ENGLISH

LITERATURE I 2ND CLASS

MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

A SHORT INTRODUCTION

The Normans came from Normandy in northern France, and when they
conquered England they imposed Norman laws, the Norman System of
Government, and even the Norman French language upon the English.
King William considered all of England his personal property, and he had
the military power to enforce that presumption. That military power was
based on the knight, who differed from the Anglo-Saxon warrior
principally in the superior quality of his armor and training, and in the
fact that he rode a horse. The mounted knight was the tank of medieval
warfare, and a warrior on foot had little chance against him. With his
knights William succeeded in doing what no Anglo-Saxon king had been
able to do unite all of England under a single ruler.

When we think of the Middle Age perhaps the first image that comes to
mind is that of a walled castle topped by lofty towers and surrounded by
deep moat. It was the Normans who brought castle architecture to
England (the Anglo-Saxon hall was a much smaller structure). If we think
about the castle for a moment we can see the essential characteristics of
the Norman social system known as feudalism.
Inside the castle lived a nobleman and his family, the knights that the
nobleman retained, and assorted dependents and servants. In return for
the military training and high social status they received, the knights
protected their lords lands and followed him to fight in foreign wars. The
nobleman in his turn owed fealty to the king, who was responsible for
resolving disputes between nobles, making grants of land to those who
served him well, and making national policy. Thus the feudal system was
one of reciprocal duties and responsibility between the king and his
nobles and between the nobles and his knights. It was a hierarchical
system, with the duties and privileges of each level of society from the
king at the top on down to the lowliest apprentice knight clearly
defined.

The system extended outside the castle walls as well, where the vast
majority of the population lived. This lower order of men, know as serfs,
were responsible for tiling the land and providing food and services to
their lord within the castle in return for protection against attacks by
outlaws and renegade knights. The life of a serf was hard and usually
brief, for he was entirely at the mercy of his master, forbidden either to
own his own land or to leave his masters fields. There was one great
social leveler, however, which did not distinguish between classes. That
was the plague, which periodically swept through medieval England
killing master and serf alike. Against the plague the only protection was
prayer.

 Alongside the secular social system of feudalism was the Church, which
maintained an influence even more powerful than the kings. The Church,
too, possessed a hierarchical organization descending from the pope in
Rome at the top to the cardinals and bishops in cathedral cities to the
lowliest priest in a country parish. Conflicts between the secular and
ecclesiastical powers occasionally occurred, as when king Henry II had his
knights murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, for
disagreeing with the kings policies.

The church, however, could boast of a source of power to which the king
and his nobles could only bow the peoples belief that God worked
through the authority of His church. Powerful Henry II, for example, was
forced to kneel in front of Beckets tomb and be scourged; Becket himself
was declared a holy martyr and a saint, and his tomb became the most
popular shrine in all England.

For many years after the Norman conquest England was divided into two
societies, each speaking its own language. The majority of the serfs and
untitled freeman were of the Anglo-Saxon race and continued to speak
their Germanic tongue. The Norman nobles and knights, on the other
hand. Spoke a dialect of French. Partly as a result of this linguistic
confusion, Latin, the international language of the Church, became the
official language of the land and was used in schools.
Still, literature in the peoples native tongues continued to be composed,
inside the great castles walls the nobles and their ladies preferred
romances, long fantastic stories of the chivalrous deeds of knights and
their love affairs with great ladies. The most famous romances take as
their subject a legendary king called Arthur and his famous knights of the
Round Table. The historical Arthur was a fifth-century British king who
fought a series of rearguard actions against the invading Anglo-Saxons.
The Arthur of the romances, though, was an idealized king of the High
Middle Ages, a man distinguished by wisdom, piety, and idealism. He lives
in a sumptuous castle (in the best Norman style) and presides over the
Knights of the Round Table, whom he sends on various chivalric missions.
The knights rescue damsels in distress or search for the miraculous Holy
Grail, the cup used by Christ at the last super the night before he was
crucified.

There are literally hundreds of different romances about Arthur, Queen

Guenevere, Sir Galahad, Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, and the rest, attesting to
the tremendous popularity of the Arthurian legend in medieval times, a
popularity which has continued to the present day.
Most of the Arthurian romances were written in French, the castle
Language. In the peasant villages and fields there grew up a different kind
of literature, with different legends and different heroes. This popular
literature (as opposed to the aristocratic literature of the romances)
consisted mostly of songs, either lyrics about the coming of spring or a

beautiful girl, or ballads telling stories of tragic love and warfare. One of
the ballad heroes famous even today is Robin Hood, who led his band of
Saxon outlaws into Sherwood Forest to find freedom from harsh Norman
rule.
The spoken forms of language are always more fluid and changeable than
the written forms. In those days, when few people knew how to read or
write, the Old English and Norman French tongues spoken by the people
gradually mixed to form what is called Middle English, a language much
closer in both structure and vocabulary to Modern English than Anglo-
Saxon. Like Anglo-Saxon, though, Middle English was not a single tongue
but a group of regional dialects more or less resembling one another. One
dialect, the East Midland dialect spoken in London and at the kings court,
was to prevail over all the others, partly because it was in that dialect that
the first genius of English literature wrote. His name was Geoffrey
Chaucer.