Preamble

The term proper name deserves some theoretical discussion, as it is not uncontroversial. For the purposes of this chapter, it can be understood in an entirely traditional way; but needs to be elucidated with great care when discussing the ways in which ordinary expressions of a language become proper names. I shall define the term as meaning a species of noun phrase intended, on a particular occasion of use, to achieve individual reference to some person, object, place, institution, etc. Proper names differ from other noun phrases in achieving such reference independently of the semantic characteristics of the words out of which they may appear to be constructed. In short, proper names have no sense (as defined by e.g. Lyons 1977: 197–206), or, to use the term taken from a tradition begun by J. S. Mill and used by Cecily Clark in the corresponding chapter of volume II, they have no connotation. The theoretical issues surrounding these remarks are dealt with more fully in a related paper (Coates 1990). The distinction between denotation and reference should be clearly maintained if confusion is to be avoided. Proper names are often said to be ‘names for individuals’; whilst it is true to say that they are typically used to refer to individuals (i.e. on particular occasions of use), it is quite false of the most typical ones to say that they denote individuals. For brevity, the word name will mean ‘proper name’ throughout.

The business of this chapter is to discuss English names (as defined above) since 1776. The English language has been used for onomastic purposes far outside its original heardand, most notably in formerly Celtic Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada, the other former British Dominions, the surviving British colonies, to some extent in the New Commonwealth (especially the Caribbean islands), in Antarctica, and on the ocean floor.

Even if Chaucer had not in a famous moment referred to his friend as ‘moral’, our image of Gower would be much the same. To Shakespeare he was already synonymous with sententious precept and exemplary fable, and later criticism has made him the moral voice of his age, the ‘articulate citizen’, or less flatteringly ‘an encyclopedia of current prejudices and ideals’. The subtitle of Fisher’s pioneering monograph, ‘Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer’, reinforces the traditional image, neatly eliding Gower’s role as poet in the process. But the tradition begins with Gower himself: in manuscripts whose preparation he oversaw, a colophon defines his three major works, the Anglo-Norman Mirour de l’Omme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and his English masterpiece, the Confessio Amantis, as ‘three learned books’, composed ‘between work and leisure’ to instruct his society and its leaders. Each reviews the estates of society from its own perspective: in the case of the Mirour the focus is provided by the moral doctrine of the penitentials; in the Vox, by a review of the state of contemporary England; and in the Confessio by world history and ancient political thought, punctuated with episodes from the historians, poets and philosophers.

Selective and somewhat misleading as a characterization of Gower’s corpus, the colophons make plain that he wanted his poetry to matter as social criticism. It is clear too that his appeals for reform were heard in high places, though the life records show nothing like Chaucer’s lifelong service to the crown, and we can only guess at the grounds on which Gower presumed to dedicate the Confessio, first to Richard II, then to his successor-to-be, Henry of Lancaster.

This section, which employs the problematic but indispensable organizational categories of ‘Britain’ and ‘the British Isles’, begins with chapters on Wales, Ireland and Scotland. We then move to a study of historical writing in England – the mode of writing that did most to define English imaginings of, and claims to, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. We end with a study of writing in the English capital between 1375 and 1485, a period which seals a shift away from monastic domination of documentary, historical, and myth-making practices.

Wales, Scotland and Ireland have generated literary traditions, sponsoring institutions, and forms of imaginative pleasure that are peculiarly their own; the chapters dedicated to them here write their histories, so to speak, from the inside out (with the English sometimes visible, sometimes not). Developments in these countries often run against the teleological grain of traditional English historiography. For Scotland, 1058 (when Malcolm III ascended the throne) is a more important date than 1066. In Gwynedd (north Wales), territories lost after 1066 were regained in 1135; the next sixty years witnessed a great cultural revival. And in fifteenth-century Ireland, Irish was winning the battle to become the pre-eminent vernacular (as Norman French faded away and English struggled to hold on). Each of these countries elaborated cultural and geographic conceptions that made scant reference to England. Welsh bards, effectively inventing the notion of ‘Britain’, sang of a territory that took in large areas of northern English and Scottish territory; Gaelic poets in Scotland and Ireland shared links through the Gaidhealtachd that persisted long after the Middle Ages. All three nations absorbed cultural influences through contacts with Anglo-Normans (or Cambro-Normans, Hiberno-Normans and Norman Scots); but all three also enjoyed direct and fruitful dealings with the continental French.

