Chapter 4

Individual and community

Collective ideals

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman, contemporary late 14th-century poems that are widely studied still, the poets examine how the individual represents and espouses the values of their society. Sir Gawain is a great Arthurian romance derived, in part, from Celtic and French literary tradition and English originary myth claiming the foundation of Britain through Brutus, whose ancestor was Aeneas. Gawain represents the court of King Arthur in his arduous solo quest to find the Green Knight. His shield, painted with a pentangle and an image of the Virgin Mary, reminds Gawain and the poem’s audience of the significance of the chivalric values of ‘fraunchyse’, ‘felawschyp’, ‘cortaysye’, ‘pité’, and ‘clannes’ (‘generosity’, ‘fellowship’, ‘courtesy’, ‘piety’, and ‘cleanness’ or ‘purity’), and of a life lived while adhering resolutely to Christian virtues.

As the representative of the court of Arthur, it is Gawain’s duty to uphold the whole community’s value-system, and to reinforce it through his actions. Among the many foci of the poem is the issue of whether or not Gawain maintains his integrity, or, at least, whether his desire to save his own life by concealing a truth is sufficient to undo him as the epitome of the chivalric code. The poem demands the engagement and judicious response of an informed audience familiar with the courtly mores under scrutiny; a demand that is also required of a 21st-century audience.

What Sir Gawain and the Green Knight illustrates, too, is the poet’s interest in the single, thinking man. Gawain’s actions are certainly knightly; he defends King Arthur’s honour when he comes forward in court to meet the challenge of an exchange of axe-blows offered by the Green Knight (the Beheading Game). He decapitates the Green Knight, who promptly (and both alarmingly and hilariously) picks up his head and rides out of court, reminding Gawain to find and meet him a year hence. Gawain sets out courageously on his quest for the Green Knight from whom he must receive an axe-stroke in return. But Gawain’s actions are not necessarily unflinchingly heroic as the story unfolds. He stays at a castle, hosted by a knight, Bertilak (whose magical alter ego is the Green Knight), and we are shown something of Gawain’s fallibility when he seeks to protect his life by keeping a girdle with supposed magical powers given to him by the wife of his host. As the Green Knight gets ready to bring down the axe on the neck of the kneeling Gawain, the poet reveals the absolute humanness of the knight:

Bot Gawayn on þat giserne glyfte hym bysyde

But Gawain on that battle-axe glanced sideways

As hit com glydande adoun on glode hym to schende,

As it came gliding down in a flash to destroy him,

And schranke a lytel with þe schulderes for þe scharp yrne.

And shrank a little with his shoulders from the sharp steel.

The swiftness of this sequence (emphasized and supported by the alliterating syllables) reveals a knight in fear for his life, an insight into an individual response that is entirely understandable. Easy to empathize with, too, perhaps, is Gawain’s shame when he is caught out and called a coward by the Green Knight, who knows that his wife gave Gawain the girdle. But this individual shame that Gawain feels is dismissed by Arthur’s court when Gawain returns and tells his story, showing them the girdle—his ‘token of untrawþe’ (‘token of infidelity’) that he now wears permanently. His fellow courtiers see instead his courage and true virtue in taking on and surviving the challenge of the Green Knight and take it as an honour to the court and the ethos of the Round Table. They thus adopt the girdle as a token of their collective support for Gawain, recognizing in the valiant actions of the individual the renown of the community.

Many other medieval romances highlight the actions of individual knights working on behalf of their community through the solo quest. Anglo-Norman families in the later 12th and 13th centuries seemed particularly keen on stories that spoke to them of England as they sought to establish their new English heritage. The community depicted in some of these romances (like Lai d’Haveloc or Havelock the Dane and Boeve or Bevis of Hampton) could be an entire kingdom. This is the case in the 13th-century Middle English poem King Horn, adapted from a now-lost French poem, which must itself have been related to one of the best surviving insular French poems, the Roman de Horn (Romance of Horn), written around 1170 by a certain Thomas.

