This book is about descriptions in alliterative poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and how descriptive passages function within the narrative. The forward drive of the story is impeded by the static reflection of set-piece description, and yet alliterative poets are adept at integrating these opposing impulses so that they cohere and indeed support one another. Are there distinctive features of the form that lend themselves to both narrative and descriptive excellence? This would imply that there are aspects of alliterative poetry that are sui generis. Is it, then, useful to write of ‘The Nature of Alliterative Poetry’?

The diversity of alliterative poetry must be acknowledged at the outset. The misconception that it was a poetic movement centred on the north-west Midlands is hard to dislodge. Certainly many fine and important poems, among them the works of the Gawain-poet and The Wars of Alexander, were written in the Staffordshire/Cheshire/Lancashire area, but major works were composed elsewhere: The Siege of Jerusalem in Yorkshire, Morte Arthure still further east in Lincolnshire, William of Palerne in the south-west, probably Gloucestershire. It won't do to make William Langland, from the south-west Midlands and writing in London, an outrider of a central alliterative movement: the author of Richard the Redeless and probably of Mum and the Sothsegger places himself in Bristol, and other followers of Langland are also from the south midlands. Alliterative poetry was certainly read in Scotland, and several Scottish poets of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries chose alliterative forms. There is no particular reason why poets writing in various parts of the country couldn't have known and been influenced by one another's work, although, just as the poems were geographically diverse, so they were temporally diverse also. The earliest datable poems to survive, Wynnere and Wastoure and William of Palerne, were composed in the 1350s; Langland was writing and rewriting Piers Plowman in the twenty-five years following 1365; Pierce the Ploughman's Crede refers sympathetically to the Lollard Walter Brut, condemned in 1393; Richard the Redeless was composed shortly after the accession of Henry IV in 1401; Mum and the Sothsegger seems to refer to Arundel's Constitutions of 1409.