INTRODUCTION
 period from the Conquest to the mid-fourteenth century is not
simply an unfortunate ‘gap’ in the otherwise glorious annals of literary
writing in England, but is filled with works of great variety and distinction, mostly written in Latin or Anglo-Norman. Latin was the language
of the learned, the ‘clerks’, used for history, theology and philosophy,
religious instruction and devotion and science, but also for less learned purposes: tales and satires, lyrics and plays. The group of brilliant Anglo-Latin
historical writers produced not only memorable ‘portraits’ of contemporaries
like King Henry I and Abbot Samson, but tales of wonder and folklore.
Similarly, the Anglo-Norman writers, often ahead of their continental French
counterparts, wrote history in verse, fables and fabliaux, plays and lyrics, and
lays and romances which are among the glories of medieval Europe. And in
the midst of the history of this multilingual period, we can see the English
language continuing and changing, and writing in English slowly emerging
and eventually matching the quality of works in Latin and Anglo-Norman.
This Introduction will offer a few notes on the cultural background to this
literary flowering.
The year , a date notoriously supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
remembered by everyone in England, is certainly a very significant one in
English political history; and also in the cultural and literary history of
the world in which our writers lived. The embattled positions of earlier
historians—that it demonstrated either the obliteration of the traditions of
pre-Conquest England and suddenly brought new ideas and new enlightenment, or that it was rather part of a continuous flow, with Norman ‘achievements’ being simply the culmination of earlier Saxon development, so that,
as G. K. Chesterton ironically remarked, ‘a man may end by maintaining
T
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that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest’—have given way to less
dogmatic ones. Yet we still sometimes hear of a ‘national trauma’, and though
this is exaggerated, the year certainly was a catastrophe for some Saxons. It is
very difficult, however, to say more generally what the replacement of one
set of rulers by another would have meant to people in the eleventh
century, and how they felt about it. Some clearly felt hostility and fear; one
suspects that some others may have welcomed an end to conflict and
uncertainty, as they seem to have done after the death of Æthelred. The
situation would not have been identical with one in the modern period, if
one ‘nation state’ were to invade and ‘take over’ another. The late Saxon
kingdom had a certain unity, but it was not a purely racial one. The fathers
and grandfathers of the generation of  had themselves lived through a
Danish conquest in  and the establishment of the great AngloScandinavian empire of Cnut. Anglo-Saxon England was still in parts
Anglo-Scandinavian England in social structure and law, especially in the
old ‘Danelaw’. Indeed, the historian Sir Frank Stenton went as far as to
suggest that we ‘begin to discern two races in pre-Conquest England, differing in language, law, and social order, held together by little more than
common acquiescence in the rule of a king whose authority was narrowly
limited by custom’.1 The effects of this, with the ‘two races’ being sometimes assimilated, sometimes living side by side, continued for some considerable time, as did Scandinavian claims to the English throne. Contacts
between the North and Scandinavia continued, and stories with a Danish
element, like those of Havelok, were circulating in the twelfth century and
later. The effects of this close contact are clearly seen in the Scandinavian
place names and place-name elements (like –by) in many areas of England,
and by the considerable Scandinavian influence on the English language
(which was helped of course by the fact that English was more closely
related to Old Norse than to the languages of the Celtic inhabitants in
other parts of the British Isles).
The English language even took grammatical forms from Scandinavian—
the personal pronouns they, them and their—as well as a multitude of words,
including some which modern speakers certainly would not think of as in
any way foreign, like take or cast. And many more appear in Middle English,
as readers of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight quickly notice. Sometimes
words of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon origin survive for a while as synonyms or near-synonyms, like the ‘eggs’ and ‘eyren’ which still bothered the
fifteenth-century printer Caxton. The Old Norse language survived for a
1
Sir Frank Stenton, ‘The Danes in England’, PBA  (), p. .
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long time in parts of Britain—the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, Shetland, and
Orkney (where ‘Norn’ was still in use in the eighteenth century); even in
England inscriptions are found as late as c.. However, King Harold
Godwinson’s victory earlier in  over the Norwegian king Harold
Hardradi, the ‘last of the great Viking captains’, followed by his defeat at the
hands of Duke William of Normandy, meant a significant (but gradual)
turning away from the Scandinavian North to northern France and its connections with the developing culture of western and central Europe. (Ironically, the Normans themselves were of Scandinavian origin, but had adopted
the language and customs of the Franks.) Duke William’s invasion was part
of a larger Norman expansion led by renowned warriors in Europe, to Italy,
Sicily, and (with the crusades) to the Near East; this in turn could be seen
as part of the great medieval European expansion, brilliantly described by
Robert Bartlett.2
The consequences in England were obvious and widespread—new abbots
and bishops were installed (although the saintly Saxon bishop Wulfstan
continued at Worcester), new landlords and a new landowning class
appeared, as did a new language, which was also to have a great effect on
English. (But even here we must enter a cautious footnote about ‘newness’:
there were earlier English links with France and Normandy in the reign of
Edward the Confessor and there was a Norman faction in his court; Cnut’s
second wife Emma was a Norman princess, and her son by Æthelred grew up
in Normandy.)
