Perhaps the greatest change imposed by the Norman Conquest was linguistic. We still know little of how long or deeply Normans and English were divided by their vernaculars. Latin offered a lifeline of communication at some social levels of this initially fractured society. The European clerics who arrived under Lanfranc and Anselm brought a new and different learning, and often new and deeply unwelcome religious practices such as scepticism about local saints, a celibate priesthood and newly disciplined monasticism. Despite these differences, and despite the generations-long tensions that accompanied them, clerics, whether of European or insular origin, were linked by a similar liturgy, a considerable body of shared reading, and most of all a common learned language. This unifying tongue, more over, operated well beyond the bounds of the Church, both among the surprising number of secular aristocrats who had some Latin education, and through the activities of the many clerics who served in secular law courts and other offices and cultural capacities among the laity.

At the same time, the Latin textual culture of England after 1066 had also to bridge the religious, social and cultural fissures opened by the Conquest: both the wide range of new cultural and social forces that arrived with the Normans, and the yearning of Normans and Saxons alike to inscribe continuities with the English past. This resulted in an outpouring of textual production, both in traditional and new forms, in the century-and-a-half after the Conquest.

The allegorical drama written in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of literary history’s most static genres. Though performed decades apart, plays like The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400–25), Mankind (c. 1450), Magnyfycence (c. 1519) and Wyt and Science (c. 1531–47) tell similar stories of temptation, fall and regeneration. In every extant morality and most surviving interludes, personified virtues and vices contend over passive protagonists incapable of understanding or ameliorating their predicaments. Precisely because this drama privileges abstract types over sharply particularized examples, it resists formalist attempts to distinguish one play from another. One morality may feature more exuberant vices than another, or one may exhibit an unusually Latinate syntax, but their overall dramatic conception remains constant. This chapter interprets this constancy itself in relation to the interactions of economic, demographic, political and religious developments in late medieval society. Allegorical entertainments could serve widely varying ends depending on the audiences for whom they were performed and the values they were supposed to uphold.

Morality plays

In general, plays like The Pride of Life, Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind and Everyman critique English society from a conservative perspective. Their principal vices are avarice, ambition, greed, extortion, and other sins associated with class mobility. The morality playwrights adopted allegory as their basic mode because its subordination of the particular to the universal mirrored the hierarchies of an imagined feudal polity that equated social aspiration with pride. They did not portray isolated instances of corruption but an entire society, Mankind writ large, infected by the profit motive.

In addition to serious and personal matters that lie beyond the scope of this essay (such as accusations of rape directed at Chaucer and Malory), scholars who investigate the interrelationship of literature and law are generally interested in one of two main topics: the formal question of legal writing as a species of literature, or the thematic question of the law as it has been represented in literature. The first approach is often restricted to a somewhat belle-lettristic discussion of the work of noted legal stylists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, but it can extend to a more subtle analysis of legal forms: the adversarial trial as agonistic drama, for instance, or the witness’s deposition as narrative. At its most extreme, as in Stanley Fish’s impudent interrogation of the text of the American constitution, it is likely to appear irrelevant, if not downright offensive, to many practising lawyers. The second, and commoner, approach is generally less controversial. Many authors have been interested in legal matters and many literary works present fictional trials or lawsuits, so that a minor critical genre has grown up analysing the trials of Shylock or Billy Budd or the progress of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce or the proceedings against Josef K, in terms of either legal history or general jurisprudential principles. There remains, however, a third area of investigation: regarding the law and literature as parallel forms of discourse, each with its own conventions and traditions, the scholar asks how the lawyer’s comparatively more formal analysis of mental or social processes can help us understand what the imaginative writer sometimes leaves unspoken or expresses only obliquely.

