No More Learning

He is abandoned in infancy by the princess, who, however, leaves
with him a pair of magic gloves which will fit no hands but hers.
The child in time becomes a knight, and his prowess in the lists
renders him eligible for the hand of the princess, his mother. By
means of the gloves, however, they learn their real relationship;
whereupon Sir Degare relinquishes his claim and succeeds in the
filial task of re-uniting his parents. In Sir Gowther, the hero is the
son of a “fiendish” knight and a gentle lady whom he had betrayed.
The boy, as was predicted, proved to be of a most savage tempera-
ment, until the offending Adam was whipped out of him by means
of self-inflicted penance. He then wins the love of an earls
daughter by glorious achievements in the lists, and piously builds
an abbey to commemorate his conversion.
It is in the Arthurian romances and, more particularly, in those
relating to Sir Gawain, that we find the loftier ideals of chivalry
set forth. Gawain is depicted as the knight of honour and courtesy,
of loyalty and self-sacrifice. Softer manners and greater magna-
nimity are grafted upon the earlier knighthood. Self-restraint
becomes more and more a knightly virtue. The combats are not
less fierce, but vainglorious boasting gives way to moods of humility.
Victory is followed by noble concern for the vanquished. Passing


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312 Metrical Romances, 1200-1500
over Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, which is treated else-
where, we find in Golagros and Gawane these knightly elements
plainly visible. The rudeness of Sir Kay, here and elsewhere, is
devised as a foil to the courtesy of Gawain. Arthur in Tuscany
sends Sir Kay to ask for quarters in a neighbouring castle. His
rude, presumptuous bearing meets with refusal, though, when
Gawain arrives, the request is readily acceded to. The domains
of Golagros are next approached. He is an aggressive knight of
large reputation, whom Arthur makes it his business forthwith to
subdue. A combat is arranged, in which Gawain proves victor;
whereupon the noble Arthurian not only grants the life of the
defiant Golagros, but spares his feelings by returning to his castle
as if he himself were the vanquished. Matters are afterwards
explained, and Golagros, conquered alike by arms and courtesy,
becomes duly enrolled in Arthur's train. In the Awntyrs [Adven-
tures) of Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne we find something of the
same elements, together with an exhortation to moral living. The
romance deals with two incidents alleged to have occurred while
Arthur was hunting near Carlisle. The first, however, is an
adaptation of the Trentals of St Gregory. A ghastly figure is
represented as emerging from the Tarn, and appearing before
Guinevere and Gawain. It is Guinevere's mother in the direst
torments. The queen thereupon makes a vow as to her future
life, and promises, meanwhile, to have masses sung for her mother's
soul. The second incident is of a more conventional kind, and
deals with the fight between Gawain and Galleroun.
Ywain and Gawain is another romance which embodies much
that is characteristic of Arthurian chivalry. Ywain sets out on a
certain quest from Arthur's court. He defeats a knight near the
fountain of Broceliande, pursues him to his castle and marries
Laudine, mistress of that place. After further adventures in love and
war, in most of which he has the company of a friendly lion, he falls
in with Gawain and, ignorant of each other's identity, they engage
in combat. The fight is indecisive, and each courteously concedes
to the other the victory-an exchange of compliments which is
speedily followed by a joyful recognition. The Wedding of Sir
Gawain, again, points to loyalty and honour, as involving supreme
self-sacrifice. It relates how Gawain, to save Arthur's life, under-
takes to marry the loathsome dame Ragnell. His noble unselfish-
ness, however, is not unrewarded: the dame is subsequently
transformed into the most beauteous of her kind. Libeaus
Desconus, the story of Gyngalyn, Gawain's son, is constructed


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The Gawain Cycle
313
on rather conventional lines. The fair unknown has several
adventures with giants and others. He visits a fairy castle, where
he meets with an enchantress, and rescues a lady transformed
into a dreadful serpent, who, afterwards, however, becomes his
wife. The scene of the Avowing of Arthur is once more placed
near Carlisle. Arthur is hunting with Sir Gawain, Sir Kay and
Sir Baldwin, when all four undertake separate vows. Arthur is
to capture single-handed a ferocious boar; Sir Kay to fight all
who oppose him. The king is successful; but Sir Kay falls before
a knight who is carrying off a beautiful maiden. The victor, how-
ever, is afterwards overcome in a fight with Gawain, and then
ensues a significant contrast in the matter of behaviours. Sir Kay
sustains his earlier reputation by cruelly taunting the beaten
knight; while Sir Gawain, on the other hand, mindful of the claims
of chivalry, is studiously kind and considerate towards his fallen
foe. The riming Mort Arthur, and the alliterative work of
the same name, deal with the close of Arthur's life. In the first
occurs the story of the maid of Ascolot, and her fruitless love for
the noble Lancelot. The narrative is instinct with the pathos
of love, and here, as in Tristram, the subtlety of the treatment
reveals further possibilities of the love theme. Lancelot is, more-
over, depicted as Guinevere's champion. The queen is under
condemnation, but is rescued by Lancelot, who endures, in con-
sequence, a siege in the Castle of Joyous Garde. The end of the
Arthurian story begins to be visible in the discord thus intro-
duced between Lancelot and Gawain, Arthur and Modred. The
alliterative Morte Arthure is more seriously historical. Arthur
is represented as returning home from his wars with Lucius on
hearing of Modred's treachery. He fights the traitor, but is
mortally wounded, and is borne to Glastonbury, where he is given
a magnificent burial.
In addition to the romances already mentioned as representative
in some measure of definite influences at work, there yet remain
certain others which call for notice. We have, in the first place,
a group of some five romances which may be considered together as
studies of knightly character. They are works which may be said to
deal, incidentally perhaps, with the building up of the perfect knight
and Christian hero, though anything like psychological treatment
is, of course, entirely absent. In Ipomedon, we see the knight as
a gallant if capricious lover. Marriage having been proposed
between young Ipomedon, prince of Apulia, and the beautiful


