In every thing,

Far, far passing

That I can indite,

Or suffice to write

Of Merry Margaret,

As midsummer flower,

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower...

His themes range wide: he gives us a picture of the drubken customers of a Suffolk public-house; he writes at length, and tenderly, on the death of a sparrow; he produces a powerful monologue of Christ on the cross; he satirises the great Cardinal Wolsey in Speak, Parrot.

The fifteenth century had an established prose-writer. In 1484 Caxton printed the Morte D'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. Malory's is the fullest record we have of the work of the mythical Knights of the Round Table, their loves, treacheries, their search for the Holy Grail. Malory has become our main source for the Arthurian legends, and it is satisfying to know that these stories are set out in a prose-style that is dignified and clear.

Several strongly secular genres emerged in the Middle English period after the Norman invasion. They borrowed their forms and contents from the corresponding European genres of literature. Those included: romance, ballad, lyrics and fabliau, and were intended primarily for entertainment. Education and literacy developed steadily but very slowly. The mass of the people, even some of the ruling class remained illiterate, and as a consequence poetry continued to be composed primarily for oral presentation and many of the oral traditions of Old English verse persisted for centuries. Dramatic changes in poetic forms took place with the importation of rhyme from France to replace alliteration as a primary technique, though it did not die out but co-existed with rhyme for hundreds of years. Middle English literature is naturally far richer and more varied than Old English literature, with several new genres emerging.

The romance was easily recognised the most popular form of aristocratic secular literature of the late Middle Ages in England and West Europe generally. It may be long or short, in verse or prose, with or without love interest, but the romance is always a story of adventure involving famous kings, knights, or distressed ladies, and governed by an elaborate code of literary conventions. Of the dozens of romances surviving in Middle English only three or four - by the Gawain poet, J. Chaucer and Th. Malory - have established themselves through the sheer power of their art as permanent classics in literature.

The romance appears first in France in the twelfth century, evolving seemingly out of the earlier epic form called the 'chanson de geste', the most famous of which is the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100). To the battle scenes and heroic exploits that were the exclusive subject-matter of the 'chanson de geste', however, a large new dimension - the elaborate French code of courtly behaviour and of love - was added.

The romance reached England in the thirteenth century. Most of the romances appearing at that time were mediocre or uninspired as works of art. Nonetheless, the century did produce five or six romances of genuine distinction. Of these the earliest is Sir Orfeo (c. 1320) - a short verse romance dealing with Breton or at least Celtic characters. Chaucer's Franklin's Tale is the finest of the type in English. Sir Orfeo is a Celticised rendering of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice but with a happy ending. It is in a way a fairy story - lively, witty and delightful.

The greatest of all English verse romances are those of the Gawain poet and Chaucer. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in the north-west Midland by an unknown poet about 1375. In the superb artistry of its narrative technique, in its fusion of rollicking humour and moral seriousness, and in sheer poetic expressiveness, the poem remains one of the finest things of its kind in any European literature. It is the story of the testing of a good man's honour in love and fortitude in the face of deadly combat; there is tremendous suspense as Gawain is humbled at the end by his human frailty while maintaining the essential nobility of his character. In Chaucer's Knight's Tale, in the conventional heroics of love and war, brilliantly described with touches of humour, one can find interlarded passages of philosophical commentary that are very unusual in the romance as a genre. The most astonishing quality is the fullness and the psychological depth of characterisation in Troilus and Criseyde. We see Troilus, the noble idealist, obsessed by his love for Criseyde; Pandarus, the pragmatic go-between, cynical, witty, garrulous, amusingly cunning; Criseyde, the canny, brilliant heroine, and ambivalent woman of infinite charm and fascination, - all struggling against but drifting towards their tragic destiny. Troilus and Criseyde, so far transcends its genre, that some critics have been reluctant to label it as a romance at all, though it has all the trappings of the form. Chaucer's Troilus is one of the supreme long poems in English literature, one of the great love stories.

