Yiff he us mete we schal deye, Flee we faste out of hys weye.' (Richard Cor de Lion,' II. 6727-6764, Weber's Metrical Romances, 1810, vol. ii. p. 264.) 1 Aux armes ! 2 Ready! 3 First of all (text, Al the fyrst). 4 Wassail, I shall drink your healths. An earlier account (lines 2503-2570) of a sea-fight in which we are told of the sailors, They rowed hard, and sunge ther-to to overtake the enemy, is no less vivid; and though there are some dreary wastes in the seven thousand lines of which it consists, the romance must take high rank. Bevis of Hampton is the story of a child sold by his unnatural mother as a slave to the Saracens. He wins the affections first of his master, King Ermyn, and then of Ermyn's daughter, the fair Josyan. When Josyan becomes a Christian out of love for Bevis, her father turns against the knight, and there are numberless thrilling adventures, Bevis regaining his heritage, boiling the usurper in pitch, brimstone, and lead, and then setting off on new wars until his son, Sir Mili, is crowned King of England, and he himself, his wife Josyan, and his horse Arundel enjoy a happy death on the same day. Guy of Warwick is neither so simply conceived nor so well told, though its popularity in different forms seems to have been greater than that of any of its rivals. Guy loves Felice, the daughter of his lord, Rohand, Earl of Warwick; but the lady is haughty, and though, at the command of an angel, she promises him her love when he shall have proved himself worthy of it, she insists, even after he has shown his bravery, that he shall undertake further adventures; and these lead him far afield. Returning to England, Guy, after incidentally slaying a dragon, claims and obtains Felice's hand. But after forty days of marriage he bethinks him how he had Slain many a man with hand, He journeys to the Holy Land as a palmer, fighting now and then when need arises, and on his return engaging in single combat with the Danish champion, Colbrand. As soon as he has killed this giant he resumes his palmer's dress, visits his castle without declaring himself to Felice, and only sends for her at last that she may receive his dying breath. Probably the fight with Colbrand was the germ of the story, and procured its popularity, which is hardly justified by the merit of the romance as a whole. With the Richard Cœur de Lion three other romances have been connected on the ground of similarity of style, though there is no strong reason for believing in their common authorship. These are the Merlin and Arthur, King Alisaunder, and the Seven Sages, all written in rhyming couplets. The first-named gives a full and graphic account of the birth and early adventures of Merlin; but the bulk of the story, dealing with the wars of Arthur and the help Merlin lends him, is rather dull. The romance of King Alisaunder opens, like the Merlin, with a full account of its hero's origin, the remainder of the poem, a translation of the French Roman d'Alixandre, being slightly shortened. The Seven Sages is mainly interesting as an English version of tales of immemorial antiquity, those which the wicked Queen tells to persuade her husband of his son's guilt, and the counter-stories by which the friendly sages combat her on his behalf, being all of Eastern origin. Of the other metrical romances, mostly shorter than these, it is impossible to mention more than a few of the best. Among these are two on Arthurian subjects, Ywain and Gawain and Lybeaus Desconus (i.e. 'The Fair Unknown), Ipomydon, Emaré (the plot of which resembles that of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale), Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Isumbras. As tales these are superior to the lengthy mock-historical romances, and they are quite as well told. We have still left unnamed the romance of A squyer of lowe degre That loved the kings daughter of Hungarie, which in some respects ranks with the best of them, but it is such a compound of cleverness and absurdity that we may almost believe that it was written between jest and earnest. The alliterative romances, including those which have both alliteration and rhyme, are not nearly so numerous as those which have rhyme only, but both in poetic interest and technical execution their standard is higher. Written in the north and north-west, some of them, on account of their dialect and as corresponding in title to works mentioned by Andrew Wyntoun (see below, page 181) as written by a mysterious 'Huchown of the Awle Reale,' have been claimed as Scottish (page 171); but until this Huchowne has been