We British: The Poetry of a People

and out under the oak tree at dawn;

there I must sit through the long summer’s day

and there I mourn my miseries …

Along with the misery and mourning, the poet, then, understands that there are good married lives to be had. She has been forced out of her community, into the woods. We used to think of Anglo-Saxon Britain as being very heavily wooded. In fact, modern historians of the landscape tell us, much of the country had been opened up for farming for a thousand years or more.

There’s a strong sense in this poem of life being literally close to the earth, and surrounded by foliage. That’s an obvious separation from our lives today. Back then, even impressive towns were tiny and dangerous. Here is a fragment of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem about Durham, rare in being written after the Norman Conquest:

All Britain knows of this noble city,

its breathtaking sight: buildings backed

by rocky slopes appear over a precipice.

(And, particularly if you pass through by train, Durham is pretty much like that today. But hang on:)

Weirs hem and madden a headstrong river,

diverse fish dance in the foam.

Sprawling, tangled thicket has sprung up

there; those deep dales are the haunt

of many animals, countless wild beasts.

Archaeologists tell us that Anglo-Saxon Britain was studded with trading towns and urban centres huddled around churches, even if most of them, being made of wood and straw, have long disappeared. Durham, like York, got its sense of itself through the saints and missionaries buried there.

But what about the rest of the people? What sense of history did they have? Who did they think they were? We know we live in the twenty-first century. But by seven or eight centuries after the Roman legions had left, most British had no real sense of how their own history connected to that of the rest of mankind. There’s a wonderful eighth-century poem in which an Anglo-Saxon wanders through the ruins of Bath:

Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate;

the city-buildings crumble; the works of the Giants decay.

Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,

barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,

houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,

undermined by age. The Earth’s embrace,

its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;

they are perished and gone.

So who were these craftsmen, who used techniques no longer understood, and built such walls? Wrongly, the Anglo-Saxon poet, himself a representative of the people who destroyed the Romano-British world, thinks they must have been destroyed by the plague, a contemporary problem; and he imagines them as being like bigger Anglo-Saxons – warriors bestriding courts where

… Once many a man

joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour,

proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour …

Interesting, isn’t it, that passing reference to wine? But this Anglo-Saxon tourist is most impressed that these extraordinary people washed themselves, a pleasure which he almost salivates over:

Stone houses stood here; a hot spring

gushed in a wide stream; a stone wall

enclosed the bright interior; the baths

were there, the heated water; that was convenient.

They allowed the scalding water to pour

over the grey stone into the circular pool …

And in ‘The Seafarer’, the poem quoted earlier, we get a similar strong sense that the world has decayed since the great days of – presumably – the Romans. That poet speaks of:

Days little durable,

And all arrogance of earthen riches,

There come now no kings nor Cæsars

Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

Howe’er in mirth most magnified,

Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,

Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

This pessimism, so different from the Christian celebration of Caedmon, is something we should take with a pinch of salt. Anglo-Saxon Britain was full of advanced and sophisticated craftsmanship, from ornate goldwork to well-built ships and fine vellum books. No serious historian of the age now regards it simply as a time of anarchy and disaster. But if there is pessimism it is surely driven by politics – the restless, bloody tribal struggles that convulsed all of Britain, from the Picts in northern Scotland to the lands of the Jutes in southern England. Local warlordism isn’t much fun even for the warlords. It isn’t until the 800s, as the kingdom of the west Saxons pushed back against its Mercian, Northumbrian and Viking enemies, that the possibility of a dominant nation, an ‘England’, begins to emerge. Alfred the Great first managed to unite Wessex with Mercia, and then reached out until he could call himself the king of all the Anglo-Saxons. We know from a life written by the Welsh cleric Asser that Alfred was brought up on English poetry, though we don’t know what that was. As a ruler he was much more than a warlord, a highly ambitious and cultured figure, in touch with the latest developments on the Continent. Alfred personally oversaw the translation of key European Christian texts from Latin into English. He imported French and German men of letters. He began – almost, it seems, single-handedly – to forge a coherent English culture.

Despite the devastating effects of the Norse raids on monasteries, with their books, we might from this point have expected a steady growth and flowering of English poetry.

It didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen for another three centuries, again because of dynastic politics, in this case the unwanted arrival of those transplanted Vikings with their strange foreign tongue, the Normans. Eventually, the violent collision between Anglo-Saxon English and Norman French would produce a supple, flexible new language. But the hugely disruptive collision of the Conquest meant that there is a long gap after 1066 before we hear again the authentic voice of ordinary British people expressed in verse in their own language. No doubt it once existed. But it’s gone, and gone forever.

If the prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, it would have been a poetry of lamentation. The Chronicle ends by describing the coronation of the man it calls simply Count William, who despite earlier promises ‘laid taxes on people very severely’. He and Bishop Odo then ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!’

But there was more to this than the clash of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Recent scholarly work points out that the pre-Norman Conquest court of Cnut, king of most of Scandinavia as well as England (and the Canute who mocked himself by ordering back the waves) and the court of Edward the Confessor were open to Danish, German, French and Latin learning. English queens were notable early sponsors of what became French literature. Britain in this period was very much part of Europe, and its dynasties were interlinked with those of France, Sweden and Hungary. The cowherds spoke Anglo-Saxon; but on the coasts and in the towns you would have heard a chatter of Norse, Latin, French – and Welsh too. For the people speaking the old British or Celtic languages hadn’t gone away. What was their poetry like? Mostly oral, of course, and therefore mostly lost, of course. We have infuriatingly few fragments to go on, but there is an Irish poem about a fair in County Wexford, around the time of the Norman Conquest, which gives some idea of early non-English poetry in these islands:

There are the Fair’s great privileges:

trumpets, harps, hollow-throated horns,

Pipers, timpanists unwearied,

poets and meet musicians.

Tales of Find and the Fianna, a matter inexhaustible,

sackings, forays, wooings,

tablets, and books of lore,

satires, keen riddles:

Proverbs, maxims …

… The Chronicle of women, tales of armies, conflicts,

hostels, tabus, captures …

Pipes, fiddles, gleemen,

bone-players and bag-pipers,

a crowd hideous, noisy, profane

shriekers and shouters.

They exert all their efforts

for the king of seething Berba:

the King, noble and honoured,

pays for each art its proper honour.

That’s a translation, of course, by Professor Thomas Owen Clancy of Glasgow University. He makes it sound great fun – like a modern literary festival on acid. Not everybody in the so-called dark ages was having a miserable time.

2

Knights in Green Satin

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.