The earliest literature in English is essentially continental and Germanic and reflects the continental origins of the earliest English settlers (called Anglo-Saxons) who migrated to Britain from what is now northern Germany and southern Denmark in the late fourth and fifth centuries AD. These settlers brought with them their language (subsequently known by scholars as Old English) and a fully developed poetic style, through which they expressed their concerns and celebrated their heroes, both historical and legendary, in oral performance. Literature, as we may choose to call it, is at this stage entirely an oral art and the most enduring and effective form that this art took was poetry. Although there are signs of an Anglo-Saxon prose story-telling tradition (in parts of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance), it has left little trace and creative, rather than purely functional, prose seems not to have emerged until the end of the Anglo-Saxon period.
  Much of the Anglo-Saxon poetry that has survived is likely to have been created in oral performance and possibly reshaped and recreated through successive performances by the poet or scop who, in early Germanic society, was a learned man of high social status and was both poet and performer. Poems were only committed to writing late in the Anglo-Saxon period, when church and state together established the practice of written manuscript records. Consequently, there is often a wide disparity between the supposed date of a poem and the date of the manuscript in which it appears and we must also assume that what has survived represents only a fraction of what was at any time current. Although a few poets’ names are known to us, most Anglo-Saxon poetry is anonymous, impersonal, thoroughly conventional and concerned with a limited number of reiterated themes.
  Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is its conservatism. A single style prevails throughout the entire Anglo-Saxon period (from the sixth to the eleventh centuries), a style which fully reflects the oral origins of poetry, with its use of formulae, set-pieces and repetitions, all devised to assist a poet in the practice of his craft. Furthermore, the poet was required to express himself through an elaborate and exacting set of metrical rules, all of which derived from the nature of the spoken language. These rules depended on regular speech, yet they heightened and distilled it, both associating poetry with the spoken language yet, at the same time, distancing itself from it and marking itself out as special, as ‘poetic’ in fact. The tendency of Old English, in common with all the Germanic languages, to stress the root syllable of a word caused elaboration and ornamentation to be concentrated on the beginning of a word, in the form of alliteration or repetition of the same initial sound (only excepting vowels, which were allowed to alliterate together). Alliteration in Anglo-Saxon poetry was systematic and the poetic line is defined by the distribution of alliterating sounds between a fixed number of strongly stressed syllables (commonly four), arranged into two half-lines according to a limited number of patterns.

Early Anglo-Saxon poetry is dominated by Beowulf, the only full-scale heroic epic to have survived from this period. Generalizations about the nature of the Anglo-Saxon epic based on Beowulf are likely to be risky, for the poem survives only in a single manuscript from the tenth century. The poem itself has been variously dated to the late seventh and early eighth centuries and is, on the face of it, deceptively simple. Beowulf, a warrior of the Geatish tribe in present-day southern Sweden, travels to Denmark to purge the Danish court of a marauding man-monster, called Grendel. Grendel is killed by Beowulf and so is his mother. Much later, back in Geatland, Beowulf, now an old king, kills a treasure-guarding dragon. Both Beowulf and the dragon are killed in the confrontation and Beowulf is succeeded as hero by his companion, the young Wiglaf. Much of Beowulf is pure folk tale and folk tale sources have indeed been established. The first surprise for a modern reader coming to Beowulf is that, language apart, there is nothing English about it. The setting is entirely Scandinavian and factual references within the poem are mostly to northern Germanic people and places. Grendel is clearly a Scandinavian troll. The Scandinavian link is reinforced by consideration of parallel tales (or analogues) of which there are several, notably the early fourteenth-century Icelandic prose saga The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettixsaga). The most likely explanation is that both Beowulf and Grettissaga draw upon the same northern Germanic folk tale. Elsewhere, references to Scandinavian events and people of the sixth century AD may be explained by trading and cultural contacts between the East Anglians (with whom Beowulf is associated linguistically) and the Scandinavians or, perhaps, by the presence in the east of England of a tribe of Scandinavian settlers, whose presence may also be indicated by Swedish elements in the seventh-century ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk.
  Despite its apparent simplicity, Beowulf is artfully contrived and sophisticated in its structure. The three successive confrontations provide a basic tripartite structure and suggest that the tale was, in the first instance, told in three episodes. Cutting across this simple tripartite structure, however, is a further structure. Throughout the text, there are cryptic references to other personages and other deeds which, in contrast with the deeds of Beowulf and his non-human foes, are very much of the real, historical world. These references are among those which are sometimes, inappropriately, called ‘digressions’ and are carefully placed within the poem to contrast with, or comment on, events of the main narrative. Taken together, the events of this sub-plane concern the political and military affairs of Denmark and Sweden and become increasingly clear and coherent as the poem proceeds, binding the tripartite structure of the main narrative into a unified whole.
  Beowulf presents the reader with a very clear picture of the Germanic warrior hero of the Dark Age period. He is, of course, of superlative strength, arrogant, self-confident, proud of his heroic deeds and of exceptional military ability, though, oddly, Beowulf is happier fighting monsters than men and his deeds in the world of men are dealt with rather summarily in the poem. The world of the hero is aristocratic and masculine and women play only a subservient role. A hero is driven by the desire to ensure a long-lasting reputation for himself and is loyally served by warriors who expect protection and reward for their service, in return for which they will fight to the death on behalf of their leader. Loyalty and disloyalty, through which such a society is threatened, are themes which are explored in both Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems.