Some of the consequences—the disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon noble
class, for instance—must have been a cultural shock if not a traumatic
catastrophe. There were rebellions, by landowners like Hereward and
Waltheof (Earl of Northampton, executed in , and the object of a
popular cult), but opposition seems to have been mainly local, apart
from that in the more independently minded North. Disaffected
Normans were probably as much a problem for the Conqueror as
dispossessed Saxons.
Some of the features which we would associate with modern conquests
were markedly absent. Rebellion was put down with severity, sometimes
extreme severity, but there was no ‘ethnic cleansing’, and the Conqueror does
not seem to have tried consciously to impose French, the language of the
conquerors. He made use of ‘loyal’ Englishmen who had not opposed him,
R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe : Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change –
(London, )
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and eventually was able to make use of the Saxon ‘fyrd’. He does not seem to
have been averse to all links with the past; possibly he wished to be seen as
Edward the Confessor’s true heir.
And there were more general continuities—notably in the continuing
survival of the English language, and in the fields of religion (in devotions to
the saints, and in the continuing patronage of the older monasteries) and in
law (for instance, the Quadripartitus, an edition of Anglo-Saxon laws, was
produced in the twelfth century). The historians used Bede and the AngloSaxon Chronicle. Other institutions and customs also continued (a humble
example, perhaps, is found in the ‘Life’ of Christina of Markyate, where she
acts as cupbearer at a feast for Saxon nobles).
It is not surprising that there should have been some hostility between
two peoples, distinct and with a sense of their own identity, but it does not
seem to have been the absolute, long-lived ethnic hostility so memorably
portrayed in the pages of Scott’s Ivanhoe. The two were gradually assimilated
and eventually the Normans were ‘anglicized’. This process and the reasons
for it have been much debated: among the points raised may be mentioned
the fact that the Conqueror’s army was not a purely Norman one, but
contained warriors and adventurers from elsewhere, especially Bretons and
Flemings; the suggestion that possibly Norman identity was too exclusively
bound up with an association with military prowess and success (as William
of Malmesbury says, they are ‘a people accustomed to warfare, and which
scarcely knows how to live without fighting’), and it proved relatively weak in
Italy; and the undoubted existence of intermarriage (as can be seen from a
number of our writers)—though the extent of this is debated. If we may
(rashly?) accept an offhand remark as having some validity, the Dialogus de
Scaccario (?) says that ‘now that the English and the Normans have been
dwelling together, marrying and giving in marriage, the two nations have
become so mixed that it is scarcely possible today, speaking of free men, to
tell who is English, who is of Norman race’.3
Questions of language and languages are of especial importance for the
student of literature. The French of the conquerors quickly developed the
characteristics which we now call ‘Anglo-Norman’, and evolved rapidly away
from continental French. For about  years after the Conquest, French was
the ordinary language among the upper classes, and a significant effect of
French dominance was ‘to make it easy for Englishmen to read French, and
so to learn something of the literature of France, and of Europe more widely’
3
Cited by A. C. Baugh, A History of the English Language (London, ).
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(N. Davis). French, though less closely related to English than Norse, had a
similarly profound effect on the English language. There are a great number
of loanwords, many of which are now totally assimilated—table, conceal, aid,
gentle, cry, arrive—as well as synonyms and near synonyms: kingdom/realm.
Sometimes we can detect Norman forms as against those from continental
French—catch against chase, real (as in ‘real tennis’) against royal. The words
come from a variety of areas, including, obviously, those of law, religion and
warfare. The question of how much bilingualism there was has been endlessly
discussed, and it is doubtful if we will ever be able to give an exact answer
(and, it must be remembered, ‘bilingualism’ can cover a range of linguistic
expertise). A tentative answer might be ‘a fair amount’, probably more than
allowed for in the earlier histories of the English language. In the twelfth
century, we hear of Englishmen unable to speak French, but Christina of
Markyate, who is a native English speaker, can communicate easily it seems
with the Norman abbot Geoffrey, and with two Norman archbishops.
The fact that sermons were preached in Anglo-Norman, and that the Jeu
d’Adam was probably publicly performed in England, might suggest a
reasonable degree of comprehension of French in some audiences.
Knowledge of English by Normans is often based on anecdotal evidence.
Here, King John’s loss of Normandy in the early thirteenth century was
certainly a significant event: ‘English, though not the language of prestige,
slowly became the first language of bilingual Norman speakers and in the
course of the thirteenth century slowly regained its primacy among
the languages spoken throughout England.’ (Stanley). Latin, and Latin
writings continued into the later Middle Ages and beyond. The literature
written in English in this period is distinctive in coming from a trilingual
cultural setting.
The political background to this situation is very interesting. When the
new Anglo-Norman kingdom was firmly established—towards the end of
the eleventh century—it entered a period of expansion, moving sometimes
consciously, sometimes unconsciously, towards a kind of High Kingship
of the British Isles, what R. R. Davies has called the ‘first English empire’.4
The Anglo-Norman historians wrote of the unification of England around
its king. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s vastly influential book (see No. ) had
offered a British ‘origin myth’, and this was to be captured by the English,
legitimizing claims to the domination of Britain and a revival of Arthur’s
R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles –
(Oxford, ).
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empire. England and part of Scotland had an Anglo-French model of unitary
monarchy, but surrounding areas, Gaelic-speaking Scotland, Wales, and
Ireland, proved more resistant and continued their older and different
patterns of ‘kingship’, but even in an area limited geographically and chronologically the advance of English law, English language and social systems led
to an anglicization, and sometimes to the regarding of the native inhabitants
of Ireland and Wales as ‘barbarians’ (even in Gerald of Wales’s generally
sympathetic portrayal of the habits of the Welsh we sometimes feel that we
are listening to an informant from a higher level of culture). It has been
suggested that this is where English ‘nationalism’ first began to emerge. The
effects of this political and cultural expansion were significant: as Davies says,
‘What is surely striking about the British Isles in  compared to the British
Isles of  is how much more integrated—though far from unitary—a
world they now were, and how central in that integration had been the drive,
the enterprise and ambition of the English.’ Davies suggests that this
‘anglicization’ was a distinctively insular version of a general medieval process
of ‘Europeanization’. By the earlier fourteenth century the limits had been
reached: the Scots, Welsh, and Irish were firmly refusing to be assimilated.
Langtoft, after his paean of praise for Edward I, becomes gloomy at the
prospect of future events; Robert Mannyng remarks that Merlin had foretold
that the tripartite kingdom of England, Scotland, and Wales would again be
united, but ‘what he prophesied has very remarkably not come to pass’. The
momentum of colonization seems to have fallen, and with it came a weakening of English economic and cultural dominance. England now had new
territorial ambitions, the opening of hostilities with France in , and
Edward III’s assumption of the title of King of France in . Davies detects
a growing defensive exclusiveness about claims for English law and language,
and although the fourteenth century saw the ‘triumph’ of English, this was in
England: elsewhere native languages and literary values flourished (in Wales
the stories that make up the ‘Mabinogion’ were written down in the White
Book of Rhydderch c.).
However, the cultural history of England had benefited from this expansion of England and of Europe, this sense of a society on the move, in which a
common culture emerged throughout Europe. One of the more striking
‘renewals’ of literary culture came from contact with the Celtic speakers of
Britain and their stories and tales. Benedeit’s exciting story of the voyage of St
Brendan comes ultimately from an Irish source. After the ‘Celtic revival’
instigated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, tales of Arthur, Merlin, and Tristan
became greatly popular (sometimes to the dismay of moralists) and eventually produced some of the greatest works of medieval literature. The
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linguistic barriers were crossed, often through the work of professional
interpreters or ‘latimers’, who were, it seems, commonly used in the Welsh
Marches5 (an earlier example is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth when
the Saxon Rowena (or Renwein) greeted Vortigern with ‘Laverd, was heil’,
‘he asked his interpreter what the maiden had said’—here Wace uses the
word latimiers; he may have been one himself).
Within the boundaries of England were flourishing Jewish communities
(whose activities included much else besides the large-scale lending of
money). Sadly, it seems that there was not much cultural intercourse. Perhaps
the existence of Judaism encouraged the Christian concern to demonstrate
the rationality of Christianity. There are isolated examples, usually in aid of
biblical interpretation, such as Herbert of Bosham’s twelfth-century commentary on the Psalms, or the Hebrew, Latin, and French dictionary at
Ramsey Abbey in east Anglia. But there were gruesome stories of ritual
murder, like those of William of Norwich and ‘Little’ St Hugh (cf. No. ),
and some horrific outbreaks of violence like the massacre in York in ,
before the final expulsion of the Jews by Edward I.
