A History of English Literature
A History of English Literature
A History of English Literature
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
artist, who lived a century and more later than Laghamon and probably a<br />
little earlier than Chaucer. The story consists <strong>of</strong> two old folk-tales, here<br />
finely united in the form <strong>of</strong> an Arthurian romance and so treated as to<br />
bring out all the better side <strong>of</strong> knightly feeling, with which the author is<br />
in charming sympathy. Like many other medieval writings, this one is<br />
preserved by mere chance in a single manuscript, which contains also three<br />
slightly shorter religious poems (<strong>of</strong> a thousand or two lines apiece), all<br />
possibly by the same author as the romance. One <strong>of</strong> them in particular, 'The<br />
Pearl,' is a narrative <strong>of</strong> much fine feeling, which may well have come from<br />
so true a gentleman as he. The dialect is that <strong>of</strong> the Northwest Midland,<br />
scarcely more intelligible to modern readers than Anglo-Saxon, but it<br />
indicates that the author belonged to the same border region between<br />
England and Wales from which came also Ge<strong>of</strong>frey <strong>of</strong> Monmouth and Laghamon, a<br />
region where Saxon and Norman elements were mingled with Celtic fancy and<br />
delicacy <strong>of</strong> temperament. The meter, also, is interesting--the Anglo-Saxon<br />
unrimed alliterative verse, but divided into long stanzas <strong>of</strong> irregular<br />
length, each ending in a 'bob' <strong>of</strong> five short riming lines.<br />
'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' may very fittingly bring to a close our<br />
hasty survey <strong>of</strong> the entire Norman-French period, a period mainly <strong>of</strong><br />
formation, which has left no literary work <strong>of</strong> great and permanent fame, but<br />
in which, after all, there were some sincere and talented writers, who have<br />
fallen into forgetfulness rather through the untoward accidents <strong>of</strong> time<br />
than from lack <strong>of</strong> genuine merit in themselves.<br />
CHAPTER III<br />
PERIOD III. THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES. ABOUT 1350 TO ABOUT 1500<br />
THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS. Of the century and<br />
a half, from 1350 to 1500, which forms our third period, the most important<br />
part for literature was the first fifty years, which constitutes the age <strong>of</strong><br />
Chaucer.<br />
The middle <strong>of</strong> the fourteenth century was also the middle <strong>of</strong> the externally<br />
brilliant fifty years' reign <strong>of</strong> Edward III. In 1337 Edward had begun the<br />
terrible though <strong>of</strong>ten-interrupted series <strong>of</strong> campaigns in France which<br />
historians group together as the Hundred Tears' War, and having won the<br />
battle <strong>of</strong> Crecy against amazing odds, he had inaugurated at his court a<br />
period <strong>of</strong> splendor and luxury. The country as a whole was really increasing<br />
in prosperity; Edward was fostering trade, and the towns and some <strong>of</strong> the<br />
town-merchants were becoming wealthy; but the oppressiveness <strong>of</strong> the feudal<br />
system, now becoming outgrown, was apparent, abuses in society and state<br />
and church were almost intolerable, and the spirit which was to create our<br />
modern age, beginning already in Italy to move toward the Renaissance, was<br />
felt in faint stirrings even so far to the North as England.<br />
The towns, indeed, were achieving their freedom. Thanks to compact<br />
organization, they were loosening the bonds <strong>of</strong> their dependence on the<br />
lords or bishops to whom most <strong>of</strong> them paid taxes; and the alliance <strong>of</strong> their<br />
representatives with the knights <strong>of</strong> the shire (country gentlemen) in the<br />
House <strong>of</strong> Commons, now a separate division <strong>of</strong> Parliament, was laying the<br />
foundation <strong>of</strong> the political power <strong>of</strong> the whole middle class. But the feudal<br />
system continued to rest cruelly on the peasants. Still bound, most <strong>of</strong><br />
them, to the soil, as serfs <strong>of</strong> the land or tenants with definite and heavy