  Whether we should regard Beowulf simply as a poetic narrative designed to entertain an early English audience interested in the deeds of strong men is a matter of continuing debate. Certainly, Beowulf acts as a deliverer of both the Danes and his own people and he finally meets his own death in the process. Through Beowulf, good undoubtedly triumphs despite obstacles both human and non-human. The issue is complicated by the Christian overtones within the poem which sometimes seem at odds with the generally pagan world of Beowulf, which would seem to be governed by a belief in fate (wyrd), though God is also often referred to. Furthermore, Grendel is unambiguously described as a descendant of the biblical Cain, the first murderer, in which case we might view Beowulf as a Christian avenger or even as a Christ-like figure who sacrifices himself in a Christian allegory. Given that the tenth-century manuscript was probably copied out in a monastic scriptorium (or writing room), there is also the possibility that the original text was tampered with, brought up to date, as it were, and given a Christian veneer.
Generally speaking, it seems reasonable to accept and judge Beowulf as we have it and to see it as a Christian poem, but a Christian poem about an age that was pagan. Hence the apparent mix of values. In any case, we should remember that Christianity was only gradually established in England throughout the seventh century and that a conscious attempt was made by the Christian missionaries to adapt to pagan practices and situations wherever possible. The nature of Anglo-Saxon Christianity was, in other words, quite different from that of the modern period and so was Anglo-Saxon Christian literature. This is plainly seen in those later Anglo-Saxon epic poems which are quite clearly Christian, such as Judith (the tale of the Old Testament Apocryphal heroine of the Jews who slew the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes) and Elene (which tells of St Helena, mother of the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine, and her search for the True Cross). In these poems, and others, the heroes, whether male or female, pursue their objectives with a ruthless determination that is worthy of any pagan hero. The only significant difference is that they fight in the name of God, rather than to establish a lasting reputation for themselves. The whole of the Anglo-Saxon period may, in fact, be seen as an age of transition from one set of values to another.

Elegiac and meditational poetry

This spirit of transition is also encountered in The Wanderer and The Seafarer, the finest of a small group of poetic meditations on the theme of loss which are commonly known as ‘elegies’. Both poems are usually dated later than Beowulf and are clearly Christian, but both, to a greater or lesser degree, seem to relate to an earlier age. Both are bedevilled by textual problems and both deal with the theme of isolation and the comfort that God can give to the lonely man. The narrator of The Wanderer is a lordless man, who has lost his protector in battle. His search for a new patron leads him to the realization that his best hope of security lies in God. There is a clear contrast in The Wanderer between the heroic world of the bulk of the poem and its Christian resolution.
  The Seafarer, by way of contrast, is more thoroughly Christian and the narrator of the poem has chosen his exile. Whether he is simply a seaman or else a Christian exile from the world of men is a matter of debate. Again, the picture is one of man alone against a hostile nature, as the narrator conjures up, in this highly atmospheric poem, a vivid picture of ice-cold northern seas, with only the cries of sea birds as company. Mid-way through, the poem takes an allegorical turn, as exile is viewed as an escape from worldly pleasures, despite their temptations, to the more permanent pleasures of heaven. Life on earth is of value only if man has performed good deeds; the old heroic days, the narrator suggests, have gone. Humility and moderation better prepare man for the love of God.
  Probably the best-known and the finest of all Anglo-Saxon Christian poems is The Dream of the Rood, a highly individual meditation on the crucifixion. Although, as expected, it is thoroughly conventional in language and metre, it has, nevertheless, an experimental feel. Again, although unambiguously Christian, it bears traces of an earlier, heroic cast of mind, as Christ is viewed in the poem as a young intrepid hero who willingly mounts the cross and embraces His crucifixion in His triumph over death. Uniquely, Christ’s suffering is transferred to the cross itself which speaks of its suffering and torment. Unusually, we identify with the cross, rather than with Christ. This device of using the inanimate cross as narrator (prosopopeia) is infrequent in Anglo-Saxon literature, though inanimate objects in plenty do speak in the many surviving Anglo-Saxon Riddles and, perhaps, in the problematic elegy The Husband’s Message. Also, too, The Dream of the Rood is cast as a dream poem, a very early example of a mode that was to become widely popular in the Middle Ages, in which the narrator dreams of the crucifixion and the cross, which then speaks. Following its description of the crucifixion and its aftermath, the cross describes its own burial, recovery and veneration and the value of the cross as a symbol of salvation. The dreamer wakes, inspired by the vision, and looks forward to the time when, through worship of the cross, he may join the ranks of the saved.
  Although the complete text of The Dream of the Rood only occurs in a late tenth-century manuscript (in The Vercelli Book), fragments of an earlier version are carved in Northumbrian runes on the early eighth-century Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, an evocative setting for a cross that speaks. The poem itself, or at least some form of it, may be even earlier. Both poem and carved cross are likely to be part of the cult of the cross that was stimulated by the miraculous discovery of a fragment of the True Cross by Pope Sergius I in Rome in 701.