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314 Metrical Romances, 1200-1500
queen of Calabria, the former determines to woo for himself.
He arrives incognito at the court of the queen, wins her favour
by manly exploits, and then departs somewhat capriciously. He
is, however, induced to return on hearing that a tournament is
to be held of which the queen herself is to be the prize. But,
again, his conduct is strange. He loudly proclaims his dislike for
boisterous tournaments, and ostentatiously sets out on hunting
expeditions on the days of the contests. But he actually
goes to a neighbouring hermitage, whence he issues to the
tournament, clad, on successive days, in red, white and black
armour-a favourite medieval method of disguise adopted by
Sir Gowther and others. He carries all before him and then
vanishes as mysteriously as ever, without claiming his prize or
revealing his identity. Soon afterwards, the queen is hard pressed
by a neighbouring duke, and the hero appears once more to fight
her battles, this time disguised as a fool. It is only after further
adventures, when he feels he has fooled to the top of his bent,
that he declares his love with a happy result. In this stirring
romance we see the knight-errant in quest of love. The assumed
slothfulness and fondness for disguise were frequent attributes
of the medieval hero: the one added interest to actual exploits,
the other was an assurance that the love of the well-born was
accepted on his own individual merits.
In the beautiful romance of Amis and Amiloun we have friend-
ship set forth as a knightly virtue. It is depicted as an all-absorbing
quality which involves, if necessary, the sacrifice of both family and
conscience. Amis and Amiloun are two noble foster-brothers, the
medieval counterparts of Orestes and Pylades, much alike in ap-
pearance, whose lives are indissolubly linked together. Amiloun
generously, but surreptitiously, takes the place of Amis in a trial by
combat, for which piece of unselfishness, with the deception involved
in it, he is, subsequently, visited with the scourge of leprosy. Some
time afterwards, Amis finds his friend in pitiable plight, but fails, at
first, to grasp his identity. It is only after a dramatic scene that
the discovery is made, and then Amis, grief-stricken, proceeds to
remove his friend's leprosy by the sacrifice of his own children.
But such a sacrifice is not permitted to be irrevocable. When
Amis and his wife Belisante go to view their slaughtered children,
they are found to be merely sleeping. The sacrifice had been one
upon which the gods themselves threw incense. The romance, as
it stands, is one of the most pathetic and elevating of the whole series.
Knightly love and valour were eloquent themes of the


## p. 315 (#335) ############################################

The Squire of Low Degree 315
medieval romance : in Amis and Amiloun, the beauty of friend-
ship is no less nobly treated. In Sir Cleges, the knightly character
is further developed by the inculcation of charity, wit and shrewd-
ness. The story is simply, but picturesquely, told. The hero is
a knight who is reduced to poverty by reckless charity. When
his fortunes are at their lowest ebb he finds a cherry-tree
in his garden laden with fruit, though snow is on the ground and
the season is yuletide. With this goodly find he sets out to king
Uther at Cardiff, in the hope of restoring his fallen fortunes; but
court officials bar his way until he has promised to divide amongst
them all his reward. The king is gratified, and Cleges is asked
to name his reward. He asks for twelve strokes, which the
officials, in accordance with the bargain, duly receive, to the
unbounded delight of an appreciative court. The identity of
the knight then becomes known and his former charity is suitably
recognised.
The theme of Sir Isumbras is that of Christian humility, the
story itself being an adaptation of the legend of St Eustace. Sir
Isumbras is a knight who, through pride, falls from his high estate
by the will of Providence. He is severely stricken; his posses-
sions, his children and, lastly, his wife, are taken away; and he
himself becomes a wanderer. After much privation nobly endured,
he has learnt his lesson and arrives at the court of a queen, who
proves to be his long-lost wife. His children are then miraculously
restored and he resumes once more his exalted rank.
The Squire of Low Degree is a pleasant romance which does
not belie an attractive title. Its theme suggests the idea of
the existence of knightly character in those of low estate, a
sentiment which had appealed to a conquered English people
in the earlier Havelok. The humble squire in the story wins the
affection of “the king's daughter of Hungary,” as well as her
promise to wed when he shall have become a distinguished knight.
An interfering and treacherous steward is righteously slain by the
squire, who then suffers imprisonment, and the king's daughter,
who supposes her lover dead, is thereby reduced to the direst
straits. She refuses consolation, though the king categorically
reminds her of much that is pleasant in life and draws up, in fact,
an interesting list of medieval delights, its feasts, its finery, its
sports and its music. Persuasion failing, the king is obliged to relent.
The squire is released and ventures abroad on knightly quest. He
returns, in due course, to claim his own, and a pleasant romance
ends on a pleasant note. The story loses nothing from the manner


## p. 316 (#336) ############################################

316 Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
of its telling ; it is, above all, “mercifully brief. ” Its English origin
and sentiment, no less than its pictures of medieval life, continue
to make this romance one of the most readable of its kind.
Besides these romances which deal, in some sort, with the
knightly character, there are others which embody variations of
the Constance theme, namely, Sir Triamour, Sir Eglamour of
Artois and Torrent of Portugal. Like Emarè, they belong to
the “reunion of kindred” type-a type which appealed to Chaucer
and, still more, to Shakespeare in his latest period. One well-known
romance still calls for notice. This is William of Palerne, a tale of
love and action which embodies the primitive belief in lycanthropy,
according to which certain people were able to assume, at will,
the character and appearance of wolves. The tradition was wide-
spread in Europe, and it still appears from time to time in modern
works dealing with ghouls and vampires. The story relates how
William, prince of Apulia, is saved from a murderous attack by the
aid of a werwolf, who, in reality, is heir to the Spanish throne. The
werwolf swims with the prince across the straits of Messina, and
again renders aid when his protégé is fleeing from Rome with his
love, Melchior. William, subsequently, recovers his royal rights,
and then helps to bring about the restoration to the friendly
werwolf of his human form.
It is striking and, to some extent, characteristic of the age,
that, although the field of English romance was thus wide and
varied, the personality of scarcely a single toiler in that field
has come down to posterity. The anonymity of the work em-
bodied in our ancient cathedrals is a parallel to this, and neither
fact is without its significance. With the Tristram legend is
connected the name of Thomas, a poet of the twelfth century, who
is mentioned by Gottfried of Strassburg in the early thirteenth
century. The somewhat misty but historical Thomas of Erceldoune
has been credited with the composition of a Sir Tristram story,
but this was possibly due to a confusion of the twelfth century
Thomas with his interesting namesake of the succeeding century.
The confusion would be one to which the popular mind was
peculiarly susceptible. Thomas the Rhymer was a romantic
figure credited with prophetical gifts, and a popular tale would
readily be linked with his name, especially as such a process
was consistent with the earlier Thomas tradition as it then
existed.
In the case of three other romances there seem to be certain
grounds for attributing them to a single writer. All three works,


