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The conception of the“Middle Ages”or the“Medieval Period”varies according to different categories or locations. In European history, whether it indicates a period dated from AD 476 to AD 1453 between the 5 th and the 15 th century (between the decline of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance), or in Great Britain, the period between approximately AD 1000 and AD 1400, covering over three centuries from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII, it has been a time of legitimating power of the dominants,those kings, lords, or masters. It has often been said the period was that of the chivalric tradition with cavaliers and knights struggling for power: All men in medieval times were instructed to know how to fight and were expected to readily serve their kings at any moment;soldiers were basically medieval knights, foot soldiers, and archers. As the composition and re-composition of Arthurian legends have shown, the old conception of holy power has collapsed, and the logic of“fighting for the state power and ruling the country”, as initiated from Beowulf , continued to be strengthened.
The chivalric tradition relating legends of cavaliers and knights is one of the most striking features of English medieval literature, but more of which were written in the prose romance.Layamon, the 12 th century English poet and priest, made it into the poetic form by adapting Wace's Roman de Brut [1] into Middle English alliterative verse and thus providing the earliest version of the Arthurian story in English. His Brut (c. 1190) runs to 16,095 lines, expanding on Wace and adding much new material. Composed with a long alliterative line that goes back to Old English poetry, he had the two halves of a poetic line linked by rhyme as well as by alliteration, thus revealing his close ties with Germanic literary tradition.
The topic of Arthur's legendary return is conceived in a recurrent myth about a leader or hero who has not really died, or lived in some state of suspended life and will return to save his people. The narrative goes in such that after winning the continental campaign against Lucius, Arthur is forced to return to Britain upon learning that his nephew, Mordred, whom he had left behind as regent, has usurped Arthur's throne and queen; when he was mortally wounded, he was carried off to the island of Avalon to have his wounds treated, giving over the crown to his cousin Constantine, the son of Duke Cador in the year 542; evidently, the Bretons and Welsh developed this myth about Arthur in oral tradition long before it turns up in medieval chronicles.
Arthur was mortally wounded, grievously badly;
To him there came a young lad who was from his clan,
He was Cador the Earl of Cornwall's son;
The boy was called Constantine; the king loved him very much.
Arthur gazed up at him, as he lay there on the ground,
And uttered these words with a sorrowing heart:
“Welcome, Constantine; you were Cador's son;
Here I bequeath to you all of my kingdom,
And guard well my Britons all the days of your life
And retain for them all the laws which have been extant in my days
And all the good laws which there were in Uther's days.
And I shall voyage to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens,
To the Queen Argante, a very radiant elf,
And she will make quite sound every one of my wounds,
Will make me completely whole with her health-giving potions.
And then I shall come back to my own kingdom
And dwell among the Britons with surpassing delight.”
After these words there came gliding from the sea
What seemed a short boat, moving, propelled along by the tide
And in it were two women in remarkable attire,
Who took Arthur up at once and immediately carried him
And gently laid him down and began to move off.
And so it had happened, as Merlin said before:
That the grief would be incalculable at the passing of Arthur.
The Britons even now believe that he is alive
And living in Avalon with the fairest of the elf-folk,
And the Britons are still always looking for when Arthur comes returning.
Yet once there was a prophet and his name was Merlin:
He spoke his predictions, and his sayings were the truth,
Of how an Arthur once again would come to aid the English.