However, our writers interestingly show a knowledge of the wider world—
Arabic science from the twelfth century, Greek and Greek learning, especially
in the thirteenth: Adelard of Bath went to Magna Graecia; Grosseteste
used Greeks to help him with translation; Henry Aristippus made a translation of the Phaedo and the Meno for Robert of Cricklade, prior of St
Frideswide.
Literary material came from even further afield—the Eastern stories of
Petrus Alfonsi (see No. ) became part of Western culture; the story of
Barlaam and Josaphat which had been slowly travelling from the Buddhist
East was turned into Anglo-Norman by Chardri. The East was par excellence
the place of wonders, like those depicted in the Hereford Mappa Mundi of
c. or the romances of Alexander, or of stories of romance like Floris
and Blauncheflour or Boeve de Haumptone. There is even a legend (noted in
D. J. Hall’s English Mediaeval Pilgrimage)6 concerning the father of Thomas
Becket, Gilbert, who, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was imprisoned. His
captor, an emir, allowed his daughter to visit him. She fell in love and was
converted. Gilbert escaped, and she followed him, knowing only two English
words, ‘London’ and ‘Becket’, which she repeated. A jeering crowd attracted
the attention of Gilbert’s servant, and eventually she was baptized and they
5
6
See C. Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters and the Matter of Britain (Cardiff, ).
D. J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage (London, ).
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were married. Stories of the wonders of the mysterious lands of the Orient
come to a climax in our period in the fabulous journeys of ‘Mandeville’.
Our writers could, and did, participate in the cultural life of Europe. They
went to study in the cathedral schools of northern France, and to Paris. John
of Salisbury became bishop of Chartres. There were also great collections
of books in English monasteries, and although Oxford, the first English
university, was not ‘founded’, it grew from a number of schools in the
twelfth-century city. In  Gerald of Wales read his work to clerks there.
The sense of intellectual excitement, curiosity, and discovery, and the
‘humanism’ of writers like John of Salisbury, have led to the term ‘the
twelfth-century Renaissance’, and England played an important role in this;
it has indeed been said that England was the high point of the Renaissance of
the twelfth century. In the latter part of the century, the court of Henry II
and Eleanor of Aquitaine was an important centre of patronage for poets like
Peter of Blois, Wace, and other writers of verse chronicles and romances. The
troubadour Bernart de Ventadour dedicates lyrics to the English king, who
was clearly more than the suffering penitent seen by the Monk of Eynsham
(cf. No. ), punished for his affairs with fair Rosamund and others, and his
turbulent relationship with his sons.
Religion in this period was influenced by successive European movements
of reform—the founding of new orders like the Cistercians, or the coming
of the Franciscan and Dominican friars, or the reforming Lateran council of
. We can see a gradual shift from the dominance of the monasteries to the
concerns of the parish, and to the concerns of the individual layperson.
England had its own developments. In the earlier part of our period, the
advent of ‘Anselmian’ devotion with its stress on the importance of meditation and the use of memory and imagination was clearly significant, and
probably encouraged the growth of a more emotional ‘affective’ piety. The
solitary life, that figures so prominently in the Life of Christina of Markyate,
seems to have continued to appeal up to (and beyond) the time of Richard
Rolle of Hampole. It is often accompanied by a desire for like-minded
devotees to congregate in small communities. A number of our texts show
evidence of the later emphasis on the instruction of the laity. It is true that
our earlier texts sometimes show a fascination with the torments of hell in
their most grisly form and with the activities of demons and evil spirits.
Although these latter are treated with genuine fear, they can be comic in their
defeat, especially by such powerful friends of the Christian soul as the Virgin
Mary. The cult of the saints and of the Virgin Mary constitute an important
area of continuity with late Anglo-Saxon devotion. And, occasionally, as in
the ‘Land of Cokaygne’, we see a high-spirited turning of the world of
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religion upside down. A more ‘contained’ use of comedy can be seen in the
merry exemplary stories used by preachers.
Alongside the fear of sin and death we find a stress on the love of God
and a marked interest in the individual. The twelfth century is sometimes
called the age of the discovery of the individual, or of the discovery of self,
and while it is easy to exaggerate this it contains a germ of truth.7 It is hard to
believe that the ‘individual’ was invented in the twelfth century—an awareness of the individual is clearly there in ancient literature and in Christianity
itself—but the twelfth century gave the idea a distinctive emphasis in its
literature and theology. This appears in a variety of forms: some writers (like
Gerald of Wales) have a very distinctive literary personality and ‘voice’; there
is often an ‘inwardness’ in religious writing, and a concern for the welfare of
the individual soul; in biography there is a growing interest in the personality
of the subject, as in Eadmer’s Life of Anselm or Walter Daniel’s Life of
Aelred. Personal choices become more prominent—in fiction, as in the story
of Sir Percival and other young knights, and in life, as in a decision to go on
crusade or pilgrimage or to choose a particular monastic rule (which is turned
to comic effect in the Speculum Stultorum.)
Literature was not the only art to flourish in this period. Our writers lived
in a land where building was continuous, from the Norman castles to those
of Edward I in Wales; fine cathedrals (one of the Lives of ‘great’ St Hugh gives
an aesthetic appreciation of the columns in the cathedral at Lincoln, where
‘the little columns which surround the larger columns seem to perform a kind
of dance’), abbeys, churches large and small (the Tower of London contains
the beautiful Norman chapel of St John), as well as secular buildings. The arts
of sculpture and painting had their high points as well. Great illuminated
manuscripts like the St Albans Psalter were made. The period saw the
development of ‘pictorial narrative’. Two contrasting examples of this may
be mentioned. The very impressive Bayeux Tapestry (?c.–), an
embroidery covering eight lengths of material, which is likely to have been
made in England, probably for bishop Odo, Duke William’s half-brother,
tells the epic narrative of the Conquest in a series of vivid episodes with
captions in Latin, beginning with Edward the Confessor sending Harold on a
See the discussion by C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual – (London, )
and in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History  (); J. F. Benton, ‘Consciousness of Self and
Perceptions of Individuality’, in Renaissance and Renewal, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable
(Oxford, ); C. W. Bynum, ‘Did the th Century Discover the Individual?’, Journal
of Ecclesiastical History  (). Cf. D. Gray, ‘Finding Identity in the Middle Ages’, in
A. J. Piesse, ed., Sixteenth-Century Identities (Manchester, ).
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mission to Normandy, Harold’s oath of allegiance to William (with perhaps
some of the Aesopic fables in the margins suggesting the idea of deceit), his
return, the death of Edward, and Harold’s assumption of the English throne.
Halley’s comet appears ‘with tail outstretched’ as a portent. Then follow
splendid depictions of the invasion, the battle of Hastings (with the English
fighting on foot ‘in dense array’), and the final defeat and death of Harold. In
striking contrast to this powerful portrayal of the glories and horrors of war,
comes a much more peaceful monument, the ‘Holkham Bible Picture Book’
from the earlier fourteenth century, an example of the way biblical stories
from Genesis to the Last Judgement were presented pictorially for the laity.
The vivid scenes are accompanied by explanatory captions in Anglo-Norman
verse, with one exception, the scene where the shepherds, who are traditionally humble folk, are celebrated in English: they ‘ont chaunte en le honour de
la nativite. Songen alle wid one stevene/Also angel song that cam fro hevene
Te Deum et Gloria’ (and they have difficulty with the Latin of the angels’
message).8 These two works may reasonably be taken to be landmarks from
the beginning and the end of this period.
The literature that it produced was yet another manifestation of ‘medieval
media’ through which the society’s culture and values were diffused, and
readers and hearers were entertained and instructed. Increasingly, we see that
‘earnest’ and ‘game’ may exist side by side, or become fascinatingly mingled.
And we see the three main languages of medieval England in a fruitful
interrelationship: the thirteenth-century manuscripts which contain many of
our early English texts (MSS Jesus , Trinity College Cambridge , Digby
, or Cotton Caligula A IX in the British Library) all contain material in
different languages. The Bayeux Tapestry and the Holkham Bible Picture
Book remind us of one more important thing: the omnipresence of story. A
fine article by Geoffrey Shepherd discusses the ‘emancipation of story in the
twelfth century’.9 Certainly the century saw a great expansion of stories, with
the oral story often being assimilated into script, fictions, and fables, no
longer always being condemned or dismissed but often used by moralists
and clerics. Our Anglo-Latin chroniclers love tales and gossip, and beyond
the monasteries the courts show themselves to be eager for stories. Of course
the literature of the period contains many other ‘kinds’—expositions, songs
and lyrics, and drama for example, but it is striking how central the desire
8
‘They sang all with one voice, as the angels’ song that came from heaven, Te Deum and
Gloria.’
9
‘The Emancipation of Story in the Twelfth Century’, in G. T. Shepherd, Medieval Studies,
ed. T. A. Shippey and J. Pickles (Cambridge, ).
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for story is, whether for the histories in prose or verse, or for the new
narrative form of the romance, which is so dominant for centuries. The
curious traveller in this fascinating landscape will certainly find more
examples of where conquest is linked with continuity, and out of it comes
both renewal and innovation.