identified it is hardly safe to dogmatise as to whether they were composed north or south of the Tweed. The Pistyl of sweet Susane, a wonderfully well-told version of the story of Susanna and the Elders, is one of these, and in the height of tragic pathos to which it rises when Joachim comes to bid farewell to his condemned wife, strikes a note rare at all times in British poetry, and not previously met with. Another poem attributed to Huchowne is an alliterative Morte d'Arthur, of some four thousand lines, which has been identified with the great geste of Arthure' mentioned by Wyntoun. The romance of Joseph of Arimathea and the long tale of the Destruction of Troy can only be mentioned here; but the story of William of Palerne (Palermo) and Sir Gawane and the Grene Knight demand longer notice, because in both of them, in addition to the charm of wonderful adventures, there is real characterisation. William of Palermo (the romance is freely translated from a French original still extant) had the advantage of being brought up by a werewolf—that is, a prince whom enchantment had caused to assume a wolf's form. From the care of the werewolf William passed to that of a peasant, and from the peasant to that of the Emperor of Rome, whose daughter Melior gradually fell in love with him. Melior confides her love to her cousin Alexandrine, who, by the aid of a little white magic, brings William's wishes into harmony with Melior's, and all promises well till Melior's hand is claimed for the son of the Emperor of Greece. The lovers disguise themselves as two white bears (a strange device to escape observation in Italy), and, aided by the werewolf, make their escape, the romance ending happily after adventures as wonderful as any reasonable reader could desire. The plot is perhaps a little too romantic, but the telling of it is excellent; and the girlish charm of Melior and Alexandrine and the naïveté of William are very pleasing. Here, from Professor Skeat's edition (The Romance of William of Palerne; E.E.T.S., 1867, ll. 967-1001), is the passage in which the pretty magician Alexandrine, having bewitched William into loving Melior, gravely takes him under her protection and persuades the amorous Melior to have pity on him: Alysaundrine a-non thanne answered and sayde Seththe thou sadli hast me said the sothe of thi cunsaile, Than Alisaundrine a-non as sche wel couthe, And seide, 'A mercy, madame, on this man here, Seththe he so lelly the loves, to lemman him thou take.' Than Meliors full mekliche to that mayde carped, 'Nou, bi God that me gaf the gost and the soule, Lelliche mi love for ever, al mi lif time, And gif a gift here to God and to his gode moder, That other lud, while I live, schal I love never.' I-wisse, certainly witou, know thou; Seththe, since; sadli, earnestly; Holliche, wholly; Clepudi, called; sertes, certainly; greithli, quickly; lemman, love; lelly, lelliche, loyally; Les, lose; yut, yet; carped, spoke; myland, smiling; manquellere, man-killer; ac, but; prestely, readily; lud, man. Unlike William of Palerne, the romance of Sir Gawane and the Grene Knight is, as far as we know, an original and not a translated work; and though it begins with the fantastic episode of the Green Knight allowing his head to be cut off, picking it up, and continuing to talk, it possesses a serious psychological interest which, with its metrical and poetical excellence, gives it a unique place among English romances. It is Gawain the courteous who strikes off the Green Knight's head at Arthur's court in pursuance of a challenge to an exchange of blows. When his uncanny challenger has disappeared with his head in his hand, Gawain knows that he must abide his blow a year hence at an unknown Green Chapel, and early in November he starts on his quest, only anxious lest he may fail to find the Green Chapel by New Year's Day, and so appear forsworn. At last, on Christmas Eve, he reaches a castle whose lord not only entertains him hospitably, but promises to lead him to the Green Chapel, which is hard by, on the appointed day. Meanwhile Gawain must stay at the castle to rest himself, and his host bargains that he will on three successive days give Gawain the proceeds of his hunting if Gawain will give him whatever he receives during his absence. Gawain lies late in bed, and when her lord and his men are afield the lady of the castle comes to his bedside and shows her love to him. On her challenge Gawain craves a kiss at parting, and when his host returns and spreads before him the game he has caught, he clasps his hands round the lord's neck and kisses him courteously, thus keeping his bond. The next morning the same thing happens: He commes to the cortyn and at the knyght totes, And connes not of companye the costes under-take, And if mon kennes yow hom to knowe, ye kest hom of your mynde; Thou hats for-yeten yederly that yisterday I taghtte Bi alder-truest token of talk that I cowthe.' 