Читать книгу We British: The Poetry of a People - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 10

It took hundreds of years for the elite language of Norman French to begin to mingle with the tongues of the Anglo-Saxons. For a long time, looking for English poetry we have to rely on very short lyrics, which nonetheless can remind us that Britain was a multi-ethnic place:

Ich am of Irlande

And of the holy lande

Of Irlande

Gode sire, pray Ich thee

For of saynte charite

Come and daunce with me

In Irlande

Oh, all right then. The lyrics of early medieval Britain are full of music and dancing, celebrations of spring and love. It’s as if the shuddering, ice-bound, rainy islands of so many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts had been transformed. Up to a point, they had been. Historians talk about the early-medieval warm period, when the world’s climate was more temperate. In Britain it lasted very roughly from 900 to 1300. Monks grew vines in Yorkshire; the Black Death hadn’t been heard of.

Sumer is icumen in,

Llude sing cuccu!

Groweth sed, and bloweth med,

And springeth the wude nu –

Sing cuccu!

Close to nature, the medieval lyrics brim with references to flowers – primroses, roses, blossom of all kinds – and to the incessant sound of birdsong.

For more than a century after the Norman Conquest, Britain was riven by conflict – Saxon rebellions, wars between the Normans and the Welsh or the Normans and the Scots, and the bloody civil disputes between rivals for the crown. Although a lot of massive building of castles and some cathedrals was done, very little survives in English poetry, and that’s hardly surprising. Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, is generally remembered these days as the man who ordered the killing of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. He won the throne with his sword, and later fought long wars against his children and rebel barons – it was the Plantagenet way – but his reign brought great cultural advances and long periods of peace. He famously reformed and civilised English law. Henry was, like his predecessors and immediate successors, more French than English, Count of Anjou and Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine and so forth, whose empire covered rather more than half of modern France. This matters because France was the centre of European civilisation, going through its glorious twelfth-century renaissance. French literature, with its romances, its new ideology of courtly love and its reworkings of the Arthurian myths, had a huge influence.

Henry’s death is referred to in a very rare survivor of English poetry from this period. It’s a long, difficult poem, mostly read by students these days, which is nevertheless full of the sounds of medieval England – the arguments of peasants, the noise of birds – as well as the authentic stink and prejudice of the time.

It’s called The Owl and the Nightingale, and it was probably written in the late 1100s, somewhere in southern England. There are teasing references to a Nicolas of Guildford, a priest living in the village of Portesham in Dorset. He may have been its author. The poem is a long argument between a nightingale, whose song represents love, lechery and frivolity, and a gloomy, croaking owl. As they argue, the nightingale stands on a sprig of foliage, and the owl on a dreary, ivy-encrusted stump.

At times we might imagine that the nightingale stands for the free English people and the owl for the oppressive Norman ruling class; more likely, the nightingale is an airy French troubadour, and the owl the moralistic representative of religious poetry and attitudes. Certainly, a lot of the argument is about the nature of love – is it mere sexual lust, and who may love whom properly? The early Middle English the poem is written in is too hard to be enjoyed without translation, so here is a modern version, by the former soldier and one-legged champion of Middle English verse, the late Brian Stone. The owl is having a go at the nightingale over her merely physical view of sex, and its effect on the common people:

In summer peasants lose their sense

And jerk in mad concupiscence:

Theirs is not love’s enthusiasm,

But some ignoble, churlish spasm,

Which having achieved its chosen aim,

Leaves their spirits gorged and tame.

The poke beneath the skirt is ended,

And with the act, all love’s expended.

Much of the fun in the poem comes from the side-swipes: the infuriated nightingale attacks the owl for choosing to sing at night in the very place where country people go to defecate, giving us a rare insight into medieval toilet habits:

Perceiving man’s enclosure place,

Where thorns and branches interlace

To form a thickly hedged retreat

For man to bide his privy seat,

There you go, and there you stay;

From clean resorts you keep away.

When nightly I pursue the mouse,

I catch you by the privy house

With weeds and nettles overgrown –

Perched at song behind the throne.

Indeed you’re likely to appear

Wherever humans do a rear.

As to the charge that the nightingale, representing the saucy Continental troubadour and courtly love tradition, is spreading immorality amongst the English people, the songbird first responds that she isn’t to blame for the brutal behaviour of some husbands, who drive their wives to desperate straits:

The husband got the final blame.

He was so jealous of his wife

He could not bear, to save his life,

To see her with a man converse,

For that would break his heart, or worse.

He therefore locked her in a room –

A harsh and savage kind of doom.

This chauvinist husband gets what he deserves. Next, the nightingale goes on to champion the rights of girls to love whom they want. In a culture where the man of the house claimed rights over the women around him, this would have caused a lively chatter of argument among the listeners:

A girl may take what man she chooses

And doing so, no honour loses,

Because she did true love confer

On him who lies on top of her.

Such love as this I recommend:

To it, my songs and teaching tend.

But if a wife be weak of will –

And women are softhearted still –

And through some jester’s crafty lies,

Some chap who begs and sadly sighs,

She once perform an act of shame,

Shall I for that be held to blame

If women will be so unchaste,

Why should the slur on me be placed?

The poem is a self-conscious literary confection, harking back to a long tradition of debate-poetry in Latin and French literature, and using many of the legal tricks and twists of the contemporary law. It doesn’t refer only to the recently deceased Henry II, but to the Pope and a papal embassy to Scandinavia; it’s very much a poem of its time. But for us, it’s perhaps most interesting for the way it illuminates, almost by accident, changing attitudes. By the late 1100s, thanks to the Plantagenets, southern England was firmly part of the wider European culture dominated by the French. One strongly gets the sense in the poem that the other British, to the north and west, are no longer regarded as ‘one of us’ but as incomprehensible and threatening barbarians. As today, a divide is opening up across the archipelago. The owl, who is of course heard all over the place, attacks the nightingale for sticking to the soft southern landscape:

You never sing in Irish lands

Nor ever visit Scottish lands.

Why can’t the Norsemen hear your lay,

Or even men of Galloway?

Of singing skill those men have none

For any song beneath the sun.

Why don’t you sing to priests up there

And teach them how to trill the air?

To this, the nightingale replies with a ferocious description of the other British:

The land is poor, a barren place,

A wilderness devoid of grace,

Where crags and rocks pierce heaven’s air,

And snow and hail are everywhere –

A grisly and uncanny part

Where men are wild and grim of heart,

Security and peace are rare,

And how they live they do not care.

The flesh and fish they eat are raw;

Like wolves, they tear it with the paw.

They take both milk and whey for drink;

Of other things they cannot think,

Possessing neither wine nor beer.

They live like wild beasts all the year

And wander clad in shaggy fell

As if they’d just come out of hell.

This is a poem still encrusted with the letters and spellings, as well as much of the archaic language, of an English we can no longer understand. That’s terribly sad, because in its energy, humour and eye for detail it stands up well to Chaucer himself. It’s interesting too because it ignores what was rapidly becoming the central story the British were telling about themselves.

