In 1376 John Wyclif, an Oxford theology master, was in London ‘running from church to church’ (as Thomas Walsingham put it) preaching that the ‘temporal lords could meritoriously withdraw [auferre] from sinful pastors their goods’ – could, in the jargon, disendow them. ‘He went even further, and said that temporal lords … could justly sell the goods of possessioners in order to relieve their own poverty’. These were respectable things to say, and welcome to the royal government, financially embarrassed since the 1340s and delighted to be told that confiscating church goods was ‘a work of charity, saving souls from hell’, as Wyclif is said to have told Parliament. Disendowment, as Wyclif described it, transcended mere opportunism: it was a duty to God and neighbour. Disendowment was no new idea, but Wyclif’s way of putting it was dazzlingly, brilliantly radical; it provoked a movement of religious dissent that extended beyond university and Parliament and beyond his death in 1384.

English ‘Lollardy’ never died and never joined the mainstream: the mainstream joined it, with the advent of Lutheranism, and hijacked its historiography. Foxe’s Actes and Monuments – the ‘Book of Martyrs’ – traced the survival of primitive Christian truth through the centuries of Catholic darkness. It was therefore bound to find a deep unity in the beliefs of Wyclif and his followers. It also presupposed a logic of persecution: before the Protestant Reformation, the mere speaking of this truth provoked, of necessity, the violence of repression.

Richard II left Ireland in May 1395 in the mistaken belief that his busy year-long visit had established peace with the Irish leaders. The peace was not to be permanent and he had to return in June 1399 after his designated heir Roger Mortimer had been killed in a battle in County Carlow. This trip lasted only until August because he had to go back to deal (unsuccessfully as it turned out) with the insurrection at home. England’s unhappy political involvement with Ireland had commenced centuries before when Henry II went to Ireland in response to a call for help from the King of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchadha, and also to carry out a sort of moral mission which had been authorized in the bull Laudabiliter by the only Englishman ever to be pope, Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear, pope from 1154 to 1159). A version of the bull, which had encouraged Henry to incorporate Ireland into the realm of England on the pretext of remedying the iniquity into which Irish morals had allegedly sunk, is provided by Giraldus Cambrensis (?1146–?1220), whose aspersions against the Gaelic Irish will continually resurface throughout the period covered by this chapter and beyond in, for instance, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596).

Two hundred years of romance writing in England separate the Prologue to Waldef, written in the Anglo-Norman of post-Conquest England, from the Prologue of the Franklin, equipped with the smooth rhythms of Chaucerian English. The first claims knowledge of Old English sources, the second that it appropriates an ancient tale from the traditional lays of the Bretons. This chiastic movement can serve to illustrate the historical, generic and linguistic complexities of the topic addressed in this chapter.

The genre of romance is resistant to definition, nowhere more so than in its manifestation in medieval England. ‘Gestes’, if the term refers to epic narratives, can be seen as too heroic, the ‘layes’ of the Breton tradition too lyrical. It is not the purpose of this chapter to adopt any demarcation that excludes such important contributions to the narrative literature of the period; rather we will work with a recent definition that is also one of the simplest, ‘the principal secular literature of entertainment of the Middle Ages’. This usefully places the emphasis not on form or content, both shifting ground, but on the essentially recreational function of romance. The lure of romance is primarily the lure of the story and secondarily of the exotic setting or enviable achievement it describes. It is entertainment for an audience; some audiences may like to display their status, discrimination and moral rectitude through their choice of entertainment, some may prefer to escape from just such concerns; but a successful romance is one which gives pleasure, whether or not accompanied by information or instruction.

