Resurgence of English

Evidence of this development of the vernacular meets us in many quarters. Writing in 1385 Trevisa observes that some forty years earlier, two Oxford grammar masters, John Corn­wall and Richard Pencrich, had first decreed that boys should construe their Latin, not into French, but into English, and that this custom had since become general.' It was in 1362 that the statute ordering the use of English in the law-courts was enacted and in 1363 that the chancellor first opened parliament in his native tongue, a precedent which was commonly, though not invariably followed. French was still in use at court until the end of the century, though, when Froissart was received by Richard II in 1395, he thought it worthy of comment that the king could speak and read French very well. The historians in the monastic scriptoria continued, for the most part, to write in Latin; but the Brut, the oldest prose chronicle in Middle Eng­lish, was translated from Norman-French between 1350 and 1380. John Trevisa, who had been Wyclif s contemporary at Oxford, finished his translation of Higden's Polychronicon in 1387 and of the great encyclopaedia of Bartholomew the Englishman (De Proprietatibus Rerum) in 1398. North of the Border, John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, had completed his Bruce in 1375. A poet like Gower, who was at home in all three languages and used them with equal facility, is becoming something of an exception by 1400, and it is noteworthy that Gower chose Eng­lish for his last important work (c. 1390). For by this date English had invaded the realms of lyric and romance, of comedy and tragedy, of allegory and drama, of religion and education. It had become the language, not of a conquered, but of a conquer­ing people.

The geography of this fourteenth-century revival is interest­ing. Most of the literature was provincial and much of it was north-midland and north-western, springing from regions which had been almost completely silent for over 500 years. In sharp contrast to the metrical romances composed in the south under French influence (and satirized by Chaucer in Sir Thopos), the northern poems are written in unrhymed, alliterative verse, an ancient form which may have survived, without record, since before the Norman Conquest. But the revival was not merely antiquarian; for the structure of the language had been subtly modified by the passage of centuries, and the influence of France, though weakened by time and distance, is unmistakable in the most distinguished of the northern alliterative produc­tions—four poems, all contained in a single manuscript and likely to have been the work of a single author. Three of them— Pearl (a moving allegory on a dead child in which the author uses the vision convention of the romances), Patience, and Purity —present familiar medieval moralizing in attractive dress. The fourth and most impressive—Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight— is an Arthurian romance set in wintry and mountainous country by an artist of real imaginative power, whose vocabulary in­cludes many words of Scandinavian origin, not to be found in the southern writers. In the same alliterative tradition are such poems as The Parlement of the Thre Ages (Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age), and Wynnere and Wastoure (Winner and Waster). All the authors are anonymous. But this strange flowering of alli­terative allegories and romances in the age of Chaucer, who 'writes as if they had no existence and would have written no differently had he known them’, may serve to remind the his­torian how much still remains to be discovered of the knightly and aristocratic households of the north and midlands where such poets must have found their audiences.

Further evidence of the literary vitality of these regions may be found in the miracle plays and in devotional literature. The three almost complete cycles of plays which have come down to us—the York, Wakefield (or Towneley), and Chester cycles— all derive from this part of the country; and, though the manu­scripts date from the fifteenth century, the plays were almost certainly taking shape during our period. Among religious writers, Richard Rolle (c. 1300-49), of Thornton-le-Dale in Yorkshire, turned his back on Oxford and withdrew to his native county to live as a hermit at Hampole, where he trans­lated the Psalter into English prose and composed a number of religious lyrics and devotional tracts in both Latin and English, Robert Mannyng who, in the 12,000 octosyllabic lines of his Handlyng Synne, made an heroic effort to distract his readers from secular romances, came from Bourne in Lincolnshire. Walter Hilton (d. 1396), author of the widely read Scale of Perfection, was a canon of Thurgarton, near Newark; and the Cursor Mundi (c. 1300-35) is also of northern origin. In a very different genre the patriotic verses of Lawrence Minot. composed between 1333 and 1352, are likewise traceable to the north.