The first two chapters have been concerned with preliminary issues: the poems that will be covered in this book and the vocabulary they used. We can now turn to a detailed study of a single poem in order to look at some basic features that I shall explore throughout this book, and to do so I take up the most familiar and best-loved of all alliterative narratives, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Alliterative poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative: the characteristic unrhymed alliterative poem tells a story of incident and adventure. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets. There is here a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension. A descriptive passage is a digression that interrupts the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. How the poet handles the relationship between static description and active narrative is what I shall explore here.

The opposition between description and narrative is not actually as stark as I have set it out. There can be no narrative without description, though an example of narrative with virtually no description is the list, a feature of alliterative poetry, such as the twenty-two lines at the end of the incomplete text of The Wars of Alexander enumerating the sixty-five places conquered by Alexander, including ‘Ingland, Italie and Yndee, and Ireland costis, / Meede and Mesopotayme and Massedoyne eke’ (5789–90). However, most description involves a degree of narrative and nearly all narrative includes description. The Gawain-poet is particularly good at combining the two with no sense of interruption in the story, as in the graphic account of Gawain's lonely wandering through the frozen wilderness of Wirral:

This depiction of winter misery defines the hero's predicament as much as it illustrates the plight of the birds, and so in no sense can it be seen as digressive.

The characteristic set-piece descriptions in alliterative poetry build upon the inclusiveness of the vocabulary. Poets, particularly those from the north, could draw on a range of synonyms to express the common concept ‘man’, ‘knight’: to the standard stock of words such as lord, man, knight and wight, used by Chaucer and other writers, alliterative poets added burne, freke, gome, hatel, lede, renk, schalk, segge, tulk and wye. All are derived from the Old English poetic word-hoard, with the exception of tulk, which is from Old Norse. Nouns such as blonk, ‘horse’, douth, ‘army’, bent in the sense ‘battlefield’, all recorded in Old English poetry, are regularly used by northern poets, though found rarely, if at all, outside alliterative verse. Such words are of ‘high alliterative rank’, predominantly carrying the alliteration of the line. The same is true of verbs meaning ‘go, hasten’, such as buske, ferke, kever, raike, skelte, strake, thringe and trine; adjectives such as athel, ‘noble’, cof, ‘nimble’, runish, ‘mysterious’, wale, ‘excellent’ and wlonk, ‘splendid’; and adverbs meaning ‘quickly’, such as graithely, naitely, rapely, taytely and yederly. Half of these words are of Old English origin and have counterparts in poems such as Beowulf, and half are derived from Old Norse; only kever comes from French. Poetic compounds reminiscent of Old English usage are not uncommon, such as chyn-wedys, ‘chin-clothing’, i.e. ‘beard’, dragon-hame, ‘dragon-covering’, i.e. ‘dragon's skin’, fetherhame, ‘plumage’, here-wedes and stele-wedes, ‘armour’. To extend further the range of vocabulary, the poets use adjectives as nouns, such as (to denote a lovely lady): tat blissful, bright, fre, clene, comly, gay, hende, shene and wlonk; tat grene ‘the green man’, te naked ‘the naked flesh’, and so on. Such traditional features of the vocabulary contribute to the elevated tone of the style.

The effects enabled may be demonstrated by comparing two contemporary translations of the description of Alexander's fearsome horse Bucephalus in the Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni, which provide revealing contrasts in style and vocabulary. The first is from the Prose Life of Alexander:

The Classical Tradition

At the beginning of the Aeneid Virgil related how the Trojan fleet, sailing to Carthage, was just out of sight of land when it was struck by a massive storm. The winds crashed upon the sea, sending huge breakers rolling to the shores. Sailors shouted out as the sky and daylight disappeared behind the dark clouds; thunder shook the poles; the only light came from constant flashes of lightning. Aeneas cried out to the heavens in despair as the north wind struck his ship's sail and flung the waves to the sky. Oars were smashed by a mountain of water that battered the ship with full force; the waves rose and then fell so as to expose the sea-bed. The south wind threw three ships onto the rocks; the east wind drove three others onto sandbanks. Before Aeneas's very eyes an enormous wave crashed onto another ship, throwing the helmsman overboard as the ship was sucked under in a whirlpool. Here and there drowning sailors could be seen in the water, amid floating wreckage and possessions (Aeneid 1.81–123). It is a scene of dramatic action and powerful emotion.

Virgil's opening scene became the obligatory model for subsequent storms at sea in classical literature. He himself looked back to the storms in the Odyssey, particularly the first storm that struck Odysseus on his journey towards Ithaca (5.291–370), a scene that Virgil reworked. In doing so, Virgil marked the Aeneid from the outset as epic, dealing with themes on a cosmic scale. As Poseidon summoned the storm in the Odyssey, so in the Aeneid Juno, attempting to prevent the Trojans from establishing themselves in her beloved Carthage, commanded Aeolus, king of the winds, to release the four winds from their prison and descend upon the sea. As Athene took pity on Odysseus and calmed the winds, so Neptune, outraged by Aeolus's usurpation of his powers, quelled the storm and rescued the Trojans. Virgil's storm introduces the key themes of the Aeneid: the fragility of the Trojans in their search for a home; the vulnerability and yet resilience of Aeneas himself; the cosmic struggle between the gods as it is to be played out in future generations in the struggles between Rome and her neighbours, particularly the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars.

This book has explored a feature of Middle English alliterative poetry much praised: its descriptions, and how they relate to the narrative. Here and there I have suggested sources or models for descriptive passages without confronting fully two difficult questions: what precedents are there for the poets’ fondness for description, and are their descriptive techniques in any way distinctive?

In searching for precedents we might naturally look first to a form of alliterative verse composed a century or more earlier, Laȝamon's Brut, an expanded version in long-lines of Wace's Roman de Brut from the mid twelfth century in rhyming octosyllables. In a remarkable and original passage, Wace describes Arthur's embarkation from Southampton (11190– 238). The account is full of precise and technical detail: the ships are renovated and checked out, helmets, shields and hauberks carried aboard, horses dragged in. Finally they set sail:

As the ships move out to sea the seamen adjust and secure the various sails and, observing wind and stars, set their course for France.

Authenticity

The author of St Erkenwald was keen to affirm the historical accuracy of his narrative. Like the alliterative historians I have been examining, he set great store by authenticity. The author of Morte Arthure, as we have seen, promises a history ‘þat trewe es and nobyll’ (16). At the opening of The Destruction of Troy John Clerk regrets that true histories of the distant past are forgotten, but they may be recovered ‘by lokyng of letturs þat lefte were of olde’ (26) – by studying ancient writings; unfortunately some of these authorities, such as Homer, are unreliable:

The true accounts of the Trojan war, he tells us, were set down by Dares and Dictys, both eye-witnesses at the siege, translated into Latin by Cornelius, and fleshed out by Guido de Columnis, the poet's source, who ‘declaret it more clere’ (51–77). The author of the Wars frequently assures his readers of the historical veracity of his account by finishing off his line with an authority tag, ‘as þe buke tellis’ (17, 35, etc.), ‘as I in writt fynd’ (24), ‘þe text me recordis’ (214) and so on, and indeed his poem faithfully translates the Historia de Preliis.

The story of Gawain is framed by the history of the Trojan settlement of Britain by Brutus, even though we must realise that the Green Knight does not feature in this historical account.

St Erkenwald is a historical figure, bishop of London from 675 to 693, the outlines of whose career were recorded by no less an authority than Bede. We are thus securely set in London in the time of early Anglo-Saxon England, not long after the Conversion, by a poem that begins:

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.

Previous chapters have concentrated upon descriptions of an object or scene; if an object, the narrative is suspended; if a landscape, the protagonist moves through the scene as it is described. The point of view is that of a participating observer, who expresses curiosity, wonder, delight, fear. In Gawain it is the courtiers who study the Green Knight closely and with anxiety (‘Ther watz lokyng on lenþe’ 232); Gawain himself observes the shield (‘þay schewed hym þe schelde’, 619), the castle (‘þe haþel auysed’ 771) and the Green Chapel (‘he seȝ’ 2170). In Erkenwald the Londoners peer at the mysterious letters on the tomb (‘auisyd hom many’ 53). Alexander surveys the ceremonial pageant laid on for him and ‘heues vp his eȝe’ (Wars 1712) at the bishop's headgear. In the dreams of Mum and the Sothsegger and Pearl the vision is a projection of the dreamer's concerns, as in Mum (‘mette I’ 871, ‘I totid aboute / Beholding’ 885–6), insistently repeated in Pearl (‘I bere þe face’ 67, ‘me lyste to se’ 146, ‘con I stote and stare’ 149). So, too, in Arthur's two dreams in Morte Arthure, verbs of dreaming (‘Hym dremyd’ 760, ‘he mett’ 3223) are reinforced by verbs of seeing (‘to beholde’ 760, ‘merked’ 3238), but in these cases we subsequently have a second point of view besides that of the dreamer – that of the interpreter of the dream.