Horn, as a king in search of vengeance for the death of his father and loss of his kingdom, travels overseas with his group of dedicated followers, a small band of trusted warriors who are similar to the Germanic Heroic comitatus (lord’s troop of warriors) from the earlier medieval period. He helps another king in battles against enemies, and falls in love with the king’s daughter. To prove himself, Horn alone undertakes his exploits and hand-to-hand combat against treacherous opponents and giant antagonists, and after journeying from place to place, and rescuing his beloved from an enforced marriage, he regains his country, dividing all the spoils among his most faithful comrades. The poem represents an effective commingling of the epic—with its grand scale and geography of the text—and the romantic, with the love interest, and the themes of exile and return, loyalty and betrayal.

Horn is always instantly recognizable to those he encounters as a noble and heroic character, because he is beautiful; and the action of this poem is rapidly told, particularly in the English version where there is sparse detail and little character delineation. This early romance essentially demonstrates the ideal hero’s resilient engagement with villainous enemies (such as the gigantic Saracens, typical villains in the French poetic ‘songs of deeds’, the chansons de geste). In these narratives with the happy ending necessary in romance, virtue eventually defeats vice; nobility of character and courageous action is victorious over evil. Evil takes the form of the non-Christian in these romances, such that the aspirations of a religiously inspired Christian community are embodied in the pious efforts of the knight.

The 12th century, then, sees a very important literary-cultural shift from the Germanic Heroic demonstrations of lordly treasure-giving, absolute loyalty between lord and comitatus, and public declarations and acts of bravery, to the more privately motivated individual quests of knights, who fight for their king, certainly, but also for the love of a lady. The audience were entertained and educated through these poems; their aspirations and desires are reflected in them, too. These romances’ emphases on the knightly, the chivalric, and love are inspired predominantly by French literature—the songs and stories of the itinerant troubadour (southern French) or trouvère (northern) as they were adapted into longer narrative form.

One of the most famous continental romance writers was Chrétien de Troyes, a French trouvère, who was associated with the court of Marie de Champagne, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Chrétien built on the fundamentally important Arthurian legend established earlier in the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth. This was the first work to establish the legend of Arthur and to create the myth of the foundation of Britain by Brutus, descendant of Aeneas. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work was adapted into French by the Plantagenet court poet Wace in the 1150s. It was Wace who introduced the Round Table into the narrative.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, among others, initiated the immensely significant literary tradition of the Arthurian tale that was taken up by Chrétien around the 1170s, when his highly influential cycle included Yvain, Perceval, Lancelot, and Eric and Enide. These Arthurian romances appeared to have particular purchase in royal courtly circles in France and England at first, but the genre of romance more generally became highly popular in the context of noble families. These families included regional baronial households, the homes of nobles, and, increasingly, the homes of wealthy professionals within the context of rapidly developing urbanization. Any one or more of these audiences might have been happy to receive the early 13th-century version of Arthur’s story written in English by Layamon, and included in his adventure-packed alliterative poem, the Brut.

On proper conduct

Some of the Welsh prose texts regarded as part of the collection known as the Mabinogi (or Mabinogion, as their 19th-century editor, Charlotte Guest, called them) share at least a common source with Chretien de Troyes’s work. In the Welsh tradition, the Three Romances (Y Tair Rhamant)—Owain, Peredur, and Geraint and Enid—are a subset of the group of eleven stories that nowadays form the Mabinogi, datable to the later 11th and 12th centuries. Single stories exist in six different manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts, the earliest of which is from the second half of the 13th century; that is, much later than the probable dates of the prose works’ original, oral compositions. These anonymous narratives have different authors, and they relate legends about Welsh kings and princes and their families, who must deal with various opponents and troubles, some involving magic and the otherworld.

The lively and sometimes complicated plots instruct the audience in patience, perseverance, and self-reliance. Some of them, such as the Four Branches, focus on a variety of protagonists from Wales, England, and Ireland, with legendary and mythical elements that are ancient, told and retold by the keepers of stories, the cyfarwyddyd. One character—Pryderi—appears in all Four Branches. In the first branch, he is the son born to Pwyll, lord of Dyfed, and Rhiannon, the ‘Great Queen’. Pryderi disappears on the night of his birth, and is found and brought up by others, only to be restored in adulthood to his parents, his mother having been accused of murder at his disappearance. In the second branch, he is one of the warriors who survives conflict between the British and the Irish kings, Bran and Matholwch. In the third, Pryderi and his mother fight a sequence of enchantments, overcoming all manner of obstacles; and in the fourth branch, Pryderi dies in a war between Welsh kingdoms. He seems to have been, perhaps like Arthur himself, an early Welsh hero, who makes appearances in texts other than the Mabinogi, such as the Book of Taliesin, and the Spoils of Annwn.

