THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

swords, their scales gleaming like gold-plated shields, their fins floating as if they were spears (`heore scalen wleoteD
swulc gold-faZe sceldes | Þer fleoteD heore spiten swulc hit spaeren weoren’).
One version of LaZamon’s Brut survives in a manuscript compendium with a very different poem, the anonymous
The Owl and the Nightingale (probably written in the opening years of the thirteenth century). Where Brut takes the
broad sweep of national history as its subject, The Owl and the Nightingale takes the form of an overheard debate
between two birds. Where LaZamon seems to hanker for the syllabically irregular, alliterative verse of his ancestors,
the author of The Owl and the Nightingale writes spirited, even jocular, four-stressed rhyming couplets. Despite his
debts to a Latin tradition of debate poetry, to vernacular beast fables, and to the kind of popular bestiary which drew
out a moral significatio from the description of an animal, his poem is more of an intellectual jeu d’esprit than a
moral or didactic exercise. The Owl and the Nightingale presents the birds as birds, while endowing them with a
human intelligence and a human articulacy. The fastidious nightingale opens the debate by insulting the owl’s
deficient personal hygiene and by suggesting that her song is distinctly miserable. The owl, stung into response,
insists that her voice is bold and musical and likely to be misunderstood by one who merely chatters ‘like an Irish
priest’. As they argue, personal abuse gives way to more subtle charges and countercharges; they score intellectual
points off one another and they twist in and out of complex issues, capped aspersions, and temporary advantages.
Both birds establish themselves in irreconcilable philosophical opposition to one another. The nightingale sees the
owl as dirty, dismal, pompous, perverse, and life-denying; the owl looks down on the nigh-
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tingale as flighty, frivolous, libidinous, and self-indulgent. The arguments, like the kind of contemporary legal,
philosophical, or theological debates on which the poem may be based, need an arbiter, and it is solely on the choice
of this human arbiter that the birds agree. They finally resolve to fly off to Portisham in Dorset to submit themselves
to the judgement of an underpaid clerk, one Master Nicholas of Guildford. Such is the emphasis placed by the birds
on this provincial priest’s wisdom and discrimination that some commentators have claimed that the poem must be
the work of the otherwise unknown Nicholas (and, moreover, a covert plea for his professional advancement).
Whether or not The Owl and the Nightingale bears Master Nicholas’s personal imprint, it conspicuously ends with his
distinguished arbitration unrealized. The disputants wing their way to Dorset while the narrator abruptly resorts to
silence: ‘As to how their case went, I can tell you nothing more. There is no more to this tale’ (‘Her nis na more of
Þis spelle’).
It has been suggested that The Owl and the Nightingale may have been written for the edification and amusement
of a literate, but not necessarily highly Latinate, community of English nuns. Such communities, and their stricter
alternatives - women recluses who had chosen the solitary life - were of considerable importance to the intense
religious culture of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. The prose-texts in the so-called Katherine-group - which
concentrate on the lives of heroic virgin saints (Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana), on the person of Christ, and on his
mystical relationship with his contemplative and chaste brides-seem to have been written specifically for a group of
women in Herefordshire who did not possess the command of Latin expected of their male equivalents. The same
would seem to be true of the most substantial devotional text of the early thirteenth century, the Ancrene Riwle (‘the
Anchoress’s Rule or Guide’). The work was originally composed in English by a male confessor for the instruction
and comfort of three young sisters of good family who had elected to withdraw into a life of solitary prayer, penance,
and contemplation (it was reworked, for more general devotional use, as the Ancrene Wisse). The Ancrene Riwle is
divided into eight books which give detailed, practical, personal advice to the solitaries and recommend regular
reading and meditation as well as formal spiritual discipline and religious observance (such as the increasingly
popular practices of self examination, private confession, and penance). While the writer does not shy away from the
spiritual benefits of humiliation and mortification, he offers counsel against the dangers inherent in excessive
introspection. Although the women are separated from the world and obliged to explore their inner resources of
spiritual strength, they are recommended to see Christ as a mystical wooer, as a knight, and as a king and to respond
actively and exuberantly to his proffered love and honour. God comes in love to those who pine for him with a pure
heart and Love is his chamberlain, his counsellor, and his wife from whom he can hide nothing. The first and last
sections of the Ancrene Riwle govern the outer life while its middle sections explore the promised joys of the inner
life. At the end, the writer returns to
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more mundane affairs, offering advice on diet, dress, and hygiene and on how to cope with illness. The sisters are
advised to keep a cat rather than a cow (they are likely to become too concerned for the cow and be tempted into
worldliness) and, in order that they should be well provided for without having to shop and cook, to confine
themselves to two maidservants each. The writer ends with the hope that his book will be profitably read and then,