Geoffrey Chaucer is the most famous writer of the Middle English period and one of the most celebrated authors in the history of English literature. His range of styles and genres, his invention of multi-layered narrative structures, and his oblique, ironic tone give his compositions qualities that delight and satisfy aesthetically, so much so that it is not difficult to divorce them from their historical context. For much of the twentieth century his poetry was discussed chiefly in terms of its psychological acuity and artistic complexity. Chaucer’s own evasiveness in regard to direct political and social reference helped to foster this approach; he is a major cause of his own dehistoricizing. But such literary characteristics are themselves historical, and a good deal of recent criticism of Chaucer has sought to re-establish the social and ideological conditions of his literary art, in much the same way that other scholars have worked to historicize, say, Enlightenment or Romantic claims to universality. Chaucer is no less embedded in late medieval English culture than the authors of Winner and Waster and the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, and the extent to which he may appear ahead of or beyond his time has much to do with our own failure to appreciate the full complexity of that time. The goal of this chapter is less to describe or interpret Chaucer’s works, on which any number of books and guides are available, than to consider some of the cultural contexts in which they came about.

The terms ‘Middle English mystics’ and ‘fourteenth-century English mystics’ have been devised in this century as ways of constituting a heterogeneous club of four, or five, writers whose works span the years between c. 1330 and c. 1440. The writers are the hermit, Richard Rolle (d. 1349), author of a large body of ecstatic commentaries and treatises on the perfect life in Latin (primarily) and English; the lawyer and Augustinian canon, Walter Hilton (d. 1396), author of a dozen or so theological and controversial works in English and Latin; the anchoress, Julian of Norwich (d. after 1415), author of two versions of A Revelation of Love, a deeply ambitious work of speculative theology developed from a set of visions experienced in 1373; the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and several other English works; and Margery Kempe (d. after 1438), author of The Book of Margery Kempe, a work whose membership of the canon has been a matter of continuing controversy. Other writers have been proposed for inclusion; but the canon – institutionalized in journals, bibliographies, conferences, and scholarly and devotional books – has undergone no modifications since the eruption of Kempe on to the scene half a century ago.

In form, this discussion follows the scholarly tradition it is partly intended to introduce, devoting much of its analysis to these five writers and the period in which they lived. The overarching theme of this chapter, however, is that both the canon of ‘Middle English mystics’ and the term ‘mysticism’ itself have largely outlived their usefulness to scholars.

The afterlife of Old English may be evoked in two remarkably disparate poems from the first fifty years of Norman rule. The first – the verses on the death of William the Conqueror from the Peterborough Chronicle entry of 1087 (known to modern scholars as The Rime of King William) – seems like a garbled attempt at rhyming poetry: a poem without regular metre, formalized lineation or coherent imagery. So far is it in language, diction and form from the lineage of Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems (from the finely nuanced Battle of Brunanburh of 937 to the looser verses on the deaths of Prince Alfred of 1036 and of King Edward of 1065), that this poem has rarely been considered part of the Old English canon. It was not edited by Krapp and Dobbie in their authoritative six-volume Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, and, when it has been critically considered at all, it has been dismissed as an example of the ‘rough and ready verse’ of popular encomium, arrestingly inept when compared to the rhetorical sweep and homiletic power of the prose account of William’s reign that contains it.

The second of these poems is the supple vernacular encomium urbis known as Durham. Perhaps composed to celebrate the translation of St Cuthbert’s remains to Durham Cathedral in 1104, this poem more than competently reproduces the traditional alliterative half-lines of Old English prosody. Its commanding use of interlace and ring structure, together with its own elaborate word plays, puns and final macaronic lines, makes Durham something of a paradox in Anglo-Saxon verse.

Within forty years of the death of Henry VIII in 1547, Sir Philip Sidney looked back on Chaucer as a poet lost in ‘mistie time’. Surveying English literature, Sidney celebrated Chaucer for his ‘reuerent antiquity’ but – unlike Wyatt two generations earlier – treated him as a writer of the past. Modern writing for Sidney begins with the Mirrour of Magistrates of 1555, and his summary of authors obliterates everything after Chaucer, even Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, the Mirrour’s inspiration. English literary history has been strongly influenced by this sense of a division from the past, which continues to this day to divorce the study of Chaucer from Shakespeare, the ‘medieval’ from the ‘modern’ (or at least ‘early modern’). The schism is none the less seldom and reluctantly accounted for. In a classic study, C. S. Lewis at once recognized Elizabethan literature as a ‘new culture’ and then categorically rejected all received explanations for this new spirit of the age, whether ‘Humanism’ or the ‘Renaissance’, Copernican astronomy or New World geography.