At some point after the Norman Conquest, the people of Britain begin to spin new and more ambitious theories about their origins. The tales of the ancient Greeks and Romans had never quite disappeared, so along with the Bible there were ideas about the origins of humanity and civilisation preserved in the monasteries and courts. But the world of the ancient heroes and the Jews of the Bible must have been worryingly disconnected from the here-and-now of medieval Britain: did ‘we British’ emerge merely from barbarian tribes, or was there a more noble and respectable descent? Presumably this didn’t much worry the fishermen of the east coast or the peasants of Wiltshire, but it certainly concerned baronial and royal courts.

So now we get chronicles which connect Britain to the earliest times of all. The Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a Latin history of the kings of Britain. It begins with the Trojan wars, and claims that the British Isles were settled by the descendants of Virgil’s hero Aeneas – his great-grandson Brutus arrived via the Devon settlement of Totnes, giving his name to Britain, and so on. Geoffrey, writing in around 1136, was regarded as a terrible liar by some of his contemporaries, but this notion of a connection reaching back to the Trojans proved long-lasting and popular. It probably began in Welsh and other oral literatures now lost to us. There is also a long tradition of romances and stories based on Danish or German originals, which linger in the oral tradition until they pop up as popular ballad-like poems, stanzaic or metrical romances, in the 1300s. These are ‘Horn’, ‘Guy of Warwick’, ‘Bevis of Hampton’ and the like. They were well-known in Chaucer’s time, and in Shakespeare’s, and in the case of ‘Bevis’, well into the early modern age. But they are little-known now, and perhaps for good reason. They tend to be all action, with the slaying of numerous foreign enemies – Saracens or Muslims above all – flesh-eating boars and dragons, and treacherous emperors and knights. Blood, gore, the ravishing or saving of maidens, sudden and unlikely reversals of fortune, and a hero with almost supernatural powers … They tell us, at least, that the British have always loved a good story, and have never been keen on foreigners.

The opening of a north-western poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, written 250 years after Geoffrey of Monmouth, tells us that as soon as Troy had been reduced to ashes, Aeneas and his descendants spread across the west, with Romulus founding Rome and Brutus, charging across from France, founding Britain: his dynasty eventually produced King Arthur. Many of the popular romances, translated into English from Norman French, are about the doings of Arthurian knights. Arthur also features in the Original Chronicle of a Scottish priest, Andrew of Wyntoun. He says that it was Brutus who first cleared Britain of giants and founded its human story: his three sons then divided the islands between them. Wyntoun, with impressive ambition, tries to write a history of modern Scotland that connects it without a break to the creation of the world by God. It’s important to him that the Scots arrived in Britain before the English. So he tells a complicated tale about a hero, Gedyl-Glays, who marries the daughter of a pharaoh, Scota, and settles in Spain. Their descendants occupy Ireland and thence arrive in Scotland, clutching the Stone of Destiny.

All of this stitching together of biblical history, the ancient myths, Arthur and the modern story of the British may not matter much to us today, but it was incredibly important to the medieval mind. It gave people in the rainy northern isles a sense of belonging to the wider human story, an essential dignity. And whether it was the Scottish priest in his tiny monastery by the edge of a loch, or the anonymous, magically gifted northern English poet who wrote Gawain, or Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in Oxford with his tongue in his cheek, these zigzagging genealogies always seemed to foreground one single name, the man who became the ultimate British hero – and perhaps still is.

Sir Gawain, who slew the green knight, was a member of King Arthur’s court, a Knight of the Round Table. Andrew of Wyntoun says that at the time of the first Pope Leo in Rome, when Lucius was Roman emperor, the ‘King of Brettane than wes Arthour’ … And not of Britain alone. Rather than a misty, romantic figure hanging around Avalon, King Arthur was regarded as the ultimate military overlord – Andrew reckons that his conquests included France, Lombardy, Flanders, Holland, Brabant, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Orkney ‘and all the isles in the sea’. He made Britain all one realm, free from foreign claims.

It’s clear that the first references to Arthur come not from English, but from early Welsh sources. If Arthur ever existed as a historic figure – and it’s a big ‘if’ – he was probably a Romano-British knight, leading campaigns against the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Between 800 and 900 he is described as a leader of the ‘British’ – i.e. not the Saxons. In the poem Y Goddodin, mentioned earlier, there is a glancing reference. It’s clear that the retreating British people kept his name alive as a symbol of heroic resistance.

To begin with, the Norman chroniclers regarded him as a ridiculous fantasy of the people they were busily oppressing. William of Malmesbury wrote around 1125 of ‘Arthur, about whom the foolish tales of the Britons rave even today; one who is clearly worthy to be told about in truthful histories rather than to be dreamed about in deceitful fables’; and seventy years later William of Newburgh attacked his rival Geoffrey of Monmouth as ‘a writer … who, in order to expiate the faults of these Britons, weaves the most ridiculous figments of imagination around them, extolling them with the most impudent vanity above the virtues of the Macedonians and the Romans’.

Norman hostility to Arthur is interesting. It suggests that by the time of the Conquest the Saxons (against whom this Welsh hero fought) had already taken him over as one of their own, and saw him as their symbol of resistance to the latest, French-speaking, invaders. But Arthur proves a prize for almost everyone: almost immediately, French poets are appropriating him in turn, and he will flower as a Europe-wide hero and an enduring symbol of chivalry. During the medieval period he is steadily transformed and reshaped into the very image of Christian, knightly behaviour, a hero for all the new British – Welsh-speaking, Saxons and Norman French as well. He becomes, to all intents and purposes, the symbol of Britishness as the country coagulates.

If we want to understand how the medieval British understood themselves, the Arthur poems can’t be ignored. One of the greatest, written around 1400, is the so-called Alliterative Morte Arthure, beautifully translated for modern times by the contemporary poet Simon Armitage. This King Arthur, like Andrew of Wyntoun’s, is an expansive military conqueror. His realm covers France, Germany and Scandinavia, as well as all of Britain; and he claims lordship over Rome itself, as well as all of northern Italy. The enemy is a combination of the Roman emperor Lucius with his Mediterranean allies, who, unhistorically, include Muslim warlords ‘from Babylon and Baghdad’, alongside Greek and Egyptian kings and Roman senators. No doubt this reflects the patriotic mood of England after the great victories against France of the early phase of the Hundred Years War, as well as the effect of centuries of crusading against ‘Saracens’. The result is a medieval world war epic, extremely gory. Consider the unhappy but typical fate of a certain Sir Kay:

Then keen Sir Kay made ready and rode,

went challenging on his charger to chase down a king,

and landed his lance from Lithuania in his side

so that spleen and lungs were skewered on the spear;

with a shudder the shaft pierced the shining knight,

shooting through his shield, shoving through his body.

But as Kay drove forward, he was caught unfairly

by a lily-livered knight of royal lands;

as he tried to turn the traitor hit him,

first in the loins, then further through the flank;

the brutal lance buried into his bowels,

burst them in the brawl, then broke in the middle.