  The majority of Anglo-Saxon poetry is, in fact, Christian in function and content and most surviving poems are semi-narrative pieces, with homiletic overtones, which describe the lives of saints or retell, very freely, certain books of the Bible (particularly the Old Testament). All adapt to the expectations of an Anglo-Saxon audience used to tales of heroes in action, though apart from Beowulf only fragments of these have survived.

Two of the most obviously heroic poems in Old English, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon, survive from the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, when we might suppose the heroic manner to have become outmoded. However, both revive the heroic style for what are clearly propagandist purposes. Both poems celebrate actual historical events; the one a triumph, the other a disaster. In both cases, events have been recast to show the heroes in the best possible light. The Battle of Brunanburh, which is found in some versions of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 937, celebrates the victory of the English King Aethelstan and his brother Edmund against a combined force of Scandinavians, Norse-Irish and Scots. The poem is conceived in the manner of an Irish or Scandinavian praise poem, in being a succession of flattering statements. All is black and white; the heroes are Christian and fearless, their opponents are pagan, cowardly and flee from the battle humiliated. The Battle of Brunanburh is unashamedly partisan and by using the heroic style, both Aethelstan and Edmund are in consequence linked with the heroes of old.
  At seventy-three lines, The Battle of Brunanburh is short. More substantial is The Battle of Maldon, with which it is often paired and contrasted. The Battle of Maldon also springs from an actual historical event which is reported in a few lines in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 991. This was a minor skirmish, in which a party of Danes, attempting to make landfall from an islet off the coast of Essex, defeated the local ‘ealdorman’ and his troops. The picture that we get from The Battle of Maldon, however, is utterly different. The ‘ealdorman’ of Essex, called Byrhtnoth, has been transformed into an ancient, proud and determined warrior, served by men who are scarcely less heroic than he is. Unfortunately, treachery in his own camp and among the Danes, as well as his own pride, bring about Byrhtnoth’s downfall and that of his men. The Danes are allowed to cross to the mainland for a fight to the death. Though outnumbered, Byrhtnoth fights heroically, even when mortally wounded, in a series of ferocious confrontations. Inevitably, he is killed and his fight is taken up by a succession of young warriors, who boast of their fitness for the fight, before one by one they are slaughtered. To a modern, cynical mind. The Battle of Maldon reads at times like a parody, as exaggerated boasts of heroic deeds to be performed lead only to death. Certainly, the poem seems written to a formula and has all the characteristics that we would expect of a heroic poem. Like The Battle of Brunanburh, it, too, is thoroughly partisan, with treacherous Danes destroying Christian heroes. Yet, the poem is inevitably of its age; a renewed attack by the Danes, such as occurred in 991, was a feared prospect, for memories of earlier Viking attacks were no doubt a live folk memory. The Battle of Maldon was written to boost morale; a defeat was not so much ‘covered up’ as transformed. The English might die, but there was nothing squalid about the way in which they met their deaths.
  Anglo-Saxon prose ‘literature’ is, by way of contrast, largely functional in intent and arose during the course of the period to satisfy the needs of both Church and State, The earliest prose works are charters and legal documents which, though of linguistic and historical value, are of little, if any, literary interest. It was not until the reign of King Alfred of Wessex, who ruled from 871 to 899, that a prose literature developed that served, in large part, to instil a sense of national identity among Englishmen who were confronted by Danish occupation in the north and east. Chief of these ‘government’ prose works are the various versions of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a series of annals which incorporated earlier materials and which continued to be compiled in various monastic centres throughout the rest of the Anglo-Saxon period) and the historical, educational and theological works which were translated or paraphrased under the auspices of King Alfred, if not, as was once thought, entirely by King Alfred himself. These include St Gregory’s Pastoral Care (Cura Pastoralis), Paulus Orosius’s Histories against the Pagans (Historiae adversum Paganos), Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (De Consolatione Philosophiae) and St Augustine’s Soliloquies (Soliloquia). What makes these particularly distinctive are the prefaces which precede each of them and in which we can discern the beginnings of an imaginative prose tradition in English. Perhaps the most interesting and popular, because of its subject matter, is the extended preface which precedes the paraphrase of Orosius’s Histories against the Pagans and which includes the reports of two travellers to the north of Europe: that of Ohthere who travelled round the North Cape to the White Sea and that of Wulfstan who travelled along the coast of the Baltic. Both pieces are, strictly speaking, documentary prose and are the earliest examples of geographical writing in English.
  The most mature and flamboyant prose in Old English is that which was designed for oral performance in service of the church, notably the contrasting collections of sermons associated with the names of Aelfric and Wulfstan, statesman and Bishop of London (996-1002) before becoming Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury. The sermons of Aelfric (of which there are 85) are learned expositions of themes or biblical texts appropriate to the major festivals of the Church calendar. Each is clearly argued and draws from an impressive array of theological and biblical sources and is presented in a prose which adapts the style and techniques of poetry in order to make it effective in performance. In contrast, the 21 surviving sermons of Wulfstan seem primarily designed for oral performance and use an abundance of classical rhetorical devices to underscore their argument. In fhct, his most popular sermon. The Sermon of the Wolf to the English (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos) seems, at times, rather too self-consciously an exercise in rhetoric, with repetitions and parallel statements piled up in super-abundance, as Wulfstan attacks his English audience for its godlessness which has led to God’s vengeance in allowing further Danish successes in late Anglo-Saxon England.

In many ways, the literary tradition that had been developing throughout the Anglo-Saxon period amounted to little, for political and cultural affairs were to be utterly transformed by the events that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066. From the late eleventh century until the accession of King John in 1204, England became effectively an extension of northern France. A new Norman-French speaking elite was transplanted into England where it had control of government (both secular and religious) and cultural life. The English language, both as a spoken tongue and as the language of literature, was marginalized and, consequently, nothing of literary substance survives in English from this new ‘dark age’ until the end of the twelfth century.
  The Norman Conquest of England conventionally marks the beginning of the medieval period in English history and life, and the English that began to emerge as a literary language at the end of the twelfth century has been labelled Middle English by scholars, in recognition of the very clear differences between it and the preceding Old English and to identify its status as transitionary between the English of the Anglo-Saxon period and the new or modern English of the post-Renaissance period. Middle English is characterized, among other things, by large-scale lexical loans from French, the deletion of many words of Germanic origin, the development of a fixed word order and a simplification of the inflectional system that controlled nouns, adjectives and verbs.
  The political and cultural forces that transformed Old English into Middle English are also responsible for the new kinds of literature that emerge during the medieval period in England, as increased familiarity with literature in Latin and French gave English writers access to new models, which provided new ideas and new forms. Thus, the Old English epic was transformed into the romance, by which hero tales became more fabulous, less earth-bound and more imaginative. Heroes, now commonly knights, were ruled by elaborate codes of conduct to do with chivalry and courtesy which governed the behaviour of knight towards knight and, importantly, knight towards lady. The romance was largely an aristocratic genre aimed at an elite who required as literary entertainment an idealized view of itself and its aspirations. Love between well-born men and ladies made a substantial appearance in medieval literature and was ritualized into fin amour or courtly love, whereby the precise behaviour of both parties was codified and prescribed into a refined and courtly game. Conversely, comic tales, called fabliaux, gave an alternative, often bawdy, view of sexual relations, usually among the bourgeoisie or low-born, where woman as descendant of Eve was preferred to woman as a derivative of the Virgin Mary.
  These new narrative genres were composed in a variety of imported metres, syllabic and usually rhymed, and embellished with rhetorical devices derived ultimately from classical tradition. In the Middle Ages the domain of English poetry was extended to embrace a range of new forms: lyrical, dramatic, comic, romance, devotional. Yet, the earlier Old English poetic tradition did leave its mark, particularly in the western fringes of England and Scotland, where the alliterative tradition seems to have continued. In consequence, there was a degree of transition between the old and the new and the important Brut, by the Worcestershire priest Layamon, illustrates this, with its Germanic alliteration and rhyme (essentially a characteristic of romance poetry). Written towards the end of the twelfth century, the Brut (named after Brutus, the supposed grandson of Aeneas and founder of Britain) is a lengthy narrative poem chronicling the early history of Britain and is now chiefly read and remembered for those passages which concern the history of King Arthur, who here owes much to preceding notions of the Germanic hero. In fact, as the earliest example of Arthurian literature in English it is of crucial importance to the development of King Arthur as a prominent figure of romance tales in both verse and prose in English. Although Layamon invented and expanded certain details of his narrative, his work is essentially a retelling of existing materials. His immediate source is a lengthy verse chronicle in Norman French by the Jerseyman Wace called Roman de Brut (c.1155), which itself is a retelling of the lengthy and influential Latin prose history The History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae) by Geoffrey of Monmouth who, it is generally agreed, completed his work some time during the 1130s.

With the rise of English as a literary language from the late twelfth century onwards, certain types of poetry and prose that would previously have been associated with Latin and French began to make their appearance in English, in a style and format that was largely new and unfamiliar to an English audience. An example is the late twelfth-century debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale, an astonishingly sophisticated and assured piece, whose maturity can only be explained if we see it as part of a long-established tradition, but a tradition that was Latin and French, rather than English. Yet, despite its non-English roots. The Owl and the Nightingale emerges as a thoroughly English piece, as a very human owl and nightingale debate the merits of their opposing lifestyles.
  Although on the surface it is a light-hearted piece. The Owl and the Nightingale is clearly intended to be taken seriously. Whether we are to interpret the argument in general terms, as simply contrasting a life of pleasure with a life of sobriety, or as something more specific, contrasting a secular with a monastic life, for instance, is a matter of debate.