Historians in other disciplines – not only political or social but artistic or musical – might consider that this aetiology resolutely misses the most material change of all: the Reformation. Debate about the meaning and consequences of this event (whether it is an event at all) has preoccupied English historical writing for centuries. Yet by this fierce controversy literary history remains largely unmoved. The Reformation is a watershed in English history, but in the history of English literature is no more than a backwater, a stagnant and brackish one at that.

This section begins and ends with paired chapters on dynasties (Lancastrians, Tudors) established more by force of arms than by claims of birthright. Use of force crucially threatens to expose aspiring or usurping monarchs as mere magnates among magnates; such perceptions need to be rapidly foreclosed through self-legitimating or diversionary practices at court (chapters 24, 30), at church (25, 31), or in outward-focused territorial expansionism. Processes of Englishing, vigorously pursued throughout the fourteenth century, assume increasing importance as English monarchs identify themselves ever more closely with the English tongue. Expanded popular access to English texts, however, leads secular and religious authorities to worry about who might be reading what to whom, and to what end; the spread of print culture frustrates attempts at centralized regulation of reading by class, gender and location. William Caxton (chapter 27) astutely balances the pleasing of putative royal patrons against the more certain demands of a broader market. Guild-sponsored drama in the north calibrates increasing degrees of independence from ecclesiastical and aristocratic dominance; drama in the south and east concerns itself more straightforwardly with turning a profit (chapter 28). Covetousness, the most dangerous vice of earlier allegorical drama, is later supplanted as villain-in-chief by old-feudal aristocratic Pride; the newly enterprising individual, busily fleeing idleness, comes to triumph over pretensions of birth (chapter 29). Compilers of late romance offer models of courtesy, etiquette, letter-writing and artes militari that might please merchant and gentry audiences as well as aristocratic patrons (chapter 26). The struggles of magnates to monarchize themselves do, then, draw poetry and prose of singular intensity from those caught up in, or forcibly excluded from, processes of dynastic fabrication. All the while, however, more commercially minded models of writing, publishing and performance steadily advance into every corner of English life. Some of these corners lie far from Westminster.

So the sixteenth-century antiquary John Stow transcribed, in the London church of St Michael at Basinghall, the epitaph of a mercer who died in 1460. Perhaps composed for or by its subject before his death, as was often the case with medieval funerary verses, the epitaph reveals little about John Burton beyond his name, his livery company, and his immediate family connections: the bare outline of an apparently successful business and family life. Its essential point is the exemplary fact of Burton’s demise, and the inscription makes no attempt to recall individual features of his person or biography beyond those which point up most effectively the levelling power of death – to which mercers and citizens of London were as subject as any less exalted casual bystander. Here, as in most other Middle English funerary verses, the particularities of individual lives are flattened out into terse and exemplary generality.

This history of monastic productions begins, paradoxically, at the end of what are termed the ‘monastic centuries’, when the type of monastic life dominant in Britain had already begun to undergo drastic and widespread change. British monastic life had grown, as it had in all the western Church, from the seed planted in a variety of scriptural prescriptions for the ideal Christian life. Monks and nuns had responded in particularly concrete terms to the injunction Jesus made to all his disciples to leave all they had (‘fratres aut sorores aut patrem aut matrem aut filios aut agros’) that they might ‘receive an hundredfold and possess life everlasting’ (‘centuplum accipiet, et vitam aeternam possidebit’), and they had tried to retreat from the world into a mode of contemplative living, as it was sometimes conceived, ‘in the desert’. A variety of programmes, or rules, had arisen to direct their retreat, and the Rule that had predominated from the eighth to the twelfth centuries in Britain and all the western Church alike was written by St Benedict (d. 547) in the first part of the sixth century. The character of Benedictine monasticism was shaped by ‘regular’ obedience to the simple but austere plan for daily life this Rule provided (‘in omnibus igitur omnes magistram sequantur regulam … nullus in monasterio proprii sequatur cordis voluntatem’ [in all things, therefore, let all follow the Rule as master … let no one in the monastery follow the will of his own heart]), although the general nature of St Benedict’s prescriptions (he spoke to ideals more than to practicalities) and the absence of any constitution for standardizing observance (‘general chapters’ were not introduced until after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) left room for considerable variation in this regular observance over time.

This chapter addresses ways in which those excluded from the dominant institutions and cultures of discourse made themselves heard in England during the period after the Black Death. The excluded, who comprised the vast majority of people, rarely left written statements disclosing their projects and assumptions, their motives, their hopes and fears. We tend to encounter the excluded only as they affect the perceptions, needs and goals of those who sought to govern them, to rule their bodies and souls. The governing classes, together with those who directly served their interests, tended only to take note of plebeian communities and individuals as those on whom their own forms of life depended, those whom they had to coerce into yielding up rents, fines, taxes, labour-power and tithes. Most of the ruled lived in self-governing, self-policing rural communities which had customarily sought to resist these extractions through a wide range of strategies. In the later fourteenth century customary struggles were pursued in radically changed circumstances.

These were shaped by the Black Death and ensuing plagues which probably killed up to half the population. This human catastrophe led to unprecedented opportunities for wage-labourers and servants to improve their standards of living, for villeins to challenge their customary status and services, and for more substantial agriculturists, free or bond, to improve the conditions on which they rented land, and to accumulate holdings. These new opportunities encouraged increasing self-confidence and determination on the part of the ruled, while the governing classes inevitably met this threat to their incomes with the full range of resources at their disposal – political, legal and ideological.

The first Tudors are generally supposed to have done more to centralize the government of England than any earlier monarch. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign areas outside the jurisdiction of the crown, such as feudal liberties and religious sanctuaries, had been significantly diminished, and papal jurisdiction over spiritual affairs had in theory been destroyed by the break with Rome. Most historians would agree that Parliament was closer to conceiving itself as law-maker for the entire nation by 1550 than it was in 1485. The great architectural monuments of Tudor England, the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, are studded with Tudor roses and Beaufort portcullises, and visibly seek to establish a picture of a nation unified by the Tudor victory at Bosworth Field in 1485. These monuments, though, also aim to dazzle their viewers into forgetting that the claims of Henry VII to the crown were insecure. The early years of his reign were troubled by the Yorkist pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who attempted to rouse opposition to the new dynasty. Henry VII paid architects and historiographers to mask these awkward facts with panegyric and architectural ornament.

He was not so generous with poets. The centripetal tendencies in early Tudor juridical and spiritual affairs might lead one to expect the literature of the period to abound in poets of the centre, who would hymn the Tudor unification of the nation and rejoice in their own central position in the court that welded the realm into one body.