It’s a poem probably based on much earlier oral sources, but by 1400 it’s a modern poem too. It tells us a lot about the truth of medieval combat. In 1996, for instance, workmen at a site by the town of Towton in Yorkshire uncovered a mass grave of men killed during the battle there in 1461, just sixty years after this poem. The skeletons, stripped of their armour, showed horrific injuries. One had had the front of his skull bisected and then a second deep slash across the face splitting the bone, followed by another horizontal cut from the back. It is estimated that 3 per cent of the entire adult population of England took part in the battle, in which 28,000 people died. The corpses of the dead were said to have been mutilated, and evidence from the skeletons suggests that ears and tongues and noses were hacked off.

The audience for this poem, clearly made to be read aloud on long winter nights, well understood what a bloody butchery contemporary warfare was; but they also seem to have had an almost modern enthusiasm for the grotesque. They had been brought up on the stories of Bevis and Guy of Warwick, and our poet knows what they want. At times he sounds like a scriptwriter for a horror movie, as for instance when Arthur comes across a French cannibal giant who has just had his wicked way with an unfortunate princess:

How disgusting he was, guzzling and gorging

lying there lengthways, loathsome and unlordly,

with the haunch of a human thigh in his hand.

His back and his buttocks and his broad limbs

he toasted by the blaze, and his backside was bare.

Appalling and repellent pieces of flesh

of beasts and our brothers were braising there together,

and a cook-pot was crammed with Christian children,

some spiked on a spit …

Poems reflect the politics of their time. By 1400, when the English and the Scots were at war again and the great Welsh rebellion of Owen Glendower was at its height, King Arthur, once a Welsh hero who fought for Edinburgh, can no longer represent all the people of Britain. In this English poem,when he returns to confront his great enemy Mordred, he meets an army of all England’s foes – Danes, Muslims and Saxons – and also

Picts, pagans and proven knights

of Ireland and Argyll, and outlaws of the Highlands.

English archers confront them. Mordred flees to Wales. King Arthur has, in the hands of a few generations of poets, completely changed sides.

But he always belongs to the people, fed on romances and ballads. The anonymous poem Gawain and the Green Knight is the most earthy and local-feeling of any work written in English in medieval times. It was produced, probably in Lancashire or Cheshire, by an educated writer born around 1330; and it was only rediscovered in a manuscript during the nineteenth century. It is, like the previous poem, alliterative rather than rhymed, though there are short rhyming lines, and it brims with the mystery and chilliness of the old English north. Very early on the poet insists that it’s the kind of story the common people knew:

I’ll tell it straight, as I in town heard it,

with tongue;

as it was said and spoken

in story staunch and strong,

with linked letters loaded,

as in this land so long.*

He protests too much. What we are really going to get is an extremely complex, beautifully patterned work, full of symbolism, eroticism and a courtly ethic which has more to do with the French romances than anything else in English we know of. But the poet’s assertion that Arthurian tales are part of popular culture – ‘in town … as it was said and spoken’ – feels right. There must have been a huge, now lost oral culture of poems and stories in medieval England, as there was in the Gaelic lands of Ireland and Scotland and Wales.

The Gawain story is, on the surface, a simple one. Arthur and his knights are feasting at Christmas, looking for a seasonal game to play. Then the door blows open and a green giant arrives, not very jolly …

a dreadful man,

the most in the world’s mould of measure high,

from the nape to the waist so swart and so thick,

and his loins and his limbs so long and so great

half giant on earth I think now that he was;

but the most of man anyway I mean him to be,

and that the finest in his greatness that might ride,

for of back and breast though his body was strong,

both his belly and waist were worthily small,

and his features all followed his form made

and clean.

Wonder at his hue men displayed,

set in his semblance seen;

he fared as a giant were made,

and over all deepest green.

He calmly rides, on his huge green horse, into the hall with a strange challenge: one of the knights can have a free go at beheading him with an axe, and if the giant survives, the knight must take a blow in return, not flinching, a year from now. They are understandably nervous, but Sir Gawain takes up the challenge, and slices off the giant’s head. He promptly gets to his feet, picks it up, pops it under his arm and walks out. As he leaves, the severed head calmly and mockingly repeats the deal. Fast forward a year, and Gawain has set out on his quest through freezing dark forests to find the giant and offer his neck to the axe. He is riding through a landscape full of monsters and challenges, but also a real Britain:

He had no friend but his steed by furze and down,

and no one but God to speak with on the way,

till that he neared full nigh to northern Wales.

All the Isle of Anglesey on the left hand he held,

and fared over the fords by the forelands,

over at Holyhead, till he reached the bank

in the wilderness of Wirral – few thereabouts

that either God or other with good heart loved.

On Christmas Eve, he finally finds a mysterious castle that seems to float in a green landscape untouched by winter. He is welcomed by its lord, Bertilak. Over the next three days Gawain will stay in the castle and they will exchange gifts. But Bertilak’s wife tries hard to seduce our hero while her husband is away hunting. He doesn’t give way, except for kisses and accepting a green garter from her. Then he rides off to find the giant at his Green Chapel. The first time he kneels for the axe he flinches away, and the giant mocks him. The second time, the giant misses. The third time his blade cuts Gawain, but only slightly. He reveals himself as Bertilak, who has known all along about the attempted seduction – a test of Gawain’s nobility which he (almost) passed. Gawain returns to Arthur’s court to tell his story.

Laid out like that, the poem is a straightforward enough magical romance – the monster, the wicked lady, the tempted hero, the test, the happy outcome. It is structured around triplets – three journeys, three scenes in court, three tests, and so on. It’s a longer version of the kind of story we can imagine being told around hundreds of medieval hearths. But what my account misses is everything that is really important here – the contrast between the warm, luxurious, succulent world of the castles and the bare, icy, threatening landscape of cliffs and forests beyond; the psychological subtlety of erotic temptation struggling with Christian morality; the genuine menace of the green knight as he mocks Arthur’s court. These aren’t idealisations or symbols but real people, caught up in a world of magical threats and spiritual redemption that feels very much like the world of the early 1400s. Here, for example, is Gawain snug in bed in Bertilak’s castle, as his wife tries to seduce him one morning while her husband is out hunting the deer:

Thus larks the lord by linden-wood eaves,

while Gawain the good man gaily abed lies,

lurks till the daylight gleams on the walls,

under canopy full clear, curtained about.

And as in slumber he lay, softly he heard

a little sound at his door, and it slid open;

and he heaves up his head out of the clothes,

a corner of the curtain he caught up a little,

and watches warily to make out what it might be.

It was the lady, the loveliest to behold,

that drew the door after her full silent and still,

and bent her way to the bed; and the knight ashamed,

laid him down again lightly and feigned to sleep.

And she stepped silently and stole to his bed,

caught up the curtain and crept within,

and sat her full softly on the bedside

and lingered there long, to look when he wakened.