  Although much of the prose of the medieval period is still largely functional, rather than imaginative, some of the religious prose does display an assurance and fluency which would seem to continue the tradition established by Aelfric and Wulfstan. Most important of the early medieval Christian prose works is the devotional handbook Ancrene Riwle of the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, which was later revised as the Ancrene Wisse. This lengthy, anonymous work was, apparently, written at the request of three noble ladies who had withdrawn from the world to live as Christian recluses or anchoresses and who required guidance on spiritual conduct. The Riwle begins and ends with a discussion of ‘outer’ matters, to do with religious observance and everyday behaviour, but, for the most part, it is concerned with the ‘inner’ or spiritual life, with moral values that are absolute. Much is made of worldly temptation and the special dangers to women, as the example of Eve is frequently contrasted with that of the Virgin Mary. Inevitably, there is much in the Riwle on sin and, almost inevitably, it is the depiction of sin and sinners that provides some of the liveliest and most graphic passages, as in its discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is a learned work, yet a work that carries its learning lightly, mixing anecdote, scriptural exegesis and quotations from the Church Fathers. That this West Midlands work was influential is clear from the fact that it was revised for a wider audience and, unusually for an English work of this period, was translated into both Latin and French.

For much of the early medieval period, the status of English as a literary language remained uncertain and a writer was as likely to compose in Latin or French as in English. Even in the fourteenth century, the ‘golden age’ of medieval English literature, there was still a choice for, it should be remembered, English was only permitted for use in law courts in 1362 and it was not until 1385 (according to Trevisa) that English, rather than French, was generally adopted as the medium of instruction in schools. Thus it was that John Gower (c. 1327/30-1408), the author of three substantial pieces, chose French as the language of his first major poem, Speculum Meditantis (The Mirror of One Meditating), and Latin for his second, Vox Clamantis (The Voice of One Crying). It was only with his final collection of poetic tales, Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession), of which the first version dates to 1390, that he turned to English, his native tongue. However, the establishment of English as the prime vehicle for literature written in England was given a powerful boost by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1337-1400), the most influential writer of the English Middle Ages who chose to write exclusively in English. Despite this, Chaucer was very much a European and his reworking of Italian and French texts elevated both his work and the English literary language to European rank. His prodigious output reflects both his learning and his social position. Although always close to the court, he was also a man of the world.
  As a writer, Chaucer is largely associated with long narrative poems, compiled in a range of continental metres and stylistically in tune with European, rather than native English, traditions. Yet he also wrote lyric poetry, ballads and roundels and prose pieces, notably a translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae.
  Chaucer’s work is conventionally divided into three periods, reflecting the degree to which he was dependent on external influences. To his first, French, period (before 1372) belongs his translation (of which only a part survives) of the allegorical Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose), by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, a poem which was to exert an influence over much of Chaucer’s later writing. From it Chaucer borrowed the device of the dream vision and the seasonal setting which he commonly used to introduce romantic and allegorical narratives, as in The Book of the Duchess, the major poem of his first period, which is said to have been written for John of Gaunt following the death of his first wife Blanche in 1369.

The major work of Chaucer’s second, or Italian, period (1373-84) is the long philosophical romance Troilus and Criseyde, one of the twin peaks of his literary career. Prior to this are the two dream vision poems The House of Fame (c.1379), a sprawling, incomplete and unsatisfactory narrative, yet one that includes much that is typical of Chaucer’s mature work and several passages of great invention, and the lively The Parlement of Foulys (The Parliament of Birds), 1382-83, a light-hearted debate piece, written for St Valentine’s Day, which uses birds to contrast natural and courtly love.
  However, Chaucer’s most substantial examination of the theme of courtly love is his massive Troilus and Criseyde (1379-83), which, because of its panoramic sweep, its delineation of character and its exploration of moral issues, is sometimes regarded as a verse precursor of the novel. Chaucer has taken his story from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato and much of his thinking from Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, yet he has convincingly made the borrowed material his own. As narrator, Chaucer is, as so often, a presence in the poem as he both reports and comments on his narrative. As the title suggests, central to the tale are Troilus and Criseyde and the poem is the history of their tragic love; as Fate, politics, personality and the intervention of others all conspire against them. The aristocratic world that they inhabit is an unreal mix of courtly formality and realistic behaviour, just as the pagan Trojan and Greek background is, in the medieval manner, anachronistically reinterpreted into a medieval present, with life governed by both Fate or Fortune and the Christian God. Initially, both Troilus and Criseyde are reluctant lovers. Troilus, who is more in love with warfare than with women, is disdainful of love, until he sees Criseyde. Criseyde is a widow and, as such, is sexually aware, though love is for her a matter of the past. However, the intervention of Pandarus, Criseyde’s uncle, as go-between, brings them together. Troilus is converted into the conventional lovesick knight of courtly romance, totally obsessed with an idealized view of the object of his veneration. Criseyde, though, always retains a degree of independence and is, surely, Chaucer’s most complex and compelling character, one of the great women of fiction. To some extent, she acts freely and knowingly, yet, at the same time, she is the victim of circumstances beyond her control. She allows herself to fall in love with Troilus, but, like Guinevere in Arthurian story, at no time is she the idealized woman of Troilus’s imagination. Called to the Grecian camp against her will, by her traitor-father, she is forced to abandon Troilus and, despite her promise to remain faithful to him, she allows herself to be seduced by the worldly-wise Grecian hero Diomede. Unlike Troilus, Diomede is an opportunist, practical and realistic, and through him and Troilus we have Chaucer’s view of the inadequacies of the courtly love ethic when confronted by the values of the real world. Courtly love may work in the world of literary romance, but is ineffective elsewhere. Inevitably, Troilus is killed in action at the end of the poem and with him die his ideals, as both Diomede and Criseyde live on. For Troilus, at least, Boethius’s Wheel of Fortune has turned full circle, driven by forces that Troilus has always felt powerless to resist. Yet the poem ends optimistically, as the final stanzas emphasize the value of Christian, rather than worldly, love and, in three stanzas that were absent from the first version of the poem, the soul of Troilus, the good pagan, flies to Heaven from where, enlightened, it views the foolishness of mankind.
