The Middle Ages

to ca. 1485
43–ca. 420: Roman invasion and occupation of Britain
ca. 450: Anglo-Saxon Conquest
597: St. Augustine arrives in Kent; beginning
of Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity
871–899: Reign of King Alfred
1066: Norman Conquest
1154–1189: Reign of Henry II
ca. 1200: Beginnings of Middle English literature
1360–1400: Geoffrey Chaucer; Piers Plowman; Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight
1485: William Caxton’s printing of Sir Thomas
Malory’s Morte Darthur, one of the first
books printed in England

T he Middle Ages designates the time span roughly

from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the
Renaissance and Reformation. The adjective
“medieval,” coined from Latin medium (middle) and
aevum (age), refers to whatever was made, written, or
thought during the Middle Ages. The Renaissance
was so named by nineteenth-century historians and
critics because they associated it with an outburst of
creativity attributed to a “rebirth” or revival of Latin
and, especially, of Greek learning and literature. The
word “Reformation” designates the powerful religious
movement that began in the early sixteenth century
and repudiated the supreme authority of the Roman
Catholic Church. The Renaissance was seen as spread-
ing from Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centu-
ries to the rest of Europe, whereas the Reformation
began in Germany and quickly affected all of Europe
to a greater or lesser degree. The very idea of a Renais-
sance or rebirth, however, implies something dormant
or lacking in the preceding era. More recently, there
have been two nonexclusive tendencies in our under-
standing of the medieval period and what follows.
Some scholars emphasize the continuities between

Pilgrims leaving Canterbury, ca. 1420. For more information

about this image, see the color insert in this volume.

3
4 | THE MIDDLE AGES

the Middle Ages and the later time now often called the Early Modern
Period. Others emphasize the ways in which sixteenth-century writers in
some sense “created” the Middle Ages, in order to highlight what they saw as
the brilliance of their own time. Medieval authors, of course, did not think
of themselves as living in the “middle”; they sometimes expressed the idea
that the world was growing old and that theirs was a declining age, close to
the end of time. Yet art, literature, and science flourished during the Middle
Ages, rooted in the Christian culture that preserved, transmitted, and trans-
formed classical tradition.
The works covered in this section of the anthology encompass a period
of more than eight hundred years, from Cædmon’s Hymn at the end of the
seventh century to Everyman at the beginning of the sixteenth. The date
1485, the year of the accession of Henry VII and the beginning of the Tudor
dynasty, is an arbitrary but convenient one to mark the “end” of the Middle
Ages in England.
Although the Roman Catholic Church provided continuity, the period
was one of enormous historical, social, and linguistic change. To emphasize
these changes and the events underlying them, we have divided the period
into three primary sections: Anglo-Saxon Literature, Anglo-Norman Litera-
ture, and Middle English Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centu-
ries. The Anglo-Saxon invaders, who began their conquest of the southeastern
part of Britain around 450, spoke an early form of the language we now
call Old English. Old English displays its kinship with other Germanic
languages (German or Dutch, for example) much more clearly than does
contemporary British and American English, of which Old English is the
ancestor. As late as the tenth century, part of an Old Saxon poem written
on the Continent was transcribed and transliterated into the West Saxon
dialect of Old English without presenting problems to its English readers.
In form and content Old English literature also has much in common with
other Germanic literatures with which it shared a body of heroic as well as
Christian stories. The major characters in Beowulf are pagan Danes and
Geats, and the only connection to England is an obscure allusion to the
ancestor of one of the kings of the Angles.
The changes already in progress in the language and culture of Anglo-
Saxon England were greatly accelerated by the Norman Conquest of 1066.
The ascendancy of a French-speaking ruling class had the effect of adding
a vast number of French loan words to the English vocabulary. The conquest
resulted in new forms of political organization and administration, architec-
ture, and literary expression. In the twelfth century, through the interest of
the Anglo-Normans in British history before the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, not
only England but all of Western Europe became fascinated with a legendary
hero named Arthur who makes his earliest appearances in Celtic literature.
King Arthur and his knights became a staple subject of medieval French,
English, and German literature. Selections from Latin, French, and Old
Irish, as well as from Early Middle English have been included here to give
a sense of the cross-currents of languages and literatures in Anglo-Norman
England and to provide background for later English literature in all
periods.
Literature in English was performed orally and written throughout the
Middle Ages, but the awareness of and pride in a uniquely English literature
 INTRODUCTION | 5

did not actually exist before the late fourteenth century. In 1336 Edward III
began a war to enforce his claims to the throne of France; the war continued
intermittently for more than one hundred years until finally the English were
driven from all their French territories, except for the port of Calais, in 1453.
One result of the war and these losses was a keener sense on the part of
England’s nobility of their English heritage and identity. Toward the close of
the fourteenth century English finally began to displace French as the lan-
guage for conducting business in Parliament and much official correspon-
dence. Although the high nobility continued to speak French by preference,
they were certainly bilingual, whereas some of the earlier Norman kings had
known no English at all. It was becoming possible to obtain patronage for
literary achievement in English. The decision of Chaucer (d. 1400) to emu-
late French and Italian poetry in his own vernacular is an indication of the
change taking place in the status of English, and Chaucer’s works were
greatly to enhance the prestige of English as a vehicle for literature of high
ambition. He was acclaimed by fifteenth-century poets as the embellisher
of the English tongue; later writers called him the English Homer and the
father of English poetry. His friend John Gower (ca. 1330–1408) wrote long
poems in French and Latin before producing his last major work, the Confes-
sio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession), which in spite of its Latin title is com-
posed in English.
The third and longest of the three primary sections, Middle English Lit-
erature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, is thus not only a chron-
ological and linguistic division but implies a new sense of English as a
literary medium that could compete with French and Latin in elegance and
seriousness.
Book production throughout the medieval period was an expensive
process. Until the invention of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century
(introduced into England by Caxton in 1476), medieval books were repro-
duced by hand in manuscript (literally “written by hand”). While paper
became increasingly common for less expensive manuscripts in the fif-
teenth century, manuscripts were until then written on carefully prepared
animal (usually calf or sheep) skin, known as parchment or vellum. More
expensive books could be illuminated both by colored and calligraphic let-
tering, and by visual images.
The institutions of book production developed across the period. In the
Anglo-Saxon period monasteries were the main centers of book production
and storage. Until their dissolution in the 1530s, monastic and other reli-
gious houses continued to produce books, but from the early fourteenth
century, particularly in London, commercial book-making enterprises came
into being. These were loose organizations of various artisans such as parch-
mentmakers, scribes, flourishers, illuminators, and binders, who usually
lived in the same neighborhoods in towns. A bookseller or dealer (usually
a member of one of these trades) would coordinate the production of books
to order for wealthy patrons, sometimes distributing the work of copying
to different scribes, who would be responsible for different gatherings, or
quires, of the same book. Such shops could call upon the ser vices of profes-
sional scribes working in the bureaucracies of the royal court.
The market for books also changed across the period: while monasteries,
other religious houses, and royal courts continued to fund the production
6 | THE MIDDLE AGES

of books, from the Anglo-Norman period books were also produced for (and
sometimes by) noble and gentry households. From the fourteenth century
the market was widened yet further, with wealthy urban patrons also order-
ing books. Some of these books were dedicated to single works, some largely
to single genres; most were much more miscellaneous, containing texts of
many kinds and (particularly in the Anglo-Norman period) written in differ-
ent languages (especially Latin, French, and English). Only a small propor-
tion of medieval books survive; large numbers were destroyed at the time of
the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.
Texts in Old English, Early Middle English, the more difficult texts in
later Middle English (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman), and
those in other languages are given in translation. Chaucer and other Middle
English works may be read in the original, even by the beginner, with the
help of marginal glosses and notes. These texts have been spelled in a way
that is intended to aid the reader. Analyses of the sounds and grammar of
Middle English and of Old and Middle English prosody are presented on
pages 19–25.