The lord lay low, lurked a full long while,

compassing in his conscience what this case might

mean or amount to, marvelling in thought.

But yet he said to himself: ‘More seemly it were

to descry with speech, in a space, what she wishes.’

Then he wakened and wriggled and to her he turned,

and lifted his eyelids and let on he was startled,

and signed himself with his hand, as with prayer, to be

safer.

With chin and cheek full sweet,

both white and red together,

full graciously did she greet,

lips light with laughter.

‘Good morning, Sir Gawain,’ said that sweet lady,

‘You are a sleeper unsafe, that one may slip hither.

Now are you taken in a trice, lest a truce we shape,

I shall bind you in your bed, that you may trust.’

All laughing the lady made her light jests.

This is as vividly imagined, and as sexy, as any modern novel. Chaucer himself couldn’t have done it better, and it’s a fit entrant, perhaps, for the Good Sex Awards. Here, by contrast, is a description of Bertilak’s men slicing up the animals he’s killed while out hunting. As you enjoy it, remember that we, like Gawain, are waiting for the moment, which cannot be far off, when he has to present his own neck to the green giant’s blade … This isn’t really just about dead deer.

Some that were there searched them in assay,

and two fingers of fat they found on the feeblest.

Then they slit the slot, and seized the first stomach,

shaved it with sharp knives, and knotted the sheared.

Then lopped off the four limbs and rent off the hide,

next broke they the belly, the bowels out-taking,

deftly, lest they undid and destroyed the knot.

They gripped the gullet, and swiftly severed

the weasand from the windpipe and whipped out the guts.

Then sheared out the shoulders with their sharp knives,

hauled them through a little hole, left the sides whole.

Then they slit up the breast and broke it in twain.

And again at the gullet one then began

rending all readily right to the fork,

voiding the entrails, and verily thereafter

all the membranes by the ribs readily loosened …

We are, all of us, only animals in the end, fragile bags of slithering flesh; if Gawain is tempted by the sins of the flesh, we have a horrible presentiment about where it will end for him. The symbolism of this poem is rich enough to keep whole departments of English academics hard at work for decades. The green giant is closely related to the ‘green man’ myths of Saxon England – in a way, he stands for authentic, menacing Britishness against the Frenchified civilisation of the beautiful castles. But the beheading test comes from ancient Welsh and Irish sources. The poem is partly about Christians trying to live in a world that remains unredeemed and pagan: there are complicated symbolic games based on the pentangle of Christian truth, and almost every aspect of Gawain’s armour and clothing has a specific meaning. The whole story takes place at Christmas, the time of Christ’s birth, and is therefore saturated with spiritual promise. In the end, our hero is redeemed. Yet beyond all that, this is a story about scared, horny human beings trying to enjoy themselves, do the right thing, and stay safe in a cold, dangerous world. There’s nothing else like it in English.

That includes the other poems thought to be by the same poet – the moving Christian reflection on the death of his two-year-old daughter, ‘Pearl’, and two other religious poems, ‘Patience’ and ‘Cleanness’. But for the great Christian poem of this period we have to travel due south from the Wirral, to the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It’s there that a shadowy figure, probably a cleric at Oxford, called William Langland, set his allegory of virtue and corruption, Piers Plowman. It has nothing to do with the world of Arthur or knightly virtues; it’s an angry poem about the here-and-now of an England where corrupt clerics and greedy priests have far too much power. It’s the first poem we’ve discussed which could be called in any real sense political. Like the work of the Gawain poet, in order to understand it most of us now need it translated – though only just. This is how it famously begins:*

In a summer season when soft was the sun,

I clothed myself in a cloak as I shepherd were,

Habit like a hermit’s unholy in works,

And went wide in the world wonders to hear.

But on a May morning on Malvern hills,

A marvel befell me of fairy, methought.

I was weary with wandering and went me to rest

Under a broad bank by a brook’s side,

And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the waters

I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry.

Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,

That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.

As I looked to the east right into the sun,

I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;

A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,

With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight

A fair field full of folk found I in between,

Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,

Working and wandering as the world asketh.

Some put them to plow and played little enough,

At setting and sowing they sweated right hard

And won that which wasters by gluttony destroy.

So here we are again in a recognisable English landscape – a gentler, more rolling landscape than that of the forested north-west, but like it a landscape being reshaped and restructured by belief. A hilltop becomes a tower, a symbol of Christian truth; a dale becomes a dark dungeon, standing for evil and the underworld. Between them, unheeding, are all the plain people of England, the kind of busy crowd a medieval writer would rarely come across, except at a fair. And we are away, in a country ravaged by unfairness, in which the poor sweat and the rich guzzle. Langland compares the poor to mice being torn by cruel cats. He’s clearly a man who knows London and the ways of the wealthy, corrupt clerics and their allies. His vision, however, gives us a social portrait of the British of a kind we haven’t had before. Here, for instance, he’s having a go at lawyers – a favourite target of radical writers over the centuries.

There hovered an hundred in caps of silk,

Serjeants they seemed who practised at Bar,

Pleading the law for pennies and pounds,

And never for love of our Lord unloosing their lips.

You might better measure the mist on the Malvern hills,

Than get a sound out of their mouth unless money were showed.

Barons and burgesses and bondmen also

I saw in this crowd as you shall hear later.

Bakers and brewers and butchers a-many,

Woollen-websters and weavers of linen,

Tailors and tinkers, toll-takers in markets,

Masons and miners and men of all crafts.

Of all kinds of labourers there stood forth some;

Ditchers and diggers that do their work ill

And spend all the day singing …

Cooks and their knaves cried ‘Pies, hot pies!

Good pork and good goose!’

So, roadworkers standing around leaning on their shovels rather than getting on with it, and takeaway food … The joy of Piers Plowman is often how extraordinarily modern it feels, behind the cloak of a medieval religious sermon. But it isn’t modern; this is a view of the world in which everything has a religious meaning and significance. A poem like this one can remind us how different life must have felt when, for instance, events as banal as high winds and bad weather were thought to be a sign from God:

He proved that these pestilences were purely for sin,

And the south-west wind on Saturday at even

Was plainly for pure pride and for no point else.

Pear-trees and plum-trees were puffed to the earth

For example, ye men that ye should do better.

Beeches and broad oaks were blown to the ground,

Turned upwards their tails in token of dread

That deadly sin at doomsday shall undo them all.

This world is not our world, yet Piers Plowman keeps its wild vitality when Langland feels obliged to be explicit about the terrible behaviour he is condemning. It’s not all the corruption of the rich, but also the swinish behaviour of the ordinary Briton. Here for instance is Gluttony hard at the beer in his local pub, drinking away with ratcatchers, roadsweepers, fiddlers, horse dealers and needle sellers:

There was laughing and lowering and ‘Let go the cup!’

They sat so till evensong singing now and then,

Till Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill.

His guts ’gan to grumble like two greedy sows;

He pissed a pot-full in a paternoster-while;

And blew with the bugle at his backbone’s end,

That all hearing that horn held their nose after

And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze.

