Ichot from hevene it is me sent,

From alle wymmen my love is lent

Ant lyht on Alisoun.

We may translate this as follows:

By a gracious chance I have caught it - I know it has been sent from heaven.

From all other women I have taken away my love: it has alighted on Alison.

There are also patriotic songs, carols for Christmas and Easter, even political songs.

Longer poems of the period are The Owl and The Nightingale - the story of a dispute between the two birds as to which has the finer song; Pearl - a long lament in very ornamental language on the death of a child and a vision of the heaven to which she has gone. There is a very remarkable work written by an unknown author in the Lancashire dialect called Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight (the middle of the fourteenth century). This poem takes its tale from the myths of the Round Table and tells of the knight Gawain and his curious encounter with the Green Knight of the title, a giant who, having had his head cut off by Gawain, calmly picks it up, tucks it under his arm, and walks off. But he had made a compact that after a year he should deliver a return blow, at the Green Chapel where Gawain undertakes to meet him. On the way there Gawain stays at a castle and is subjected to various temptations by the lord's wife. He resists them, but when the lord of the castle proves to be the Green Knight, Gawain conceals from him the girdle of invulnerability the lady had given him. The Green Knight had himself planned the temptations, and because of the one deception Sir Gawain is given a blow which, however, only slightly wounds him, his merit in resisting the main temptations being sufficient to save him from receiving a fatal blow. The poem is written in head-rhyme, in language which shows little Norman influence but is nevertheless notable for a lightness of touch, a certain humour, and great power of description.

Of the other works of the fourteenth century we must mention a very strange book of travel written by a certain 'Sir John Mandeville' - probably the name is fictitious. The writer seems to have been fond of his own book, for apparently wrote it in Latin first, then in French, finally in English. It is an interesting book in many ways, and seems to have been a popular one, for it was copied out again and again (printing as we remember was organised a bit later - almost a century after) and in the British Museum there are, at this day, twenty or so manuscript copies of this book. Mandeville introduces a great number of French words into his English - words which have now become common coinage, such as cause and quantity. As a record of travel in the East it is a ludicrous work; there are fantastic tales of cannibals and men with only one foot - a large one which they use to shield themselves from the sun - dog-headed men and the most incredible monsters.

We should also mention the name of William Langland (1332 - 1400), the last writer of any merit to use the Old English technique of head-rhyme for a long poem. The Vision of Piers Plowman attacks the abuses of the Christian Church in England, but also calls upon the ordinary people - the laity - to cease their concern with the things of this world and to follow the only thing worth following - 'holy Truth'. The ploughman who gives the name to the poem appears before the 'field full of folk' which represents the world, and shows them the way to salvation. The poem is allegorical - we meet figures with names like Covetousness, Gluttony, Theology, and the story is that of a pilgrimage - a following of the hard road to salvation. The poem has religious and moral motives and sometimes we feel an attack at the decadent life of the church and the higher religious hierarchy. Piers Plowman often wanders from its way making the whole story shapeless, but the author's dramatic power is considerable and his verse has beauty and vigour, perhaps only superceded in terms of poetic form by Geoffrey Chaucer, who uses a different technique from Langland. Chaucer looks forward to the future, while Langland, in many ways, sums up the past. The future lies with regular rhyme-patterns, French stanza-forms, classical learning, wit, and colour. The past with its head-rhyme, its formlessness, its concern with sin and its love of a sermon, nevertheless has a perfect swan-somg in Langland's poem. The music captures our aesthetic attention immediately and haunts us long afterwards: