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.)

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.