'What is that,' quoth the wyghe, 'i-wysse I wot never, If hit be sothe that ye breve, the blame is myn awen.' 'Yet I kende yow of kyssyng,' quoth the clere thenne, 'Quere-so countenaunce is couthe, quikly to clayme, That bicumes uche a knyght, that cortaysy uses.' 'Do way,' quoth that derf mon, 'my dere, that speche, For that durst I not do, lest I denayed were, If I were werned, I were wrang i-wysse, gif I profered.' ‘Ma fay,' quoth the mere wyf, 'ye may not be werned, Ye are stif in-noghe to constrayne wyth strenkthe, gif yow lykes, Gif any were so vilanous that yow denaye wolde.' I am at your comaundement, to kysse quen yow lykes, The lady loutes a-doun, And comly kysses his face, Much speche thay ther expoun, Of druryes greme and grace. (Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight; ed. R. Morris, E.E.T.S., 1864, ll. 1476-1507.) She came to the bedside and looked on the knight, and Gawain gave her fit greeting, and she greeted him again with ready words and sat her by his side and laughed, and with a sweet look she spoke to him: 'Sir, if ye be Gawain, I think it a wonder that ye be so stern and cold, and care not for the courtesies of friendship; but if one teach ye to know them ye cast the lesson out of your mind. Ye have soon forgotten what I taught ye yesterday, by all the truest tokens that I knew!' 'What is that?' quoth the knight. 'I trow I know not. If it be sooth that ye say, then is the blame mine own.' 'But I taught ye of kissing,' quoth the fair lady. "Wherever a fair countenance is shown him, it behoves a courteous knight quickly to claim a kiss.' 'Nay, my dear,' said Sir Gawain, 'cease that speech; that durst I not do, lest I were denied, for if I were forbidden I wot I were wrong did I further entreat.' 'I' faith,' quoth the lady merrily, 'ye may not be forbid ; ye are strong enough to constrain by strength an ye will, were any so discourteous as to give ye denial.' 'Yea, by Heaven,' said Gawain, 'ye speak well; but threats profit little in the land where I dwell, and so with a gift that is given not of good-will. I am at your commandment to kiss when ye like, to take or to leave as ye list.' Then the lady bent her down and kissed him courteously. (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, retold in modern prose, by Jessie L. Weston, 1898.) The kiss is again passed on to her lord in return for the produce of his hunting. On the third morning the lady, when Gawain has refused her proffered gift of a ring, presses him to accept her green girdle: 'Now forsake ye this silke,' sayde the burde thenne, Ther is no hathel under heven to-hewe hym that myght; Thenne he thulged with hir threpe, and tholed hir to speke, And ho bere on hym the belt, and bede hit hym swythe, 'Now,' said the lady, 'ye refuse this silk, for it is simple in itself, and so it seems, indeed; lo, it is small to look upon and less in cost, but whoso knew the virtue that is knit therein he would, peradventure, value it more highly. For whatever knight is girded with this green lace, while he bears it knotted about him there is no man under heaven can overcome him, for he may not be slain for any magic on earth.' Then Gawain bethought him, and it came into his heart that this were a jewel for the jeopardy that awaited him when he came to the Green Chapel to seek the return blow-could he so order it that he should escape unslain, 'twere a craft worth trying. Then he bare with her chiding, and let her say her say, and she pressed the girdle on him and prayed him to take it, and he granted her prayer, and she gave it him with good-will, and besought him for her sake never to reveal it, but to hide it loyally from her lord; and the knight agreed that never should any man know it, save they two alone. He thanked her often and heartily, and she kissed him for the third time. (Miss Weston's retelling.) At night Gawain gives up the kiss to his host, but conceals the gadle. On New Year's Day a sqaire, who tries to frighten him, leads him to the Green Chapel. There the Green Knight makes two feints at him, and then strikes a blow which grazes his neck and no more. 