Within standard literary histories (including, obviously, the present volume), Early Middle English exists at once as a distinctive, self-contained phenomenon, and as an integral and indispensable unit of English literature. This status for Early Middle English (hence forth, eME) reflects foundationalist assumptions about the enduring nature of language and nation as historical realities. On this view, eME language and writing articulate a specific historical milieu embodying the unique cultural life of the land and people. At the same time, the period illustrates a coherent and continuous movement of history, from Old English to later Middle English expressly, and more largely from the pre-recorded to the contemporary. Such history aims to produce in eME the unchanging and therefore still recognizable voice of a single people or nation, whose identity is bound up in a racial (English, or British) core. Rereading vernacular texts according to these principles has made eME out to be, on consensus, one of the dullest and least accessible intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights. To be sure, this appearance of dullness or inaccessibility arises in part from the application of inappropriate nineteenth- and twentieth-century models of nationalist histories and racial identities, or through irrelevant conceptions of the status of ‘literature’ itself. Yet this seeming opaqueness stems even more from the fact that, in its surviving writings and in its structural and historical dimensions, eME actually participates in, and therefore puts in question, the historical emergence of these same foundational and analytical categories – race, nation, language of the people, literary writing, historical periodization. In attaching to these concepts a fluid and historical meaning, rather than a settled and self-evident one, the cultural activities of the eME period open to scrutiny, often in ways unfamiliar or uncomfortable to modern sensibilities, the processes by which these ‘natural’ modes of literary analysis take historical shape.

‘Can anything new be said of Caxton?’ When William Blades began his monumental Life and Typography of William Caxton (1861–3) with this question, the state of Caxton scholarship had largely been determined by the panegyrics of nationalist biography and the appreciations of antiquarian bibliophilia. Such writings had, by the mid-nineteenth century, distilled Caxton’s legacy into a myth of culture: a tale of individual entrepreneurship and technological innovation, of literary taste and economic savvy, that fit well into the Victorian vision of the scholar-craftsman. Blades did much to enhance this portrait of England’s ‘arch-typographer’ – a portrait limned out of the middle-class conviction of the power of technology and the artisan’s nostalgia for the handmade craft – and he had an immense impact on Caxton’s modern appreciation. He was a great enthusiast, republishing his researches in several popular volumes and overseeing the quatercentenary exhibitions of 1877 that influenced, among other things, the Arts and Crafts revival of fine book-making. But he was also an acute historian, whose studies established Caxton scholarship on firm positivist grounds. By examining in detail Caxton’s typography, by organizing a descriptive history of all his products, and by uncovering relations between English and Low Countries printing in the late fifteenth century, Blades set the modern lines of enquiry into the history of English printing.

Blades also set the major lines of enquiry into Caxton’s life, and the contours of that life remain as clear – or as blurry – as they did a century ago. Born sometime between the mid-1410s and the mid-1420s to a Kentish family, Caxton first appears in the public record as an apprentice to the Mercers’ Company in 1438. By the late 1440s, he was in Bruges, the centre of the cloth trade, and in 1452 he returned to London to take the livery of the Mercers’ Company (a ritual symbolizing the passage out of apprenticeship).

When literary scholars of the 1980s revived interest in London as the home of a ‘social’ Chaucer, they recognized that the city could no longer be treated as a self-contained cultural entity. Not only was the city linked to the court because Chaucer’s circle bridged both places, but a fresh awareness of the events of 1381 revealed the city to be open to influences from the countryside as well. A city with such permeable boundaries could no longer be defined in terms of a culturally distinct ‘merchant class’. It was plausibly argued that ‘English mercantile culture was largely confected out of the materials of other cultural formations – primarily aristocratic but also clerical – and lacked a centre of its own’. For critics preoccupied with Chaucer, London had become an ‘absence’, a place without a defining centre that could be imagined only as a ‘discourse of fragments, discontinuities, and contradictions’ and not as a ‘single, unified site’.

In emphasizing the fluidity and derivative quality of urban culture, such formulations have much to contribute to a literary history of London. They liberate the city from its traditional identification with a ‘merchant mentalité’ and re-create it as a fascinating convergence of cultural influences and institutional discourses. This has proved to be a particularly fruitful approach in studies of Chaucer, where it has helped to explain the generic diversity and polyvocality of the Canterbury Tales. For a literary study of London that goes beyond Chaucer, however, it would also seem desirable to rematerialize the city somewhat, not to redraw the old boundaries but to recover more of the specific historical conditions – including the conditions of textual production and reception – that Chaucer’s poetry is so notoriously concerned to suppress.