ANGLO- SAXON LITER ATURE

From the first to the fifth century, England was a province of the Roman
Empire and was named Britannia after its Celtic-speaking inhabitants, the
Britons. The Britons adapted themselves to Roman civilization, of which the
ruins survived to impress the poet of The Wanderer, who refers to them as
“the ancient works of giants.” The withdrawal of the Roman legions during
the fifth century, in a vain attempt to protect Rome itself from the threat of
Germanic conquest, left the island vulnerable to seafaring Germanic invad-
ers. These belonged primarily to three related tribes, the Angles, the Saxons,
and the Jutes. The name English derives from the Angles, and the names of
the counties Essex, Sussex, and Wessex refer to the territories occupied by
the East, South, and West Saxons.
The Anglo-Saxon occupation was no sudden conquest but extended over
decades of fighting against the native Britons. The latter were, finally, largely
confined to the mountainous region of Wales, where the modern form of their
language is spoken alongside English to this day. The Britons had become
Christians in the fourth century after the conversion of Emperor Constan-
tine along with most of the rest of the Roman Empire, but for about 150 years
after the beginning of the invasion, Christianity was maintained only in the
remoter regions where the as yet pagan Anglo-Saxons failed to penetrate. In
the year 597, however, a Benedictine monk (afterward St. Augustine of Can-
terbury) was sent by Pope Gregory as a missionary to King Ethelbert of Kent,
the most southerly of the kingdoms into which England was then divided,
and about the same time missionaries from Ireland began to preach Christi-
anity in the north. Within 75 years the island was once more predominantly
Christian. Before Christianity there had been no books. The impact of Chris-
tianity on literacy is evident from the fact that the first extended written
specimen of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language is a code of laws pro-
mulgated by Ethelbert, the first English Christian king.
 INTRODUCTION | 7

In the centuries that followed the

conversion, England produced many
distinguished churchmen. One of the
earliest of these was Bede, whose Latin
Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, which tells the story of the con-
version and of the English church, was
completed in 731; this remains one of
our most important sources of knowl-
edge about the period. In the next gen-
eration Alcuin (735– 804), a man of
wide culture, became the friend and
adviser of the Frankish emperor Char-
lemagne, whom he assisted in making
the Frankish court a great center of
learning; thus by the year 800 English
culture had developed so richly that it
overflowed its insular boundaries. Lindisfarne Gospels. Opening of
In the ninth century the Christian Gospel of St. Matthew, ca. 698. The
Anglo-Saxons were themselves sub- veil of mysteries is drawn aside, and the
jected to new Germanic invasions by author of the gospel text copies his book
the Danes who in their longboats as if by divine dictation.
repeatedly ravaged the coast, sacking
Bede’s monastery among others. Such a raid late in the tenth century
inspired The Battle of Maldon, the last of the Old English heroic poems.
The Danes also occupied the northern part of the island, threatening to
overrun the rest. They were stopped by Alfred, king of the West Saxons
from 871 to 899, who for a time united all the kingdoms of southern
England. This most active king was also an enthusiastic patron of litera-
ture. He himself translated various works from Latin, the most impor-
tant of which was Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century
Roman work also translated in the fourteenth century by Chaucer. Alfred
probably also instigated a translation of Bede’s History and the beginning
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: this year-by-year record in Old English of
important events in England was maintained at one monastery until the
middle of the twelfth century. Practically all of Old English poetry is
preserved in copies made in the West Saxon dialect after the reign of
Alfred.

Old English Poetry

The Anglo-Saxon invaders brought with them a tradition of oral poetry (see
“Bede and Cædmon’s Hymn,” p. 29). Because nothing was written down
before the conversion to Christianity, we have only circumstantial evidence
of what that poetry must have been like. Aside from a few short inscriptions
on small artifacts, the earliest records in the English language are in manu-
scripts produced at monasteries and other religious establishments, begin-
ning in the seventh century. Literacy was mainly restricted to servants of
the church, and so it is natural that the bulk of Old English literature deals
with religious subjects and is mostly drawn from Latin sources. Under the
8 | THE MIDDLE AGES

expensive conditions of manuscript production, few texts were written

down that did not pertain directly to the work of the church. Most of Old
English poetry is contained in just four manuscripts.
Germanic heroic poetry continued to be performed orally in alliterative
verse and was at times used to describe current events. The Battle of Brunan-
burh, which celebrates an English victory over the Danes in traditional
alliterative verse, is preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Battle of
Maldon (in the supplemental ebook) commemorates a Viking victory in which
the Christian English invoke the ancient code of honor that obliges a warrior
to avenge his slain lord or to die beside him.
These poems show that the aristocratic heroic and kinship values of Ger-
manic society continued to inspire both clergy and laity in the Christian
era. As represented in the relatively small body of Anglo-Saxon heroic
poetry that survives, this world shares many characteristics with the heroic
world described by Homer. Nations are reckoned as groups of people related
by kinship rather than by geographical areas, and kinship is the basis of
the heroic code. The tribe is ruled by a chieftain who is called king, a word
that has “kin” for its root. The lord (a word derived from Old English hlaf,
“loaf,” plus weard, “protector”) surrounds himself with a band of retainers
(many of them his blood kindred) who are members of his household. He
leads his men in battle and rewards them with the spoils; royal generosity
was one of the most important aspects of heroic behavior. In return, the
retainers are obligated to fight for their lord to the death, and if he is slain,
to avenge him or die in the attempt. Blood vengeance is regarded as a sacred
duty, and in poetry, everlasting shame awaits those who fail to observe it.
Even though the heroic world of poetry could be invoked to rally resistance
to the Viking invasions, it was already remote from the Christian world of
Anglo-Saxon England. Nevertheless, Christian writers like the Beowulf poet
were fascinated by the distant culture of their pagan ancestors and by the
inherent conflict between the heroic code and a religion that teaches that we
should “forgive those who trespass against us” and that “all they that take the
sword shall perish with the sword.” The Beowulf poet looks back on that
ancient world with admiration for the courage of which it was capable and at
the same time with elegiac sympathy for its inevitable doom.
For Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is difficult and probably futile to draw a line
between “heroic” and “Christian,” for the best poetry crosses that boundary.
Much of the Christian poetry is also cast in the heroic mode: although the
Anglo-Saxons adapted themselves readily to the ideals of Christianity, they
did not do so without adapting Christianity to their own heroic ideal. Thus
Moses and St. Andrew, Christ and God the Father are represented in the
style of heroic verse. In The Dream of the Rood, the Cross speaks of Christ
as “this young man, . . . strong and courageous.” In Cædmon’s Hymn the
creation of heaven and earth is seen as a mighty deed, an “establishment of
wonders.” Anglo-Saxon heroines, too, are portrayed in the heroic manner.
St. Helena, who leads an expedition to the Holy Land to discover the true
Cross, is described as a “battle-queen.” The biblical narrative related in the
Anglo-Saxon poem Judith is recast in the terms of Germanic heroic poetry.
Christian and heroic ideals are poignantly blended in The Wanderer, which
laments the separation from one’s lord and kinsmen and the transience of all
earthly treasures. Love between man and woman, as described by the female
 INTRODUCTION | 9

speaker of The Wife’s Lament, is disrupted by separation, exile, and the mal-
ice of kinfolk.
The world of Old English poetry is often elegiac. Men are said to be
cheerful in the mead hall, but even there they think of war, of possible tri-
umph but more possible failure. Romantic love— one of the principal topics
of later literature—appears hardly at all. Even so, at some of the bleakest
moments, the poets powerfully recall the return of spring. The blade of the
magic sword with which Beowulf has killed Grendel’s mother in her sinis-
ter underwater lair begins to melt, “as ice melts / when the Father eases the
fetters off the frost / and unravels the water ropes, He who wields power.”
The poetic diction, formulaic phrases, and repetitions of parallel syntac-
tic structures, which are determined by the versification, are difficult to
reproduce in modern translation. A few features may be anticipated here
and studied in the text of Cædmon’s Hymn, printed below (pp. 29–32) with
interlinear translation.
Poetic language is created out of a special vocabulary that contains a mul-
tiplicity of terms for lord, warrior, spear, shield, and so on. Synecdoche and
metonymy are common figures of speech, as when “keel” is used for ship or
“iron” for sword. A particularly striking effect is achieved by the kenning,
a compound of two words in place of another as when sea becomes “whale-
road” or body is called “life-house.” The figurative use of language finds
playful expression in poetic riddles, of which about one hundred survive.
Common (and sometimes uncommon) creatures, objects, or phenomena are
described in an enigmatic passage of alliterative verse, and the reader must
guess their identity. Sometimes they are personified and ask, “What is my
name?”
Because special vocabulary and compounds are among the chief poetic
effects, the verse is constructed in such a way as to show off such terms by
creating a series of them in apposition. In the second sentence of Cædmon’s
Hymn, for example, God is referred to five times appositively as “he,” “holy
Creator,” “mankind’s Guardian,” “eternal Lord,” and “Master Almighty.” This
use of parallel and appositive expressions, known as variation, gives the verse
a highly structured and musical quality.
The overall effect of the language is to formalize and elevate speech.
Instead of being straightforward, it moves at a slow and stately pace with
steady indirection. A favorite mode of this indirection is irony. A grim irony
pervades heroic poetry even at the level of diction where fighting is called
“battle-play.” A favorite device, known by the rhetorical term litotes, is ironic
understatement. After the monster Grendel has slaughtered the Danes in
the great hall Heorot, it stands deserted. The poet observes, “It was easy
then to meet with a man / shifting himself to a safer distance.”
More than a figure of thought, irony is also a mode of perception in Old
English poetry. In a famous passage, the Wanderer articulates the theme of
Ubi sunt? (where are they now?): “Where did the steed go? Where the young
warrior? Where the treasure-giver? . . .” Beowulf is full of ironic balances
and contrasts—between the aged Danish king and the youthful Beowulf,
and between Beowulf, the high-spirited young warrior at the beginning, and
Beowulf, the gray-haired king at the end, facing the dragon and death.
The formal and dignified speech of Old English poetry was always distant
from the everyday language of the Anglo-Saxons, and this poetic idiom
10 | THE MIDDLE AGES

remained remarkably uniform throughout the roughly three hundred years

that separate Cædmon’s Hymn from The Battle of Maldon. This clinging to
old forms— grammatical and orthographic as well as literary—by the Anglo-
Saxon church and aristocracy conceals from us the enormous changes that
were taking place in the English language and the diversity of its dialects.
The dramatic changes between Old and Middle English did not happen over-
night or over the course of a single century. The Normans displaced the
English ruling class with their own barons and clerics, whose native lan-
guage was a dialect of Old French that we call Anglo-Norman. Without a
ruling literate class to preserve English traditions, the custom of transcrib-
ing vernacular texts in an earlier form of the West-Saxon dialect was aban-
doned, and both language and literature were allowed to develop unchecked
in new directions.
For examples of Irish medieval literature, see the excerpt from the Old
Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) and some delight-
ful monastic lyrics.

ANGLO- NORMAN LITER ATURE

The Normans, who took possession of England after the decisive Battle
of Hastings (1066), were, like the Anglo-Saxons, descendants of Germanic
adventurers, who at the beginning of the tenth century had seized a wide part
of northern France. Their name is actually a contraction of “Norsemen.” A
highly adaptable people, they had adopted the French language of the land
they had settled in and its Christian religion. Both in Normandy and in Brit-
ain they were great builders of castles, with which they enforced their politi-
cal dominance, and magnificent churches. Norman bishops, who held land
and castles like the barons, wielded both political and spiritual authority.
The earlier Norman kings of England, however, were often absentee rulers,
as much concerned with defending their Continental possessions as with
ruling over their English holdings. The English Crown’s French territories
were enormously increased in 1154 when Henry II, the first of England’s
Plantagenet kings, ascended the throne. Through his marriage with Eleanor
of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Louis VII of France, Henry had acquired
vast provinces in the southwest of France.
The presence of a French-speaking ruling class in England created excep-
tional opportunities for linguistic and cultural exchange. Four languages
coexisted in the realm of Anglo-Norman England: Latin, as it had been for
Bede, remained the international language of learning, used for theology,
science, and history. It was not by any means a written language only but
also a lingua franca by which different nationalities communicated in the
church and the newly founded universities. The Norman aristocracy for the
most part spoke French, but intermarriage with the native English nobility
and the business of daily life between masters and servants encouraged
bilingualism. Different branches of the Celtic language group were spoken
in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.
Inevitably, there was also literary intercourse among the different lan-
guages. The Latin Bible and Latin saints’ lives provided subjects for a great
deal of Old English as well as Old French poetry and prose. The first medi-
 INTRODUCTION | 11

King Harold Fatally Struck in the Eye. Bayeux Tapestry, textile,

ca. 1070– 80. The decisive historical moment is captured as Harold
falls victim to irrepressible horizontal attack. Note the dead being
stripped of their armor, in the margins.

eval drama in the vernacular, The Play of Adam, with elaborate stage direc-
tions in Latin and realistic dialogue in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French,
was probably produced in England during the twelfth century.
The Anglo-Norman aristocracy was especially attracted to Celtic leg-
ends and tales that had been circulating orally for centuries. The twelfth-
century poets Thomas of England, Marie de France, and Chrétien de
Troyes each claim to have obtained their narratives from Breton storytell-
ers, who were probably bilingual performers of native tales for French
audiences. Sir Orfeo may represent the kind of lay that served as a model
for Marie. “Breton” may indicate that they came from Brittany, or it may
have been a generic term for a Celtic bard. Marie speaks respectfully of
the storytellers, while Thomas expresses caution about their tendency to
vary narratives; Chrétien accuses them of marring their material, which,
he boasts, he has retold with an elegant fusion of form and meaning.
Marie wrote a series of short romances, which she refers to as “lays” origi-
nally told by Bretons. Her versions are the most original and sophisticated
examples of the genre that came to be known as the Breton lay, represented
here by Marie’s Milun, Lanval, and Chevrefoil. It is very likely that Henry II
is the “noble king” to whom she dedicated her lays and that they were writ-
ten for his court. Thomas composed a moving, almost operatic version of
the adulterous passion of Tristran and Ysolt, very different from the power-
ful version of the same story by Beroul, also composed in the last half of the
twelfth century. Chrétien is the principal creator of the romance of chivalry
in which knightly adventures are a means of exploring psychological and
ethical dilemmas that the knights must solve, in addition to displaying mar-
tial prowess in saving ladies from monsters, giants, and wicked knights.
Chrétien, like Marie, is thought to have spent time in England at the court
of Henry II.
12 | THE MIDDLE AGES

Thomas, Marie, and Chrétien de Troyes were innovators of the genre that
has become known as “romance.” The word roman was initially applied in
French to a work written in the French vernacular. Thus the thirteenth-
century Roman de Troie is a long poem about the Trojan War in French.
While this work deals mainly with the siege of Troy, it also includes stories
about the love of Troilus for Cressida and of Achilles for the Trojan princess
Polyxena. Eventually, “romance” acquired the generic associations it has for
us as a story about love and adventure.
Romance was the principal narrative genre for late medieval readers. Inso-
far as it was centrally concerned with love, it developed ways of representing
psychological interiority with great subtlety. That subtlety itself provoked a
sub-genre of questions about love. Thus in the late twelfth century, Andreas
Capellanus (Andrew the Chaplain) wrote a Latin treatise, the title of which
may be translated The Art of Loving Correctly [honeste]. In one part, Elea-
nor of Aquitaine, her daughter, the countess Marie de Champagne, and other
noble women are cited as a supreme court rendering decisions on difficult
questions of love—for example, whether there is greater passion between lov-
ers or between married couples. Whether such “courts of love” were purely
imaginary or whether they represent some actual court entertainment, they
imply that the literary taste and judgment of women had a significant role in
fostering the rise of romance in France and Anglo-Norman England.
In Marie’s Lanval and in Chrétien’s romances, the court of King Arthur
had already acquired for French audiences a reputation as the most famous
center of chivalry. That eminence is owing in large measure to a remarkable
book in Latin, The History of the Kings of Britain, completed by Geoffrey of
Monmouth, ca. 1136–38. Geoffrey claimed to have based his “history” on a
book in the British tongue (i.e., Welsh), but no one has ever found such a
book. He drew on a few earlier Latin chronicles, but the bulk of his history
was probably fabricated from Celtic oral tradition, his familiarity with Roman
history and literature, and his own fertile imagination. The climax of the book
is the reign of King Arthur, who defeats the Roman armies but is forced to
turn back to Britain to counter the treachery of his nephew Mordred. In
1155 Geoffrey’s Latin was rendered into French rhyme by an Anglo-Norman
poet called Wace, and fifty or so years later Wace’s poem was turned by Lay-
amon, an English priest, into a much longer poem that combines English
alliterative verse with sporadic rhyme.
Layamon’s work is one of many instances where English receives new
material directly through French sources, which may be drawn from Celtic
or Latin sources. There are two Middle English versions of Marie’s Lanval,
and the English romance called Yvain and Gawain is a cruder version of
Chrétien’s Le Chevalier au Lion (The Knight of the Lion). A marvelous
English lay, Sir Orfeo, is a version of the Orpheus story in which Orpheus
succeeds in rescuing his wife from the other world, for which a French origi-
nal, if there was one, has never been found. Romance, stripped of its courtly,
psychological, and ethical subtleties, had an immense popular appeal for
English readers and listeners. Many of these romances are simplified adap-
tations of more aristocratic French poems and recount in a rollicking and
rambling style the adventures of heroes like Guy of Warwick, a poor steward
who must prove his knightly worth to win the love of Fair Phyllis. The ethos
of many romances, aristocratic and popular alike, involves a knight proving
 INTRODUCTION | 13

his worthiness through nobility of character and brave deeds rather than
through high birth. In this respect romances reflect the aspirations of a
lower order of the nobility to rise in the world, as historically some of these
nobles did. William the Marshall, for example, the fourth son of a baron of
middle rank, used his talents in war and in tournaments to become tutor to
the oldest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He married a great
heiress and became one of the most powerful nobles in England and the
subject of a verse biography in French, which often reads like a romance.
Of course, not all writing in Early Middle English depends on French
sources or intermediaries. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be writ-
ten at the monastery of Peterborough. It is an invaluable witness for the
changes taking place in the English language and allows us to see Norman
rule from an English point of view. The Owl and the Nightingale (?late
twelfth century) is a witty and entertaining poem in which these two female
birds engage in a fierce debate about the benefits their singing brings to
humankind. The owl grimly reminds her rival of the sinfulness of the
human condition, which her mournful song is intended to amend; the night-
ingale sings about the pleasures of life and love when lord and lady are in
bed together. The poet, who was certainly a cleric, is well aware of the fash-
ionable new romance literature; he specifically has the nightingale allude to
Marie de France’s lay Laüstic, the Breton word, she says, for “rossignol” in
French and “nightingale” in English. The poet does not side with either bird;
rather he has amusingly created the sort of dialectic between the discourses
of religion and romance that is carried on throughout medieval literature.
There is also a body of Early Middle English religious prose aimed at
women. Three saints’ lives celebrate the heroic combats of virgin martyrs
who suffer dismemberment and death; a tract entitled Holy Maidenhead
paints the woes of marriage not from the point of view of the husband, as in
standard medieval antifeminist writings, but from that of the wife. Related
to these texts, named the Katherine Group after one of the virgin martyrs,
is a religious work also written for women but in a very different spirit. The
Ancrene Wisse (Anchoresses’ Guide) is one of the finest works of English
religious prose in any period. It is a manual of instruction written at the
request of three sisters who have chosen to live as religious recluses. The
author, who may have been their personal confessor, addresses them with
affection, and, at times, with kindness and humor. He is also profoundly
serious in his analyses of sin, penance, and love. In the selection included
here from his chapter on penance, he imagines the enclosed life in richly
metaphorical ways, mixing pleasure strangely with pain.

MIDDLE EN GLISH LITER ATURE IN THE

FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
The styles of The Owl and the Nightingale and Ancrene Wisse show that
around the year 1200 both poetry and prose were being written for sophis-
ticated and well-educated readers whose primary language was English.
Throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, there are many
kinds of evidence that, although French continued to be the principal lan-
guage of Parliament, law, business, and high culture, English was gaining
14 | THE MIDDLE AGES

The City. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government in the City, 1338–39. The
extraordinary energies of urban culture are set in a dynamic relation of peace and
competition: the external walls of the city protect against outside invasion, even as the
skyscrapers compete for space and power within the city.

ground. Several authors of religious and didactic works in English state that
they are writing for the benefit of those who do not understand Latin or
French. Anthologies were made of miscellaneous works adapted from French
for English readers and original pieces in English. Most of the nobility were
by now bilingual, and the author of an English romance written early in the
fourteenth century declares that he has seen many nobles who cannot speak
French. Children of the nobility and the merchant class were now learning
French as a second language. By the 1360s the linguistic, political, and cul-
tural climate had been prepared for the flowering of Middle English litera-
ture in the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain poet.
The Fourteenth Century
War and disease were prevalent throughout the Middle Ages but never more
devastatingly than during the fourteenth century. In the wars against France,
the gains of two spectacular English victories, at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers
in 1356, were gradually frittered away in futile campaigns that ravaged the
French countryside without obtaining any clear advantage for the English. In
1348 the first and most virulent epidemic of the bubonic plague—the Black
Death—swept Europe, wiping out a quarter to a third of the population. The
toll was higher in crowded urban centers. Giovanni Boccaccio’s description
of the plague in Florence, with which he introduces the Decameron, vividly
portrays its ravages: “So many corpses would arrive in front of a church every
day and at every hour that the amount of holy ground for burials was cer-
tainly insufficient for the ancient custom of giving each body its individual
place; when all the graves were full, huge trenches were dug in all of the
cemeteries of the churches and into them the new arrivals were dumped by
the hundreds; and they were packed in there with dirt, one on top of another,
like a ship’s cargo, until the trench was filled.” The resulting scarcity of labor
and a sudden expansion of the possibilities for social mobility fostered popular
 INTRODUCTION | 15

discontent. In 1381 attempts to enforce wage controls and to collect oppres-

sive new taxes provoked a rural uprising in Essex and Kent that dealt a pro-
found shock to the English ruling class. The participants were for the most
part tenant farmers, day laborers, apprentices, and rural workers not attached
to the big manors. A few of the lower clergy sided with the rebels against their
wealthy church superiors; the priest John Ball was among the leaders. The
movement was quickly suppressed, but not before sympathizers in London
had admitted the rebels through two city gates, which had been barred
against them. The insurgents burned down the palace of the hated duke of
Lancaster, and they summarily beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury and
the treasurer of England, who had taken refuge in the Tower of London. The
church had become the target of popular resentment because it was among
the greatest of the oppressive landowners and because of the wealth, worldli-
ness, and venality of many of the higher clergy.
These calamities and upheavals nevertheless did not stem the growth of
international trade and the influence of the merchant class. In the portrait
of Geoffrey Chaucer’s merchant, we see the budding of capitalism based on
credit and interest. Cities like London ran their own affairs under politically
powerful mayors and aldermen. Edward III, chronically in need of money to
finance his wars, was obliged to negotiate for revenues with the Commons
in the English Parliament, an institution that became a major political force
during this period. A large part of the king’s revenues depended on taxing
the profitable export of English wool to the Continent. The Crown thus
became involved in the country’s economic affairs, and this involvement led
to a need for capable administrators. These were no longer drawn mainly
from the church, as in the past, but from a newly educated laity that occu-
pied a rank somewhere between that of the lesser nobility and the upper
bourgeoisie. The career of Chaucer, who served Edward III and his succes-
sor Richard II in a number of civil posts, is typical of this class—with the
exception that Chaucer was also a great poet.
In the fourteenth century, a few poets and intellectuals achieved the
status and respect formerly accorded only to the ancients. Marie de France
and Chrétien de Troyes had dedicated their works to noble patrons and, in
their role as narrators, address themselves as entertainers and sometimes as
instructors to court audiences. Dante (1265–1321) made himself the pro-
tagonist of The Divine Comedy, the sacred poem, as he called it, in which he
revealed the secrets of the afterlife. After his death, manuscripts of the work
were provided with lengthy commentaries as though it were Scripture, and
public readings and lectures were devoted to it. Francis Petrarch (1304–1374)
won an international reputation as a man of letters. He wrote primarily in
Latin and contrived to have himself crowned “poet laureate” in emulation of
the Roman poets whose works he imitated, but his most famous work is the
sonnet sequence he wrote in Italian. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was
among Petrarch’s most ardent admirers and carried on a literary correspon-
dence with him.
Chaucer read these authors along with the ancient Roman poets and drew
on them in his own works. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is based on a Latin version
Petrarch made from the last tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron; in his prologue,
the Clerk refers to Petrarch as “lauriat poete” whose sweet rhetoric illumi-
nated all Italy with his poetry. Yet in his own time, the English poet Chaucer
16 | THE MIDDLE AGES

never attained the kind of laurels that he and others accorded to Petrarch.
In his earlier works, Chaucer portrayed himself comically as a diligent reader
of old books, as an aspiring apprentice writer, and as an eager spectator on
the fringe of a fashionable world of courtiers and poets. In The House of
Fame, he relates a dream of being snatched up by a huge golden eagle (the
eagle and many other things in this work were inspired by Dante), who trans-
ports him to the palace of the goddess Fame. There he gets to see phantoms,
like the shades in Dante’s poem, of all the famous authors of antiquity. At
the end of his romance Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer asks his “litel book” to
kiss the footsteps where the great ancient poets had passed before. Like
Dante and Petrarch, Chaucer had an ideal of great poetry and, in his Troilus
at least, strove to emulate it. But in The House of Fame and in his final work,
The Canterbury Tales, he also views that ideal ironically and distances him-
self from it. The many surviving documents that record Geoffrey Chaucer’s
career as a civil servant do not contain a single word to show that he was also
a poet. Only in the following centuries would he be canonized as the father
of English poetry.
Chaucer is unlikely to have known his contemporary William Langland,
who says in an autobiographical passage (see pp. 392–95), added to the third
and last version of his great poem Piers Plowman, that he lived in London
on Cornhill (a poor area of the city) among “lollers.” “Loller” was a slang
term for the unemployed and transients; it was later applied to followers of
the religious and social reformer John Wycliffe, some of whom were burned
at the stake for heresy in the next century. Langland assailed corruption in
church and state, but he was certainly no radical. It is thought that he may
have written the third version of Piers Plowman, which tones down his
attacks on the church, after the rebels of 1381 invoked Piers as one of their
own. Although Langland does not condone rebellion and his religion is not
revolutionary, he nevertheless presents the most clear-sighted vision of social
and religious issues in the England of his day. Piers Plowman is also a pain-
fully honest search for the right way that leads to salvation. Though learned
himself, Langland and the dreamer who represents him in the poem arrive at
the insight that learning can be one of the chief obstacles on that way.
Langland came from the west of England, and his poem belongs to the
“Alliterative Revival,” a final flowering in the late fourteenth century of the
verse form that goes all the way back to Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon
traditions held out longest in the west and north, away from London, where
Chaucer and his audience were more open to literary fashions from the
Continent.
John Gower is a third major late fourteenth-century English poet. While
his first and second large works are written in French and Latin verse respec-
tively, his Confessio Amantis (1390) is written in English four-stress couplets.
Gower’s first two works are severe satires; the Confessio, by contrast, broaches
political and ethical issues from an oblique angle. Its primary narrative con-
cerns the treatment of a suffering lover. His therapy consists of listening to,
and understanding, many other narratives, many of which are drawn from
classical sources. Like Chaucer, Gower anglicizes and absorbs classical Latin
literature.
Admiration for the poetry of both Chaucer and Gower and the controver-
sial nature of Langland’s writing assured the survival of their work in many
 INTRODUCTION | 17

manuscripts. The work of a fourth major fourteenth-century English poet,

who remains anonymous, is known only through a single manuscript, which
contains four poems all thought to be by a single author: Cleanness and
Patience, two biblical narratives in alliterative verse; Pearl, a moving dream
vision in which a grief-stricken father is visited and consoled by his dead
child, who has been transformed into a queen in the kingdom of heaven; and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the finest of all English romances. The plot
of Gawain involves a folklore motif of a challenge by a supernatural visitor,
first found in an Old Irish tale. The poet has made this motif a challenge to
King Arthur’s court and has framed the tale with allusions at the beginning
and end to the legends that link Arthur’s reign with the Trojan War and the
founding of Rome and of Britain. The poet has a sophisticated awareness of
romance as a literary genre and plays a game with both the hero’s and the
reader’s expectations of what is supposed to happen in a romance. One could
say that the broader subject of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is “romance”
itself, and in this respect the poem resembles Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in
its author’s interest in literary form.
Julian of Norwich is a fifth major writer of this period. The first known
woman writer in the English vernacular, the anchoress Julian participates
in a Continental tradition of vision-
ary writings, often by women. She
spent a good deal of her life medi-
tating and writing about a series
of visions, which she called “show-
ings,” that she had received in 1373,
when she was thirty years old.
While very carefully negotiating the
dangers of writing as a woman, and
of writing sophisticated theology
in the vernacular, Julian manages
to produce visionary writing that is
at once penetrating and serene.

The Fifteenth Century

In 1399 Henry Bolingbroke, the
duke of Lancaster, deposed his
cousin Richard II, who was mur-
dered in prison. As Henry IV, he
successfully defended his crown
against several insurrections and
passed it on to Henry V, who briefly
united the country once more and
achieved one last apparently deci-
sive victory over the French at the
Battle of Agincourt (1415). The pre-
The Seasons. Limbourg Brothers, “Febru-
mature death of Henry V in 1422,
ary,” from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de
however, left England exposed to Berry (ca. 1411–16). The calm inevitability of
the civil wars known as the Wars of cosmic, seasonal change is set above the
the Roses, the red rose being the uncertain yet inventive struggle of peasants,
emblem of the house of Lancaster; for heat and food, in the main frame.
18 | THE MIDDLE AGES