'Gawain seizes his sword and declares the compact fulfilled. The Green Knight reveals himself as his Christmas host, and says that because he took the girdle he has been grazed, otherwise his constancy had held him scatheless. Gawain is abashed, and vows to wear the green girdle ever to remind him of his fall; but when he tells the story at Arthur's court all his brother-knights vow to wear a green girdle also! The story thus strikingly conceived is no less strikingly told. The Lancashire dialect and the needs of the alliteration make the language present more difficulties than most of the poetry of the date (about 1360) at which it is supposed to have been written. But it is always picturesque and full of variety, and the hunting scenes, the description of the Christmas festivities, as well as the temptation of Gawain by the fair lady, stand out as the work of a literary artist of some skill. Alliterative Poems. The same manuscript which contains this romance contains three other poems written in the same dialect and style, probably about the same time, and, so it is thought, by the same unknown author. Two of these, written in alliterative blank verse, are didactic exaltations of Cleanness (see page 174) and Patience. The former, which is much the longer, running to 1812 lines, to show the perils of impurity narrates at length the fate of the man without a wedding garment, the Fall of the Angels, the punishment of the world by the Flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the story of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, and exhorts the listener who would loyally love his Lord : Then conform thee to Christ and thee clean make, The latter, which has 531 lines, enforces the duty of patience by the story, not of Job, but of Jonah. Both poems rise far above the mere stringing together of stories and denunciations which made the usual medieval exhortation. Cleanness especially is full of poetry and of passion, and yet preserves a sanity and proportion which on this subject are peculiarly rare in medieval literature. The third poem, Pearl, midway in length between the other two (it has 1211 lines), tells of the poet's dream in which the Pearl he has lost, his little twoyear-old daughter, appears to him, standing on the other side of a river, in heavenly array. She is now, she tells him, a queen in heaven; and when the father cannot understand how so little a child can have so rich a reward, the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard is told to enlighten him. Much of the poem is taken up with the glories of an apocalyptic vision; and at last, when the father tries to cross the stream to join his little maid, the dream ends and he wakes The combination of elaborate alliteration and elaborate thyme at times gives the poem a slight artificiality, but its human tenderness and love, and its sympathy with the joys of heaven, are so overflowing that they carry us over all obstacles. Here are three stanzas (21-23) from the talk of father and daughter in which the music must be evident even to those who are repelled by the number of now obsolete words : set in, decked with by me when lonely concealed I weakened-tortured 'O Perle,' quoth I, 'in perles pyght, 2 region 3, 4 put me in sorrow 5 jeweller, jewel-keeper fair, dainty Raised-face-eyes That juel thenne in gemmes gente crown did she say mistaken enclosed remain loss gentle was dear to thee Bot jueler gente if thou schal lose And thou has called thy wyrde a thef, 6 lostest 7 8 9 ΤΟ remedy 1 Since thou glided away from me into the grass. 2 Hast lighted upon a life of delight. 3 Weird, fate. 4 Caused to come. 5 Since we were drawn apart and sundered. 6 Thou seemest set in a foolish intent, and concernest thyself with little reason. 7 As nature caused it. 8 Chest that did enclose it. 9 It is proved to be a pearl of price. 10 That hath bereft thee of no whit. Mr Gollancz, from whose edition of Pearl (Nutt, 1891) our text, with some slight simplification of spelling, and most of our glosses have been taken, has adduced some rather slender arguments for assigning its authorship, and that of Cleanness and Patience, to Radulph Strode ('the philosophical Strode' Chaucer called him), of Merton College, Oxford, of whom there is a record: 'Nobilis poeta fuit et versificavit librum elegiacum vocatum Phantasma Radulphi.' At present this is no more than a conjecture; but it would be pleasant if we could find a name for one who, on the evidence only of these three poems, was a considerable poet, and who, if Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght may be added to them, was a very considerable poet indeed. Minot. The advantage of a name