## p. 317 (#337) ############################################

The Age of Romance
317
King Alisaunder, Arthur and Merlin and Richard Cour de Lion,
are, apparently, of much the same date, and alike hail from Kent.
Each is animated by the same purpose—that of throwing on to a
large canvas a great heroic figure; there is also to be found in
each of them a certain sympathy with magic, The handling of
the theme in each case proceeds on similar lines; the close
parallel in the schemes of King Alisaunder and Richard Coeur de
Lion has already been noticed; and the narrative, in each, moves
along in easy animated style. Moreover, similarities of technique
are found in all. The recurrence of similes and comparisons as
well as riming peculiarities in common, suggest the working of
a single mind. In King Alisaunder and Arthur and Merlin
appears the device of beginning the various sections of the nar-
rative with lyric, gnomic, or descriptive lines, presumably to
arouse interest and claim attention. In Richard Coeur de Lion
something of the same tendency is also visible, as when a delight-
ful description of spring is inserted after the gruesome account of
the massacre of a horde of Saracens. All three works betray a joy
in fighting, a joy expressed in vigorous terms. In all is evinced
an ability to seize on the picturesque side of things, whether of
battle or feasting ; Saracens fall "as grass before the scythe";
the helmets of the troops shine “like snow upon the mountains. ”
But if the identity of a common author may thus seem probable,
little or nothing is forthcoming as regards his personality. Certain
coarse details, together with rude humour, seem to suggest a
plebeian pen; and this is, apparently, supported by occasional
references to trades. But nothing certain on the subject can be
stated. The personality of the poet is, at best, but shadowy,
though, undoubtedly, his work is of outstanding merit.
In certain respects these romances may be said to reflect the age
in which they were written. They bear witness in two ways to the
communistic conception of society which then prevailed: first, by
the anonymous character of the writings generally and, secondly,
by the absence of the patriotic note. The individual, from the
communistic standpoint, was but a unit of the nation; the nation,
merely a section of a larger Christendom. The sense of indi-
vidualism, and all that it implied, was yet to be emphasised by a
later renascence. It is, therefore, clear that the anonymity of
the romances, as in the case of the Legendaries and Chronicle,
was, in part, the outcome of such conceptions and notions. The
works represent
The constant servico of the antique world
When service sweat for duty, not for meed.


## p. 318 (#338) ############################################

318 Metrical Romances, 1200-1500
And the absence of patriotism from the romances results from the
same conditions: national consciousness was not yet really awakened.
The mental horizon was bounded not by English shores, but by the
limits of the Holy Roman Empire Cour de Lion's career alone
appealed to latent sympathies; for the rest, the romance is un-
touched by national feeling. French and other material was
adapted without any re-colouring.
The romance also reflects the medieval love of external beauty.
The picturesqueness of the actual, of medieval streets and buildings,
the bright colours in dress, the love of pageantry and pictorial effects,
all helped to inspire, and are, indeed, reflected in the gay colouring
of the romances. If the stories, again, make considerable demands
upon the credulity, it was not remarkable in regard to the cha-
racter of the times. All things were possible in an age of faith:
the wisdom of credo quia impossibile was to be questioned in
the succeeding age of reason. Moreover, the atmosphere which
nourished the romantic growth was that of feudalism, and an
aristocratic note everywhere marks its tone and structure. But
it is a glorified feudalism which is thus represented, a feudalism
glorious in its hunting, its feasting and its fighting, in its brave men
and fair women; the lower elements are scarcely ever remembered,
and no pretence is made at holding up the mirror to the whole
of society.
Lastly, like so much of the rest of medieval work, the romance
moves largely amidst abstractions. It avoids close touch with the
concrete: for instance, no reflection is found of the struggles of the
Commons for parliamentary power, or even of the national strivings
against papal dominion. The problems of actual life are carefully
avoided; the material treated consists, rather, of the fanciful
problems of the courts of love and situations arising out of the
new-born chivalry.
The romance has many defects, in spite of all its attractions and
the immense interest it arouses both intrinsically and historically.
It sins in being intolerably long-winded and in being often devoid
of all proportion. A story may drag wearily on, long after the
last chapter has really been written, and insignificant episodes
are treated with as much concern as those of pith and moment.
Further, it makes demands upon the “painful” reader, not only by
its discursiveness and love of digression, but also by the minuteness
of its descriptions, relentlessly complete, which leave nothing to the
imagination. “The art of the pen is to rouse the inward vision. . .
because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description. "
This truth was far from being appreciated in the age of the school.


## p. 319 (#339) ############################################

319
General Defects
men, with their encyclopaedic training. The aristocratic tone of
the romance, moreover, tends to become wearisome by its very
monotony. Sated with the sight of knights and ladies, giants and
Saracens, one longs to meet an honest specimen of the citizen
class; but such relief is never granted. To these and other short-
comings, however, the medieval eye was not always blind, though
romances continued to be called for right up to the end of
the fourteenth century and, indeed, after. Chaucer, with his
keen insight and strong human sympathies, had shown himself
aware of all these absurdities, for, in his Sir Thopas, designed
as a parody on the romance in general, these are the points
on which he seizes. When he rambles on for a hundred lines
in Sir Thopas without saying much, he is quietly making the
first point of his indictment. He is exaggerating the discur-
siveness and minuteness he has found so irksome. And, in the
second place, he ridicules the aristocratic monotone by introducing
a bourgeois note into his parodied romance. The knight swears
an oath on plain "ale and bread”: while, in the romantic forest
through which he is wandering, lurk the harmless “buck and hare,”
as well as the homely nutmeg that flavours the ale. The lapse from
romance is sufficiently evident and the work silently embodies
much sound criticism. The host, with blunt remark, ends the
parody, and in him may be seen a matter-of-fact intelligence
declaiming against the faults of romance.
But, with all its shortcomings, the romance has a peculiar
interest from the modern standpoint in that it marks the begin-
ning of English fiction. In it is written the first chapter of the
modern novel. After assuming a pastoral form in the days of
Elizabeth, and after being reclaimed, with all its earlier defects,
in the seventeenth century, romance slowly vanished in the dry
light of the eighteenth century, but not before it had flooded
the stage with astounding heroic plays. The later novels, how-
ever, continued the functions of the earlier romances when they
embodied tales of adventures or tales of love whether thwarted or
triumphant. Nor is Richardson's novel of analysis without its
counterpart in this earlier creation. He treated love on psycho-
logical lines. But charming love-problems had exercised the minds
of medieval courtiers and had subsequently been analysed in the
romances after the approved fashion of the courts of love. It is
only in the case of the later realistic novel that the origins have
to be sought elsewhere—in the contemporary fabliaux, which
dealt, in a ready manner, with the troubles and the humours of
a lower stratum of life.


