The Middle Ages in England
H i s t o r i c a l B a c k g r o u n d
Prehistory: The Iberians, the Picts; the creation of the Stonehenge
5th century B.C.: The Celts, the Gauls; evidence in the language: e.g. bog, glen and many proper nouns; the origin of the Arthurian legend
43 - c. 420 A.D.: Roman invasion and occupation of Britain
c. 450: Anglo-Saxon Conquest, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians; evidence in the language: Essex, Sussex and Wessex, occupied by the East, South and West Saxons
597: St Augustine arrives to Kent; beginning of Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity
871 - 899: Reign of King Alfred the Great
1066: Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror, the Battle of Hastings
1360 - 1400: Geoffrey Chaucer; Piers Plowman; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
1485: William Caxton's printing of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, one of the first books printed in England
P e r i o d C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s
- the Middle Ages = the time span from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance
- the date 1485 = the year of the accession of Henry VII and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, used to mark the end of the Middle Ages for convenience
(1) Anglo-Saxon England (c. 450 - 1066)
- language: Old English, in this period clearly displays the kinship to other Germanic languages
- literature: shares a body of heroic as well as Christian legends with other Germanic literatures
- texts: Beowulf, "The Wanderer"
(2) Anglo-Norman England (1066 - c. end of the 13th century)
- language: the French of the ruling class, remains in loan words in the English vocabulary
- literature: fascination with the legendary hero Arthur, originating in Celtic literature
(3) Middle English Literature in the 14th and 15th Centuries
- language: Middle English, gradual displacement of French by English
- literature: emergence of the awareness and pride in a uniquely English literature, a new sense of English as literary medium able to compete with French and Latin
- texts: Geoffrey Chaucer; Piers Plowman; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
M e d i e v a l S o c i e t y S t r a t i f i c a t i o n
- medieval society was made up of three estates:
> the nobility, a small hereditary aristocracy, whose mission on earth was to rule over and defend the body politic
> the church, whose duty was to look after the spiritual welfare of that body
> the commoners, a large mass, who was supposed to do the work that provided for its physical needs
- in Chaucer's time a growing and prosperous middle class was beginning to play an increasingly important role, blurring the traditional class boundaries
A n g l o - S a x o n E n g l a n d
C u l t u r e
- based on the aristocratic heroic and kinship values, emphasizes especially the uncle-nephew relationship
- the tribe is ruled by a chieftain called king, the lord surrounds himself with a band of retainers, often his kins
- the faithfulness of the warriors is rewarded by royal generosity, the good king is called a ring-giver
- the king sets an example which his men are to follow
- life is harsh, men are said to be cheerful in the mead hall, but even there they think of struggle in war
- blood vengeance is a sacred duty
- Romantic love does not exist yet, women are paid no attention
O l d E n g l i s h P o e t r y
- the Anglo-Saxon invaders brought a tradition of oral poetry performed in alliterative verse by a scop, i.e. bard
- poetry is moulded by the inherent conflict between the heroic code and the Christian religion
- much of the Christian poetry is also cast in the heroic mode: "The Dream of the Rood", "Caedmon's Hymn"
- the poetic diction consists of formulaic phrases and repetitions of parallel syntactic structures
- uses synecdoche (keel for ship), metonymy (iron for sword) and kenning, i.e. a compound of two words in place of another which creates a condensed metaphor (life-house for body)
- uses parallel and appositive expressions known as variation (God as holy Creator, Master Almighty etc.)
- also uses irony and litotes, i.e. ironic understatement (battle-play for fighting)
A n g l o - N o r m a n E n g l a n d
C e l t i c L e g e n d s
- Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes both claimed to have obtained their narratives from Breton storytellers
- the former speaks respectfully of the storytellers, the latter accuses them of marring their material which he had to weave in a more elegant fusion of form and meaning
- both were 12th century authors writing in French and using romances as a means of exploring psychological and ethical dilemmas and the individual's relation to society
R o m a n c e
- roman = the word was originally applied in French to a work written in the French vernacular
- romance = eventually acquired the meaning of a story dealing with chivalric adventures and courtly love
- the knight, obliged to obey the gentlemanly code of behaviour, sets off for a quest, often involving the saving of a damsel in distress threatened by monsters, dragons or vicious knights
- the romance contrasts with the previous period (love to a lady was not a subject of Anglo-Saxon literature), started a revolution in thinking about love and today influences our ways of thinking and perceiving
< initiated by the Troubadour poets in Italy and Southern France in 13th and 14th centuries
< Dante's idealisation of love to Beatrice in La Vita Nuova (The New Life, 1283 - 1293)
< also influenced by the worship of Virgin Mary
< might have been influenced by the misunderstanding of the wit and irony in The Remedy of Love, originally by Ovid, then a tale by Chaucer
A r t h u r i a n L e g e n d
- characters: King Arthur; Arthur's wife Guinevere; the magician Merlin; Arthur's evil half-sister Morgana le Fay; Arthur's best knight Lancelot; Arthur's nephew Mordred
- attributes: Excalibur (the sword in the stone); the Round Table (designed to make all the seated knights equal); the quest for the Holy Grail (the cup used to caught Christ's blood, then used by Apostles); the capital city Camelot; the heavenly city Avalon (to which Arthur retires after his death)
- the myth of Arthur's return: a recurrent myth of the hero being not really dead but asleep somewhere to return to save his people when needed
- later renderings: Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1856 - 1885), Terence Hanbury White's The Once and Future King (1958), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982) etc.
L e g e n d a r y H i s t o r i e s
- told by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon in Latin, French and Middle English respectively
- begin with a foundation myth, a heroic account of national origins modelled on Virgil's Aeneid (in Virgil's epic Rome is founded by refugees from the fall of Troy; in British legends another band of refugees establishes Britain)
- end with the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the native Britons
- fascinated with the prestige and power of ancient Rome
- the figure of King Arthur, who had defeated Rome itself, flattered the ambitions of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy
- at the same time the destruction of Arthur's kingdom served as a lesson of the consequences of civil wars
Literature
Abrams, M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1999.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.