II: The Close of the Middle Ages in England
I
In a fifteenth-century book of devotions, a vernacular ‘Primer’ as men called it, we find a hymn that goes like this;
The Wisdom of the Father, The truethe of the high king,
God and Man, was taken In the morening.
In a similar book dating from 1535 we also have a hymn;
Holy Mary pray to thy son
The weak in sprete to encorage
To socore the miserable in their affliction
To comfort the sorrowful their sorrows to assuage.
The contrast between these two pieces of anonymous verse—the graceful movement and firmness of line in the former, and the doggerel rigmarole of the latter—epitomizes the history of later medieval poetry in England. From the varied excellence of the fourteenth century to the work of the early sixteenth it is a history of decay; so that in turning from the Scotch poetry of that age to the English we pass from civilization to barbarism. In certain other respects, of course, it might be called a transition from barbarism to civilization. We pass from a Scotland perpetually torn by feudal wars, in which neither life nor property is secure for a moment, to an England where Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth (1485) had at least begun the restoration of national unity, where the New Learning was already beginning to spread, and where the new king’s mythical connexion with Arthur (after whom he named his son) might be expected to give a poetic sanction to men’s not ill-grounded hopes of a new era of prosperity, splendour, and power. All the conditions—or what we naturally suppose to be the conditions—of a great literature seem to be present in early Tudor England. If that great literature had been written, can we doubt that most historians would confidently point to those conditions as its cause? In Scotland they are all lacking. But it is Scotland which has the literature.
We shall even find that the transition from poetical mastery to poetical imbecility as we come southward is a gradual one. On the border we still have ballads (treated in another volume), and some of them excellent. In Cheshire we shall find an alliterative poem which, if not at the top of its own class, can still be read with continuous pleasure. It is when we reach London that the really bad work meets us.
The alliterative poem is Scotish Feilde, a miniature epic in two ‘fyttes’ celebrating (in general) Henry VIII’s French campaign and the victory of Flodden, and (in particular) the house of Stanley. This partial and local loyalty may perhaps explain both why the poem is so completely medieval and why poetry of the old sort languishes in the south. It is the little court that is favourable to heroic poetry: organization, centralization, bigness, and all the other necessary evils of a complex society, are not. The poem has not greatly pleased most modern critics. They complain that it is a mosaic of stock phrases; but so is the Iliad. It must be allowed, indeed, that the author of the Scotish Feilde does not always use them with discretion. The tag ‘saddest (i.e. staunchest, most reliable) of all other’ is contradictorily used of two different earls within ten lines. But even that offends a reader much more than a listener, for whom, I suppose, the poem was intended; and in general the traditional character of the language, if it throws no light on the poet’s personal sensibility, does throw light (where, for my part, I much prefer to have it) on the bills and bows, the moors and the banners. What has been used often before is none the less useful here: it works, just as ‘Savage, his sister’s son’ may be true even though it also carries the mind back to many a swuster sunu at Maldon and before. The descriptions of morning (‘damped with dew’ and birds singing that it ‘was solace to heare’) which precede two of the battles may, as the editors tell us, be commonplaces: but in their context they give us just the right sense of expectation and alacrity. The ‘gaping gunns’, the thirst and hunger of the English army (‘Water was a worthy drinke; win it who might!’), the ‘clowdes cast up cleerlye like castles ful hie’, the beautiful terror of the trumpets before the action begins (‘Heavenly was their melody’), the Scotch dead—
Beside Brinstone in a bridge breathless they lyen
gaping against the moon—
all seem to be admirably vivid. If the poet was not really at the battle his convincing use of the first person (‘Then we seen our enemies, were moving over the mountains’) is all the more to his poetical credit; but perhaps he was. Hales and Furnivall concluded that he was not, because ‘he is far from accurate in the details’, but that is the argument of a civilian; what a man sees, still more what he remembers, of an engagement seldom agrees with the official histories. One pleasing feature of the poem is its treatment of enemies. It dismisses Richard III (for its narrative starts at Bosworth) without reviling in the worlds
He fought full freshlie his foemen among . . .
I will min(d)e him no more,
But let Droughten deale with all as him deare liketh,
and though he thinks the Scots fell and treacherous he does not jeer at them nor exult shrilly. We are ready to believe him when he tells us ‘He was a gentleman by Jesu that this geste made’; and compared with the geste, Skelton’s ‘Against the Scots’ is like a guttersnipe putting out his tongue. The poem is not great: there is nothing in it like Roland’s last moments, or the speech of Byhrtwold, or ‘Norway from thy hand, oh King’; but it is incomparably better battle poetry than England was to produce for many centuries. It must have been written after 1515.