Generally the observed object or scene is an enigma that requires interpretation, so that enigma becomes a narrative device to replace action: ‘what will we understand next?’ replacing ‘what happens next?’ We need, however, to be alert to the possibility that the observer's interpretation is not necessarily reliable. Arthur's courtiers do not know what to make of the Green Knight, but they suppose him to be supernatural; the sudden appearance of the castle comes as a surprise to Gawain, welcome but possibly threatening; Gawain is quite wrong to suppose the Chapel is the devil's place. The citizens of London are entirely mystified by the tomb, whose secret is revealed only with the help of their bishop. The Pearl dreamer has no idea where he finds himself: ‘I ne wyste in þis worlde quere þat hit wace’ (65).

A Pistel of Susan and Pearl

The grieving narrator in Pearl enters a garden of loss. In his misery the ‘joylez juelere’ clasps his hands in front of a mound covered with flowers yellow, blue and red: gillyflower, ginger, gromwell, peonies. On that mound, where he had lost his Pearl, he falls to the ground and is drugged to sleep by the scent of the flowers. The scene is illustrated in the first picture in the manuscript: the dreamer, dressed in a red gown with an elaborate blue hood, lies asleep on a yellow and green flowery mound by a stream surrounded by bushes. Descriptions of gardens are a favourite topic in medieval literature, and are often traced back to the Roman de la rose. To assess the extent of the Roman's influence on Pearl, we may compare another English garden.

The most elaborate of all garden descriptions is Joachim's orchard in A Pistel of Susan (Susannah). In alliterative thirteen-line rhyming stanzas the poem recounts the biblical story of the innocent Susannah, the young wife of the wealthy and upright Joachim, ‘a very beautiful young woman and one that feared God’ (Dan. 13.2), and the lecherous elders who spied on her and propositioned her while she was bathing in her secluded garden. In a departure from his source, Daniel 13 (in the Vulgate, excluded from the Authorised Version), the poet launches into a set-piece description of Susannah entering her garden with her two maids to enjoy the beauty of the trees and birds:

In the previous chapter I studied description in a romance, and in the chapter following this one I shall focus on a history. What kind of work is Morte Arthure, and what are the nature and functions of its descriptions? The varied interpretations of the poem are in part attributable to varied perceptions of its genre. At different points it associates itself with both ‘cronycle’ and ‘romance’, unsettling and in the end evading genre classifications.

In fact, the poet draws on both history and romance, and develops the descriptive techniques and topics characteristic of both: the main source of the framework is the ‘historical’ account of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth as mediated through Wace, while some episodes draw on romances, in particular an episode involving Gawain and Priamus (2513–649) modelled on the Charlemagne romance Fierabras. The dreamvision and its descriptive conventions contribute yet another strand to the make-up of the poem in the two episodes we shall be examining. Most striking are the numerous set-piece descriptions and the extraordinarily vivid scenes of action, with detailed accounts of hand-to-hand combat, armour and naval equipment. We need to consider how these descriptive passages contribute to the nature of the poem and our interpretation of it. The reaction of an early reader is captured in a colophon added to the unique text of the poem in Robert Thornton's manuscript, following an account of Arthur's Requiem Mass and burial: ‘Hic jacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus’ – the once and future king. Buried he may have been, but Arthur was still alive in the fourteenth century, appropriated as a historical validation for suzerainty as well as an exemplar of chivalry in an age when a state of war was the normal condition. To flesh out this cult figure as an authentically historical hero as well as a man whose psychological complexity stirs our interest and evokes our sympathy, the poet needed to supplement his ‘historical’ sources with material from romances and elsewhere, material which is just as ‘true’: true to this portrait of the man who was Arthur.

In a prologue the poet affirms his fidelity to history (story, 25) ‘þat trewe es and nobyll’ (16), outlining the ‘historical’ account of Arthur's defeat of the Roman emperor Lucius and then affirming his dependence on fact-based chronicle with a list of thirty-three countries and provinces conquered by Arthur.