It’s perhaps only the fact that the amount of time taken to piss out so much beer is measured not in minutes but by how long it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer that reminds us that this beery scene comes from a very different England.

I hope by now I’ve convinced you that medieval poetry in English is a bigger and more exciting field than just Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet that portly, self-deprecating, white-bearded London civil servant is unavoidable, a mountain in our landscape – the man who transforms English poetry more than any other in the medieval period. His great contemporaries Gower and Lydgate have virtually disappeared from the common culture, but Chaucer is different, and always has been. He was published in Tudor times and appropriated, despite his Catholic world, by the new England of the Protestant reformers: Shakespeare certainly knew his work.

And indeed, we all know our Chaucer, don’t we – jokes about farts and fat women, the long-winded knights, parsons and the other pilgrims as they jolt and bicker their way towards Canterbury, this Chaucer who is the essence of unabashed celebratory Englishness, and the father of English poetry. These days when we say ‘Chaucerian’ we seem to mean simply lecherous and drunk. But a prolonged swim in the ocean of English verse this extraordinary man produced reminds us that his world was much more European than simply English, and that he saw himself as the inheritor and passer-on of Latin, French and Italian culture. Indeed, everything in Chaucer looks not just south to Canterbury, but south to the Continent too. If the Gawain poet stands for the wintry north, and Langland with his crowd of folk sprawls across the Midlands, Chaucer is emphatically the poet of London. His victory is also the victory of London over the rest of Britain.

London in Chaucer’s time, almost as much as London today, depended upon trade and intercourse with Europe. The courts of Chaucer’s three kings – the Plantagenets Edward III and Richard II, and the Lancastrian Henry IV – were all deeply intertwined with French affairs. The to and froing of clerics, official embassies, artisans, merchants and bankers made London feel different from (and superior to) anywhere else in Britain. Chaucer himself came from a family of merchant wine-sellers, and spent his life on the fringes of the court. He served in the army in France, and was ransomed; he was connected to John of Gaunt through marriage; he received money as the king’s valet and was sent abroad on royal commissions. He made repeated trips to France and Italy, where he may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio; he worked as a civil servant, responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames, and received money from three different monarchs, neatly negotiating the complex and lethal politics of the medieval monarchy. Chaucer was, in short, what we would call a member of the London political establishment, as smoothly elite as Langland was rebelliously crude.

His early poetry owes a lot to the traditions of French courtly romance; later he would pick up the newly fashionable poetry of Florence and northern Italy; and only in later life, when he was well established, would he turn to the stories and idioms of the urban English. It’s an unfair and ungenerous thought, but perhaps, along with his duller contemporary John Gower, he was simply too successful for the greater good of British poetry, helping push out the language and the alliterative techniques used further north.

Chaucer’s earlier poetry, with strong French influences, isn’t much about the contemporary world of medieval England. These early poems are fun, and make light work of the heavy learning they are based on; but they’re not the Chaucer we know today. As he moves from French influence to Italian, with a longer, more flexible line, and steadily greater vocabulary, he comes more into focus. First in his almost novel-like poem of love betrayed, Troilus and Criseyde, and then in the Tales themselves, this small, sharp-eyed bureaucrat proves himself above all a brilliant observer – of everything from clothing to the twists and turns of how we fool ourselves.

But the more you read of Chaucer, the more you realise that his medieval characters are not much like us. They experience a complicated, religion-saturated existence. Saints are real, and Purgatory looms for sinners. Daily life is governed by the movement of the planets, and explained by a complex web of folklore. Living so close to animals, birdlife and flora, the Chaucerian English find allegory in everything. As Chaucer shows us in his ‘Parliament of Fowls’, every bird has its own stories and its own meaning:

The noble falcon, who with his feet will strain

At the king’s glove; sparrow-hawk sharp-beaked,

The quail’s foe; the merlin that will pain

Himself full oft the lark for to seek;

There was the dove with her eyes meek;

The jealous swan, that at his death does sing;

The owl too, that portent of death does bring;

The crane, the giant with his trumpet-sound;

The thief, the chough; the chattering magpie;

The mocking jay; the heron there is found;

The lapwing false, to foil the searching eye;

The starling that betrays secrets on high;

The tame robin; and the cowardly kite;

The rooster, clock to hamlets at first light;

The sparrow, Venus’ son; the nightingale,

That calls forth all the fresh leaves new;

The swallow, murderer of the bees.*

And on and on … But it isn’t just birds that have special meanings in the medieval world. Almost everything carries a story, even – from the same poem – different kinds of wood:

The builder’s oak, and then the sturdy ash;

The elm, for pillars and for coffins meant;

The piper’s box-tree; holly for whip’s lash;

Fir for masts; cypress, death to lament;

The ewe for bows; aspen for arrows sent;

Olive for peace; and too the drunken vine;

Victor’s palm; laurel for those who divine.

However, as Chaucer’s other poems make clear, this is a world in which numerous divine influences, including the gods of ancient Rome and Greece, are still felt and thought to be potent. At a social level there is a huge, complicated and expensive hierarchy of priests, nuns and their servants, always present. For the upper classes there is of course a chivalric honour code which matters more than life itself.

Yes, as every schoolchild knows – or used to know – Chaucer’s characters have bawdy appetites, are corrupt or cruel, and regularly fart. But as every student soon learns, this is a false familiarity. With its iron hierarchies of class and caste, its guilds, beggars, religious con-artists and its sense that allegory is ubiquitous, Chaucer’s England is closer to the more remote parts of Hindu India than to anywhere in today’s Britain. Far from being the rollicking essence of Englishness, his characters spent a great deal of their time overseas – as did Chaucer himself. His knight, for instance, has fought in Alexandria in Egypt, in Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain and North Africa, as well as modern-day Turkey and Syria. For Chaucer’s religious characters, Rome is the real capital of the world. Or take that most famous and homely of the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury:

A good WIFE was there from next to BATH,

But pity was that she was somewhat deaf.

In cloth-making she was excellent,

Surpassing those of Ypres and of Ghent.

… Her kerchiefs were finely wove I found;

I dare to swear those weighed a good ten pounds,

That on a Sunday she wore on her head.

Her hose were of a fine scarlet red,

And tightly tied: her shoes full soft and new.

Bold was her face, and fair and red of hue.

Had been a worthy woman all her life;

Husbands at the church-door she had five,

Besides other company in her youth –

No need to speak of that just now, in truth.

And thrice had she been to Jerusalem;

She had crossed many a foreign stream.

At Boulogne she had been, and Rome,

St James of Compostella, and Cologne,

And she knew much of wandering by the way,

Gap toothed was she, truthfully to say.

We remember the five husbands, the jolly clothing, even the gap in her teeth – she starts to feel almost like a female Falstaff – but how often do we remind ourselves that the wife of Bath spent so much time gallivanting across Europe?