  Despite its serious theme, there is much to delight in Troilus and Criseyde. Its style is a fluent mix of the formal and the colloquial and passages of realism alternate with abstract speculation, all conveyed through a sequence of rhyme-royal stanzas over five books, which together mirror the rise and fall of Troilus and Criseyde’s love. Characterization throughout is sharply delineated as four utterly different personalities (Troilus, Criseyde, Pandarus and Diomede) are brought into conflict. Not the least interesting is Pandarus, here essentially Chaucer’s own creation, who provides a welcome light relief and a note of comic realism, as he uses any means, whether dishonest or not, to bring Troilus and Criseyde together.

The masterpiece of Chaucer’s third and final period, which is marked by a greater degree of originality, is The Canterbury Tales (begun c. 1386), a compendium of tales told by pilgrims en route to the shrine of St Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. Chaucer’s intention, as announced in his Prologue, was to give each of the thirty-one pilgrims four tales, two for the outward journey and two for the return, with conversational links and prologues to bridge the intervals between the stories and give unity to an otherwise diverse work. In the event The Canterbury Tales was never finished. Only twenty-two pilgrims tell complete stories and not all are linked, rendering the exact ordering of the tales problematic at times.
  Although incomplete. The Canterbury Tales shows a significant advance in Chaucer’s narrative art, as he is here obliged to create stories, most of them borrowed, through a variety of voices. The whole design is set in motion by a magnificent Prologue which sets the scene and introduces the pilgrims, including Chaucer and the congenial Host of the Tabard Inn at Southwark who takes charge of them. The pilgrims are drawn from a wide social spectrum and through them Chaucer creates an impression of a complete society, a society which is seen in terms of its classes or ‘estates’, as defined by both social position and occupation (see Mann, 1973). The pilgrimage, as one of the few places where the classes would mix, provides Chaucer with the ideal framework and, in this respect. The Canterbury Tales is much more effective than other such collections of tales that may have influenced him, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Boccaccio’s Decameron, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis and his own (unfinished) Legend of Good Women (1385-86).
  Chaucer, in The Prologue, is both observer and omniscient narrator, as he describes what he sees and what he knows of the background of each of the pilgrims. An important theme of The Prologue is the clash between personality and the expectations of a profession as, for example, is made clear in the contrasting portraits of ecclesiastics. Only the Poor Parson, significantly, lives up to the ideals of the Church. Necessarily, Chaucer’s attitude to the pilgrims varies, as some are regarded with respect, some are savagely satirized and others are exposed through gentle irony. The result, however, is a gallery of vivid, live and thoroughly believable characters, few of them without flaws.
  The tales themselves are, inevitably, something of a patchwork. Some relate naturally to the tellers, such as the two very different kinds of Romance tale told by both Knight and Squire and the story of a Christian child murdered by Jews, which is told by the Prioress. Others arise dramatically from the context of the poem. Thus, the Miller tells a bawdy tale about a gullible carpenter and the Reeve, who is also a carpenter, retaliates with an equally bawdy piece about a corrupt miller who gets his come-uppance. Similarly, the Summoner’s tale shows the hood-winking of a foolish and corrupt friar, which is the Summoner’s response to the Friar who, in his tale, told of a lecherous and greedy summoner who is dragged off to Hell.
  Several of the finest tales in the collection, however, appear to have no obvious relevance to their narrator. The Nun’s Priest, who is scarcely mentioned in The Prologue, delivers one of the highlights of the whole Canterbury Tales, a delicious rendering of ‘Chantecleer and the Fox’, a well-known animal fable warning against pride, here reported as mock epic. Other highlights are the unattractive Pardoner’s allegorical tale on the price of greed (highly ironic in view of the Pardoner’s own character), the Franklin’s moral tale on the problems of conflicting honour (to one’s husband on the one hand and to one’s word on the other) and the Merchant’s witty reinterpretation of the stock fabliau plot of a jealous old husband who is outwitted by his young wife and her lover. Among the disappointments are the Wife of Bath’s Tale, a quest piece, in which a young knight, under sentence of death, saves his skin and gains a beautiful wife by discovering what it is that women most desire. This comes as a massive anti-climax after the superlative Prologue that precedes it, in which the Wife of Bath gives a frank and bawdy autobiographical account of her succession of marriages.
  Love and marriage, in fact, are dominant themes in The Canterbury Tales and are explored from a variety of perspectives; from the romantic and idealistic to the mercenary, realistic and often comic. As Chaucer had earlier shown in The Parlement of Foulys, courtly love or fin amour is the preserve of the knights and ladies of romance, whereas natural, realistic and, often bawdy, lustful ‘love’ is associated with the bourgeoisie. Style and topic in The Canterbury Tales are also perfectly matched. Where appropriate, colloquial speech and realism contrast with formal speech and an elevated, stately language, all usually conveyed through fluent heroic couplets. Learned references and all the devices of the classical rhetorical tradition amplify and underline his theme, whether Chaucer’s intention is straightforward or ironic. Although Chaucer is, rightly, regarded as an original and innovative writer, his originality, like Shakespeare’s, depends on his ability to recreate existing materials to suit his own style and purpose. Few of his tales, in other words, are his own invention, most are borrowed from Classical, Italian and French literary sources.

Like all medieval writers, Chaucer wrote in a literary form of his own regional speech, that of the south-east midlands. Inevitably, given that this was the speech of London and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, this was the dialect that ultimately became established as the literary norm, the basis of modern Standard Literary English. Hence, Chaucer’s work is reasonably accessible to the modern reader. Less accessible, perhaps, are the important works associated with the west of England which, in the fourteenth century, saw a revival of an alliterative poetry which combined native English alliterative metres with Romance themes and ideas. William Langland’s Piers Plowman, for instance, uses dream visions and allegory, but is otherwise an entirely English piece, alliterative and unrhymed. Written during the second half of the fourteenth century, it operates as a sequence of Christian moralities, in which the path to salvation is explored against a vivid background of vice and corruption throughout the whole of society. It is strongly didactic in tone, though often untidy and poorly structured. It survives in three versions (A, B and C), which suggests that it was subject to constant change and revision, and was clearly popular, as is indicated by the large number of surviving manuscripts.
  The greatest achievements of the alliterative revival, however, are the works of the anonymous ‘Gawain poet’ who, on stylistic grounds, is thought to have written three lengthy religious poems Pearl, Patience and Purity and, most notably, the narrative romance which has given rise to his ‘name’. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century).
The alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in fact, stands comparison with anything that Chaucer wrote, but its north-west midland dialect does cause difficulties. Its Arthurian theme may reflect north-western English Celtic associations and, significantly, certain elements of its story are paralleled in early Irish literature. Like so many Arthurian narratives, the poem is both quest and trial, in which the hero Gawain (and, by implication, Arthur and his court) is tested for his moral courage, in a manner which, unusually, highlights his vulnerability as a man, rather than knight.

The fourteenth century also sees the development of a tradition of English drama. Although secular plays are known to have been performed, virtually nothing has survived and medieval English drama commonly means religious drama, notably the cycles of Mystery plays that were often performed in urban and ecclesiastical centres on church festivals (particularly the Feast of Corpus Christi).
  The Mystery plays, which are likely to have had their origins in quasi-dramatic expansions to the church liturgy at Christmas and Easter, were performed out-of-doors and often processionally on movable wagons (called pageants). They have as their purpose the Christian message of redemption through Christ, illustrated through a sequence (or cycle) of biblical plays that range from the Creation of the World and the Fall of Man to the Nativity, Passion, Resurrection and Last Judgement. Also included were Old Testament Plays on subjects believed to prefigure Christ. Each of the plays was mounted by Craft or Trade guilds (or mysteries), which gave their name to the genre.
  Four more or less complete cycles have survived from the many that are known to have once existed; one, the so-called N-town Cycle, is variously associated by scholars with East Anglia or Lincoln, the others with Chester, York and Wakefield. All are in verse and all the plays are necessarily short, since the cycles were performed in the course of a single day (as with York and Wakefield) or over two days (Chester). All dramatize virtually the same biblical episodes, though their treatment is often strikingly different and each contains apocryphal, folk and invented materials to a greater or lesser degree. Anachronisms abound and biblical events are commonly set in a medieval present, establishing their message as true for all time. The Chester Cycle (usually dated to about 1375) is uniform in character and relatively straightforward, whereas the later York Cycle is mixed in character and clearly contains the work of several hands over several periods. The brevity of some of the York plays occasionally reduces their dramatic effectiveness and reflects the number of participating guilds in prosperous York. Among the best of the plays are those attributed to the so-called York Metrist and York Realist, notably the York Realist’s play of The Crucifixion. The Wakefield Cycle (also called the Towneley Cycle, from the Lancashire family that once owned the sole manuscript) is clearly based in part on the York plays, which the authorities at Wakefield are thought to have borrowed. At some point in the first half of the fifteenth century, six plays (it is commonly thought) were replaced by those of a playwright conventionally known as the Wakefield Master and with these plays the Mystery play genre reaches its highest achievement. Despite the limitations imposed by the biblical sources and the confined playing area, the Master’s plays give the impression of absolute freedom. Vigorous action and colloquial speech combine with apocryphal and folk material and frequent references to social ills. Yet the biblical source at the core of each play is left intact and the theological message is unimpaired. Clearly, though, what was perceived as an increasing secularization of the Mystery plays contributed to their being banned by the church authorities at the time of the Reformation. Most daring and adventurous of the Master’s plays is his Second Shepherds’ Play (Secunda Pastorum). At first sight, the adoration of the shepherds (the subject of the play) would seem to be marginalized, with the first two-thirds of this long play being given over to a ‘pseudo-Nativity’, in which a sinister sheep-thief, Mak, steals a sheep from the shepherds which is concealed by his wife in ‘swaddling bands’ and passed off as her own new-born child. Exposure follows a mock adoration by the shepherds, who then proceed to the actual nativity, which is marked by a tone of absolute reverence at odds with the rest of the play. Although the ‘pseudo-Nativity’ is undoubtedly comic and possibly distracting, its intention is certainly serious, with the stolen sheep, perhaps, to be seen as a ‘false Christ’ and ‘his Father’, Mak, as agent of the devil. In this play, and all the Master’s plays (with the exception of Cain and Abel), he uses an intricate nine-line stanza, characterized by both internal and end-of-line rhyme which, astonishingly, never disrupts the dialogue, whether naturalistic or formal.