the white, of York. These wars did not end until 1485, when Henry Tudor
defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field and acceded to the throne as
Henry VII.
The most prolific poet of the fifteenth century was the monk John
Lydgate (1371?–1449), who produced dream visions; a life of the Virgin;
translations of French religious allegories; a Troy Book; The Siege of Thebes,
which he framed as a “new” Canterbury tale; and a thirty-six-thousand-
line poem called The Fall of Princes, a free translation of a French work,
itself based on a Latin work by Boccaccio. The last illustrates the late
medieval idea of tragedy, namely that emperors, kings, and other famous
men enjoy power and fortune only to be cast down in misery. Lydgate shapes
these tales as a “mirror” for princes, i.e., as object lessons to the powerful
men of his own day, several of whom were his patrons. A self-styled imitator
of Chaucer, Lydgate had a reputation almost equal to Chaucer’s in the fif-
teenth century. The other significant poet of the first half of the fifteenth
century is Thomas Hoccleve (1367?–1426). Like Lydgate, Hoccleve also
wrote for powerful Lancastrian patrons, but his poetry is strikingly private,
painfully concerned as it often is with his penury and mental instability. The
searing poem My Compleinte is an example of his work.
Religious works of all kinds continued to be produced in the fifteenth cen-
tury, but under greater surveillance. The Lancastrian authorities responded
to the reformist religious movement known as “Lollardy” in draconian ways.
They introduced a statute for the burning of heretics (the first such statute)
in 1401, and a series of measures designed to survey and censor theology in
English in 1409. Despite this, many writers continued to produce religious
works in the vernacular. Perhaps the most remarkable of these writers is
Margery Kempe (who records her visit to Julian of Norwich in about 1413).
Kempe made pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Rome, Santiago, and to shrines
in Northern Europe. These she records, in the context of her often fraught
and painful personal life, in her Book of Margery Kempe. Both Julian of Nor-
wich and Margery Kempe, in highly individual ways, allow us to see the
medieval church and its doctrines from female points of view.
Social, economic, and literary life continued as they had throughout all of
the previously mentioned wars. The prosperity of the towns was shown by
performances of the mystery plays— a sequence or “cycle” of plays based on
the Bible and produced by the city guilds, the organizations representing the
various trades and crafts. The cycles of several towns are lost, but those of
York and Chester have been preserved, along with two other complete cycles,
one possibly from Wakefield in Yorkshire, and the other titled the “N-Town”
Cycle. Under the guise of dramatizing biblical history, playwrights such as
the Wakefield Master manage to comment satirically on the social ills of the
times. The century also saw the development of the morality play, in which
personified vices and virtues struggle for the soul of “Mankind” or “Every-
man.” Performed by professional players, the morality plays were precursors
of the professional theater in the reign of Elizabeth I.
The best of Chaucer’s imitators was Robert Henryson, who, in the last
quarter of the fifteenth century, wrote The Testament of Cresseid, a contin-
uation of Chaucer’s great poem Troilus and Criseyde. He also wrote the
Moral Fabilis of Esope, among which The Cock and the Fox, included here,
is a remake of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
 INTRODUCTION | 19

The works of Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) gave the definitive form in
English to the legend of King Arthur and his knights. Malory spent years in
prison Englishing a series of Arthurian romances that he translated and
abridged chiefly from several enormously long thirteenth-century French
prose romances. Malory was a passionate devotee of chivalry, which he per-
sonified in his hero Sir Lancelot. In the jealousies and rivalries that finally
break up the round table and destroy Arthur’s kingdom, Malory saw a distant
image of the civil wars of his own time. A manuscript of Malory’s works fell
into the hands of William Caxton (1422?–1492), who had introduced the new
art of printing by movable type to England in 1476. Caxton divided Malory’s
tales into the chapters and books of a single long work, as though it were a
chronicle history, and gave it the title Morte Darthur, which has stuck to it
ever since. Caxton also printed The Canterbury Tales, some of Chaucer’s ear-
lier works, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Caxton himself translated many
of the works he printed for English readers: a history of Troy, a book on chiv-
alry, Aesop’s fables, The History of Reynard the Fox, and The Game and Playe
of Chesse. The new technology extended literacy and made books more easily
accessible to new classes of readers. Printing made the production of litera-
ture a business and made possible the bitter political and doctrinal disputes
that, in the sixteenth century, were waged in print as well as on the field of
battle.

MEDIEVAL EN GLISH
The medieval works in this anthology were composed in different states of
our language. Old English, the language that took shape among the Ger-
manic settlers of England, preserved its integrity until the Norman Con-
quest radically altered English civilization. Middle English, the first records of
which date from the early twelfth century, was continually changing. Shortly
after the introduction of printing at the end of the fifteenth century, it attained
the form designated as Early Modern English. Old English is a very heavily
inflected language. (That is, the words change form to indicate changes in
function, such as person, number, tense, case, mood, and so on. Most lan-
guages have some inflection—for example, the personal pronouns in Modern
English have different forms when used as objects—but a “heavily inflected”
language is one in which almost all classes of words undergo elaborate pat-
terns of change.) The vocabulary of Old English is almost entirely Germanic.
In Middle English, the inflectional system was weakened, and a large number
of words were introduced into it from French, so that many of the older Anglo-
Saxon words disappeared. Because of the difficulty of Old English, all selec-
tions from it in this book have been given in translation. So that the reader
may see an example of the language, Cædmon’s Hymn has been printed in the
original, together with an interlinear translation. The present discussion,
then, is concerned primarily with the relatively late form of Middle English
used by Chaucer and the East Midland dialect in which he wrote.
The chief difficulty with Middle English for the modern reader is caused
not by its inflections so much as by its spelling, which may be described as
a rough-and-ready phonetic system, and by the fact that it is not a single
standardized language, but consists of a number of regional dialects, each
20 | THE MIDDLE AGES

with its own peculiarities of sound and its own systems for representing
sounds in writing. The East Midland dialect—the dialect of London and of
Chaucer, which is the ancestor of our own standard speech— differs greatly
from the dialect spoken in the west of England (the original dialect of Piers
Plowman), from that of the northwest (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight),
and from that of the north (The Second Shepherds’ Play). In this book, the
long texts composed in the more difficult dialects have been translated or
modernized, and those that—like Chaucer, Gower, Everyman, and the
lyrics— appear in the original, have been re-spelled in a way that is designed
to aid the reader. The remarks that follow apply chiefly to Chaucer’s East
Midland English, although certain non-Midland dialectal variations are
noted if they occur in some of the other selections.
I. The Sounds of Middle English: General Rules
The following general analysis of the sounds of Middle English will enable
the reader who does not have time for detailed study to read Middle English
aloud and preserve some of its most essential characteristics, without, how-
ever, worrying too much about details. The next section, “Detailed Analysis,”
is designed for the reader who wishes to go more deeply into the pronuncia-
tion of Middle English. The best way to absorb the sound of Middle English
pronunciation is to listen to it; the StudySpace offers recordings of selections
as an aid to this end.
Middle English differs from Modern English in three principal respects:
(1) the pronunciation of the long vowels a, e, i (or y), o, and u (spelled ou, ow);
(2) the fact that Middle English final e is often sounded; and (3) the fact that
all Middle English consonants are sounded.

1. long vowels
Middle English vowels are long when they are doubled (aa, ee, oo) or when
they are terminal (he, to, holy); a, e, and o are long when followed by a single
consonant plus a vowel (name, mete, note). Middle English vowels are short
when they are followed by two consonants.
Long a is sounded like the a in Modern English “father”: maken, madd.
Long e may be sounded like the a in Modern English “name” (ignoring
the distinction between the close and open vowel): be, sweete.
Long i (or y) is sounded like the i in Modern English “machine”: lif, whit;
myn, holy.
Long o may be sounded like the o in Modern English “note” (again ignor-
ing the distinction between the close and open vowel): do, soone.
Long u (spelled ou, ow) is sounded like the oo in Modern English “goose”:
hous, flowr.
Note that in general Middle English long vowels are pronounced like
long vowels in modern European languages other than English. Short vow-
els and diphthongs, however, may be pronounced as in Modern English.

