Chapter 2. Literature of Pre-Renaissance

The period of Pre-Renaissance is a huge lapse of time and is conditionally taken as generalising the tendencies in literature pre-conditioned by social, cultural and linguistic changes in the eleventh - fifteenth centuries. Alongside numerous historical events that took place during the period there occurred a change in the cultural life in England which eventually led to the origination of the English as a nation. With the Norman conquest of England the Norman-French language became the official language of the country. It was the tongue spoken by the ruling class, the language of the court. Court literature was written in Norman-French. But it was not the language of ordinary people and therefore could not become the means of interpersonal communication as well as between different layers of the society. The English were then subdued, separated from their rulers by birth and language. Norman-French influenced English (late Anglo-Saxon) enormously. Even today we are reminded by synonyms that the Anglo-Saxons used to call the cows, calves, sheep and swine they grew, but it was the Normans who ate them as beef, veal, pork and mutton.

The Normans in England wrote a literature which was neither a true English literature, nor a true French one. Living in England, they were cut off from French culture, and the kind of French they used lost its purity. The Anglo-Saxons who tried to use the language of the conqueror were not very skilful yet. And so Latin - rather than Norman French or Old English - tended to be employed as a kind of compromise. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find songs and histories in Latin, some of the latter throwing a good deal of light on the changing mythology of England.

By a mythology we mean a body of beliefs - not necessarily based on true happenings or true historical characters - which touch the imagination of a race or of an age, inspire its literature and sometimes its behaviour, and provide a kind of romantic glamour to colour the dullness of everyday life. In our own age we find many of our myths in film-stars, popular singers, strip-cartoon characters, adverts, etc. (you will learn more about it through Critical Theory). These myths are bigger than life, they are midway between gods and men, they are in the Old Greek sense heroic. A religion does not provide mythical figures while it is still alive: as long as we believe in the religion, its great names are divine. But when a religion dies, is no longer seriously believed in, then its figures can become part of a mythology. Thus the Old Greek gods belong to European mythology still, and so do the old Greek warriors who gained so much of their strength and skill from the gods - Agamemnon, Ulysses, Aeneas, and so on. These heroic figures began to appear in the Latin writings of England after the Norman Conquest, and so did Brutus (the legendary grandson of Aeneas), who was presented in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Britons (written about 1140) as the father of the British race. But - and this is interesting - a far greater hero than any of Greece and Rome emerges in the figure of King Arthur. This is interesting and curious because Arthur belongs to the mythology of a race - the Welsh or true Britons - that the Anglo-Saxons drove out of England and that the Normans, invading their borders, struck with a heavy fist. Why this renewed interest in the shadowy British king and his Knights of the Round Table? Well, Geoffrey of Monmouth himself had been brought up in Wales and lived close to the myth; but even Norman writers were fascinated by it. It is very likely that the Normans, through their invasions of Wales, became interested in the Welsh and their culture.

Anyway, the myth of King Arthur is as powerful today as ever it was - we can see this not only from films and children's books but also from the curious rumour that circulated in England in 1940 - that Arthur had come again to drive out the expected invader, that Arthur would never really die. Soon another powerful myth was to arise among the English - that of Robin Hood and his followers, the outlaws who would not accept Norman rule but lived, free as the green leaves, in the forest.

Although the development of English from Anglo-Saxon to Middle English underwent some great changes, especially in vocabulary, due to the outspread of Norman-French in the country, English did not lose its fundamental linguistic characteristics, either in its grammar or in its basic vocabulary. During the thirteenth century various dialects of Middle English came closer to form a single language and in the fourteenth century the dialect of London and the South-East Midlands began to be accepted as the standard written language. The acceptance of one standard for the written language was hastened during the fifteenth century by the introduction of printing and the consequent spreading of printed books from London area throughout the country. In 1474 William Caxton the printer set up his press at Westminster and printed the first book in English - The History of Troye. Caxton printed nearly a hundred books, including The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and Morte d'Arthur about the chivalry of King Arthur by a Yorkist Knight named Sir Thomas Malory.

Already in the early Middle Ages in England there developed an interest in learning. Far more schools were established, with theology and philosophy added to the curricula. Classical literature declined in popularity, and a greater interest developed in medicine, astronomy and other sciences. Law and history also received some attention of scholars. The large increase in the number of private and official documents also contributed to the development of the historical knowledge of the period. Scholars began to use their own language instead of Latin for writing, and thus tended to fix the form of a literary English. A notable result of the intellectual revival was the rise of universities: about 1167 the University of Oxford was established with a curriculum similar to that of Paris. Shortly afterwards the University of Cambridge appeared (1209). The period from the twelfth till the fifteenth century was the time when English Gothic architecture outstood, the most striking instances of which are the many fine cathedrals throughout the country.

All those facts testified that a new era started, its spirit, absolutely new and unknown ever before, being noticeable in the cultural life of the country. This new spirit was marked by an optimism unknown yet to the Middle Ages. It was best reflected in the most outstanding works of literature of the period - in the literary works by Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400), William Langland (1330-1386) and in the prose of Thomas Malory.

There is plenty to say about the literature written in Middle English - the language of transition. There was a good deal of religious writing - works like the Ormulum, a translation of some Gospels, made by the monk Orm about 1200. There is the Ancrene Riwle - advice given by a priest to three religious ladies living not in a convent but in a little house near a church. This is rather charming, and it seems that, for a time in the literature of England, there is an awareness of woman as woman - a creature to be treated courteously and delicately, in gentle language. There is a connection here with the devotion to the Blessed Virgin, Mother of Christ, a cult which the Normans brought over, practised by them in prayers and homage even when it was forbidden by Rome.

Chivalry, which demanded a devotion to womankind almost amounting to worship, is another myth of old Europe, killed finally by Cervantes in his satire Don Quixote, written in Shakespeare's time. There is a curious book written about 1300 - a translation from the French spoken in England - by Robert Mannyng, called Handlyng Synne, setting out in verse stories the various paths of sin - satirical, amusing, as well as edifying. There is the Pricke of Conscience, probably written by Richard Rolle about 1340, which deals with the pains of hell in horrifying detail - the damned souls, tortured by thirst, finding that fire will not quench it, suck instead the heads of poisonous snakes. Demons yell, strike with red-hot hammers, while their victims shed tears of fire, nauseated by unspeakable filth and smells of an indescribable foulness.

Of the non-religious works in Middle English, one can point first to certain lyrics, written with certain delicacy and skill, but signed by no name, which still have power to enchant us and still, in fact, are sung.This is known everywhere, together with its delightful tune:

Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med,

And springth the wude nu -

Sing cuccu!

There is love poetry, like the fine song Alison (a common name for girls in the Middle Ages), which has the refrain:

An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,