From the same region, at Chester, we find Henry Bradshaw’s Lyfe of St. Werburge, completed in 1513, the year of its author’s death. He had also, according to Anthony Wood, written a Latin De Antiquitate et Magnificentia Chestriae. From the Lyfe, which is between five and six thousand lines long, in rhyme-royal stanzas, some pleasure may be gleaned, if not always the kind of pleasure the author hoped to give. The penitent wild geese summoned before St. Werburge for destroying the crops remind us of the Jackdaw of Rheims:
Dredfully darynge comen now they be,
Theyr winges traylynge, entred into the hall;
For great confusion, after theyr kynde and propryte
Mourninge in theyr maner.
It is pleasant to record that the charitable lady pardoned them all (even restoring to life one who had been stolen by a servant with a weakness for roast goose) and dismissed them with advice on their religious duties (benedicite volucres celi domino). The scene (i. 932 et seq.) in which Werburge’s mother, though herself a saint, becomes a very human grande dame to put her daughter’s upstart suitor in his place is amusing. Amusement is not the end that Bradshaw had in view: yet our pleasure is not merely an accident. The passage is funny because it is true to nature, and it is true to nature because Bradshaw keeps his eye on the object. He knows too, as authors of his kind did not always know, that poetry must please: all is written for ‘our doctryne’, admittedly, but also for our ‘endeles pleasure’ (ii. 9) and ‘to augment our solas’ (i. 2714). I cannot discover in him the Homeric qualities which his editor Carl Horstman claimed for the Lyfe in 1887, but he is not quite contemptible. In a sense, but a sense creditable to the Middle Ages, his work shows how bad medieval narrative poetry could be. It could be as bad as this and no worse: that is, it could be dull and feeble, but not odious or perverse. Its badness is always an honest, innocent kind of badness: and at any moment there may come a gleam of imagination. The same can be said of the stanzaic romance Generydes which, on internal evidence, need not perhaps be dated earlier than 1500.
The lines which I have just quoted from St. Werburge introduce us to the most perplexing and repellent feature of late medieval poetry in England, its metre. The popular theory is that Hoccleve, Barclay, and Hawes were trying to write Chaucerian decasyllabics and failed because they were confused by the loss of final -e. To the best of my knowledge Mr. Fitzroy Pyle and myself have gone farthest in our disbelief of this theory. There are indeed some poems, a very few, which look as if their metre could have been arrived at in that way. The verse of Generydes is roughly what might be expected from a man who had the true lilt of the decasyllable in his head but ignored some changes of pronunciation and perhaps had a negligent scribe. But if we turn to the Assembly of Gods or Barclay’s Egloges or Hawes, we find something very different. The test lies in the ear, exercised not for a stanza or two but day after day over thousands of lines. The man who reads Generydes straight through for the story (and a man may do many worse things) will have the general impression that he has been moving, if a little jerkily, to the five-beat rhythm. From Hawes or Barclay he will get no such impression. The lines which are ‘normal’ by that standard come so rarely that the ear rejects them as accidents. Mr. Pyle and I think the poets were not trying to write Chaucer’s metre. To explain their departures from it by the loss of final -e is to presuppose the metrical ignorance which this theory attempts to explain. If men understand metre, that understanding itself reveals to them that pronunciation has changed. If a boy does not see from the metre that Marlowe pronounced Mahomet differently from ourselves, that is because the boy cannot scan. Accordingly Mr. Pyle and I advanced theories as to the metre that the early Tudor poets were really writing. But I have not heard that anyone agreed with either of us: and it must be confessed that almost any piece of English, whether in prose or verse, could be squeezed into the metres we suggested. Nor, even if his theory or mine were accepted, would it much help the fame of these poets; for neither of our hypothetical metres is at all good. If we are both rejected, then the true state of the case is that early sixteenth-century England witnessed a poetical barbarism in which rhyme itself became the only constant characteristic of verse (a fact very relevant to the rise of the Skeltonic), and that the causes of this barbarism are unknown. It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.