After reaching its apex in Sir Gawain and Troilus, the romance declined steadily in the course of the fifteenth century. The age of chivalry itself was by then pretty much a thing of the past; the feudal system introduced by William the Conqueror was slowly disintegrating; and a new, prosperous middle class with different literary interests was coming to the fore. The romance, then, was dying a natural (historical) death along with the aristocratic feudal culture, which had given birth to it. In the light of these historical trends, it is rather surprising to find a sudden and final resurgence of the genre at the very end of the Middle English era in the works of Sir Thomas Malory. Surprising, too, is the fact that, whereas most of the English romances were in verse, Malory chose to write in prose. Malory's is the first truly artistic prose style in the language, and for this reason, he is considered to be the father of English prose fiction. His book Morte D'Arthur is a superb reworking of the most exciting episodes and characters from the legends about king Arthur and his knights. Malory's lively and masterly work makes a fitting finale to the history of romance in Middle English.

At the opposite end of the social scale from the aristocratic romance we have the ballad, a form of oral folk literature. Most of the folk or 'popular' ballads that have come down to us seem to date from the late Middle Ages - the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries - though some are as lata as the seventeenth. Ballads are always short narratives in verse made to be sung to traditional tunes. They usually deal with sensational events - tragic love, sexual scandal, suicide, abduction, treachery, murder, magic, mayhem, heightened by the folk imaginatiom. Composed orally by gifted individuals, ballads were passed on orally from generation to generation. Most of the great ballads remained unrecorded in writing until the eighteenth century when educated people became interested in 'primitive' art. The pioneer ballad-hunters of the eighteenth century - men like Thomas Percy, David Herd and Walter Scott - often wrote down the texts as they heard them straight from the lips of local singers. Though the ballads are mainly medieval in origin, the language in which they have been preserved is relatively modern. Moreover, the language is most often Scottish rather than standard English. The ballad as an oral form can flourish only in communities that are predominantly illiterate. As soon as mass education moves in the ballad dies away and is replaced by written forms of literature. By the time the British ballads were finally recorded, the genre had already died out as a living art form in most of Britain except for Scotland and the north-east of England - yet relatively untouched by modern civilisation.

All of the ballads have come down to us in multiple versions (since they circulated in oral transmission for different areas and eras, language forms, from one generation to another). Thus, the ballad is impersonal in style: the author has been filtered out in the process of oral transmission. The frequent use of refrains (sometimes meaningless) and of other kinds of repetition as iads to memory is obviously a device to make things easier for the performer and for the listeners. The so-called 'Ballad Stanza' made things easier to perform and to absorb. It is a four-lined stanza of alternating tetrametres and trimetres, rhymed ABCB as in The Wife of Usher's Well:

There lived a wife at Usher's Well

And a wealthy wife was she;

She had three stout and stalwart sons

And sent them o'er the sea.

In narrative structure the typical method is to plunge immediately into the dramatic crisis of the situation, without preliminaries, and then to fill in the needed background information gradually or indirectly. Many British ballads have their counterparts in Continental balladry (especially Scandinavian).

"And what wul ye leave to your ain mither dear,

Edward, Edward?

And what wul ye leave to your ain mither dear,

My dear son, now tell me, O?"

"The curse of hell frae me sal ye bear,

Mither, mither,

The curse of hell frae me sal ye bear,

Sic such counseils ye gave to me, O."

Unlike the ballad, which was oral, the Middle English lyric was a form of written literature though these poems were often performed as songs or dances with musical accompaniment. Hundreds of lyrics, the majority anonymous, have survived in English from these centuries, and they show an extraordinary variety of subject matter and styles. They range from the solemnly religious to the downright bawdy, from the highly sophisticated to the naively simple. This fact suggests that the lyric of the time catered for the interests of various social classes - aristocracy and clergy, literate middle class, and the common folk. Middle English lyrics contrast sharply with modern lyric poetry in that they lack the subjective personal quality. The medieval lyric depends heavily on fixed literary conventions: the more sophisticated courtly pieces are usually built upon elaborate patterns derived from Provencal, French, or medieval Latin poetic conventions. As in the ballad there is seldom much sense of the individuality of the author. Within these stylised limitations of the Middle English lyric, it achieves freshness and vitality that are elusive but delightful. These fine qualities may easily be illustrated. Among the lyrics of the simpler kind is the well-known I Sing of a Maiden (13th century), - a charming and tender tribute to the Virgin: