The verse of Pearl, as has been said, belongs to that type of octosyllabic, four-stress poetry to be found also among the works of poets such as Chaucer and Milton; but the other three poems in the manuscript belong to a different metrical tradition, less familiar in modern times and therefore requiring some explanation here. They all employ the longer, unrhymed alliterative line throughout (except for the ‘bob and wheel’ with which each paragraph of Sir Gawain ends) and so form part of what some modern scholars call the Alliterative Revival.

The metrical tradition to which Pearl belongs, along with most post-medieval English verse, had its origins in medieval Latin and French writings; but alliterative verse originated, not in Romania, but in Germania. The Anglo-Saxon peoples who colonized Britain in the fifth century brought with them a common Germanic tradition of verse-making, and all the poetry that survives from England before the Norman Conquest exhibits these already well-established techniques: Old English verse is all ‘alliterative’. After the Conquest, however, this ancient native tradition had to compete increasingly with new international and especially French ways of composing poetry; and for about three hundred years after 1066 the record of alliterative verse is thin and patchy, so much so that one might have expected it to die out altogether. Yet, surprisingly, a very large body of alliterative verse survives from late medieval England, composed from about the middle of the fourteenth century until the beginning of the sixteenth. Literary historians have not had much success in explaining this apparent revival of an old way of writing verse; and little is known about the poets involved, most of whom remain anonymous (Langland being the chief exception). The majority of these writers must, on the evidence of their dialects, have originated away from London and the south-east: Langland in the west country, the Cotton Nero poet(s) in the north-west Midlands. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Parson says ‘I am a Southren man;|I kan nat geeste “rum, ram, ruf ” by lettre’ (X 42–3). This only makes sense if southern men (Chaucer himself included) were not expected to produce ‘rum, ram, ruf’.