The author of The Wars of Alexander is one of the most versatile of the alliterative poets. Like Morte Arthure, the Wars recounts events of the distant past and portrays a hero driven to destruction by his sense of the role allotted to him. The work is a careful translation of the Historia de preliis, an expanded version of Nativitas et victoria Alexandri Magni. Among the stories that the Historia de preliis adds is the entry of Alexander into the city of Jerusalem, the source of which is Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities. Alexander has demanded that Jadus, high priest of Jerusalem, should switch sides and pay him the tribute formerly paid to the Persian king Darius. Jadus refuses, but then hears to his horror that Alexander is approaching Jerusalem to exact revenge. He calls the citizens together for three days of fasting and prayers. An angel instructs him in a dream not to fear, but to decorate the streets and lead a procession all dressed in white out of the city to greet Alexander:

Editing Thornton’s text

In one of the earliest publications of the nascent Early English Text Society, the alliterative Morte Arthure brought Robert Thornton’s miscellany, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91, to critical attention. It was the alliterative poem most frequently edited in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it has retained its cachet as the poetic centrepiece of Thornton’s scribal oeuvre. At this time, the editio receptus of this impressively moving work remains Mary Hamel’s treatment of the poem, now thirty years old.

Hamel’s edition has been justly praised. She offers some important innovations in considering the poem’s sources. However, her achievement is less happy as editorial work. As her statements about procedures indicate, Hamel conceptualizes her task as that of a person defending the plausibility of Thornton’s transcription, not, as editors conventionally do, as one engaged in a critical investigation of that transcription. Thus, the edition provides a good introduction to what Thornton copied, which is not necessarily what the poet wrote. Although her commentary is valuable, explanations of the received text are not always provided.

From this retrospect, furthermore, Hamel’s edition suffers from its timing. Her work was produced prior to two important scholarly interventions which might have inspired her to offer somewhat differing results from those printed; these we intend here to examine in turn. The first of these was the publication of the broadest available conspectus of Middle English usage, in the Aberdeen dialect atlas; the second, Hoyt N. Duggan’s important series of articles on those constraints governing alliterative metrics. We begin by addressing the effects that these have on Hamel’s presentation and on our understanding of the Morte more generally.

The Morte, as Hamel points out, has long been associated, not with the ‘home of alliterative poetry’ as conventionally recognized, the north and west, but with Lincolnshire. This view was first argued in 1962 by Angus McIntosh, who asserted that Thornton’s forms overlay two other linguistic layers. The oldest of these, in McIntosh’s account, represents the language of somewhere near Louth (in Lindsey, northeast Lincolnshire). He localized the linguistic layer intermediate between this and Thornton’s copying in Kesteven, in the south-west of the county, ‘between Sleaford and Grantham’.

What is a ‘political lyric’? The two terms need definition in relation to one another, and I shall explore them each in turn. It is worth stating the obvious at the outset, that whatever a lyric may be, it does not include major poems such as Wynnere and Wastoure, Langland's Piers Plowman and works by Langland’s successors, especially Mum and the Sothsegger, Gower's In Praise of Peace, Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, Lydgate's Fall of Princes, and others which would all figure prominently in any wider account of political poetry in Middle English. Though the lyrics cannot be fully understood except in the light of this wider tradition, and indeed in the light of Latin and French political verse, they nevertheless illustrate neatly and on a small scale a number of issues in connection with political poetry.

The term ‘political’ can be interpreted narrowly or generously. George Kane has argued that the word has been misapplied to fourteenth-century moral satires, and that it is wrong to understand such poems ‘as manifesting an increasingly secular concern for political change and reform’ (Kane 1986, 82). Kane is undoubtedly right in saying that this is a misinterpretation, but at the same time his contention that ‘political’ is indistinguishable from ‘revolutionary’ cannot be maintained. Peter Coss suggests a division that I find helpful, distinguishing three broad categories of medieval political verse: firstly, poems dealing directly with particular current events; secondly, ‘verses of social protest’ that are ‘responses to particular and topical grievances’; and thirdly, ‘satires attacking either specific vices or the vices of various social classes and groups’ (Coss 1996, xiii). To these I would add a fourth group for consideration: poems on subjects that are not themselves political but have social or political implications.

In the light of these categories I shall first look at some of the famous English lyrics of BL MS Harley 2253, three of which Kane and Coss take up in their discussions. The Harley lyrics provide an excellent starting point for an analysis of the term ‘political’, for this early collection (c.1340) provides some of the finest examples of most of the kinds of political lyric that feature in later manuscripts.