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Page 23
Middle English Poetry
E. Ruth Harvey
Middle English is a relatively precise term to us. Hindsight and the usually artificial divisions of history enable us to fix on the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066 as a starting point: English disappears almost at a stroke in the written records, and when it reappears it has been transformed from Old English to Middle English. The end of Middle English is less easy to determine. We can look back to the great divide of the vowel shift that makes Chaucer's pronunciation so different from Shakespeare's or ours, or point to the introduction of the revolutionary new technology of printing to England in 1476. In literary terms the importing of the sonnet form marks a distinctive change in style and fashion; in religious terms Henry VIII's break with the medieval Church is crucial. All these events leave their marks in language and literature, but focusing on them blurs the essential continuities: spoken English evolved gradually; written English, simply by virtue of being written, provides us with fixed though fragmentary landmarks. Literacy itself would have given medieval writers a particular place within a social and linguistic structure. English, either spoken or written, was only one of the languages current in the British Isles, and English itself came in many varied forms.
There had been no one form of English even in the days of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers in the British Isles. The groups who came to England in the fifth and sixth centuries spoke a variety of related dialects: these took centuries to coalesce into today's standard written English. There is still an enormous variety of spoken dialects and non-
 
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standard variations within the English-speaking world in spite of the cohesive force of a standard printed language, but before printing even the idea of a standard exerted far less force. The dialects of Old English continued to develop throughout the Middle English period; Middle English might in some ways more properly be called "Middle Englishes."
We know about medieval English dialects because the language was written down more or less phonetically. Writing had come relatively late to the illiterate pagan Anglo-Saxon settlers of England. The Roman alphabet accompanied Christianity (which arrived in southeast England in 597); it was gradually and imperfectly adapted for the sounds of Old English chiefly for religious purposes. Eventually it was used for secular material, but literacy principally belonged with Latin, the language of the Church. Written English at first faithfully recorded the different dialects of Old English; but after King Alfred's reign (871899) the dialect of the kingdom of Wessex gradually became a kind of standard literary medium. The violent impact of the conquest of England by French-speaking Normans in 1066 disrupted this orderly development; since all high office in the land and nearly all ecclesiastical positions were filled with French speakers, there was not much call for written English; the language was degraded to that of an underclass. The idle entertainments of a subject and still largely illiterate people did not seem worth writing down in any quantityfor almost no recorded English of the period immediately after the Conquest survives today. Latin was the language of the Church, and hence of education; the language of secular culture was French; English was spoken by the peasantry, and the verse in that language had, in any case in the earliest times, traditionally been oral. Manuscripts of Old English are lucky survivors; manuscripts of the very early Middle English period are almost nonexistent.
Written English does not emerge again in any bulk for over a hundred years. We can only guess at the kinds of English poetry composed during this lost century, when the whole language, as far as the records show, went underground. When the learned process of writing gradually extends its reach to English again the bulk of what appears is utilitarian religious material. Before the fourteenth century there is not much else: we have some lyrics, some romances, the
Owl and the Nightingale
a mysterious dialogue in verse between two birds as to their respective merits, which has been variously interpretedand the
 
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fascinating
Brut
, a vast and difficult history of the British, which seems to have been composed in an archaizing spirit in verse showing some strong similarities to Old English poetry. The
Brut
hints at the curious political relationships between the languages: an English poem about Celtic history drawn largely from a Norman French source, it contains almost no words derived from French. By the fourteenth century the English language was in the ascendant again, and by the end of that century there is a sizable body of recorded work; but the modern reader might feel that what emerges, although it looks much more like our language than Old English, is still distinctly unfamiliar. English had undergone vast changesthe loss of inflections and the enormous influx of vocabulary from Latin and French altered it almost beyond recognitionbut it makes its multiform reappearance in writing in the descendants of the different dialects of its Old English days.
The Middle English in the surviving records reveals a startling variety of dialectal variants not only of pronunciation and vocabulary, but also of grammar and syntax. Since our written language is mainly inherited from the dialect of Chaucer, he seems familiar to us; but it was largely Chaucer's own work that placed London English at the center of the literary map. In Chaucer's day there were other ways of speaking and writing that did not carry the connotations that "dialect literature" has for us today: they are not necessarily the derisively recorded utterances of an underclass, or the evocations of a quaint nostalgic rusticity. Chaucer is the first writer in English to make jokes about other dialects of English (the Reeve's Tale)perhaps in the literary circles of the royal court regional speech already sounded rustic and comicbut even in the fifteenth century regional writers themselves show little self-consciousness about their provincial speech. It is only by the end of the century with the emergence of printing that the descendant of Chaucer's London dialect becomes a definite standard, the Scots dialect of the neighboring kingdom its only rival for literary purposes. It is hard today to read "dialect literature" without the distraction of modern prejudices about standard English; but West Midland or Kentish speech was not quaint to its users, nor treated condescendingly by regional authors.
Poetry precedes literacy, and exists outside it, but nothing except speculation can tell us anything about unrecorded verse. What remains is only what was written down; and writing put English in the ambit of a very different culture. Literacy was bound up with a set of literary and cultural assumptions, sacred and profane texts written in Latin, and
 
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ideas about literature derived from Christian learning. When a man learned to read and write (women mostly did not), he learned not only in Latin, but within the scheme of the Latin learned establishment. English, in the world of written texts, was also necessarily inside the educational value system that went with literacy. Medieval schools existed to teach Latin to potential clerics; the development of the Latin word
ydiota
from its early sense of "uneducated, illiterate person," to the meaning "lay, not clerical," to its present sense of "idiot" reflects accurately a medieval sense of values.
Medieval learning, like medieval everything else, was profoundly hierarchical. The educational system was envisioned (and sometimes portrayed) as a vast pyramid or tower to which the key was Latin grammar. From grammar one ideally proceeded to the other liberal arts (logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) and eventually through philosophy to theology, the queen of all knowledge. It was, in some senses, a closed system; closed temporally, since human history was held to be finite, beginning in the garden of Eden and ending at Judgment Day. It was closed spatially too, since the earth was the center of the physical universe, and heaven lay outside the sphere of the fixed stars. Mankind's place at the material center was offset by being at the spiritual periphery. The ideal scheme of things had been radically altered by the original sin committed in the garden of Eden; Adam was held to have been created with a knowledge of all seven liberal arts as his own proper inheritance. Adam's Fall had ruined the arts (together with the human constitution, the animal kingdom, and the weather), but education could try to repair some of the damage; learning was seen as the first step in restoration. Man must be mindful that the perceptible world of the senses is only a stage in existence: his goal is the immaterial and spiritual world that he must learn to perceive in the chaos of earthly life.
Poetry fitted awkwardly inside this system of education. It was not per se a liberal art; nor was there any category for literature: both appeared bewilderingly in several different places. Grammar students might study prosody or comment on turns of expression, and they used Latin texts ranging from mnemonic verses to classical poetry. Poetry's use of figures of speech put it within the territory of rhetoric. One of the astronomical textbooks was written in verse. Boethius counted as a philosopher, but his
Consolation of Philosophy
contains many poems. Parts of the Bible were in some sense poetic, which put poetry within
 
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striking distance of theology. Definitions of poetry were confusing. The body of classical poetry embedded in the educational system differed from prose on the one hand by virtue of being written in meter; on the other it differed from more serious kinds of writing by virtue of its subject matter: it was full of fables, myths, impossible marvels, and monsters that seemed improbable even to the zoologically credulous Middle Ages. There was no necessary connection between metrics and fabulous subject matter, the two main features of poetry.
The encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264) included both views in his
Speculum Doctrinale
; poetry is first "the art of adorning something with metre, according to the proportion of the words and the length and number of the metrical feet" (III.cix)a pedestrian definition that is widespread. The fifteenth-century English translation of Palladius into rather painful verse and perhaps quite a lot of Lydgate suffer under the misapprehension that a poet's task is essentially one of versifying. It was a comfortingly utilitarian point of view: verse was easier to learn than prose, and the Bible contained lost Hebrew meters. There could be nothing essentially wrong with poetry seen simply as versification.
The other aspect of poetryits fabulous subject matterwas much more difficult to deal with. Since medieval views of life did not suffer from our prevailing sense of the indeterminacy of things, God was a reality, and life on earth was a prologue to an eternity in hell or heaven; what we call "the real world" today was to be regarded as a temporary and seductive maze of illusions, through which each soul must find its way to truth. The way to heaven and hell was relatively clearly marked out by divine revelation (the Bible) and the authority of the Church, embodied in the clerical establishment, who were alone qualified to expound the Bible and the writings of the ecclesiastical authoritiesor indeed any other writings. It is difficult to fit the subject matter of poetry into this scheme of things, unless the poetry is to be relentlessly didactic. Some poetic featuresits figures of speech, for examplecan be accommodated easily enough: they render the message more efficacious; but any subject matter that did not seem essentially Christian, moral, or useful was a source of unease.
The fables or fictions that were held by many to be the essence of poetry attracted much learned attention. The simplest solution was to dismiss the whole business of poetry as nonsense, or to relegate it to the periphery of learning: a solution adopted by the seventh-century authority Isidore of Seville (who puts poets amongst mysterious wis-
 
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dom figures such as sibyls, pagans, and gentile gods), the later Hugh of St. Victor (who classifies poetry as an appendage to the liberal arts), and many other moralists past and present. But it was inconveniently apparent that the Bible on occasion makes use of fables (e.g., Jesus' parables or the story of the trees in Judges 9:815). St. Thomas Aquinas felt that Scripture needed to be excused for this: at the beginning of his
Summa Theologiae
he argued that the poetic aspects of Scripture were appropriate because they made it accessible even to the unlearned. He reveals the "establishment" wariness of poetry, which required it to prove its credentials for the purposes of salvation.
Not all authorities looked so gloomily on "fables." An important saying of the early Christian writer Lactantius was quoted by Vincent of Beauvais, and taken up enthusiastically by Petrarch and Boccaccio: "the poet's job lies in the very act of transforming true things into something else by means of an indirect and figurative mode of speaking, and adding a certain beauty." This recognition that there were different kinds of truth rather than a simple opposition between truth and lies was of enormous help to poetry lovers. They could deploy a wide range of options (all recorded by Vincent), from arguing that poetry contained scientific truths, e.g., that the fable of the lame god Vulcan taught the crooked nature of fire, to euhemerism, e.g., insisting that Hercules was only called a god because he was a great hero in prehistorical times. A development of this line of thought was the insistence that any story that taught something true was valuable: Aesop's fables instilled good moral qualities. And "truth," of course, meant something considered valid by the learned establishment: not truth to life or nature, but to invisible and eschatological reality.
Such defenses of poetry insist on its didactic value and encourage allegory: if a story could be read for its message, then a message could be embodied in a story, and the truth or value of the message would redeem the story from the charge of untruth. Petrarch and Boccaccio are most enthusiastic about this "hidden truth" theory of poetry and hand on a vocabulary of veils, mists, and kernels that was exceedingly popular in fifteenth-century England. Poetry was supposed to be written this way to hide holy truths from the eyes of the unlearned vulgar, and to give intellectual pleasure to the eyes of the discerning few. Such an unpleasant view of poetry can only be excused by the fact that it is itself an excuse: unless poetry could lay claim to some sort of truth, it could have no intellectual place at all in a world where heaven and hell

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