So why, some people will be wondering, is Chaucer still so vastly popular when so many medieval poets have faded from view? The great trick he pulls off in The Canterbury Tales is, as different characters tell different stories, discovering a multitude of voices. So the pious and learned Chaucer can mimic a foul-mouthed miller; and it’s through this ventriloquism that we hear (we hope) the voices of the ruder, cruder medieval British. We also get that wonderful, concrete description Chaucer is so famous for. ‘The Miller’s Tale’ starts with that oldest of stories – the foolish older man, in this case a carpenter, who has taken for his wife a much younger and sexier teenager called Alison. We know what’s going to happen next. A lecherous student called Nicholas becomes Alison’s lover, and persuades the carpenter that he has had a vision of the future. There is going to be a second flood, like Noah’s; to escape drowning, the carpenter agrees to be suspended in a tub, usefully well out of the way of the two lovers. But it turns out there is a third man, Absalon, who works for the parish priest and is also in love with Alison:

Up rose this jolly lover, Absalon,

And gaily dressed to perfection is,

But first chews cardamom and liquorice,

To smell sweet, before he combs his hair.

Then he goes to Alison’s window and begs for a kiss. She, the minx, has other ideas. What follows is filthy, but is also one of the most famous scenes in Chaucer:

Then Absalon first wiped his mouth full dry.

Dark was the night like to pitch or coal,

And at the window out she put her hole,

And Absalon, had better nor worse than this,

That with his mouth her naked arse he kissed

Before he was aware, had savoured it.

Back he started, something was amiss,

For well he knew a woman has no beard.

He felt something rough, and long-haired,

And said: ‘Fie, alas, what have I done?’

‘Tee-hee!’ quoth she, and clapped the window shut,

No waxing, it seems, in medieval London. But now the story takes a darker hue. Absalon vows to take his revenge. He heats up a poker red-hot and returns to the window. He begs Alison for another kiss, in return for which he will give her a present:

First he coughed then he knocked withal

On the window, as loud as he dared

Then Alison answered: ‘Who’s there,

That knocks so? I warrant it’s a thief!’

‘Why no’ quoth he, ‘Not so, by my faith;

I am your Absalon, my sweet darling.

Of gold,’ quoth he, ‘I’ve brought you a ring.

My mother gave it me, so God me save.

Full fine it is, and carefully engraved;

This will I give you, if you will me kiss.’

Now Nicholas had risen for a piss,

And thought he would improve the jape:

He should kiss his arse ere he escape.

And he raised the window hastily,

And put his arse outside covertly,

Beyond the buttock, to the haunch-bone.

And then spoke up the clerk, Absalon:

‘Speak, sweet bird; I know not where you art.’

Then Nicholas at once let fly a fart,

As great as if it were a thunder-clap,

The clerk was nearly blinded with the blast;

Yet he was ready with his iron hot,

And Nicholas right in the arse he smote.

Off went the skin a hand’s breadth round and some;

The coulter had so burnt him on his bum,

That for the pain he thought he would die.

Could there be anything further from the bloodthirsty heroics of the alliterative poem about Arthur and his knights than this sordid tale of lower-class shenanigans? But there is an obvious connection which tells us another important truth about our forebears. It’s really rather cruel. The miller, and presumably his listeners, took great delight in the branding of Nicholas, who suffered huge pain, albeit on the backside. Just as the reality of medieval warfare was extremely brutal, and there must have been many hideously deformed and maimed ex-soldiers wandering London, so too ordinary civilian life was cruel. Children tormented animals; old women were publicly burned to death as witches; the decomposing bodies of executed criminals were left hanging in the streets. Despite the intense religiosity, despite hundreds of thousands of priests and monks, despite the noble promises of the chivalric cult, despite assumptions about the afterlife and eternal punishment for sin, this was simply a less civilised country than it is today.

It may seem that I’m making far too much out of what was meant to be simply a coarse, funny poem, but there’s so little in medieval poetry that directly describes life at the time. To the medieval mind, poetry had many purposes. It existed to educate and amuse on long winter nights; to pass on beliefs about religion and courtly, educated behaviour; to build a bridge back to the world of the ancients. But the assumption that poetry should directly reflect the dirty, often cruel and dangerous state of daily life is something that most poets would reject. Their world, apart from relative rarities such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’, is an idealised and allegorical one: poets are forever falling into dreams in which they meet the Platonic representatives of honour, love, duty or whatever it might be.

This dream world would remain hugely popular long after Chaucer died. English poetry directly after Chaucer goes into a bit of a lull. The greatest group of his followers were writing at the end of the 1400s and the beginning of the 1500s in Scotland, and not surprisingly, the poetry of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians is full of dream and allegory, and translations from the classics. But Scotland, independent politically for almost two centuries, was becoming a distinctively different country: its court poets might ape and admire the culture of London, but the country itself was both rougher and more democratic. Scotland had its own chroniclers, and just like their English equivalents they tried to tie its history back to ancient days in the Mediterranean – we have already met Andrew of Wyntoun – but its epic poets emphasise something we don’t hear much of from English poets at this time – freedom.

Since the wars of independence conducted by William Wallace and then Robert the Bruce against the English, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, Scotland had been free. It had adopted a different notion of kingship to England. In 1320 the Scots had sent a letter to the Pope expressing their view that independence from London meant a kind of freedom rare in medieval Europe. The so-called ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ asserted that ‘for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ This is the spirit of the most famous Scottish medieval poem, written by John Barbour, an Aberdonian priest who studied in Oxford and Paris. His huge epic The Brus was completed at the Scottish court in the 1370s, on a commission from the great king’s grandson, Robert II. In the tale of the independence wars, essentially an adventure story, the most famous lines are a reflection on the importance of political freedom:

A! Fredome is a noble thing

Fredome mays man to haiff lyking

Fredome all solace to man giffis,

He levys at es that freely levys.

A noble hart may haiff nane es

Na ellys nocht that may him ples

Gif fredome failyhe, for fre liking

Is yharnyt [desired] our all other thing.

Na he that ay has levyt fre

May nocht knaw weill the propyrte

The angyr na wrechyt dome [condition]

That is couplyt to foule thryldome,

But gif he had assayit it.

But if he did say, or try, it, he

Suld think fredome mar to prys

Than all the gold in warld that is.

This feels as if it was passionately written, and there are no equivalent passages in medieval poetry south of the border.

After the wars of independence, Scotland suffered a long period of terrible bad luck with its kings. That bad luck, however, gives us a rare example of poetry by a king which isn’t half bad. In March 1406 the heir to the Scottish throne, the future King James I, set off by sea to avoid his enemies at home and escape to France. But when his vessel passed close to the English coast he was captured by pirates and handed over to Henry IV of England, beginning an eighteen-year captivity under different English kings. Clearly influenced by Chaucer, James wrote an autobiographical poem now known as The King’s Quair (The King’s Book). He falls asleep – as all poets do – and dreams of the philosopher Boethius – again, almost mandatory – before describing what actually happens to him. Here is his account of boarding ship and then being captured:

Purvait of all that was us necessarye,

With wynd at will, up airly by the morowe,

Streight unto schip, no longer wold we tarye,

The way we tuke, the tyme I tald to forowe.