## p. 320 (#340) ############################################

CHAPTER XV
PEARL, CLEANNESS, PATIENCE AND
SIR GAWAYNE
AMONG the Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum, a
small quarto volume, numbered Nero A. x, contains the four Middle
English poems known as Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir
Gawayne and the Grene Knight. The manuscript is in a hand
which seems to belong to the end of the fourteenth or the early
years of the fifteenth century; there are neither titles nor rubrics,
but the chief divisions are marked by large initial letters of blue,
flourished with red; several pictures, coarsely executed, illustrate
the poems, each occupying a full page; the writing is “small,
sharp and irregular. " No single line of these poems has been
discovered in any other manuscript.
The first of the four poems, Pearl, tells of a father's grief for a
lost child, an infant daughter who had lived not two years on earth.
In a vision he beholds his Pearl, no longer a little child, transfigured
as a queen of heaven; from the other bank of a stream which
divides them she instructs him, teaches him the lessons of faith and
resignation and leads him to a glimpse of the new Jerusalem. He
sees his “little queen” in the long procession of maidens; in his
effort to plunge into the stream and reach her he awakes, to find
himself stretched on the child's grave-
Then woke I in that garden fair;
My head upon that mound was laid,
there where my Pearl had strayed below.
I roused me, and felt in great dismay,
and, sighing to myself, I said:-
“Now all be to that Prince's pleasure" 1,
Naturally arising from the author's treatment of his subject,
many a theological problem, notably the interpretation of the
parable of the vineyard, is expounded. The student of medieval
theology may find much of interest in Pearl, but the attempt to
read the poem as a theological pamphlet, and a mere symbolical
allegory, ignores its transcendent reality as a poet's lament. The
1 The renderings into modern English, throughout the chapter, are from the
writer's edition of Pearl, 1891,


## p. 321 (#341) ############################################

Sources of Pearl
321
personal side of the poem is clearly marked, though the author
nowhere directly refers to his fatherhood. The basis of Pearl is to
be found in that verse of the Gospel which tells of the man “ that
sought the precious margarites; and, when he had found one to his
liking, he sold all his goods to buy that jewel. ” The pearl was
doomed, by the law of nature, to flower and fade like a rose; there-
after it became a "pearl of price"; "the jeweller” indicates clearly
enough the reality of his loss.
A fourteenth century poet, casting about for the form best
suited for such a poem, had two courses before him: on the one
hand, there was the great storehouse of dream-pictures, The
Romaunt of the Rose; on the other hand, the symbolic pages
of Scripture. A poet of the Chaucerian school would have chosen
the former; to him the lost Marguerite would have suggested an
allegory of “the flour that bereth our alder pris in figuringe," and
the Marguerite would have been transfigured as the type of
truest womanhood, a maiden in the train of love's queen, Alcestis.
But the cult of the daisy seems to have been altogether unknown
to our poet, or, at least, to have had no attraction for him.
His
Marguerite was, for him, the pearl of the Gospel; Mary, the
queen of heaven, not Alcestis, queen of love, reigns in the
visionary paradise which the poet pictures forth. While the main
part of the poem is a paraphrase of the closing chapters of the
Apocalypse and the parable of the vineyard, the poet's debt to The
Romaunt is noteworthy, more particularly in the description of
the wonderful land through which the dreamer wanders; and it can
be traced here and there throughout the poem, in the personifica-
tion of Pearl as Reason, in the form of the colloquy, in the details
of dress and ornament, in many a characteristic word, phrase
and reference; "the river from the throne,” in the Apocalypse,
here meets "the waters of the wells" devised by Sir Mirth for the
garden of the Rose. From these two sources, The Book of Revela-
tion, with its almost romantic glamour, and The Romaunt of the
Rose, with its almost oriental allegory, are derived much of the
wealth and brilliancy of the poem. The poet's fancy revels in
the richness of the heavenly and the earthly paradise; but his fancy
is subordinated to his earnestness and intensity.
The chief episodes of the poem are best indicated by the four
illustrations in the manuscript.
In the first, the author is represented slumbering in a meadow,
by the side of a beflowered mound, clad in a long red gown, with
falling sleeves, turned up with white, and a blue hood attached
E. L. I. CH. XV.


## p. 322 (#342) ############################################

322 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
round the neck. Madden and others who have described the
illustrations have not noticed that there are wings attached to
the shoulders of the dreamer, and a cord reaching up into the
foliage above, evidently intended to indicate that the spirit has
“sped forth into space. ”
In the second, there is the same figure, drawn on a larger scale,
but without the wings, standing by a river. He has now passed
through the illumined forest-land:
The hill-sides there were crowned
with crystal cliffs full clear,
and holts and woods, all bright with boles,
blue as the blue of Inde,
and trembling leaves, on every branch,
as burnished silver shone-
with shimmering sheen they glistened,
touched by the gleam of the gladesl:
and the gravel I ground upon that strand
was precious orient pearl.
The sun's own light had paled before
that sight so wondrous fair.
In the third picture, he is again represented in a similar position,
with hands raised, and on the opposite side is Pearl, dressed in
white, in the costume of Richard II's and Henry IV's time; her
dress is buttoned tight up to the neck, and on her head is a crown.
In the fourth, the author is kneeling by the water, and, beyond
the stream, is depicted the citadel, on the embattled walls of which
Pearl again appears, with her arms extended towards him.
The metre of Pearl is a stanza of twelve lines with four accents,
rimed according to the scheme ababababbebe, and combining
rime with alliteration; there are one hundred and one such
verses; these divide again into twenty sections, each consisting of
five stanzas with the same refrain-one section exceptionally
contains six stanzas. Throughout the poem, the last or main word
of the refrain is caught up in the first line of the next stanza.
Finally, the last line of the poem is almost identical with the first,
and rounds off the whole. The alliteration is not slavishly main-
tained, and the trisyllabic movement of the feet adds to the ease
and music of the verse; in each line there is a well-defined caesura.
Other writers before and after the author used this form of metre;
but no extant specimen shows such mastery of the stanza, which,
whatever may be its origin, has some kinship with the sonnet,
though a less monumental form, the first eight lines resembling
the sonnet's octave, the final quatrain the sonnet's sestet, and the
i patches of light.