2. final e
In Middle English syllabic verse, final e is sounded, like the a in “sofa,” to
provide a needed unstressed syllable: Another Nonnë with hire haddë she.
But (cf. hire in the example) final e is suppressed when not needed for the
meter. It is commonly silent before words beginning with a vowel or h.
 INTRODUCTION | 21

3. consonants
Middle English consonants are pronounced separately in all combina-
tions—gnat: g-nat; knave: k-nave; write: w-rite; folk: fol-k. In a simplified
system of pronunciation the combination gh as in night or thought may be
treated as if it were silent.
II. The Sounds of Middle English: Detailed Analysis
1. simple vowels
Sound Pronunciation Example
long a (spelled a, aa) a in “father” maken, maad
short a o in “hot” cappe
long e close (spelled e, ee) a in “name” be, sweete
long e open (spelled e, ee) e in “there” mete, heeth
short e e in “set” setten
final e a in “sofa” large
long i (spelled i, y) i in “machine” lif, myn
short i i in “wit” wit
long o close (spelled o, oo) o in “note” do, soone
long o open (spelled o, oo) oa in “broad” go, goon
short o o in “oft” pot
long u when spelled ou, ow oo in “goose” hous, flowr
long u when spelled u u in “pure” vertu
short u (spelled u, o) u in “full” ful, love

Doubled vowels and terminal vowels are always long, whereas single vowels
before two consonants other than th, ch are always short. The vowels a, e,
and o are long before a single consonant followed by a vowel: namë, sekë
(sick), hˉoly. In general, words that have descended into Modern English
reflect their original Middle English quantity: lhven (to live), but lif (life).
The close and open sounds of long e and long o may often be identified by
the Modern English spellings of the words in which they appear. Original
long close e is generally represented in Modern English by ee: “sweet,”
“knee,” “teeth,” “see” have close e in Middle English, but so does “be”; origi-
nal long open e is generally represented in Modern English by ea: “meat,”
“heath,” “sea,” “great,” “breath” have open e in Middle English. Similarly,
original long close o is now generally represented by oo: “soon,” “food,”
“good,” but also “do,” “to”; original long open o is represented either by oa or
by o: “coat,” “boat,” “moan,” but also “go,” “bone,” “foe,” “home.” Notice that
original close o is now almost always pronounced like the oo in “goose,” but
that original open o is almost never so pronounced; thus it is often possible
to identify the Middle English vowels through Modern English sounds.
The nonphonetic Middle English spelling of o for short u has been pre-
served in a number of Modern English words (“love,” “son,” “come”), but in
others u has been restored: “sun” (sonne), “run” (ronne).
For the treatment of final e, see “General Rules,” “Final e.”
22 | THE MIDDLE AGES

2. diphthongs
Sound Pronunciation Example
ai, ay, ei, ay between ai in “aisle” saide, day, veine, preye
and ay in “day”
au, aw ou in “out” chaunge, bawdy
eu, ew ew in “few” newe
oi, oy oy in “joy” joye, point
ou, ow ou in “thought” thought, lowe
Note that in words with ou, ow that in Modern English are sounded with
the ou of “about,” the combination indicates not the diphthong but the
simple vowel long u (see “Simple Vowels”).
3. consonants
In general, all consonants except h were always sounded in Middle English,
including consonants that have become silent in Modern English, such as the
g in gnaw, the k in knight, the I in folk, and the w in write. In noninitial gn,
however, the g was silent as in Modern English “sign.” Initial h was silent in
short common English words and in words borrowed from French and may
have been almost silent in all words. The combination gh as in night or thought
was sounded like the ch of German ich or nach. Note that Middle English gg
represents both the hard sound of “dagger” and the soft sound of “bridge.”
III. Parts of Speech and Grammar
1. nouns
The plural and possessive of nouns end in es, formed by adding s or es to the
singular: knight, knightes; roote, rootes; a final consonant is frequently dou-
bled before es: bed, beddes. A common irregular plural is yën, from yë, eye.
2. pronouns
The chief comparisons with Modern English are as follows:
Modern English East Midlands Middle English
I I, ich (ik is a northern form)
you (singular) thou (subjective); thee (objective)
her hir(e), her(e)
its his
you (plural) ye (subjective); you (objective)
they they
their hir (their is a Northern form)
them hem (them is a Northern form)
In formal speech, the second-person plural is often used for the singular.
The possessive adjectives my, thy take n before a word beginning with a
vowel or h: thyn yë, myn host.
3. adjectives
Adjectives ending in a consonant add final e when they stand before the
noun they modify and after another modifying word such as the, this, that, or
nouns or pronouns in the possessive: a good hors, but the (this, my, the kinges)
 INTRODUCTION | 23

goode hors. They also generally add e when standing before and modifying a
plural noun, a noun in the vocative, or any proper noun: goode men, oh goode
man, faire Venus.
Adjectives are compared by adding er(e) for the comparative, est(e) for the
superlative. Sometimes the stem vowel is shortened or altered in the pro-
cess: sweete, swettere, swettest; long, lenger, lengest.
4. adverbs
Adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding e, ly, or liche; the adjective
fair thus yields faire, fairly, fairliche.
5. verbs
Middle English verbs, like Modern English verbs, are either “weak” or
“strong.” Weak verbs form their preterites and past participles with a t or d
suffix and preserve the same stem vowel throughout their systems, although
it is sometimes shortened in the preterite and past participle: love, loved;
bend, bent; hear, heard; meet, met. Strong verbs do not use the t or d suffix,
but vary their stem vowel in the preterite and past participle: take, took,
taken; begin, began, begun; find, found, found.
The inflectional endings are the same for Middle English strong verbs and
weak verbs except in the preterite singular and the imperative singular. In
the following paradigms, the weak verbs loven (to love) and heeren (to hear),
and the strong verbs taken (to take) and ginnen (to begin) serve as models.
Present Indicative Preterite Indicative
I love, heere loved(e), herde
take, ginne took, gan
thou lovest, heerest lovedest, herdest
takest, ginnest tooke, gonne
he, she, it loveth, heereth loved(e), herde
taketh, ginneth took, gan
we, ye, they love(n) (th), heere(n) (th) loved(e) (en), herde(n)
take(n) (th), ginne(n) (th) tooke(n), gonne(n)
The present plural ending eth is southern, whereas the e(n) ending is Mid-
land and characteristic of Chaucer. In the north, s may appear as the ending
of all persons of the present. In the weak preterite, when the ending e gave a
verb three or more syllables, it was frequently dropped. Note that in certain
strong verbs like ginnen there are two distinct stem vowels in the preterite;
even in Chaucer’s time, however, one of these had begun to replace the
other, and Chaucer occasionally writes gan for all persons of the preterite.
Present Subjunctive Preterite Subjunctive
Singular love, heere lovede, herde
take, ginne tooke, gonne
Plural love(n), heere(n) lovede(n), herde(n)
take(n), ginne(n) tooke(n), gonne(n)
In verbs like ginnen, which have two stem vowels in the indicative preterite,
it is the vowel of the plural and of the second person singular that is used
for the preterite subjunctive.
24 | THE MIDDLE AGES

The imperative singular of most weak verbs is e: (thou) love, but of some
weak verbs and all strong verbs, the imperative singular is without termina-
tion: (thou) heer, taak, gin. The imperative plural of all verbs is either e or eth:
(ye) love(th), heere(th), take(th), ginne(th).
The infinitive of verbs is e or en: love(n), heere(n), take(n), ginne(n).
The past participle of weak verbs is the same as the preterite without inflec-
tional ending: loved, herd. In strong verbs the ending is either e or en: take(n),
gonne(n). The prefix y often appears on past participles: yloved, yherd, ytake(n).