King Edward, later ‘the Confessor’, was buried in his newly constructed abbey of West Minster on the morning of 6 January 1066; Harold, Earl of Wessex, was crowned later that same day. Tostig, Harold’s brother, then allied himself with Harald Hardrada, King of Norway; both were defeated and killed by Harold’s forces at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, near York, on 25 September. When William of Normandy landed at Pevensey three days later, Harold marched south to London. He left London on 12 October and was killed at Hastings on the 14th. Wearing and bearing some of Edward’s regalia, William had himself crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. 1066, then, represents a solid bookend for English history, and hence literary history: chronicles written in England for centuries after devote inordinate space to this single, eventful year. Aristocrats and clerics from the Continent, recruited to rule and administer William’s newly conquered kingdom, arrive speaking French and Latin. Old English loses its royal and ecclesiastical sanction; early Middle English (always a problematic concept) evolves as a hybridized mother tongue with negligible textual authority. The massive transfer of wealth, land and privilege recorded by Domesday will not be rivalled in England until the Henrician revolution of the 1530s.

Introduction

The thirteenth century, a period that sees the growth of schools, also sees the growth of the confessional system. These two developments are not unrelated: the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 making annual confession to one’s own parish priest universal and compulsory also renewed the call of the Third Lateran Council of 1179 for establishment of more schools and masters at cathedrals and churches to provide comprehensive pastoral training for secular clergy. The early years of the thirteenth century also saw the creation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, which, along with the later mendicant orders, had a powerful impact on the proliferation of both educational and confessional texts. Both on historical grounds and in cultural terms, pedagogical texts and classroom practices have their natural counterparts in confessional texts and practices; our purpose here will be to consider the overlap and mutual resonance of the two traditions. The most obvious historical evidence of this connection is the practical assimilation of penitential texts into school texts, beginning in the thirteenth century and continuing into later centuries with much overlapping of classroom and confessional genres in the vernacular. In cultural and behavioural terms, classroom and confession are linked through the idea of disciplina, the regulation of knowledge and the regulation of the self, whether through the rigours of the classroom or of penitential practice. In both, the experience of the learner is individualized, yet streamlined according to time-honoured practices originating in antiquity.

The three versions of Piers Plowman, as most scholars today believe, were the lifelong labour of a single author named, or at least pen-named, William Langland (c. 1325–c. 1388). A unique note in Trinity College, Dublin, MS 212 supplies both the author’s name (‘willielmi de Langlond’) and his father’s (‘Stacy de Rokayle’), describing Stacy as a man of gentle birth (‘generosus’) and a tenant of the Despensers at Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire. A note in the hand of John Bale on the paste-down of Huntington Library, San Marino, California, MS 128 asserts that Langland himself was born in Cleobury Mortimer ‘within viii myles of Malborne hylles’, and this is generally corroborated by the evidence of dialect, which links him unquestionably to south-west Worcestershire. The Malvern Hills, which figure so memorably in the poem’s setting, were also held by the Despensers, whose ‘spectacular rise and as spectacular fall in royal favor and power roughly brackets the period of the poet’s lifetime’, as Middleton has noted. Of his means of livelihood we know nothing beyond what can be gleaned from the treacherous territory of apparent autobiographical reference within the poem; in Langland’s case the usual uncertainties of authorial attribution in a manuscript culture were apparently exacerbated by the need for anonymity which the polemical nature of his writing demanded. Ambiguity, often apparently the ‘functional ambiguity’ of the political poet, characterizes Piers Plowman and everything about it. Conceived as a series of dream-visions in alliterative metre, it shares the penchant for social and ecclesiastical satire of other ‘Alliterative Revival’ poetry, but it is infinitely more complex than any poem in that tradition because it delivers its pungent commentary in a bewildering array of voices, both realistic and allegorical.

An important function of literary histories is to organize discussions of texts into diachronic categories and groupings so the reader has a working map of a given literary period. This chapter, however, is the place for a less tidy kind of literary exploration as we consider the contexts of production and reception of material in English in post-Conquest England. One of our aims is to consider both how much and how little we can know about the audiences and the writers of early Middle English texts from the later twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The chapter gives particular consideration to Laзamon’s Brut, a historical narrative about the foundations of society on the island of Britain and the eventual formation of England; to the handbook for anchoresses known as Ancrene Wisse, together with its associated ‘Katherine group’ of saints’ lives of Juliana, Katherine and Margaret; and to some related texts and textual traditions. A particular concern is the textual communities of religious women, their literary history, and their relation to texts imaging the history of the Britain they inhabited.