## p. 323 (#343) ############################################

Cleanness and Pearl
323
whole hundred and one stanzas of Pearl reminding one of a great
sonnet-sequence. As the present writer has said elsewhere-
the refrain, the repetition of the catchword of each verse, the trammels of
alliteration, all seem to have offered no difficulty to the poet; and, if power
over technical difficulties constitutes in any way a poet's greatness, the author
of Pearl, from this point of view alone, must take high rank among English
poets. With a rich vocabulary at his command, consisting, on the one hand,
of alliterative phrases and “native mother words," and, on the other hand, of
the poetical phraseology of the great French classics of his time, he succeeded
in producing a series of stanzas so simple in syntax, so varied in rhythmical
effect, now lyrical, now epical, never undignified, as to leave the impression
that no form of metre could have been more suitably chosen for this elegiao
themel.
The diction of the poem has been considered faulty by reason
of its copiousness; but the criticism does not appear to be just.
It should be noted that the author has drawn alike from the
English, Scandinavian and Romance elements of English speech.
The attention of scholars has recently been directed to
Boccaccio's Latin eclogue Olympia, in which his young daughter,
Violante, appears transfigured, much in the same way as Pearl in
the English poem; and an ingenious attempt has been made to
prove the direct debt of the English poet to his great Italian
contemporary. The comparison of the two poems is a fascinating
study, but there is no evidence of direct indebtedness; both
writers, though their elegies are different in form, have drawn
from the same sources. Even were it proved that such debt must
actually be taken into account in dealing with the English poem, it
would not help, but rather gainsay, the ill-founded theory that would
make Pearl a pure allegory, a mere literary device, impersonal
and unreal. The eclogue was written soon after the year 1358.
The second poem in the MS, Cleanness, relates, in epic
style, three great subjects from scriptural history, so chosen as to
enforce the lesson of purity. After a prologue, treating of the
parable of the Marriage Feast, the author deals in characteristic
manner with the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
and the fall of Belshazzar. The poem is written in long lines,
alliterative and rimeless, and is divided into thirteen sections of
varying length, the whole consisting of 1812 lines.
The third poem is a metrical rendering of the story of Jonah,
and its subject, too, as in the case of Cleanness, is indicated by its
first word, Patience. Though, at first sight, the metre of the two
poems seems to be identical throughout, it is to be noted that the
1 Introduction to Pearl (1891).
21-2


## p. 324 (#344) ############################################

324 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
lines of Patience divide into what may almost be described
as stanzas of four lines; towards the end of the poem, there is
a three-line group, either designed so by the poet or due to
scribal omission. The same tendency towards the four-lined stanza
is to be found in parts of Cleanness, more especially at the be-
ginning and end of the poem. Patience consists of 531 lines;
it is terser, more vivid and more highly finished, than the
longer poem Cleanness. It is a masterly paraphrase of Scripture,
bringing the story clearly and forcibly home to English folk of
the fourteenth century. The author's delight in his subject is
felt in every line. In Cleanness, especially characteristic of the
author is the description of the holy vessels—the basins of
gold, and the cups, arrayed like castles with battlements, with
towers and lofty pinnacles, with branches and leaves portrayed
upon them, the flowers being white pearl, and the fruit flaming
gems. The two poems Cleanness and Patience, judged by the
tests of vocabulary, richness of expression, rhythm, descriptive
power, spirit and tone, delight in nature, more especially when
agitated by storm and tempest, are manifestly by the same author
as Pearl, to which poem, indeed, they may be regarded as pendants,
dwelling more definitely on its two main themes-purity and sub-
mission to the Divine will. The link that binds Cleanness to Pearl
is unmistakable. The pearl is there again taken as the type of
purity:
How canst thon approach His court save thou be clean ?
Through shrift thou may'st shine, though thou hast served shame;
thou may'st become pure through penance, till thou art a pearl.
The pearl is praised wherever gems are seen,
though it be not the dearest by way of merchandise.
Why is the pearl so prized, save for its purity,
that wing praise for it above all white stones?
It shineth so bright; it is so round of shape;
without fault or stain; if it be truly a pearl.
It becometh never the worse for wear,
be it ne'er so old, if it remain but whole.
If by chance 'tis uncared for and becometh dim,
left neglected in some lady's bower,
wash it worthily in wine, as its nature requireth:
it becometh e'en clearer than ever before.
So if a mortal be defiled ignobly,
yea, polluted in soul, let him seek shrift;
he may purify him by priest and by penance,
and grow brighter than beryl or clustering pearls.
If there were any doubt of identity of authorship in respect
of the two poems, it would be readily dispelled by a comparison
of the Deluge in Cleanness with the sea-storm in Patience.


## p. 325 (#345) ############################################

Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight 325
Cleanness and Patience place their author among the older English
epic poets. They show us more clearly than Pearl that the poet
is a “backward link” to the distant days of Cynewulf; it is with
the Old English epic poets that he must be compared, if the special
properties of these poems are to be understood. But in one gift
he is richer than his predecessors—the gift of humour. Earlier
English literature cannot give us any such combination of didactic
intensity and grim fancy as the poet displays at times in these
small epics. One instance may be quoted, namely, the description
of Jonah's abode in the whale:
As a mote in at a minster door, so mighty were its jaws,
Jonah enters by the gills, through slime and gore;
he reeled in through a gullet, that seemed to him a road,
tumbling about, aye head over heels,
till he staggers to a place as broad as a hall;
then he fixes his feet there and gropes all about,
and stands up in its belly, that stank as the devil;
in sorry plight there, 'mid grease that savoured as hell
his bower was arrayed, who would fain risk no ill.
Then he lurks there and seeks in each nook of the navel
the best sheltered spot, yet nowhere he finds
rest or recovery, but filthy mire
wherever he goes; but God is ever dear;
and he tarried at length and called to the Prince. . . .
Then he reached a nook and held himself there,
where no foul filth encumbered him about.
He sat there as safe, save for darkness alone,
as in the boat's stern, where he had slept ere.
Thus, in the beast's bowel, he abides there alive,
three days and three nights, thinking aye on the Lord,
His might and His mercy and His measure eke;
now he knows Him in woe, who would not in weal.
A fourth poem follows Cleanness and Patience in the MS-
the romance of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight. At a glance
it is clear, as one turns the leaves, that the metre of the poem is
a combination of the alliterative measure with the occasional in-
troduction of a lyrical burden, introduced by a short verse of
one accent, and riming according to the scheme ababa, which
breaks the poem at irregular intervals, evidently marking various
stages of the narrative. The metre blends the epic rhythm of
Cleanness and Patience with the lyrical strain of the Pearl. The
illustrations preceding this poem are obviously scenes from
medieval romance; above one of the pictures, representing a
stolen interview between a lady and a knight, is a couplet not
found elsewhere in the MS:
Mi mind is mukel on on, that wil me noght amende:
Sum time was trewe as ston, and fro schame couthe her defende.