The Arthurian narrative poem goes on in the Anglo-Norman tradition. After the Norman Conquest, alliterative verse continued to be recited by oral poets though composed in England in the Anglo-Norman dialect with the French vernacular. To strengthen the new order,there was a movement toward a more solitary religious life and a more personal encounter with God in the 12 th and 13 th centuries. The 14 th century produced two great English poets,Geoffrey Chaucer and the anonymous poet who wrote the Pearl , Purity, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and St. Erkenwald . During the late 14 th century there was a renewed flowering of alliterative poetry, especially in the north and west of Britain, while Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , probably written around 1400, belongs to the so-called“Alliterative Revival”. The poetic lines are longer and do not contain a fixed number or pattern of stresses like the classical alliterative meter of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but it still uses internal rhyme or alliteration: the words in each line rhyme with each other; the metrical form is called the“bob and wheel”, where each stanza ends with a short half-line of only two syllables (the bob), followed by a mini-stanza of longer lines which rhyme internally (the wheel).The poem focuses on the young Gawain, who is a knight at the legendary court of King Arthur, relating a story of knightly deeds, sexual enticement and wild landscapes. The excerpt is the denouement of the poem. [2] In addition, the Arthurian is retold again and again throughout English history,for instance, another version in the same period, the alliterative Morte Arthure , which is a 4346-line Middle English alliterative poem, retelling the latter part of the legend of King Arthur, weaving together actual, legendary, and mythic notions of war not only to celebrate heroism, but also to convey tragedy and suffering. Dating from about 1400, it is preserved in a single copy, in the early 15 th century Lincoln Thornton Manuscript.
So he winds through the wilds of the world once more,
Gawain on Gringolet, by the grace of God,
under a roof sometimes and sometimes roughing it,
and in valleys and vales had adventures and victories
but time is too tight to tell how they went.
The nick to his neck was healed by now;
thereabouts he had bound the belt like a baldric—
slantwise, as a sash, from shoulder to side,
laced in a knot looped below his left arm,
a sign that his honor was stained by sin.
So safe and sound he sets foot in court,
and when clansmen had learned of their comrade's return
happiness cannoned through the echoing halls.
The king kissed his knight and so did the queen,
and Gawain was embraced by his band of brothers,
who made eager enquiries, and he answered them all
with the tale of his trial and tribulations,
and the challenge at the chapel, and the great green chap,
and the love of the lady, which led to the belt.
And he showed them the scar at the side of his neck,
confirming his breach of faith, like a badge of blame.
He grimaced with disgrace,
he writhed in rage and pain.
Blood flowed towards his face
and showed his smarting shame.
“Regard,”said Gawain, grabbing the girdle,
“through this I suffered a scar to my skin—
for my loss of faith I was physically defaced;
what a coveting coward I became it would seem.
I was tainted by untruth and this, its token,
I will drape across my chest till the day I die.
For man's crimes can be covered but never made clean;
once entwined with sin, man is twinned for all time.”
The king gave comfort, then laughter filled the castle
and in friendly accord the company of the court
allowed that each lord belonging to their Order—
every knight in the brotherhood-should bear such a belt,
a bright green belt worn obliquely to the body,
crosswise, like a sash, for the sake of this man.
So that slanting green stripe was adopted as their sign,
and each knight who held it was honored forever,
as all meaningful writings on romance remind us:
an adventure which happened in the era of Arthur,
as the chronicles of this country have stated clearly.
Since fearless Brutus first set foot
on these shores, once the siege and assault at Troy had ceased,
our coffers have been crammed
with stories such as these.
Now let our Lord, thorn-crowned,
bring us to perfect peace. AMEN.
HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE
Known as the first English author or the“Father of English literature”, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin was considered the grammatica and most of the upper-class English spoke French. That he chose the language of the lower-class Saxons rather than Norman nobility has perplexed readers and scholars for centuries. In 1359, he joined the English army's invasion of France during the Hundred Years' War (1337—1453) and was taken prisoner. The War dominated life in England and France for well over a century. His earliest poems, The Book of the Duchess (circa 1368—1369) and The Parliament of Birds (circa 1378—1381), rest on a heavy French base. His transitional works such as Anelida and Arcite (c.1379), Parlement of Foules (c. 1382), and Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) shows his writing of the Italian influence, of which the latter can be considered as the first English novel because of the way its main characters are always operating at two levels of response, verbal and intellectual.
Chaucer's most famous work is The Canterbury Tales (circa 1375—1400). According to the original plan of 120 tales in which each of thirty pilgrims tells four, he never finished all,among which the composition of none of the tales can be accurately dated. He draws on the technique of the frame tale as practised by Boccaccio in his The Decameron (1349—1351),contributes to many recognisably“modern”novelistic techniques, including psychologically complex characters running the spectrum of the middle class from the Knight to the Pardoner and the Summoner, and subtle distinctions of the class become the focal point of the narrative.Various wars are most typically presented in The Knight's Tale , relating the romance in 2,350 lines, which Chaucer had written before beginning The Canterbury Tales , representing one of the 29 archetypes of late-medieval English society with insight and humour. The excerpt concerns a briefing of the Knight's deeds in“The Prologue”, hybridising legendary and contemporary warfare in the figure of the Knight and his tale: the Knight's many crusading battles against the Muslims in Spain, North Africa, and the Near East; and with Teutonic knights against pagans in the Baltic.
But none the less, while I have time and space,
Before my story takes a further pace,
It seems a reasonable thing to say,
What the condition was, the full array
Of each of hem, as it appeared to me,
According to profession and degree,
And what apparel they were riding in:
And at a Knight, I therefore will begin.
A knight there was, and he a worthy man,
Who, from the moment that he first began
To ride about the world, loved chivalry,
Truth, honour, freedom and all courtesy.
Full worthy was he in his liege-lord's war,
And therein had he ridden, no man more,
As well in Christendom as heathen places,
And ever honoured for his noble graces.
When we took Alexandria, he was there,
He often sat at the table in the chair
Of honour, above all nations' knights in Prussia.
In Latvia raided he, and Russia,
No christened man so often of his degree.
In far Granada the siege was he
Of Algeciras, and in Belmarie.
At Ayas was he and at Satalye
When they were won; and on the Middle Sea
At many a noble meeting chanced to be.
Of mortal battles he had fought fifteen,
And he'd fought for our faith at Tramissene
Three times in lists, and each time slain his foe.
This self-same worthy knight had been also
At one time with the lord of Palatye
Against another heathen in Turkey:
And always won he sovereign fame for prize.
Though so illustrious, he was very wise
And bore himself as meekly as a maid.
He never yet had any vileness said,
In all his life, to whatsoever might.
He was a truly perfect, gentle knight.
But now, to tell you all of his array,
His steeds were good, but yet he was not gay.
Of simple fustian wore he a jupon
Sadly discoloured by his habergeon;
For he had lately come from his voyage
And now was going on this pilgrimage.
…
But in the dome of mighty Mars the red
With different figures all the sides were spread;
This temple, less in form, with equal grace,
Was imitative of the first in Thrace:
For that cold region was the loved abode
And sovereign mansion of the warrior god.
The landscape was a forest wide and bare,
Where neither beast nor humankind repair;
The fowl that scent afar the borders fly,
And shun the bitter blast, and wheel about the sky.
A cake of scurf lies baking on the ground,
And prickly stubs, instead of trees, are found;
Or woods with knots and knares deformed and old;
Headless the most, and hideous to behold:
A rattling tempest through the branches went,
That stripped 'em bare, and one sole way they bent.
Heaven froze above, severe; the clouds congeal,
And through the crystal vault appeared the standing hail.
Such was the face without: a mountain stood
Threatening from high, and overlooked the wood;
Beneath the lowering brow, and on a bent,
The temple stood of Mars armipotent:
The frame of burnished steel, that cast a glare
From far, and seemed to thaw the freezing air.
A strait, long entry to the temple led,
Blind with high walls, and horror overhead:
Thence issued such a blast and hollow roar,
As threatened from the hinge to heave the door.
In through that door, a northern light there shone;
'Twas all it had, for windows there were none.
The gate was adamant; eternal frame!
Which, hewed by Mars himself, from Indian quarries came,
The labour of a god; and all along
Tough iron plates were clenched to make it strong.
[1] Wace (circa 1110—1180) was a Norman cleric, born on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, then part of the dukedom of Normandy. All works, including saints' lives, Le Roman de Brut (1155) , and Le Roman de Rou, were written in French verse for a lay audience, of which the former is a very free translation in eight syllable couplets of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin prose History of the Kings of Britain.
[2] Selected from Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. Lines: 2479-2531.