Elizabeth Salter has drawn attention to the limitations of attending only to works written in English as a means of understanding the literary scene of medieval England:

Authority and experience

If the history of this period is seen as a long march towards a full vernacular Bible, it has few main events. Its beginning marks the decline of a long efflorescence of biblical translation and paraphrase in Anglo-Saxon England. The next three centuries form a record of at best sporadic and fragmentary activity, until the two versions of the Wycliffite Bible in the late fourteenth century. By 1401, in the statute De Haeretico Comburendo, the Wycliffte originators of the project are branded subversive. Any chance that their work would avoid the same fate is destroyed by Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of Oxford in 1407–8, which ban the making and ownership of English Bibles. There follows a century of repression, which is brought to an end by one man, William Tyndale – whose accomplishment is to produce a translation of the entire New Testament from Greek and much of the Old from Hebrew which will form the unacknowledged foundation of all subsequent authorized English translations until the twentieth century. Tyndale’s death as a heretic in 1536, by strangulation and burning at the hands of the Catholic Emperor Charles V’s agents but with the connivance of English spies, comes only one year before the reversal of English government policy on Bible translation, and foreshadows a complete authorized translation of the liturgy in Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 Prayer Book. Together, these translations complete the overthrow of the dominant value throughout the period, Latinity.

History, if not historical writing, was fundamental to medieval English experience and thought. The Christianity sustained by the clerical institutions responsible for most – although far from all – of the vast quantities of medieval historical writing was, as it still is, inherently a historical religion. Definitions and assertions of temporal communities, dominion, and other social ideals and institutions were likewise emphatically based on historical circumstances or claims, in everything from monastic land tenures to England’s dominion over Scotland; from aristocratic and royal inheritance and status to peasants’ justifications of rebellion. As John of Salisbury in the mid-twelfth century remarked, historical writings were useful for many things: they revealed the invisible things of God, offered examples of reward and punishment, and helped establish or abolish customs and strengthen or destroy privileges.

John’s remark implies that historical writing both reveals and makes history and society, preserving but also shaping both past and present. To limit the scope but also to emphasize this relation between past visions and contemporary purposes, this chapter will treat long historical narratives in Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English that continue up to or are meant to continue up to the writers’ contemporary worlds. Even in this relatively narrow category, many hundreds of such works are extant, only some of the most representative or notable of which may here be considered.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars imagined that a dramatic tradition which had virtually disappeared with the fall of the Late Roman Empire was reintroduced into the West as an embellishment of the liturgy. Initially the interpolations were sung responses – Quem quaeritis – but by accretion they gathered dramatic qualities such as impersonation, costume and imitative gesture. These burgeoning scenes gradually evolved into more complex organisms, one result of which was that the choirs could no longer contain the action and the dramas moved first into the nave, then on to the steps and finally into the streets and on to pageant wagons. As these dramas were emerging from the church – the best example being the Jeu d’Adam which was performed on the steps – they passed into the hands of the laity, one consequence of which was that vernacular religious drama became increasingly contaminated by comic intrusions and low-life scenes. Some scholars who promoted this history expressed puzzlement that the drama should have (re-)originated in monastic choirs, given the thunderbolts directed against the theatre in the late empire and early Middle Ages. Equally puzzling was the almost total absence of an anti-theatrical polemic in the late Middle Ages after the reinvention of the drama. Gerhoh of Reichersberg and Herrad of Landsberg, both from the twelfth century, were cited by everyone as representative of what little anti-theatrical sentiment remained, and the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (early fifteenth century) was given as the only sustained polemic between the late empire and the Puritan attacks of the late sixteenth century.