## p. 326 (#346) ############################################

326 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
The romance deals with a weird adventure that befell Sir
Gawain, son of Loth, and nephew of king Arthur, the favourite
hero of medieval romance, more especially in the literature of the
west and northern parts of England, where, in all probability,
traditions of the knight lived on from early times; the depreciation
of the hero in later English literature was due to the direct influence
of one particular class of French romances. Gaston Paris, in
Volume xxx of L'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 1888, has
surveyed the whole field of medieval literature dealing with Sir
Gawain; according to his view, the present romance is the jewel of
English medieval literature, and it may, perhaps, be considered
the jewel of medieval romance. To Madden belongs the honour
of first having discovered the poem, and of having brought
it out in his great collection, Syr Gawayne. . . Ancient Romance
poems by Scottish and English Authors relating to that celebrated
Knight of the Round Table, published by the Bannatyne Club,
1839. The place of Sir Gawayne in the history of English metrical
romances is treated of elsewhere? ; in the present chapter Sir
Gawayne is considered mainly as the work of the author of Pearl.
The story tells how on a New Year's Day, when Arthur and
his knights are feasting at Camelot, a great knight clad in green,
mounted on a green horse, and carrying a Danish axe, enters
the hall, and challenges one of Arthur's knights; the conditions
being that the knight must take oath that, after striking the
first blow, he will seek the Green Knight twelve months hence
and receive a blow in return. Gawain is allowed to accept
the challenge, takes the axe and smites the Green Knight so that
the head rolls from the body; the trunk takes up the head,
which the hand holds out while it repeats the challenge to Gawain
to meet him at the Green Chapel next New Year’s morning, and
then departs. Gawain, in due course, journeys north, and wanders
through wild districts, unable to find the Green Chapel; on
Christmas Eve he reaches a castle, and asks to be allowed to
stay there for the night: he is welcomed by the lord of the
castle, who tells him that the Green Chapel is near, and invites
him to remain for the Christmas feast. The lord, on each of
the three last days of the year, goes a-hunting ; Gawain is to
stay behind with the lady of the castle; the lord makes the
bargain that, on his return from hunting, each shall exchange
what has been won during the day; the lady puts Gawain's
honour to a severe test during the lord's absence: he receives a
1 See Chapter X111.


## p. 327 (#347) ############################################

The Sources of Sir Gawayne 327
kiss from her ; in accordance with the compact, he does not fail to
give the kiss to the husband on his return; there is a similar
episode on the next day when two kisses are received and
given by Gawain ; on the third day, in addition to three kisses,
Gawain receives a green lace from the lady, which has the
virtue of saving the wearer from harm. Mindful of his next
day's encounter with the Green Knight, Gawain gives the three
kisses to his host, but makes no mention of the lace. Next
morning, he rides forth and comes to the Green Chapel, a cave
in a wild district; the Green Knight appears with his axe;
Gawain kneels; as the axe descends, Gawain flinches, and is
twitted by the knight; the second time Gawain stands as still
as a stone, and the Green Knight raises the axe, but pauses ; the
third time the knight strikes him, but, though the axe falls on
Gawain's neck, his wound is only slight. Gawain now declares
that he has stood one stroke for another, and that the compact
is settled between them. Then the Green Knight reveals
himself to Gawain as his host at the castle ; he knows all that
bas taken place. “That woven lace which thou wearest mine
own wife wove it; I know it well; I know, too, thy kisses, and
thy trials, and the wooing of my wife; I wrought it myself. I
sent her to tempt thee, and methinks thou art the most faultless
hero that ever walked the earth. As pearls are of more price
than white peas, so is Gawain of more price than other gay
knights. " But for his concealing the magic lace he would have
escaped unscathed. The name of the Green Knight is given
as Bernlak de Hautdesert; the contriver of the test is Morgan
le Fay, Arthur's half-sister, who wished to try the knights, and
frighten Guinevere; Gawain returns to court and tells the story;
and the lords and ladies of the Round Table lovingly agree to
wear a bright green lace in token of this adventure, and in honour
of Gawain, who disparages himself as cowardly and covetous.
And ever more the badge was deemed the glory of the Round
Table, and he that had it was held in honour.
The author derived his materials from some lost original; he
states that the story had long been “locked in lettered lore. ”
His original was, no doubt, in French or Anglo-French. The
oldest form of the challenge and the beheading is an Old Irish
heroic legend, Fled Bricrend (the feast of Bricriu), preserved in
a MS of the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth
century, where the story is told by Cuchulinn, the giant being
Uath Mac Denomain, who dwelt near the lake. The Cuchulinn


## p. 328 (#348) ############################################

328 2
Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
episode had, in due course, become incorporated in Arthurian
literature. The French version nearest to the Gawain story
that has so far been pointed out was discovered by Madden in
the first continuation by Gautier de Doulens of Chrétien's Conte
del Graal, where the story is connected with Carados, Arthur's
nephew, and differs in many important respects from the English
version of the romance. There is much to be said in favour
of Miss Weston's conclusion that “it seems difficult to understand
how anyone could have regarded this version, ill-motived as it is,
and utterly lacking in the archaic details of the English poem,
as the source of that work. It should probably rather be
considered as the latest in form, if not in date, of all the
versions. " There is, of course, no doubt whatsoever that we
have in the French romance substantially the same story, with
the two main episodes, namely, the beheading and the test at
the castle ; our poet's direct original is evidently lost-he, no
doubt, well knew the Conte del Graal—but we are able to judge
that, whatever other source he may have used, he brought his
own genius to bear in the treatment of the theme. It would
seem as though the figure of Gawain, “the falcon of the month
of May,” the traditional type and embodiment of all that was
chivalrous and knightly, is drawn from some contemporary knight,
and the whole poem may be connected with the foundation of
the order of the Garter, which is generally assigned to about
the year 1345. From this standpoint it is significant that at
the end of the MS, in a somewhat later hand, is found the
famous legend of the order : honi soit qui mal (y) penc; just as a
later poet, to whom we are indebted for a ballad of the Green
Knight (a rifacimento of this romance, or of some intermediate
form of it), has used the same story to account for the origin of
the order of the Bath. The romance may be taken not to have
been written before the year 1345.
The charm of Sir Gawayne is to be found in its description of
nature, more especially of wild nature; in the author's enjoyment
of all that appertains to the bright side of medieval life; in its
details of dress, armour, wood-craft, architecture; and in the artistic
arrangement of the story, three parallel episodes being so treated
as to avoid all risk of monotony, or reiteration. As a charac-
teristic passage the following may be quoted :
O'er a mound on the morrow he merrily rides
into a forest full deep and wondrously wild;
high hills on each side and holt-woods beneath,
with huge hoary oaks, a hundred together;
" of the Baline rear 1340: to be found


