of French, Latin, and, to a lesser extent, Scandinavian loanwords; and partly because scribal training in a standardized English writing no longer happened. Spelling, word choice, and grammar, rather than being a kind of authorized version like late West Saxon, became instead more dependent on the personal choices of author and scribe, heavily influenced by the forms particular to regions of a writer or scribe’s origin. At the same time, regular French language use increased during the 13th and 14th centuries to include not just the aristocracy and educated elite, but also the emergent bourgeoisie and merchant classes (see Box 6).
Middle English flourished in the 14th and 15th centuries, but notable texts were composed as early as c.1170, when the penitential verse, Poema morale, was written. By 1200, the standard literary language (late West Saxon) had broken down, and English texts from the 13th to the 15th centuries are written in the dialect of their authors and scribes, so spelling and vocabulary tend to vary considerably.
From 1170, verse had multiple metrical forms, including rhyme, often influenced by French. Many notable poetic and prose works survive from this highly dynamic multilingual and multicultural time in English literary production, and authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and Thomas Malory are especially important. As was typical of the period, authors built on the works of earlier authorities; Layamon’s early 13th-century chronicle, Brut, adapted the work of earlier writers in Latin (Geoffrey of Monmouth) and French (Wace) to tell the poetic history of Britain, founded by Brutus of Troy. As literacy increased, personal compendia of poetry and prose illustrate the extension of manuscript production from the ecclesiastical institution into the nobility’s households. Large numbers of religious tracts, books of sermons, histories, and romances are among the many texts created during this rich period of literary production.
Added to this linguistic fluidity was the preference in specific regions for particular forms of poetry; that is, regionalization of literature became an important and notable feature of English in the later part of the Middle Ages. So, for example, poetry known as tail-rhyme verse was popular in the East Anglian region of England in the 14th and 15th centuries. The opening of the 15th-century poem Athelston, which is a romance set in a fictionalized world of the Anglo-Saxons, shows this kind of tail-rhyme where the rhyme scheme is aabccb:
Lord, þat is off myƺtys most,
Lord, that is of mightiness most,
Fadyr and sone and holy gost,
Father and son and holy ghost.
Bryng us out off synne.
Bring us out of sin.
And lene us grace so forto wyrke
And grant us grace so that we work
To love boþe God and holy kyrke,
To love both God and holy church,
Þat we may hevene wynne.
That we may heaven win.
In contrast to this rhyme scheme in the east, non-rhyming alliterative verse dominated in the west and north of England, in an arguably unbroken tradition from the Anglo-Saxon period. Other, newer forms of poetry were also developed in parallel, like the octosyllabic rhyming couplets (eight syllable lines paired through rhyme) of the Nun of Barking’s French La Vie d’Édouard le confesseur, or the later Rhyme Royal of Chaucer’s major romance, Troilus and Criseyde.
So it is that by the later 14th century, what had once been a fairly consistent style and dialect of English literary production had become diverse in terms of sound, spelling, vocabulary, and poetic style. When English became firmly re-established as a major chosen literary medium (having been subordinated to French and Latin) around the reign of Richard II (d. 1399), what appeared could be identified by dialect. Thus, the three greatest English poetic works of the High Middle Ages—Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman—while roughly contemporary, are yet very different to look at and to read.
A number of versions of the long religious and didactic poem known as Piers Plowman exist, written over many years of effort by a certain William Langland in the 1360s to, perhaps, the late 1380s. The poem concerns the search for Truth (God) by the protagonist and dreamer, Will, who represents Everyman. He has an innovative sequence of dream visions in which he encounters real and allegorical characters on his journey, including the king and his court, Conscience, Reason, and a ploughman named Piers. The poem itself is set in the west of England, and is written in alliterative verse, with two half-lines linked by stressed syllables which begin with the same sound: <s> in line 1 below, <sh> in line 2, <h> in line 3, and so on. The effect of this is that, in great lines of poetry (and Piers Plowman is great poetry), the sound of the alliterating syllables generally supports and helps to emphasize and reinforce the meaning. In this spring opening then, a reverdie in literary terms, the softly articulated consonants help set a peaceful, contemplative scene, only broken in line 6 by the more abrasive repetition of <f>.
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
In a summer season, when the sun was soft,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
I dressed myself as if I were a shepherd
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes;
In the outfit of a hermit, unholy in deeds;
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
I went widely through this world to hear marvels.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
But on a May morning in the Malvern Hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of fairye me thoghte.
I had a vision; it seemed to be otherworldly.
In another contemporary text by an anonymous author, alliterative verse is also used. This text is the 2,530-line, four-part Arthurian romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which survives uniquely in London, British Library, Cotton Nero A. x. It was probably written for the household of a noble person somewhere in the northwest of England towards the end of the 14th century, and it is one of the most compelling and action-packed poems of any period. The form of this poem, while alliterative, is designed around a stanza, which ends with a short bob and a four-line wheel; the bob generally contains matter of great significance. What is also notable about Sir Gawain and the three poems in the same manuscript (Patience, Cleanness, and Pearl) is how different its dialect is from Piers Plowman or from Chaucer’s English; this is partly due to a much higher percentage of the vocabulary in Sir Gawain being of Scandinavian, or Old Norse, origin. This makes it, on an initial reading, quite difficult to access now, since a great deal of the vocabulary has died out. Lines 134–40 in Fitt (Part) 1 begin with the quietening down of Arthur’s court at Camelot as the New Year celebratory feast is served. As the knights and their ladies eat their meal, there is a sudden interruption:
For uneþe watz þe noyce not a whyle sesed,
For hardly had the noise been ceased a moment,
And þe fyrst cource in þe court kyndely served,
And the first course of the meal in the court politely served,
Þer hales in at þe halle dor an aghlich mayster,
When there rushes in at the hall door a fearsome lord,
On þe most on þe molde on mesure hyghe;
One of the biggest on the earth in measure of height;
Fro þe swyre to þe swange so sware and so þik,
From the neck to the middle so sturdy and thick-set
And his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete,
And his loins and his limbs so long and so great
Half-etayn in erde I hope þat he were.
That half-giant on earth I believed that he could be.
Not only is this half-giant terrifyingly huge, fearsome, and impolite in breaking into the feast, but, as the poem’s audience quickly learns, he is also green from head to toe and he is riding a green horse. The poem’s focus on identity is more than literary here: who belongs to the world of the human and who does not? How does a community deal with antagonistic interlopers? What happens when the ethics and the mores of an entire system like the chivalric code with its courtly ideals cannot be maintained? This poem, like many others in the languages of later medieval Britain and Ireland, seeks through entertainment and instruction to address these key social and cultural questions.