OLD AND MIDDLE EN GLISH PROSODY

All the poetry of Old English is in the same verse form. The verse unit is the
single line, because rhyme was not used to link one line to another, except
very occasionally in late Old English. The organizing device of the line is
alliteration, the beginning of several words with the same sound (“Foemen
fled”). The Old English alliterative line contains, on the average, four princi-
pal stresses and is divided into two half-lines of two stresses each by a strong
medial caesura, or pause. These two half-lines are linked to each other by
the alliteration; at least one of the two stressed words in the first half-line,
and often both of them, begin with the same sound as the first stressed word
of the second half-line (the second stressed word is generally nonallitera-
tive). The fourth line of Beowulf is an example (sc has the value of modern
sh; þ is a runic symbol with the value of modern th):
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum.
For further examples, see Cædmon’s Hymn. It will be noticed that any vowel
alliterates with any other vowel. In addition to the alliteration, the length of
the unstressed syllables and their number and pattern is governed by a highly
complex set of rules. When sung or intoned— as it was— to the rhythmic
strumming of a harp, Old English poetry must have been wonderfully impres-
sive in the dignified, highly formalized way that aptly fits both its subject
matter and tone.
The majority of Middle English verse is either in alternately stressed
rhyming verse, adapted from French after the conquest, or in alliterative
verse that is descended from Old English. The latter preserves the caesura
of Old English and in its purest form the same alliterative system, the two
stressed words of the first half-line (or at least one of them) alliterating with
the first stressed word in the second half-line. But most of the alliterative
poets allowed themselves a number of deviations from the norm. All four
stressed words may alliterate, as in the first line of Piers Plowman:
In a summer season when soft was the sun.
Or the line may contain five, six, or even more stressed words, of which all
or only the basic minimum may alliterate:
A fair field full of folk found I there between.
There is no rule determining the number of unstressed syllables, and at
times some poets seem to ignore alliteration entirely. As in Old English, any
vowel may alliterate with any other vowel; furthermore, since initial h was
 INTRODUCTION | 25

silent or lightly pronounced in Middle English, words beginning with h are

treated as though they began with the following vowel.
There are two general types of stressed verse with rhyme. In the more
common, unstressed and stressed syllables alternate regularly as x X x X x X
or, with two unstressed syllables intervening as x x X x x X x x X or a combina-
tion of the two as x x X x X x x X (of the reverse patterns, only X x X x X x is
common in English). There is also a line that can only be defined as contain-
ing a predetermined number of stressed syllables but an irregular number
and pattern of unstressed syllables. Much Middle English verse has to be
read without expectation of regularity; some of this was evidently composed
in the irregular meter, but some was probably originally composed according
to a strict metrical system that has been obliterated by scribes careless of
fine points. One receives the impression that many of the lyrics—as well as
the Second Shepherds’ Play—were at least composed with regular syllabic
alternation. In the play Everyman, only the number of stresses is generally
predetermined but not the number or placement of unstressed syllables.
In pre-Chaucerian verse the number of stresses, whether regularly or
irregularly alternated, was most often four, although sometimes the num-
ber was three and rose in some poems to seven. Rhyme in Middle English
(as in Modern English) may be either between adjacent or alternate lines,
or may occur in more complex patterns. Most of the Canterbury Tales are in
rhymed couplets, the line containing five stresses with regular alternation—
technically known as iambic pentameter, the standard English poetic line,
perhaps introduced into English by Chaucer. In reading Chaucer and much
pre-Chaucerian verse, one must remember that the final e, which is silent
in Modern English, could be pronounced at any time to provide a needed
unstressed syllable. Evidence seems to indicate that it was also pronounced
at the end of the line, even though it thus produced a line with eleven syl-
lables. Although he was a very regular metricist, Chaucer used various
conventional devices that are apt to make the reader stumble until he or she
understands them. Final e is often not pronounced before a word beginning
with a vowel or h, and may be suppressed whenever metrically convenient.
The same medial and terminal syllables that are slurred in Modern English
are apt to be suppressed in Chaucer’s English: Canterb’ry for Canterbury;
ev’r (perhaps e’er) for evere. The plural in es may either be syllabic or reduced
to s as in Modern English. Despite these seeming irregularities, Chaucer’s
verse is not difficult to read if one constantly bears in mind the basic pattern
of the iambic pentameter line.
 THE MIDDLE AGES
TEXTS CONTEXTS
43–ca. 420 Romans conquer Britons;
Brittania a province of the Roman Empire

307–37 Reign of Constantine the Great

leads to adoption of Christianity as official
religion of the Roman Empire
ca. 405 St. Jerome completes Vulgate,
Latin translation of the Bible that
becomes standard for the Roman Catholic
Church
432 St. Patrick begins mission to
convert Ireland
ca. 450 Anglo-Saxon conquest of
Britons begins
523 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
(Latin)
597 St. Augustine of Canterbury’s
mission to Kent begins conversion of
Anglo-Saxons to Christianity
ca. 658– 80 Cædmon’s Hymn, earliest
poem recorded in English
731 Bede completes Ecclesiastical
History of the English People
? ca. 750 Beowulf composed
ca. 787 First Viking raids on England
871–99 Texts written or commissioned 871–99 Reign of King Alfred
by Alfred
ca. 1000 Unique manuscript of Beowulf
and Judith
1066 Norman Conquest by William I
establishes French-speaking ruling class
in England
1095–1221 Crusades
ca. 1135–38 Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Latin History of the Kings of Britain gives
pseudohistorical status to Arthurian and
other legends
1152 Future Henry II marries Eleanor
of Aquitaine, bringing vast French
territories to the English crown
1154 End of Peterborough Chronicle,
last branch of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
? ca. 1165– 80 Marie de France, Lais in
Anglo-Norman French from Breton
sources
ca. 1170–91 Chrétien de Troyes, 1170 Archbishop Thomas Becket
chivalric romances about knights of the murdered in Canterbury Cathedral
Round Table

26
 TEXTS CONTEXTS
? ca. 1200 Layamon’s Brut 1182 Birth of St. Francis of Assisi
? ca. 1215–25 Ancrene Wisse 1215 Fourth Lateran Council requires
annual confession. English barons force
King John to seal Magna Carta (the Great
Charter) guaranteeing baronial rights
ca. 1304–21 Dante Alighieri writing
Divine Comedy
ca. 1340–1374 Giovanni Boccaccio ca. 1337–1453 Hundred Years’ War
active as writer in Naples and Florence
1348 Black Death ravages Europe
ca. 1340–1374 Francis Petrarch active 1362 English first used in law courts
as writer and Parliament
1368 Chaucer, Book of the Duchess
1372 Chaucer’s first journey to Italy
1373–93 Julian of Norwich, Book of
Showings
ca. 1375–1400 Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight
1376 Earliest record of per for mance of
cycle drama at York
1377–79 William Langland, Piers
Plowman (B-Text)
ca. 1380 Followers of John Wycliffe
begin first complete translation of the
Bible into English
1381 People’s uprising briefly takes
control of London before being
suppressed
ca. 1385– 87 Chaucer, Troilus and
Criseyde
ca. 1387–99 Chaucer working on The
Canterbury Tales
ca. 1390–92 John Gower, Confessio
Amantis
1399 Richard II deposed by his cousin,
who succeeds him as Henry IV
1400 Richard II murdered
1401 Execution of William Sawtre, first
Lollard burned at the stake under new law
against heresy
ca. 1410– 49 John Lydgate active
ca. 1420 Thomas Hoccleve, My 1415 Henry V defeats French at
Compleinte Agincourt
ca. 1425 York Play of the Crucifixion
1431 English burn Joan of Arc at Rouen
ca. 1432–38 Margery Kempe, The Book
of Margery Kempe

27
 TEXTS CONTEXTS
ca. 1450–75 Wakefield mystery cycle,
Second Shepherds’ Play
1455–85 Wars of the Roses

ca. 1470 Sir Thomas Malory in prison

working on Morte Darthur
ca. 1475 Robert Henryson active
1476 William Caxton sets up first
printing press in England
1485 Caxton publishes Morte Darthur, 1485 The earl of Richmond defeats the
one of the first books in English to be Yorkist king, Richard III, at Bosworth
printed Field and succeeds him as Henry VII,
founder of the Tudor dynasty
ca. 1510 Everyman
1575 Last per for mance of mystery plays
at Chester

28