We could only include the present chapter in a history of ‘English’ literature through a catachresis that risks imposing a distorted perspective on Scottish history and culture. If the title of the present section displays its good intentions by using the more inclusive term ‘British Isles’, the volume none the less insists on a problematic choice of dates, for neither the Battle of Hastings nor the dissolution of the English monasteries is of direct consequence to Scotland, which remained an independent kingdom of international significance throughout the Middle Ages. The following chapter therefore begins with the reign of Malcolm III (‘Canmore’) and concludes with the Reformation Parliament. By beginning and ending with Gaelic materials, moreover, the chapter points to a two-fold opposition between Lowlands Scots and Gaelic culture on the one hand, and Scotland and England on the other.

The medieval kingdom of the Scots brought many peoples and language groups into an often fragile association. The ninth-century assimilation of the Pictish kingdom in the north-east provided a stable territorial base for more recent additions to the expansionist kingdom, including the satellite British (Cumbric) kingdom of Strathclyde and the Anglian-speaking territory of Lothian south of the Firth of Forth. In the opening years of our survey, however, the Western and Northern Isles still remained under Norse control: the Hebrides were not officially ceded until the Treaty of Perth in 1266; the Orkney and Shetland Islands followed in 1468–9.

The word ‘friar’, the English reflex of the Middle French frere, means ‘brother’. Well before Chaucer’s time it had taken on as its commonest meaning a male religious of one of several new orders established in the Latin Church in the thirteenth century. These orders are sometimes called ‘fraternal’, in reference to their aspirations of spiritual brotherhood, and sometimes ‘mendicant’, in recognition of a commitment to ‘apostolic poverty’, a commitment theoretically requiring their members to live day-to-day by begging. The priests among the friars were called the ‘regular clergy’ to betoken that they lived under the specific rule (regula) of their order as opposed to the more numerous parish priests, the ‘secular clergy’, who carried on their work in ‘the world’ (saeculum). Mendicant religion emerged as a significant spiritual movement in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. It took many and varied forms, some of a local and transitory character, and the Church soon stepped in to discourage the proliferation of new orders. When Chaucer writes of his friar that there was no smoother a talker ‘in alle the ordres foure’ (CT 1.210), he refers to the four fraternal orders recognized by the pope and currently active in England as throughout Europe. These were the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor, often called the ‘greyfriars’ in England, and conventionally abbreviated OFM), the Dominicans (Order of Preachers, ‘blackfriars’, OP), the Carmelites (Order of the Hermits of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, ‘whitefrairs’, O. Carm.), and the Augustinians (Order of Hermits of St Augustine, ‘Austin friars’, OESA).

For more than three centuries of Norman and Plantagenet rule, the British Isles were, with the exception of the Norman kingdom in Sicily, the most significantly multilingual and multicultural territory in western Europe. The interactions of William the Conqueror’s followers and peoples native to Britain were not simply adversarial, nor were the ethnic conceptions and political ambitions of the time equivalent to those inspiring Britain’s modern attempts at empire. The conquerors and their followers were unquestionably bent on dominating the inhabitants of Britain, but this process was not entirely a matter of force, nor should the inhabitants’ responding manoeuvres and successes be elided into a model of helpless subjection. The extent to which intermarriage, bilingualism and cultural adoptions came to characterize Norman rule sharply contrasts with the later British programme of empire-building and testifies both to the Normans’ desire to make Britain their permanent home and to the conquered inhabitants’ success at imposing themselves and their ways on the new arrivals. Chapters below on writing in Wales, Ireland and Scotland leave to this chapter the conquerors’ experience of England.

Conquest and accommodation

To be sure, the process of conquest begins with ethnic as well as military hostilities. Wace’s account of the minstrel Taillefer singing at the Battle of Hastings about Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux, an anecdote also found in William of Malmesbury’s chronicle, may indicate that the Normans considered Charlemagne’s men to be their own heroic predecessors – however recently the Normans had borrowed them from the Franks after moving in about 911 from Scandinavia into northern France. Taillefer’s song anticipates the Anglo-Norman copy of the Song of Roland, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, made some seventy-five years after the Battle of Hastings.

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.