The Norman conquest of Wales, a piecemeal penetration over a period of some 130 years, was as much a political as a military advance. The unit of penetration was the Welsh political entities (cantrefi) with the result that lands in Wales were held by right of conquest, not by grant from the king. The initial campaigns were both swift and successful. A chain of castles was established along the north coast and Robert of Rhuddlan succeeded in penetrating through the very heart of Gwynedd to Caernarfon. In mid-Wales Roger of Montgomery, following the valley of the Dee into Powys, over-ran the cantrefi of Arwystli, Cydewain and Ceri. By 1099 Deheubarth (south Wales) seemed to have disappeared as castles were established from Cardiff to Swansea, Brecon, Cardigan and Pembroke. But 1094 saw the return from exile of Gruffudd ap Cynan of Gwynedd (north Wales) who had been the prisoner of Hugh of Chester. Gradually, lost lands were regained and new conquests consolidated in the north though the Welsh ‘revolt’ in the south had less spectacular success. By 1135, though west and north Wales were once more in Welsh hands, Deheubarth was an Anglo-Norman province.

That year, in the confused situation in England following the death of Henry I, a new ‘revolt’ broke out; the years 1135 to 1197 saw a great Welsh awakening. Owain Gwynedd continued the expansion of Gwynedd begun by his father Gruffud ap Cynan and in 1165 took the title princeps Wallensium as leader of a Welsh military confederation. After his death in 1170 Rhys ap Gruffudd continued the struggle. He was appointed justiciar of south Wales by Henry II in 1172, recognition of his right to hold the lands which he had won. He became the Lord Rhys and the independence of Deheubarth and of the lesser lordships under his protection was asserted in their uneasy relationships with the neighbouring Anglo-Norman lordships to the west and east. By the time of his death in 1197, a balance had been struck.

Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate staged their lives and careers in complex relation to the Lancastrian court, and were consciously and deliberately Lancastrian in their sympathies and proclivities. Each temporarily enjoyed what might be considered an official or ‘laureate’ status as publicist or celebrator of Lancastrian values and activities – Hoccleve for several years before and after the 1413 accession of Henry V and Lydgate during the 1420s and 1430s. Yet neither was a court-poet, in the sense either of continued residence within a court’s precincts or of consistent financial reward for specifically literary activities. If terms like ‘court-poet’ or ‘patronage’ are to be applied to their situations, considerable redefinition is demanded, with respect to the complex filiations of expectation, attachment and belief which may operate between a poet, a prince, and that prince’s programme.

Neither poet actually lived within the court’s physical ambit, although each conducted his career at its margins. Hoccleve was a clerk and stipendary in the office of the Privy Seal and commuted to his Westminster post from residences in the Strand. Despite occasional sojourns in the households of the Duke of Bedford and others, Lydgate retained his connections with the monastery of St Edmund at Bury and he began and ended his career there. Although each wrote certain works in the hope of pleasing the royal heir or sovereign, each also sought more varied patronage and undertook some works with no certain patronage at all. Hoccleve wrote as often to impress his superiors in Chancery and other well-placed royal servants as the king or the nobility of the realm. Lydgate addressed works to a host of potential patrons, including his Troy Book to Henry V and Fall of Princes to the Duke of Gloucester, as well as translations for the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, occasional pieces for a gentlewoman of Norfolk, pageants for the clerk of London, mummings for London gilds, and many other sponsors. Yet both poets also composed major works on speculation, as when Hoccleve started his ‘Series’ in the hope but not the certainty of interesting the Duke of Gloucester. Although Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes was implicitly patriotic with regard to English ambitions in France, he wrote it without apparent patronage.

Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle of 1415, which castigates the condemned Lollard knight for reading the wrong books, marks the particular interest attaching to a study of romance in the fifteenth century. At first glance, romance appears to be a profoundly ahistorical form, in many senses. It favours the fabled or the fabulous above the factual or verisimilar: a story with its roots in history or in legendary history draws closer to romance as it distances itself from the sobriety of chronicled report. Hoccleve’s own examples show exoticism to be one of the defining features of the genre, a setting far away or long ago, or preferably both, such as distances it from any immediate social comment. Furthermore, romances were extraordinarily long-lived: many that survive only in fifteenth-century or later copies were composed earlier, in historical circumstances different from those of their transmission and influence. Yet a closer look at romance at the end of the Middle Ages demonstrates that audiences and copyists valued the form more for its immediate topicality than for its escapism. Those earlier stories and long traditions are brought to bear on contemporary issues and concerns precisely because they are traditional, and with that stable and ideal. Romance in this period, as Hoccleve’s lines demonstrate, acquires a new significance in promising to preserve the old values of high chivalry and orthodox piety against the dangers of theological and political innovation. Much of the material may be old; the uses to which it is put serve the exigencies of a new and particular historical moment.

