Albion (19 page)
CHAPTER 19
Part of the Territory
It is not surprising
,” Walter Oakeshott wrote in
The Sequence of Me-
dieval
Art,
“that East Anglia should in the fourteenth century have been the center of artistic production in England.”
1
Another historian emphasised “the predominance of East Anglia over all other regional theatrical traditions in late medieval England.”
2
A unique form of “tail-rhyme stanza” has been located in romances derived from that region. The two greatest female writers of the fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, both came from East Anglia. So there exists a pattern of activity, which at a later date manifested itself in the “Norwich School” of painting.
Its two principal counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, are named after the North Folk and South Folk of the Anglo-Saxons but the topographical boundaries of those tribes are uncertain; we may also include parts of Cambridgeshire and Essex in what was the most fertile and, excluding London, the most densely populated region of the country. East Anglia was to a certain extent isolated from the rest of England by its fens. Its commerce with Europe flourished, however, since it was open to all the trade routes of northern Europe and the Netherlands; the wool trade prospered, in particular, as the emergence of the great “wool churches” of Long Melford and Lavenham may testify. Another topographical aspect lent a particular tone to the area. There were few great “manors” but instead a large number of villages and towns filled with merchants and a farming population. In turn this seems to have created, or helped to create, what has been described as an “economically precocious and religiously radical area.”
3
The area was radical in more than one sense, however; anti-monarchical in tendency, it gravitated towards parliament or the barons rather than to the king. It possessed a flourishing merchant economy, “involved in a capitalist and cash-marketing system,”
4
and out of it sprang a distinctively local art and literature.
The illuminations of what has come to be known as the “East Anglian School” are of an unmatched liveliness of outline. Whether the subject-matter is taken from bestiaries or literary romances, Bibles or lives of the saints, they are all domesticated within a native idiom which combines naturalism with grotesquerie. There are East Anglian daisies in abundance and, in the Luttrell psalter, domestic scenes which might almost illustrate a novel by Samuel Richardson. The influences of northern Europe have been assimilated, but they have also been coarsened and simplified. They have turned native, in other words.
The burgeoning of religious theatre in East Anglia was primarily due to the commercial success of the region. There were many monasteries and many great churches but, equally significantly, there were more than one hundred East Anglian areas where dramatic performances were conducted. Just as the illuminations of the “East Anglian School” were characterised by a diversity of influences and sources, so one historian of medieval theatre has described East Anglian drama as possessing “a richness and diversity of theatrical practices unmatched in any other region of the country.”
5
On the basis of vocabulary and dialect several individual plays can be traced to their source in East Anglia, among them
The Castle of Perseverance
and
The Killing
of the Children
. Characteristically these dramas were highly local affairs, run by individual parishes and performed for local profit. (One of them, at Snettisham, was known as a “Rockefeste” in anticipation of later festivals.) Just as grotesques and writhing figures play so large a part in East Anglian books, so East Anglian drama can be recognised by its emphasis on spectacle and by its general theatrical effectiveness; the characteristics are those of ribaldry, grotesquerie and “shameless manipulation of audience sympathy.”
6
It is a local art within an international context.