## p. 329 (#349) ############################################

The Question of Authorship
329
hazel and hawthorn hung clustering there,
with rough ragged moss o’ergrown all around;
unblithe, on bare twigs, sang many a bird,
piteously piping for pain of the cold.
Under them Gawayne on Gringolet glideth,
through marsh and through mire, a mortal full lonesome,
cumbered with care, lest ne'er he should come
to that Sire's service, who on that same night
was born of a bride to vanquish our bale.
Wherefore sighing he said: “I beseech Thee, O Lord,
and Mary, thou mildest mother so dear!
some homestead, where holily I may hear mass
and matins to-morrow, full meekly I ask;
thereto promptly I pray pater, ave,
and creed. "
He rode on in his prayer,
And cried for each misdeed;
He crossed him ofttimes there,
And said: “Christ's cross me speed! ”
But, much as Sir Gawayne shows us of the poet's delight in his
art, the main purpose of the poem is didactic. Gawain, the knight
of chastity, is but another study by the author of Cleanness.
On the workmanship of his romance he has lavished all care,
only that thereby his readers may the more readily grasp the
spirit of the work. Sir Gawain may best, perhaps, be under-
stood as the Sir Calidor of an earlier Spenser.
In the brief summary of the romance, one striking passage
has been noted linking the poem to Pearl, namely, the com-
parison of Gawain to the pearl ; but, even without this reference,
the tests of language, technique and spirit, would render identity
of authorship incontestable; the relation which this Spenserian
romance bears to the elegy as regards time of composition
cannot be definitely determined; but, judging by parallelism
of expression, it is clear that the interval between the two poems
must have been very short.
No direct statement has come down to us as to the authorship
of these poems, and, in spite of various ably contested theories,
it is not possible to assign the poems to any known poet. The
nameless poet of Pearl and Gawayne has, however, left the
impress of his personality on his work; and so vividly is this
personality revealed in the poems that it is possible, with some
degree of confidence, to evolve something approximating to an
account of the author, by piecing together the references and other
evidence to be found in his work. The following hypothetical
biography is taken, with slight modification, from a study published
elsewhere!
1 Introduction to Pearl, p. xlvi.


## p. 330 (#350) ############################################

330 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
The poet was born about 1330; his birthplace was somewhere
in Lancashire, or, perhaps, a little more to the north, but not
beyond the Tweed ; such is the evidence of dialect. Additional
testimony may be found in the descriptions of natural scenery
in Gawayne, Cleanness and Patience. The wild solitudes of the
Cumbrian coast, near his native home, seem to have had special
attraction for him. Like a later and greater poet, he must,
while yet a youth, have felt the subtle spell of nature's varying
aspects in the scenes around him.
Concerning the condition of life to which the boy belonged
we know nothing definite; but it may be inferred that his
father was connected, probably in some official capacity, with
a family of high rank, and that it was amid the gay scenes
that brightened life in a great castle that the poet's earlier
years were passed. In later life, he loved to picture this home
with its battlements and towers, its stately hall and spacious
parks. There, too, perhaps, minstrels' tales of chivalry first
revealed to him the weird world of medieval romance and made
him yearn to gain for himself a worthy place among contem-
porary English poets.
The Old English poets were his masters in poetic art; he had
also read The Romaunt of the Rose, the chief products of early
French literature, Vergil and other Latin writers; to “Clopyngel's
clean rose” he makes direct reference. The intensely religious
spirit of the poems, together with the knowledge they everywhere
display of Holy Writ and theology, lead one to infer that he
was, at first, destined for the service of the church ; probably, he
became a “clerk,” studying sacred and profane literature at
a monastic school, or at one of the universities; and he may
have received the first tonsure only.
The four poems preserved in the Cottonian MS seem to belong
to a critical period of the poet's life. Gawayne, possibly the
earliest of the four, written, perhaps, in honour of the patron to
whose household the poet was attached, is remarkable for the
evidence it contains of the writer's minute knowledge of the
higher social life of his time; from his evident enthusiasm it
is clear that he wrote from personal experience of the pleasures
of the chase, and that he was accustomed to the courtly life
described by him.
The romance of Gawayne contains what seems to be a personal
reference where the knight is made to exclaim : “It is no marvel
for a man to come to sorrow through a woman's wiles ; so was
Adam beguiled, and Solomon, and Samson, and David, and many


## p. 331 (#351) ############################################

Hypothetical Biography of the Poet 331
more. It were, indeed, great bliss for a man to love them well,
and love them not—if one but could. ”
Gawayne is the story of a noble knight triumphing over the sore
temptations that beset his vows of chastity: evidently in a musing
mood he wrote in the blank space at the head of one of the
illustrations in his MS the suggestive couplet still preserved by
the copyist in the extant MS. His love for some woman had
brought him one happiness—an only child, a daughter, on whom
he lavished all the wealth of his love. He named the child
Margery or Marguerite; she was his “Pearl”_his emblem of
holiness and innocence; perhaps she was a love-child, hence his
privy pearl. His happiness was short-lived ; before two years
had passed, the child was lost to him ; his grief found expression
in verse; a heavenly vision of his lost jewel brought him comfort
and taught him resignation. It is noteworthy that, throughout
the whole poem, there is no single reference to the mother of the
child; the first words when the father beholds his transfigured
Pearl are significant:
“O Pearl," quoth I,
"Art thou my Pearl that I have plained,
Regretted by me alone” [“bi myn one”].
With the loss of his Pearl, a blight seems to have fallen on
the poet's life, and poetry seems gradually to have lost its
charm for him. The minstrel of Gawayne became the stern
moralist of Cleanness and Patience. Other troubles, too, seem
to have befallen him during the years that intervened between
the writing of these companion poems. Patience appears to be
almost as autobiographical as Pearl; the poet is evidently
preaching to himself the lesson of fortitude and hope, amid
misery, pain and poverty. Even the means of subsistence seem
to have been denied him. “Poverty and patience,” he exclaims,
“are need's playfellows. "
Cleanness and Patience were written probably some few years
after Pearl; and the numerous references in these two poems to the
sea would lead one to infer that the poet may have sought distrac-
tion in travel, and may have weathered the fierce tempests he
describes. His wanderings may have brought him even to the
holy city whose heavenly prototype he discerned in the visionary
scenes of Pearl.
We take leave of the poet while he is still in the prime of
life; we have no material on which to base even a conjecture as
to his future. Perhaps he turned from poetry and gave himself