The catalogue poem Englynion y Beddau (Verses of the Graves) lists where Wales’s great heroes are buried and one of them is Pryderi. It is contained in the mid-13th-century Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (Black Book of Carmarthen, digitized in full as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 1). Arthur also appears among this group of Welsh warrior elite, along with Pryderi, King of Dyfed, and Gwallwg, an early Welsh warrior, nephew of Caradwc:

En Aber Gwenoli y mae bet Pryderi

At Aber Gwenoli is the grave of Pryderi

yny terev tonnev tir:

where the waves beat against the land;

yg Karrauc bet Gwallauc Hir.

at Carrawg is the grave of Gwallawg Hir.

Perhaps this list of the ‘graves of the great’ functions more poignantly than a lengthy romance narrative? The grave ties the legendary hero to the land and makes the legend real: an embodiment of ancient steadfastness and courage that can be visited and marked. The Verses of the Graves, with its long list of short englynion, operates as a kind of incantation to call up collective memories; a piling up of the splendour of the dead who rest, remembered, among the living. The single scribe of Peniarth 1, who may have been an Augustinian canon at Carmarthen in south Wales, seems to have worked on this manuscript for years, himself piling up texts that served to please and instruct and tell histories. As a canon writing such an overwhelmingly legible manuscript it might have been his intention to read the anthology aloud to edify a local Welsh-speaking population and to inspire them communally with the knowledge of heroes, at a time when those people were most in need of a sense of their country’s historical glories.

Building a communion

Canons, monks, and secular clergy in the medieval period were duty-bound by their Christian mission to create social stability and unity through the preaching of God’s word. Gospels, sermons, saints’ lives, and other religious books, like Confessionals and Penitentials, exist in abundance. In the Anglo-Saxon period, Old English sermons form the largest generic corpus of vernacular material that survives. Similarly, saints’ lives were written, translated, and copied throughout the period. Far from being a dull read, saints’ lives can be closely allied with romance, because both genres share particular features in common, including the hero (or heroine) who resists all forms of torment in a quest to stay resolutely on God’s side. Indeed, in a very popular romance like Gui de Warewic (Guy of Warwick), or others like Octavian or The King of Tars, significant elements of the saint’s life (or the hagiographic) inform aspects of the plot and characterization, including the Christian hero’s long-suffering, his pious spirituality, and his devotional acts alongside his valiant deeds. The wide dissemination of these romances suggests a broad audience for the saintly hero.

Whereas a great many medieval poems tend to be anonymously composed, with sermons and saints’ lives a good number of authors are known, including Rhygyfarch ap Sulien, a Welsh cleric at Llanbadarn Fawr in the later 11th century, who wrote a Latin Life of St David; William of Malmesbury, the prodigious 12th-century monk and historiographer, who translated an English Life of St Wulfstan into Latin (among many other works); and Clemence of Barking, a female hagiographer, who wrote the octosyllabic verse Vie de Sainte Catherine, a French life of St Catherine of Alexandria, in the late 12th century. The hagiographic genre had very great appeal in all the languages of the Middle Ages. In English, Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham (d. 1010), wrote a sequence of saints’ lives in a form of vernacular alliterative prose for the entire church year; and a cycle of saints’ lives, the Golden Legend, composed in Latin by the Italian Jacobus de Voragine, became one of the most important works of devotion throughout later medieval Europe.

In the 15th century, the poet and friar Osbern Bokenham (d. c.1464) wrote the Legendys of Hooly Wummen. It narrates thirteen narratives of female saints, some of which are written for specific patrons in the East Anglian area in which Bokenham lived and worked. These individual saints’ lives, written to inspire devotion, include the most beloved holy women: Margaret, Katherine, Agnes, Lucy, Anne, Dorothy, and Cecilia. A number of these were legendary female virgin martyrs, executed in the period of the Roman persecutions of Christians in the 3rd or early 4th centuries. The lives tend to follow a similar pattern and can seem quite formulaic; thus, the saints are beautiful young Christians desired by older heathen men, who torture the women to try and break their will, only to fail as the women are protected by God. The persecutors resort to extreme brutality, and usually decapitation of the saint. The saint performs miracles throughout her ordeal and posthumously.