Julian
of Norwich
can also be placed in this unique setting. She was known as “the Recluse atte Norwyche,” and was born towards the close of 1342. It seems likely that she inhabited a cell outside the church of St. Julian, near the center of Norwich, which belonged to the Benedictine nuns of Carrow. The rest of her life is known only through her own words. In her thirty-fourth year, at her mother’s house, she lay close to death; on the seventh night of her agony, after the priest had placed the crucifix before her face, she was granted sixteen “shewings” or revelations within two nights. It is believed that, after this pilgrimage of the spirit, she entered the Benedictine community as a recluse or devoted laywoman. Then, out of her epiphanies, came her reflections in
Revelations of Divine Love
. She wrote in an East Anglian dialect, with northern additions, and her writing possesses a local savour. She vividly describes the drops of blood upon Christ’s face, which “were like to the scale of heryng in the spreadeing on the forehead”; his dying body was “lyke a dry borde” and he was hanging “in the eyr as men hang a cloth to drye.” When the devil appears to her “anon a lyte smoke came in the dore with a grete hete and a foule stinke.” These powerful images might have come directly out of East Anglian drama; when Julian declares, “Methought I would have beene that time with Mary Magdalene,” at the Crucifixion, she may be recalling her experience of watching the dramatic and sensational Passion plays of her neighbourhood. When she describes how “halfe the face” was covered with “drie blode,” she might have been watching a theatrical scene. She is granted a vision of a very English St. John of Beverley as if he were “an hende neybor,” a dear neighbour, and of course the actors in the liturgical drama were in a literal sense neighbours and acquaintances.
The spiritual dimension of life on earth could not be better exemplified. When she confirms that she studied the pains of Christ as they were depicted in painting or in stained glass, a particular quality of art or theatre can be seen to inform a particular kind of devotion; indeed, in any just analysis, art and devotion cannot be separated. This, also, is part of the Catholic inheritance of England.
Just as the art of East Anglia is derived from many different sources, English and European, so in turn the lineaments of Julian of Norwich’s piety have been traced to European spiritual mentors such as St. Bernard and St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thomas Aquinas and William of St. Thierry. Yet it has been said that “Julian perfectly expresses the English spiritual tradition” because “she combines all the strands of our patristic lineage into something new.”
7
It is the characteristic English procedure of assimilation and change, expressing itself in what has been described as Julian’s native cheerfulness and common sense; her “optimism” and her “prudence” are “inherent in all English spirituality.” Her methods are practical and her metaphors pragmatic; the penitent must labour as does the gardener, “delvyn and dykyn, swinkin and sweten, and turne the earth upsodowne.” Thus she rejects “the tight juridical categories of scholastic moral theology, and the exaggerated penitential rigours of the Franciscans,”
8
arriving at a wholly English and East Anglian compromise.
Another native of that region has added significantly to England’s religious history. Margery Kempe came from Bishop’s Lynn in Norfolk, and was a contemporary of Julian of Norwich, whom she once visited for spiritual consolation. Her father had five times been mayor of this prosperous “wool” town, and her husband was elected its chamberlain in 1394. She was an East Anglian woman of wealth and competence, who tried her hand at both brewing and milling; yet
The Book of Margery Kempe
is primarily concerned with her spiritual and visionary experiences in which she encountered, and conversed with, Christ himself. The experience of the Passion would overwhelm her “sumtyme in the cherch, sumtyme in the strete, sumtyme in the chaumbre, sumtyme in the felde,” so that East Anglia becomes the site of eternity. But if Julian of Norwich was influenced by continental theology, Margery Kempe was in more literal fashion affected by continental travellers. Lynn was the port to which pilgrims came from Scandinavia and Europe, on their way to the sacred sites of England. Hers is again a local, and universal, story; Margery Kempe, very much the literal-minded daughter of East Anglian devotion, was able also to witness the details and forms of continental piety and, within certain limits, to adopt them. She knew the people of “Deuchlond” and a friend, Alan of Lynn, had already indexed the works of St. Bridget of Sweden. Yet once more, in native fashion, she mingles the ideal with the real, the sacred with the profane, with an almost Chaucerian eye for significant detail. Her career as a brewer did not flourish “for, whan the ale was as fayr standyng undyr berm as any man mygth se, sodenly the berm wold fallyn down”; the froth, in other and more modern terms, would go flat. When she asked a man to have sexual intercourse with her he replied that “he had levar ben hewyn as smal as flesch to the pott!” This matter-of-fact dialect could be effortlessly turned to spiritual matters. Jesus came to her in vision and informed her that she would be “etyn and knawen of the pepul of the world as any raton knawyth the stokfysch.” Sometimes the voices of those people of the world can be heard. “I wold thu wer in Smythfeld,” one London woman told her, “and I wold beryn a fagot to bren the wyth.” The same vivid detail, seen in the margins of the psalteries or on the scaffolds of liturgical plays, animates Margery Kempe’s East Anglian account of her visionary experiences.