With mony ‘fare wele’ and ‘Sanct Johne to borowe’

Of falowe and frende, and thus with one assent

We pullit up saile and furth oure wayis went.

Upon the wawis weltering to and fro,

So infortunate was us that fremyt day

That maugré, playnly, quhethir we wold or no,

With strong hand, by forse, schortly to say,

Of inymyis takin and led away

We weren all, and broght in thair contree:

Fortune it schupe non othir wayis to be.

King James’s story ends quite well. He hears a lady singing and is entranced by her. This will be his own bride in real life, Joan Beaufort, with whom he eventually returns to Scotland. There he wasn’t a bad king, but became entangled in English wars, as Scottish kings mostly did, and was eventually murdered by his uncle, another occupational hazard of Scottish monarchy. But James shared one thing with the best of his subjects – his enthusiasm for Chaucer and the new developments in English verse. The Scottish renaissance was late and brief, but its flowering was extraordinary; and whatever the country’s political freedom, for literary inspiration its writers looked south.

Gavin Douglas, a member of one of the most powerful Scottish families, and later an eminent churchman and diplomat, was the first person writing in any form of English to translate Virgil’s Aeneid, producing a powerful and gripping version. Robert Henryson, a cleric from Fife, wrote a series of dream poems and witty animal fables, and also a coda to Chaucer, the Testament of Cresseid. His great virtue is down-to-earth directness. In his tale of the country mouse and the town mouse, taken from Aesop, Henryson really makes us feel the distinction between the life of a rural peasant, constantly threatened with starvation, and the snug, smug world of a well-to-do merchant in the town – indeed, his town mouse has been elected as a city burgess, freed from any obligation to pay taxes.

This rurall mous into the wynter tyde

Had hunger, cauld, and tholit grit distres.

The tother mous that in the burgh couth byde,

Was gild brother and made ane fre burges,

Toll-fre alswa but custum mair or les

And fredome had to ga quhairever scho list

Amang the cheis and meill in ark and kist.

The town mouse goes to visit her sister in the country, but is deeply unimpressed with the poor food and humble abode, and persuades her to come to the town, where they feed richly:

with vittell grit plentie,

Baith cheis and butter upon skelfis hie,

Flesche and fische aneuch, baith fresche and salt,

And sekkis full of grotis, meile, and malt.

Efter quhen thay disposit wer to dyne,

Withowtin grace thay wesche and went to meit,

With all coursis that cukis culd devyne,

Muttoun and beif strikin in tailyeis greit.

Ane lordis fair thus couth thay counterfeit

Except ane thing, thay drank the watter cleir

Insteid of wyne bot yit thay maid gude cheir.

All is going swimmingly, until first a steward and then a cat find them. The country mouse falls into a faint, and just escapes being eaten by the cat after being played with. The cat departs, and the town mouse reappears to find her sister:

Out of hir hole scho come and cryit on hie,

‘How, fair sister! Cry peip, quhairever ye be!’

This rurall mous lay flatlingis on the ground

And for the deith scho wes full sair dredand

For till hir hart straik mony wofull stound,

As in ane fever trimbillit fute and hand.

And quhan hir sister in sic ply hir fand,

For verray pietie scho began to greit,

Syne confort hir with wordis hunny sweit.

‘Quhy ly ye thus? Ryse up, my sister deir,

Cum to your meit, this perrell is overpast.’

The uther answerit with a hevie cheir,

‘I may not eit, sa sair I am agast.’

Here, as so often in Henryson, I think you can hear the very voices of the Scottish people in the late 1400s. These and other fables tell us about life as it’s being lived. The town is full of luxuries like cheese and cooked meats, but it’s also a place of danger and rapacity. Henryson looks life squarely in the face: elsewhere he writes about leprosy and the plague. In the end, however, he has a very medieval sensibility: everything has an allegorical meaning, and the purpose of poetry is to point the moral. Here’s part of the moral drawn to the end of the story of the two mice, and it’s a familiar Christian one about the virtues of modesty and moderation. The best life is one of ‘sickerness’ – security, or safety, with only modest possessions:

Blissed be sempill lyfe withoutin dreid,

Blissed be sober feist in quietie.

Quha hes aneuch, of na mair hes he neid

Thocht it be littill into quantatie.

Grit aboundance and blind prosperitie

Oftymes makis ane evill conclusioun.

The sweitest lyfe thairfoir in this cuntrie

Is sickernes with small possessioun.

Aside from Chaucer himself, Robert Henryson seems the most lovable and humane of medieval poets. His slightly later and greater contemporary William Dunbar is a very different kettle of fish. More so than anyone before him, we feel we can get inside his mind, though it’s not always attractive. Probably born south of Edinburgh around 1460, this courtier, priest and ambassador to England and Norway speaks in his own voice, in a way that feels new. He writes, for instance, about having a migraine headache:

My heid did yak yester nicht,

This day to mak that I na micht,

So sair the magryme dois me menyie

Persying my brow as ony ganyie

That scant I luik may on the licht.*

Dunbar wasn’t a particularly nice man. He was always whingeing about money, enjoyed ferocious quarrels, and is the author of a spectacularly racist poem about a black African woman who arrives in Edinburgh by ship. But he has a directness that we rarely find before him. Here, for instance, is his furious address to the merchants of Edinburgh, whom he blames for leaving their city in an embarrassingly dilapidated state. May no one, he asks, go through the principal gates of the town without being assaulted by the stench of rotten fish – haddocks and skate – and the screams of old women and ferocious arguments, descending into mere abuse? Doesn’t this dishonour the town before strangers?

May nane pas throw your principall gaittis

For stink of haddockis and of scattis,

For cryis of carlingis and debaittis,

For feusum flyttinis of defame.

Think ye not schame,

Befoir strangeris of all estaittis

That sic dishonour hurt your name?

The dirty, stinking lanes cut out the light from the parish church; the porches in front of the houses make them darker than anywhere else in the world – isn’t it a shame that so few civic improvements have been made?

Your Stinkand Stull that standis dirk

Haldis the lycht fra your parroche kirk.

Your foirstairis makis your housis mirk

Lyk na cuntray bot heir at hame.

Think ye not schame,

Sa litill polesie to work,

In hurt and sclander of your name?

The high cross in the centre of the town should be a place of gold and silk; instead, it’s all crud and milk. The public weighing beam stinks of shellfish, tripe and haggis:

At your Hie Croce quhar gold and silk

Sould be, thair is bot crudis and milk,

And at your Trone bot cokill and wilk,

Pansches, pudingis of Jok and Jame.