## p. 332 (#352) ############################################

332 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
entirely to theology, always with him a favourite study, or to
philosophy, at that time closely linked with the vital questions
at issue concerning faith and belief. If the poet took any
part in the church controversies then beginning to trouble
men's minds, his attitude would have been in the main conser-
vative. Full of intense hatred towards all forms of vice, especially
immorality, he would have spoken out boldly against ignoble
priests and friars, and all such servants of the church who,
preaching righteousness, lived unrighteously. From minor tradi-
tional patristic views he seems to have broken away, but there
is no indication of want of allegiance on his part to the authority
of the church, to papal supremacy and to the doctrine of Rome;
though it has been well said recently, with reference to his
general religious attitude, that it was evangelical rather than
ecclesiastical.
It is, indeed, remarkable that no tradition has been handed
down concerning the authorship of these poems; and many
attempts have been made to identify the author with one or
other of the known writers belonging to the end of the fourteenth
century. Perhaps the most attractive of these theories is that
which would associate the poems with Ralph Strode, Chaucer's
“philosophical Strode,” to whom (together with “the moral
Gower") was dedicated Troilus and Criseyde. According to
a Latin entry in the old catalogue of Merton College, drawn up
in the early years of the fifteenth century, Strode is described as
“a noble poet and author of an elegiac work Phantasma
Radulphi. ” Ralph Strode of Merton is certainly to be identified
with the famous philosopher of the name, one of the chief logicians
of the age. It is as poet and philosopher that he seems to be
singled out by Chaucer. Phantasma Radulphi might, possibly,
apply to Pearl ; while Gawayne and the Grene Knight might
well be placed in juxtaposition to Troilus. An Itinerary of the
Holy Land, by Strode, appears to have been known to Nicholas
Brigham ; further, there is a tradition that he left his native
land, journeyed to France, Germany and Italy, and visited Syria
and the Holy Land. His name as a Fellow of Merton is
said to occur for the last time in 1361. Strode and Wyclif
were contemporaries at Oxford, as may be inferred from an
unprinted MS in the Imperial library in Vienna, containing
Wyclif's reply to Strode's arguments against certain of the
reformer's views. The present writer is of opinion that the
philosopher is identical with the common serjeant of the city


## p. 333 (#353) ############################################

Theories of Authorship
333
a
of London of the same name, who held office between 1375 and
1385, and who died in 1387. But, fascinating as is the theory,
no link has, as yet, been discovered which may incontestably
connect Strode with the author of Pearl, nor has it yet been
discovered that Strode came of a family belonging to the west
midland or northern district. The fiction that Strode was a monk
of Dryburgh abbey has now been exploded.
Some seventy years ago, Guest, the historian of English
rhythms, set up a claim for the poet Huchoun of the Awle
Ryale, to whom Andrew of Wyntoun refers in his Orygynale
Cronykil.
Guest regarded as the most decisive proof of his theory the
fact that, at the void space at the head of Sir Gawayne and the
Grene Knight in the MS, a hand of the fifteenth century has
scribbled the name Hugo de; but little can be inferred from
this piece of evidence; while the lines by Wyntoun tend to connect
the author with a set of poems differentiated linguistically and in
technique from the poems in the Cotton MS. But this is not the place
to enter into a discussion of the various problems connected with
the identity of Huchoun: it is only necessary here to state that, in
the opinion of the writer, the view which would make Huchoun
the author of Pearl, Gawayne and the Grene Knight, Cleanness
and Patience is against the weight of evidence. By the same
evidence as that adduced to establish Huchoun's authorship
of these poems, various other alliterative poems are similarly
assigned to him, namely, The Wars of Alexander, The Destruction
of Troy, Titus and Vespasian, The Parlement of the Thre Ages,
Wynnere and Wastoure, Erkenwald and the alliterative riming
poem Golagros and Gawane.
According to this view, The Parlement of the Thre Ages
belongs to the close of the poet's career, for it is supposed
to sum up his past course through all his themes—through
Alexander, Troy, Titus and Morte Arthure. But this theory,
that, on the basis of parallel passages, would make Huchoun
the official father of all these poems, in addition to those which
may be legitimately assigned to him on the evidence of Wyntoun's
lines, fails to recognise that the author of The Parlement of
the Thre Ages, far from being saturated with the Troy Book
and the Alexander romances, actually confuses Jason, or Joshua,
the high priest who welcomed Alexander, with Jason who won the
golden fleece.
* See the Chapter on Huchoun in Volume a.


## p. 334 (#354) ############################################

334 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne
Probably the work of four or five alliterative poets comes
under consideration in dealing with the problem at issue. To
one poet may, perhaps, safely be assigned the two poems The
Parlement of the Thre Ages and Wynnere and Wastoure, the
latter from internal evidence one of the oldest poems of the
fourteenth century, and to be dated about 1351: it is a precursor
of The Vision of Piers Plowman'. The former poem recalls the
poet of Gawayne, more especially in its elaborate description of
deer-stalking, a parallel picture to the description of the hunting
of the deer, the boar and the fox, in Gawayne.
The alliterative poem of Erkenwald comes nearer to the
work of the author of Cleanness and Patience than any other of
the alliterative poems grouped in the above-mentioned list. It
tells, in lines written either by this author himself or by a very
gifted disciple, an episode of the history of the saint when he
was bishop of St Paul's; and, in connection with the date of its
composition, it should be noted that a festival in honour of
the saint was established in London in the year 1386.
Internal evidence of style, metre and language, appears to
outweigh the parallel passages and other clues which are adduced
as tests of unity of authorship in respect of the Troy Book, Titus,
The Wars of Alexander and Golagros. For the present, these may
be considered as isolated remains which have come down to us of
the works of a school of alliterative poets who flourished during
the second half of the fourteenth and the early years of the
fifteenth century. So far as we can judge from these extant
poems, the most gifted poet of the school was the author of Sir
Gawayne and the Grene Knight: he may well have been regarded
as the master, and his influence on more northern poets, and on
alliterative poetry generally, may explain in part, but not wholly,
the parallel passages which link his work with that of other poets
of the school, who used the same formulae, the same phrases
and, at times, repeated whole lines, much in the same way as poets
of the Chaucerian school spoke the language of their master.
.
* See Chapter 1, Volume 1, Piers the Plowman, p. 37.


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CHAPTER XVI
LATER TRANSITION ENGLISH
LEGENDARIES AND CHRONICLERS
It is significant, both of the approaching triumph of the
vernacular, and of the growing importance of the lower and middle
classes in the nation, that some of the chief contributions to our
literature during the two generations immediately preceding that
of Chaucer were translations from Latin and Norman-French,
made, as their authors point out, expressly for the delectation
of the common people. Not less significant are the facts that
much of this literature deals with the history of the nation, and
that now, for the first time since the Conquest, men seemed to
think it worth while to commit to writing political ballads in the
English tongue.
The productions of this time, dealt with in the present
chapter, fall into two main classes, religious and historical,
the former comprising homilies, saints' lives and translations
or paraphrases of Scripture, and the latter the chronicles of
Robert of Gloucester, Thomas Bek of Castleford and Robert
Mannyng, the prophecies of Adam Davy and the war songs of
Laurence Minot. The two classes have many characteristics in
common, and, while the homilists delight in illustrations drawn
from the busy life around them, the historians seldom lose an
opportunity for conveying a moral lesson.
The earliest of the three chronicles mentioned above was
written about 1300, and is generally known by the name of
Robert of Gloucester, though it is very uncertain whether he
was the original author of the whole work. It exists in two
versions, which, with the exception of several interpolations in
one of them, are identical down to the year 1135. From this
point the story is told in one version, which may be called the
first recension, in nearly three thousand lines, and in the
other, the second recension, in rather less than six hundred.