Out
of that native soil
sprang other writers and artists, among them John Skelton of Diss, whose rough and exuberant “Skeltonics” became once more influential in the twentieth century:
To wryte or to indyte, Eyther for delyte Or elles for despite
John Lydgate of Suffolk was the most prolific and popular poet of the fifteenth century; there are writers such as John Bale, Gabriel Harvey and Nicholas Udall who together emphasise the fact that no other region of the country “could boast of so many prominent, identifiable, bookish figures.”
9
So in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the seal had been set on the prolificity and variety of East Anglia in illumination, drama and literature. Some may interpret that superiority in terms of wealth; where mercantile profit leads, the arts will follow. Yet others have discerned a local passion. One historian of art has concluded that the “flat expanses” and “rolling outlines” and “wide skies” of East Anglia “have had a curiously powerful hold on the English creative intellect and have been a striking stimulus to it.”
10
It might even be remarked here that “flatness” of surface and the bounding outline have also been the defining characteristics of English art; it is as if the landscape itself adopted the form of the English imagination.
The Poetry of England
“Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on their Journey to Canterbury,” by William Blake, detail
CHAPTER 20
A Song and a Dance
The English have
always excelled at popular song, untouched by any conscious literary art. Dance songs, and part songs, and ballads, and processional chants, were once as much part of communal life as the social and religious ceremonies which decorated existence in a more formal way. Several thousand lyrics from the eleventh to the fifteenth century survive; most of them are anonymous and, therefore, the unnamed songs of the land. There are religious lyrics in the vernacular dating from the eleventh century, although we know from other testimony that “English” songs were being performed by travelling singers or wandering minstrels in earlier centuries. It has to be remembered that sung verse was a more direct, and indeed easier, form of communication than prose. Sermons were turned into rhyme and moral homilies also acquired the natural dimensions of verse; even the hermit in his cave or simple thatched dwelling might proclaim that “the songe of louyng & of life es commen.” Just as Caedmon, the herdsman from Whitby Abbey, was the first to sing naturally in Anglo-Saxon, so the first medieval lyrics to survive sprang from the mouth of St. Godric. Yet it is perhaps characteristic that sacred and profane material became thoroughly intermingled; the addresses to Christ became those of a human lover, while the lyrics of courtly love were permeated with spiritual allegory. There are songs of love from 1300:
Nou sprinkes the sprai, All for love icche am so seeke That slepen I ne mai
These are matched by songs of sacred woe as Mary laments the death of her son:
Sodenly afraide, Half wakyng, half slepyng, And gretly dismayde, A wooman sate wepyng
The monks (here “muneches”) of Ely are celebrated with a dance measure, at a date put in the eleventh century:
Merye sungen the muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut King rew ther by; Roweth, knites, noer the land And here we thes muneches saeng
It is perhaps significant that dance songs were never prohibited by English ecclesiastics, unlike their counterparts on the continent; indigenous tradition was stronger than religious caveats. As Layamon wrote in 1189, “Tha weoren in thissen lande blissfulle songs.”
The most blissful are those wrapped in mystery and enchantment. Some lines on the conception of Jesus, for example, emphasise the delicacy and simplicity of medieval English:
He cam also stille Ther his moder was, As dew in Aprille That falleth on the grass. He cam also still To his moderes bowr, As dew in Aprille That falleth on the flowr
There is the strange ballad scribbled down in the early fifteenth century:
She sente me the cherye Withouten ony ston . . .