  The N-Town Cycle, the latest of the Mystery cycles, is less obviously dramatic and differs in many ways from the other extant cycles. Its name derives from the preliminaries in the cycle’s single manuscript; N (Latin nomen) indicates where the name of the town in which the plays were to be performed was to be entered. The likelihood, therefore, is that the plays were performed in no one town only, nor are they thought to have been performed processionally. The cycle uniquely contains a sequence of episodes on the life of the Virgin Mary and this has given rise to the suggestion that we have here a composite cycle made up of separate cycles and plays.
  Another kind of medieval religious play, the morality, arose alongside the Mystery plays and was to continue, in modified form, throughout the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, culminating in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. The morality plays take as their theme the drama of human life, as mankind is continuously forced to choose between the forces of good and evil. An early example, The Castle of Perseverance (c.1420) takes the whole of man’s life, from the cradle to the grave, as its subject. Later plays confine themselves to a single phase, as in the earthily humorous Mankind and the deeply serious Everyman, in which man, at the point of death, is forced to confront his lack of good deeds on earth and learns of the importance of contrition and confession.

A key event in both the history of the English language and English literature was the establishment by William Caxton in 1476 of a printing press in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Previously, literary texts had to be laboriously written by hand, but now multiple copies became more or less easily available. A degree of standardization of language and spelling became obviously necessary, marking an advance in the development of a Standard Literary English and heralding the decline of regional English as a medium of literature. The spread of texts also encouraged the practice of silent reading, where previously a text might have been ‘performed’ aloud.
  Caxton approached his work as printer creatively, editing where necessary and often adding prologues and epilogues of his own composition. His chosen texts were essentially medieval favourites, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and French works which Caxton translated himself. Among the most important of Caxton’s texts is Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (written in 1469 or 1470), which established prose, rather than poetry, as a suitable vehicle for Romance. Previously, apart from devotional works, prose in the English Middle Ages was essentially functional, rather than creative.
  Le Morte D’Arthur is a massive and often frustrating work, by an author of whom virtually nothing is known. Before 1934, it was assumed that Caxton’s edition represented Malory’s intentions, but the discovery in Winchester in that year of a manuscript of Le Morte D’Arthur suggested that Malory had envisaged eight tales, which he arranged chronologically to illustrate the rise and fall of Arthur’s court. Caxton, it seems, had regarded the whole collection as a single tale and had redivided it into twenty-one books. However we regard it, Malory established the basic Arthurian narrative for all time, bringing together, rearranging, translating and adapting key Arthurian texts from England and France in the manner of an historian. The result is a history of Arthur and his knights, imbued with the ideals of literary romance; a glamorized picture of a medieval past that never was and written in prison, as the author tells us, during the turbulence of the Wars of the Roses, which were to bring the medieval period to a close.
  At the core of Le Morte D’Arthur is the rivalry between Arthur and his incestuously born son Mordred, conceived through a sinful act (though committed in innocence) that left Arthur forever doomed. Superimposed on this is the romance theme of illicit love, between Lancelot, favourite of King Arthur, and Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, which provokes further division in Arthur’s court and is the major cause of its downfall. In fact, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere dominates much of Le Morte D’Arthur, for both Lancelot and Guinevere are more fully depicted than Arthur. Lancelot, the noble lover and superlative knight, is not without deceit, though he argues his innocence, and Guinevere is strong-minded in her disloyalty. Yet, in its attempt to be comprehensive, Le Morte D’Arthur contains too much; too much matter that seems only vaguely Arthurian, too many events that seem only loosely connected with its central theme, too much detail and too much repetition.
  Despite the achievements of pre-Renaissance English writers, early English literature is, for most present-day English students, synonymous with the works of Chaucer. Yet, though Chaucer dominates his age, he wrote within a context of other writers, both English and European, whose work he used and recreated, and he, in turn, inspired others (notably the ‘Scottish Chaucerian’ poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). A study of Chaucer’s context and his work can only extend our understanding of all that followed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Most of the texts referred to in this unit are included (wholly or in part) in Michael Alexander and Felicity Riddy, eds., The Middle Ages, Vol. I [Macmillan Anthologies of English Literature} (London: Macmillan. 1989). For a modern edition of the works of Chaucer, the reader is referred to Larry D. Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988). This edition is based on F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

The following series books provide useful critical essays and bibliographies:

Michael Alexander, Old English Literature [Macmillan History of Literature] (London: Macmillan 1983).
Derek Brewer, English Gothic Literature [Macmillan History of Literature] (London: Macmillan 1983).
Richard Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994).
Pietro Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986).
Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991).
Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973).