It is fascinating to know that these saints’ lives were required reading matter for aristocratic young women and these hagiographies were also regularly read out at the appropriate saint’s festival in the church year. A saint like Margaret, who was imprisoned by her torturer, and supposedly swallowed by a dragon sent by the Devil, became the patron saint of women in childbirth, presumably because she burst, unharmed, out of the dragon’s stomach when she made the sign of the cross. Quite how medieval women were supposed to live up to the high standards of resolve and fortitude exemplified by these (often fictional) saints is an interesting question; the fact that these lives were loved by readers in this period suggests a desire to witness and participate in stories that illustrated courage and resilience through suffering, and always ended happily (as in romance, indeed) with heavenly repatriation.

There is no doubt that women were significant consumers of female saints’ lives. Evidence exists in a variety of forms: in the collections of work specifically for female audiences, such as the English Katherine-Group of Lives of Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana. These were associated with female communities of anchoresses (religious women who undertook a life of isolated contemplation of God) in the West Midlands at the beginning of the 13th century. In Chaucer’s writings, too, it is clear that women and hagiography were closely associated; in the Canterbury Tales, the Second Nun tells a standard hagiography of St Cecilia’s suffering and salvation; and in Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde glibly says she should be reading holy saints’ lives.

Large collections of saints’ lives, like the multi-manuscript cycle the South English Legendary, written by multiple authors in the late 13th and 14th centuries, had a major impact, suggesting that knowing about the lives of sanctified individuals contributed considerably to a communal ideal of religious devotion. Local saints’ lives were composed, too, promoting institutions and bringing in visitors from all over a region in veneration of the saint; thus, a number of hagiographies and references to Irish saints, such as Brigid, Patrick, and Molaise, occur in the 15th-century Irish Book of Lismore (Leabhar Mhic Cárthaigh Riabhaigh), for example. These books themselves suggest a devoted community of worshippers, and attempts to build a sense of shared history and common heritage through text.

From communion to community

The symbiotic relationship between the individual and the community both within a text and as a result of textual remembrance is of great importance, particularly in a period where personal literacy—the ability to pick up a text and read it oneself—was a scarce skill. Public Christian communities took many forms from boisterous church congregations to small groups of attentive devotees.

The Ancrene Wisse, or Ancrene Riwle, is a Guide for Anchoresses associated with the Katherine Group of saints’ lives, and another text on virginity called Hali Meiðhad (Holy Maidenhood). The Ancrene Wisse was written by a male religious author to assist three aristocratic women in their avowed lives as contemplatives, shut up in a cell-like room attached to a church with a squint to allow them to peer into the church and participate remotely in the community. Such medieval anchor-holds are still to be seen adjacent to churches such as Skipton, in Yorkshire.

The Ancrene Wisse, composed c.1225, was remarkably popular and survives in English in eleven manuscript versions, as well as in four translations into French and four into Latin, and it was also adapted for male anchorites and for larger groups of religious solitaries. It exemplifies rather well the ways in which the individual functioned as part of a larger community, while, to an extent, being cut off from that community. The author creates the Guide to instruct the anchoresses in how they should live both their outer, bodily lives and their inner, spiritual lives. They are advised about what they should wear: ‘wel mei don of ower clað beo hit hwit, beo hit blac, bute hit beo unorne’ (‘it matters not whether your clothes are white or black, except that they are plain’); that they should not have jewellery; and that they can keep no animals, except a cat. The writer advises that they should build their own small textual community by reading to the women serving the needs of the anchoress: ‘ƺe ancres ahen þis leaste stucche reden to ower wummen euche wike eanes aþet ha hit cunnen’ (‘You anchoresses ought to read this last section [on the Outer Rule] to your women once each week until they know it’). In teaching the Guide, the adviser points out, the anchoress will be sure to learn it and keep it devoutly herself.