It is matched by the enchanting carol of Corpus Christi, which begins:
Lully, lulley, lully, lulley, The fawcon hath born my mak away
in which a series of still images, as vivid as hallucinations, ends with:
And by that bedes side there stondeth a ston, “Corpus Christi” wreten theron
It is the simplicity of these verses that is most arresting and significant, as if they came from a pure well of speech undefiled. The same lucidity and clarity are to be found in ballads, originally of oral provenance and later turned into “broadsides” to be distributed throughout the country. As Philip Sidney wrote in
A Defence of Poesy
, composed in the early 1580s, “I never heard the olde song of
Percy
and
Douglas
that I found not my heart mooued more than with a Trumpet . . .” The same simplicity occurs in dance songs, the extant fragments of which are to be found jotted down in the margins of manuscript books:
Trippe a lutel with thy fot And let thy body go
They are described as possessing a “peculiarly English strength,”
1
which in certain circumstances may simply be marked by the resonance of key words. “Drinke to him derly of full god bous” and “To revele with this birdes bright” are salient examples where “booze” and “birds” make up a significant line of English music. A short poem on the Passion, dated to the early fifteenth century, has a strange affiliation with the later verse of George Herbert:
O! Mankinde, Have in thy minde My Passion smert, And thou shall finde Me full kinde— Lo! Here my hert
In part it is the ancient pattern of four stresses which fulfils a native cadence, and can easily be turned into the octosyllabic couplet which is also one of the mainstays of English verse:
For many ben of swyche manere, That talys and rymys wyl blethly here
This movement has as its counterpart the process of alliteration, which seems to represent a national or instinctive tendency in the language. Much has been written about the “alliterative revival” of the fourteenth century, when poems such as
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
and
Piers the Plowman
were written. These are all works of highly conscious literary art, and were by no means the issue of some “popular” or “buried” tradition of Old English speech, but their alliterative form is entirely consonant with their English origin. It is remarkable how much alliterative verse is concerned with the incidents and examples of English history, for example, so that the native preoccupation with the past seems to clothe itself in significant and appropriate form. Alliteration is also widely employed for the purposes of translation from the French and Latin, as if the Englishness of the new versions could then be most effectively conveyed. The Latin prose of the Church fathers was translated into heavily marked cadence and ingenious alliterative prose, as a way of creating an informal English rhetoric in compensation for classical stylistics. Alliteration was also a means of assimilating foreign learning into the vernacular, so that historical as well as theological texts could be transmitted to “lewed” men. It was once believed that the “alliterative revival” sprang out of the north or the north midlands, and there is some evidence of northern inflexions or dialect forms, but provenance is less important than purpose.
Language may fashion as well as convey meaning, and the alliterative style, in particular, seems to guide its exponents towards moral and social complaint; this political or didactic tradition is normally accompanied by the use of Old English words, as if it truly were the dialect of the tribe. The alliterative line is marked by concreteness and specificity also and, in poems like
Piers the Plowman
or
Wynnere and Wastour
, it carries the moral weight of balance and parallelism. That is why sermons and homiletic pieces made extensive use of alliteration, and why a poem on London’s guardian saint, Erkenwald, concludes with “Meche mournyng and myrthe . . . mellyd together”; it is the reason why a moral treatise of Richard Rolle reminds the reader that “Al perisshethe and passeth that we with eigh see.” It may be that alliteration is implicated in the natural English tendency to compromise, since it balances opposing forces with equal strength. There is no doubt, however, that the alliterative voice was accommodating and encompassing; it could harbour a range of what anachronistically might be termed “populist” sentiment as well as the refined narratives of courtly adventure. That again is a token of Englishness or, as one critic has written of the alliterative
Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight
, that “combination of the romantic and the real, of humour and high tone, of lyrical delicacy and verbal wit.”
2
If it is a genuine native utterance, then, it may be profitable to identify other of its characteristics. Alliterative English verse is not a particularly subtle medium for the expression of human feeling. Of the English lyrics it has been claimed that they are “almost entirely wanting in ‘romance’ resonances”; 3 the “cloying sentiment” of French originals has been “stripped away . . . as if not acceptable to English audiences.”
4
This refusal to sentimentalise, or express strong feeling, is extended to the author who tends in general to adopt the role of embarrassed narrator excusing a lack of artistry. In similar spirit the alliterative poems tend to address serious topics with a certain lightness of touch or what has been described as “laconic presentation”; 5 the quality of understatement is directly inherited from Old English poetry but it preserves its stern life in Middle English and beyond. In translations from the French, also, “a dramatic pattern of events, vividly conveyed, often seems preferred to subtle thematic undercurrents,” and the ambiguous or complicated knights and ladies of Gallic provenance “tend to take on the clearly defined outlines of folk-tale types.”
6
This is a very significant observation because it emphasises a profound tendency in the English imagination—to eschew dramatic complexities for dramatic incident, to avoid intimate or interior character development in favor of the broad outlines of popular tradition, to abandon the messy complications of love or sentiment in favour of action or spectacle. The tendency always is towards simplification. The stanzaic
Morte Arthur
takes a pencil to the French
Mort Artu
and “the English poet, as the English habit was, has compressed and simplified the French story.”
7
Four centuries later French dramatists were complaining that their English adaptors shortened their plays out of all recognition, and even mingled the plots together in order to provide “variety.”
The English author of
Ywain and Gawain
took the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and removed “the web of psychological generalisation and paradoxical ratiocination in which he emmeshes his characters”;
8
in addition the “long passages of emotional and intellectual intricacy are much reduced by the English poet.”
9
Therefore, “formality and intellectual reasoning vanish to be replaced by sweetness of tone and dramatic immediacy.”
10
It is the difference between those two icons of their respective national cultures, Racine and Shakespeare; it is also the distinction between Dickens and Balzac. Even when the English poets borrow from French lyric originals, they still manage to excise the paradoxes and the abstractions, the conflicts and the contradictions, in favour of a “harmonious and optimistic” construction of the world of love. It is the same optimism and gaiety to be found in Julian of Norwich. Shakespeare suggested that the truest poetry is the most feigning but on this occasion the borrowed words burn brighter than the originals. Indeed this aspect of the English imagination is of some significance. Is the national genius, after all, simply a collection of borrowings?
The English vision tends towards the local and the circumstantial. The prose and poetry of the fourteenth century are filled with material imagery, and with specific, almost humble, detail. The interest is once more in shared or common feeling, with the alliterative line elucidating and eliciting a popular voice; many of the alliterative romances were indeed aimed at a public assembly which would have welcomed local allusions and enjoyed the narration of physical adventure in homely language. That is why there is a great emphasis on visual detail, so that the audience might
see
the scenes being presented to them. Here once more we recognise the tutelary presence of the illuminations and the wall-paintings, the liturgical plays and the stained-glass windows.
The apparent resurgence of alliterative poetry in the fourteenth century is matched by textual evidence of an increase in all forms of English writing, again complemented by an increased confidence in the national sensibility. There are many now forgotten names and forgotten poems;
Cursor Mundi
is a scriptural history of some thirty thousand lines in rhymed octosyllabics, matched only by Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne in the same measure and
The Prick of Conscience
similarly rhymed. Dan Michel’s
Ayenbite of Inwit
is a penitential work in prose, which provides the context for the visionary works of the fourteenth century. John of Trevisa’s translations of Higden’s
Polychronicon
and of Bartholomew the Englishman’s
De Proprietatibus Rerum
were part of the same urgent desire to “Englisch” every aspect of the world. Robert of Gloucester’s
Chronicle
and Gower’s
Confessio Amantis
fulfilled the same cultural project. Gower himself brought to the English world the received tales of Dido and Ulysses, Orestes and Penelope; he was avidly read by Ben Jonson and introduced by Shakespeare into
Pericles
. He lived and died in the borough of Southwark—where his tomb rests in the cathedral—but his renown and influence have now been far surpassed by a much more illustrious friend and contemporary.