The title of this chapter, ‘Alliterative Poetry’, deliberately evades an ‘Old Historicist’ literary formulation – indeed, perhaps the most significant ‘Old Historicist’ failure in Middle English studies. By long-standing custom, this chapter should be entitled ‘The Alliterative Revival’. Such a sobriquet presupposes that scholars know clearly what alliteration is and how it is used in Middle English literary culture, that such alliterative usage at some point had died and at some later point experienced a quasi-divine resuscitation, and that this return to life comprised a single ‘revival’. All these propositions strike me as dubious, as is a further claim, always implicit in traditional discussions of ‘The Revival’, that this was a regional poetry of the north and west.

Such formulations depend upon a classic example of abstract principle driving the construction of historical evidence – and thus, of what constitutes a literary historical problem. For in offering these propositions, ‘Old Historicist’ scholars prioritize the surviving archive on the basis of a humanistic belief in the (transhistorical) ‘literary excellence’ of certain poems (and thus, incongruously, for a tradition in the main anonymous, of godlike authors).

This section considers the later fourteenth century, an intellectually rigorous and highly imaginative phase of literary composition. No simple correlation can be made between heterogeneous developments in writing and the catastrophic effects of plague (which killed perhaps one third of the European population between 1348 and 1350; lesser outbreaks occurred every decade or so thereafter). The long-term economic consequences of such a pandemic, like those of world wars, often prove paradoxical. Large-scale death of peasantry, for example, intensified demand for peasant labour. This generated greater social mobility, encouraging self-determination among workers and hence challenges to established monopolists of written cultures (chapter 16). Practices of Englishing (considered in association with the Bible in the previous section, and with Lollardy in the next) are of pre-eminent importance for all topics considered in this section: alliterative poetry, Langland, Middle English mystics, Chaucer, Gower, and Middle English lives.

Several of the chapters here take issue with the anticipated terms of their own conceptualization. Piers Plowman is read as a continuous process of composition rather than as three (or even four) canonical texts. Alliterative poetry is considered as a matter of heterogeneous survival (rather than localized revival), as one competing form of a national literature (at home in London as well as Cheshire), as a space of consciousness rather than of geography. The Langland of B-text may thus be seen as a London poet, while the Canterbury Tales (following Chaucer’s move to Kent) might be read as a view from the provinces. The writers clustered and canonized as ‘Middle English mystics’ since 1900 are let loose into the wider terrain of Middle English writing.

Medieval texts cannot be adequately understood without reference to the institutions that generated, copied or preserved them; the place and moment of composition is often, of course, far from that of the text’s last (surviving) transfer to manuscript. Institutional discourses inform the peculiarities of literary texts; the accumulative study of such texts furthers understanding of how such institutions function. The larger imaginative construct subtending all this is the Church – specifically that Church whose infrastructures were drastically revised in the mid-sixteenth century. Much of the writing considered here – classroom exercises, penitential manuals, legal transcripts, fragments of translation – may not be considered ‘literature’ at all: but the acknowledged canonical authors of Middle English writing – notably Langland, Chaucer and the Pearl-poet – can hardly be understood as medieval English texts without reference to this under-studied, under-edited corpus, considered here under six interdependent aspects, or activities: monastic productions, friars and literature, classroom and confession, literature and law, vox populi (and the anti-institutional discourses of 1381), and Englishing the Bible.

The institutions in question here were exceptionally powerful: as powerful, perhaps, as any seen before the rise of modern multinational business corporations. One index of their power is a near-monopoly of textual production and conservation: monasteries, earlier chapters have noted, dominated the writing of history and the preservation of Old English textuality; more than half of all surviving medieval texts in Britain are monastic productions. (The term domination – from the Latin dominus, ‘master’ – is used advisedly here: the first Middle English text written by a nun has yet to be securely identified.)