and, we may add, of popular subjects is shown in the case of Laurence Minot, who, for lack of a better place, must be mentioned here. His poems on the wars of Edward III. have but small literary merit, and his patriotism, which is supposed to eke this out, is rather loyalty to the king's person than true national feeling. But his possession of a nameand it is only his name we know-and the names of the battles he sings have served to keep alive his verse, of which these stanzas on the taking of Calais are at least a fair specimen : Lystens now, and ye may lere, Als men the suth may understand, Another tradition, a note in a fifteenth-century hand in a Dublin manuscript of the Vision, calls him William de Langlond, and makes him the son of a freeholder, Stacy de Rokayle, of gentle birth, holding lands at Shipton-under-Wychwood, in Oxfordshire, where research has found traces, not indeed of Langlands, but of both a family and a hamlet of Langley. The evidence of the poem itself is strongly against the poet's having come of gentle birth, and Bale's tradition is the better to follow, though we may safely discard the name Robert in favour of that of William, despite the fact that there are some passages in the poem which might make us think that the poet only calls himself Will because he represents the human will in its search for truth. From the Visions themselves it is easy to obtain much more information, subject to the usual risk which attends the attempt to extract autobiography Returning to the sequence interrupted by Minot, we pass to another poet who wrote in alliterative verse and belonged to the western side of England, with which this revival of the old English form is specially connected. This is William Langland (or Longlond), who in 1362, or a little after, completed the first draft of the poem to which the manuscripts give the titles Liber de Petro Plowman and Visio Willelmi de Petro Plouhman, the 'Book of Piers Ploughman,' or 'William's Vision of Piers Ploughman.' Our knowledge of Langland himself is derived from doubtful traditions and from the information which can be gleaned from various passages in his poem, on the assumption that they are really autobiographical. Of the traditions, one- -that preserved in Bishop Bale's Scriptorum illustrium Majoris Britannie Summarium (1548)-tells us that the poet's name was yanne concience ful anteflisa countenance made ane prengte upon panericesto pere me to be falle Ans fade hum felf five Doctor eso hat be zone tille That 18 Solbel and Sobetze Sýninoms Bnolbermin Thane i fed fuse ye Some can fare no bette fforte so as soctonys tellepofoz Dolbel 1 hit holde yat tanailey to teche opejeefoz Bobet 1 holde hyrt me he pat soy as he techepen holde hrt for ye bestemm Om fact+9ocient inasmus norabitin-.. To pots clesie quos concience-cape What is Dolbel thane me excuses quos deygne bi cft birt in scole Schal no ich moting be menet for me but yese ffoz peres love pe plouhmanyat enpungnese me ones Alle bine cumminges and alle bine caftes Sane tone and lente.ans lolbneffe of herte ans no tyt to take to pene pis for thelbe Biteilige empgimu ane ene qins hitab tabnarlo tuo ne money be piny sbille.mpfit alle pinges lemo bonus sirt lel lone as the ovat loy is to be founden. Reduced facsimile from Piers Plowman in Cotton MS.1 Robert Langelande; that he was born at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire, a few miles from the Malvern Hills; and that he was, apparently, a priest. 1 In all three of the versions the poem must have attained a wide circulation. In 1886 Professor Skeat was able to enumerate no fewer than forty-five extant manuscripts, of which ten contain the A text, thirteen the B, fifteen the C, the other seven showing a mixture of A and C, or B and C. Our illustration is taken from Cotton MS. Vespasian B. xvi. of the C text, attributed to the end of the fourteenth century, and therefore copied within a few years of the writing of this version. The lines shown are 118-137 of Passus xv., and a transcript is appended: And 3e faren pus wip 3oure seke freres. wonder me þynkep. from poetry. As will be explained later, the Visions exist in three clearly defined versions (referred to as A, B, and C), the earliest of which can be shown I haue iseid seide pe doctor. i can seie no bettere Now pow clergie quod concience. carpe what is dowel And no tixt to take. to preue pis for trewe But dilige deum et proximum and domine quis habitat in tabernaculo tuo nemo bonus And proueth be puyr skille inperfijt all þynges. But let loue and trupe. pat lop is to be founden. |