Think ye not schame,

Sen as the world sayis that ilk,

In hurt and sclander of your name? …

Dunbar protests that tailors, cobblers and other low craftsmen crowd the streets, defiling them. A notorious passage leading to the main church, the so-called ‘Stinking Style’, means that the merchants are crammed together as in a honeycomb:

Tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyll

The fairest of your streitis dois fyll,

And merchantis at the Stinkand Styll

Ar hamperit in ane honycame.

Think ye not schame

That ye have nether witt nor wyll

To win yourselff ane bettir name?

The entire town is a nest of beggars; scoundrels are everywhere, molesting decent people with their cries. Even worse, nothing has been properly provided for the honest poor:

Your burgh of beggeris is ane nest,

To schout thai swentyouris will not rest.

All honest folk they do molest,

Sa piteuslie thai cry and rame.

Think ye not schame,

That for the poore hes nothing drest,

In hurt and sclander of your name?

As to the merchants themselves, who are supposed to be in charge of all this, their profits go up every day and their charitable works are less and less. You can’t get through the streets for the cries of the crooked, the blind and the lame – shame on you.

Your proffeit daylie dois incres,

Your godlie workis, les and les.

Through streittis nane may mak progres

For cry of cruikit, blind, and lame.

Think ye not schame,

That ye sic substance dois posses,

And will not win ane bettir name?

William Dunbar’s great cry of anger against the corrupt and incompetent merchants running Edinburgh concludes with a plea for reform, proper pricing and better management. He was a junior member of the court of King James IV, and one likes to hope that his passionate protests had some effect; at any rate, it’s the most vivid account of the reality of medieval streets in British poetry thus far – we could almost say English poetry, because Dunbar and his colleagues insisted that they wrote in ‘Inglis’, albeit strongly tinged with the special words and accents of contemporary Scotland.

James IV was one of the most impressive kings Scotland had had. He was multilingual, interested in everything from alchemy to shipbuilding, and he presided over a highly cultured court. Earlier, we noted the widespread influence of the old British languages – now broken up into Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Cornish. The English wars against the Welsh had helped spread the idea that the old British were barbarians. We will see this in Shakespeare later on, and by late Tudor times the wars against the Irish kick-started a strain of intra-British racism which survives today. But even in Dunbar’s Scotland, when King James was trying to pacify the Gaelic-speaking north (Dunbar used ‘Erse’ or Irish as the preferred term), there was a profound and mutually antagonistic cultural divide. In his ‘Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’ Dunbar imagines Mahoun – the devil – celebrating with Highlanders, the foreign-tongued Irish or Gaels of the north. I could try to translate for you, but it’s hardly worth it. The point is, they are barely human, and clog up even hell:

Than cryd Mahoun for a Heleand padyane.

Syne ran a feynd to feche Makfadyane

Far northwart in a nuke.

Be he the correnoch had done schout

Erschemen so gadderit him abowt,

In Hell grit rowme thay tuke.

Thae tarmegantis, with tag and tatter,

Full lowd in Ersche begowth to clatter

And rowp lyk revin and ruke.

The Devill sa devit wes with thair yell

That in the depest pot of Hell

He smorit thame with smuke.

Scotland, at least, was still deeply divided by language. In another famous poem, Dunbar engaged in what was called a ‘flyting’, a poetic competition of mutual abuse, with the poet Walter Kennedy. The two men would have stood opposite one another, probably at the court of King James, attacking each other and responding ingeniously to the insults; the competition would be judged on the complexity of the extemporised poetry as well as the invigorating level of abuse – almost identical to today’s ‘battle rap’. It’s now thought that Dunbar probably wrote the whole thing himself, although if he did, he gave some very good lines of attack to his enemy, who portrays him as a dwarfish and treacherous fool, without any control over his bowels or bladder. Dunbar attacks Kennedy for writing in Irish; and what’s interesting is that Kennedy came not from the Highlands, but from the Ayrshire coast in the Scottish south-west. The old British languages weren’t yet in full retreat.

William Dunbar could write about almost everything – the terrible winter weather, the ups and downs of court life and its politics, dancing, eating, the corruption of friars and monks, the beauties of London and his desperate need for just a bit more money. But it would be a shame to leave this wonderful writer without his greatest poem, which returns us to the ubiquitous presence of death in late-medieval Britain. Plagues, hunger and disease, not to mention wars, raiding and executions, meant that corpses were a common sight and life expectancy was short. Bodies were generally buried close to the church or under its stones, which must have meant that the smell of decomposition was something everybody knew.

In ‘Lament for the Makars’, his elegy for dead poets, Dunbar gives full vent to his terror of death. We are told that he wrote the poem when he was sick himself, and there is nothing quite like it in British medieval poetry. Timor mortis conturbat me means, roughly speaking, ‘The fear of death upends me.’

I that in hail wes, and gladnes

Am trublit now with gret seiknes,

And feblit with infermite;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Our pleasance heir is all vane glory,

This fals warld is bot transitory,

The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

Now dansand mery, now like to dee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The stanza that follows, in which Dunbar compares life to the wind rushing through reeds (‘wicker’), seems to me a small miracle of poetic skill, in which the rhythm and the meaning are indistinguishable:

No stait in erd heir standis sicker;

As with the wynd wavis the wicker,

Wavis this warldis vanite;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Death, says Dunbar, has taken the best from all the estates of life – heavily armed knights in the field, babies at the breast, champions, captains and beautiful ladies. Death has taken magicians and astrologers, rhetoricians, theologians, surgeons, physicians, and above all poets:

He hes done petuously devour,

The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,

The Monk of Bery, and Gower, al thre,

Timor mortis conturbat me.

And he is taking Scotland’s poets one by one, not forgetting Dunbar’s old enemy:

In Dumfermelyne he has done roune

With Maister Robert Henrisoun …

… Gud Maister Walter Kennedy

In poynt of dede lyis verily,

Gret reuth it were that so suld be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

And so, eventually, that great clanging Latin bell can’t be avoided by Dunbar himself, as he well knows:

Sen he hes all my brether tane,

He will nocht lat me lif alane,

On forse I man his nyxt me be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The poem has a special poignancy because, not so long after it was written, William Dunbar’s whole world was destroyed on the battlefield. In 1513 his king and patron James IV honoured a treaty with the French and invaded Northumberland, where he was confronted by the Earl of Surrey and a large English army. What followed has been described as the last great medieval battle on British soil. Though both sides used artillery, not to great effect, most of the killing was done with billhooks and spears. James, who had lingered in chivalric manner before the battle, giving the English plenty of time to prepare, was slaughtered along with a dozen earls, almost all the senior clergy of Scotland and most of the chieftains – a shattering blow to a country just emerging from a long period of feuding. The short Scottish renaissance that James had symbolised, with its poets, architects, shipwrights and men of letters, came to a juddering halt. Timor mortis, indeed.

* This translation is by A.S. Kline.

* This modern translation is taken from the Harvard internet site.

* Translation from the poetryintranslation website.

* In Scots-English, ‘yak’ means ache; to ‘mak’ is to write poetry – still in Scotland today ‘makar’ means poet; and a ‘ganyie’ is an arrow.