When Erasmus paid his first visit to England in 1499, Grocyn was close on sixty years of age, Skelton and Linacre nearly forty, Barclay and Colet (like Erasmus himself) in their thirties, and Thomas More twenty-one. The age of Stephen Hawes we do not know. The first Greek scholars had come to England nearly a hundred years before. Five Greek books were presented to Oxford in 1443. Between 1489 and 1500 a Greek called John Serbopoulos copied several Greek manuscripts at Reading. At court the new Latin, the ‘pure’ Latin as humanists called it, was already favoured for diplomacy and historiography, and foreign scholars such as Bernardus Andreas of Toulouse and Polydore Vergil were patronized by Henry VII. Before 1493 Grocyn had given those lectures on pseudo-Dionysius which, by exploding the traditional authorship of the Celestial Hierarchies, ushered in that period of critical scholarship in which we are still living. In the year of Erasmus’s own visit Colet was lecturing on the Pauline Epistles. He worked, indeed, only from the Vulgate, not from the original: but his historical approach and his rejection of the allegorical senses gave the lectures a sufficiently revolutionary character.
That is one side of the picture; we seem to see humanism steadily eating its way into the public mind. If, on the other hand, we glance at the list of Caxton’s publications we get at first quite a different impression. The seventy-odd books which he printed between 1475 and his death in 1491 are all directed to satisfying medieval needs or medieval tastes; they are either service books, books of devotion, ‘morality’, and ‘nurture’, or else allegories and ‘historiall’ romances. It has been disputed whether Caxton followed his private taste, or that of a public, or that of his noble patrons. The last seems the most probable: his own prefaces often tell us at whose instance a book was printed, and usually translated as well. This, however, might not disqualify him as a witness to public taste; noble personages often reflect it with great accuracy. What disqualifies him much more is the fact that an English printer could not then, nor long after, compete with the continental presses in printing Greek or Latin. Caxton had to rely on English as his sole specialité de maison. The absence of Sallusts and Plutarchs from his list does not therefore prove that no one wanted them: any who did would get them from abroad.
The extent to which humanism had penetrated beyond the court and beyond specially cultured circles such as that in which More grew up (the universities were not pioneers in this matter) is thus not very easy to determine. But oddly enough the question does not matter nearly as much as might be expected to an historian of English literature, or at least of English poetry. For the truth is that at this period northern humanism still carried with it few or no implications about a man’s taste in vernacular verse. It did imply a hatred of Romance and of scholastic philosophy: if men like More had been able to control English printing we should have lost our Malory. But there is little trace of that demand for classical form in the vernacular which was later to produce Gorboduc. Men who were Ciceronian in Latin might still be almost wholly medieval when they wrote or read poetry in their mother tongue.
A characteristic work of that age was the ‘literature of folly’ inaugurated in 1494 by the Narrenschiff of Brantius or Sebastian Brant; a germinal work, if ever there was one. It budded into translations in Latin, French, and English, translations some of them so very free that they are almost new growths and therefore bear all the stronger witness to the vitality of the parent stem. Most of the comic literature which will meet us later in the present chapter is influenced by it: Jill of Brentford and the Highway to the Spittle House are essentially new frameworks for catalogues of fools. The modern scholar who has most right to speak on the subject, Father Pompen, has warned us not to exaggerate the warmth of the humanistic reception given to this work: but there is certainly little sign that its amorphous prolixity and total lack of invention displeased the humanists. Erasmus and Reuchlin both praise it; Trithemius calls it a divina satira; Locher’s Latin version is humanistic. Yet it has no merits which could please a taste really formed upon the ancients: it has, without the medieval virtues, all the medieval vices. Many readers have doubtless been led by the title to expect some real comic construction, some satiric story about a ship full of fools gloriously embarked for a Rabelaisian Land of Folly. In reality, the ship is a mere figure of speech, dismissed in the opening lines, and the body of the poem consists of disconnected pieces in each of which some particular type of fool is either made to expose himself in soliloquy or (more often) directly belaboured by the author. Irony is little employed: flat denunciation of the obviously indefensible, reiterated statements that black is black, make the bill of fare. It is difficult to think oneself back into a taste which could have enjoyed such writing. Some of the enjoyment, no doubt, was due to the woodcuts. These have a remarkable, even a frightful, energy and they, or cuts clearly derived from them, appear in the Latin, French, and English texts. The flaying of ‘Marcia’ (Marsyas) is especially memorable. Notice (in Jamieson’s text) the absorbed enjoyment on the face of the bearded spectator, the smiling lady who looks down on the execution from her window, and the ‘culinary coolness’ of the nearer executioner. What is more to our purpose, many of these pictures are enigmatic without the letterpress—they lure a man to read on and find what they are about. But this is not the whole explanation of Brant’s enormous vogue. There is abundant evidence for the satiric bent (not the satiric power) of that age in several countries. In their crowded cities and among a flourishing burgher class, as confident as need be of their own good sense and often, perhaps, in conscious revolt against the more ideal elements of medieval culture, there arose a critical impulse which, far out-running any satiric skill then available, seems to have produced an unwearied appetite for bold delineations, or even mere catalogues, of squalor, roguery, and folly. In the comic parts of Sir Thomas More’s work we see it transformed by a real genius for drollery. Skelton and Heywood are better representatives, though Skelton at his best is too good to be typical. It is a different thing from the Scotch ribaldry of the same period—the work of heavier men, men who take a long time to get tired either of a moral platitude or a slap-stick joke. A steamy smell as of large dinners seems to pervade it all; if worse smells sometimes intrude, that is part of the joke. Humanism did not create the taste, but most humanists seem to have shared it.