This public display, intended to teach, inspire, and encourage the adherence to a faithful Christian life, also motivates the most communal of literature: drama. Dramatic performances of moments from the Christian story had long been part of the liturgy or church service, but in the later Middle Ages organized dramas became an established part of urban and village life. In particular cases, these were put on by the laity for the laity (often Guildsmen of the town were responsible for specific parts), and centred on the life and events of Christ, or the exemplary Christian.

Two plays survive from medieval Dublin in Ireland: The Play of the Sacrament, and the earlier 15th-century English morality play The Pride of Life. In England, the York Cycle of mystery plays, which are now performed every four years, emerged in the later 14th century as a sequence of dramatic pageants on wagons performed through the city, on or around the day of the procession on the Corpus Christi feast. These wagons were each sponsored by one of the craft guilds to perform the highlights of the Christian story from the Creation to the Nativity, to the Crucifixion, to the Last Judgement. The wagons would be driven around the town, stopping to perform the pageant at a particular station in sequence lasting all day and into the night.

Other towns—notably Chester, Coventry, and Wakefield—also have surviving dramatic cycle texts, among the most studied being the Second Shepherd’s Play, written by the Wakefield Master, and contained within the Towneley manuscript along with the other thirty-one relatively brief Wakefield plays. There are moments of absolute comedy in this play, as there are in many others, for comedy compels attention and instructs without seeming to. Yet other cycle plays survive from East Anglian centres, where the dramas were generally performed on open-air stages, rather than wagons. Further plays exist that are less about biblical events and salvation history, and more about morality, where characters represent types, or the whole of humanity, such as Humankind in The Castle of Perserverance, a morality play from the early 15th century.

Three mystery plays in a Cornish trilogy, the Ordinalia, focus on the Origin of the World, the Passion of Christ, and the Resurrection of the Lord (Ordinale de origine mundi, Passio Domini Nostri Jhesu Christi, and Ordinale de Resurrexione Domini) (see Box 7). These survive in three manuscript versions, the earliest of which is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 791. Performed over three days, these plays urged an audience to understand the basic episodes in the Christian tradition by showing the events to assembled individuals in a large public space. Through humour and fast-paced dialogue, the plays provide huge entertainment as well as core salvific instruction.

This trilogy was written down in the later 14th century, and while it is composed predominantly in Middle Cornish, there are also bits and pieces of Latin, English, and French. Linking all three parts of the Ordinalia is the story of the Holy Rood, the tree upon which Christ was crucified. Legend has it this tree grew from a seed that came from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. The seed was buried with Adam and grew into a tree itself—the same tree that was subsequently brought to the Temple of Solomon, and thereafter used to crucify Christ.

Box 7 Cornish literature

Very little literary evidence exists from medieval Cornwall before the 12th century. A rare survival is the Bodmin Gospels, a manuscript dated to the later 9th century and possibly made in Brittany, but owned by St Petroc’s in Cornwall. The book was used to record the manumitting ceremony freeing slaves and it contains names and vocabulary that attest to written Cornish in this early period.

It is many hundreds of years more before substantial Cornish literary texts survive in written form. Three such manuscripts contain a sequence known as the Cornish Ordinalia—three mystery plays performed outdoors from the 14th century. The existence of these few remarkable works suggests that there was a lively religious poetic and dramatic tradition in Cornwall. And just as remarkably, only a few years ago, a substantial Cornish saint’s life with its part-Arthurian narrative was discovered in a 16th-century manuscript bequeathed to the National Library of Wales: NLW MS 23849D. The Middle Cornish Beunans Ke (The Life of St Ke) tells the story of Saint Kea who mediated between King Arthur and Mordred, reminding readers of the significance of the Arthurian legend to Celtic literary history.

In Cornish, too, is the rare survival of a saint’s life written as a drama: that of St Meriasek, a Breton saint. Beunans Meriasek is contained in an early 16th-century paper manuscript (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 105B (see Figure 4)), and tells the story of the saint’s life, miraculous abilities, and death, as bishop of Vannes. As is the case with the Ordinalia, the framework of the drama—the rubrics and directions for the performers—is cast multilingually, using Latin and English, as well as Cornish, suggesting a mixed community of players were accessing this text.

4. Beunans Meriasek, the Cornish drama The Life of St Meriasek, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 105B, folio 5r.