It is therefore not possible in the late years of the fifteenth and the early years of the sixteenth century to distinguish a medieval and a humanist strain in English poetry. In the work of Hawes and Barclay, of the young Thomas More, and of Skelton wherever Skelton is not simply sui generis, all the medieval characteristics survive—the seven-lined stanzas, the love of allegory, the commonplaces. Yet More was among the greatest of all English humanists: Barclay was certainly, Skelton arguably, tinged with humanism. It makes no difference to their poetry. It does not, so far as we can see, arouse in them any effort to heal the disease of which English verse had been slowly dying for a century—the disease of bad metre. This alone would remove the work of Hawes and Barclay, and some of Skelton, from serious critical consideration: but it is not their only defect. Their language is undistinguished, their sentences untrussed, their thought commonplace and indistinct. They are as far below Lydgate as Lydgate is below Chaucer; for their workmanship is at least as coarse as his and, with the possible exception of Hawes, they lack the fineness and tenderness of temper which alleviates his tediousness. This is the real mid-winter of our poetry; all smudge, blur, and scribble without a firm line or a clear colour anywhere.
In an amusing passage of the Moriae Encomium Erasmus describes the salient characteristics of the European nations. Germans are tall and good at magic (it was the fashionable form for the dream of power): Scotchmen are argumentative and related to the royal family: Spaniards are the best soldiers. To the English he allots three things—bodily beauty, an elegant table (lautas mensas), and music. On the first Holbein’s portraits are our best comment. The second and third help to correct a false impression of that age which we should have if we considered its poetry alone. Music and architecture show that it had artistic impulses, though poetry was not, for the moment, the channel in which they flowed. Conversely, the acknowledged supremacy of English poetry in some other ages has been accompanied by extreme penury in the remaining arts. The splendour of London in the early sixteenth century astonished the Venetian ambassador, and Erasmus was delighted with the society he found there.
Of the bad poets who wrote at this time I shall first mention Stephen Hawes, not because he is necessarily the oldest (his dates are uncertain) but because he is the most completely medieval. He was groom of the chamber to Henry VII and his life, according to Bale, was an ‘ensaumple of vertue’ (virtutis exemplum). Appropriately, he wrote The Example of Virtue (1504), The Pastime of Pleasure (1505), a Joyful Meditation on the accession of Henry VIII (1509), and a Conversion of Swerers and Comfort of Lovers. The Pastime and the Example have a not unimportant place in the history of English allegory, and it is probable that Spenser had read the Passtime. Hawes knows he is writing an old-fashioned kind of poetry and complains that men nowadays ‘fayne no fables pleasaunt and coverte’, but he sticks to what he prefers. Mrs. Browning claimed for him ‘true poetic faculty’, but ‘faculty’ seems to me exactly the wrong word. Faculty was what he lacked; there was more and better poetry in him than he could express. The adventurousness, the wonder, and the devout solemnity of his allegorical stories gleam fitfully through his broken-backed metre and dull excursions into the seven liberal arts. There was a certain genuinely medieval fineness and simplicity about his mind if not about his art. He is not, like Barclay, a man contentedly making fifth-rate translations of second-rate originals, but a man grasping at really good things beyond his reach. Accordingly, his failure excites sympathy rather than contempt—if indeed sympathy is needed for a man who lived in such a happy dream of love, chivalry, and wandering.
With Alexander Barclay (1475?–1552), Chaplain of St. Mary’s College at Ottery in Devonshire, Monk of Ely, and, after the Dissolution, Vicar of Much Baddow in Essex, we touch rock bottom. Barclay is influenced by humanism. He imitated Mantuan and translated Sallust’s Jugurtha. This, in vigorous and dignified prose, is incomparably his best work. His Introductory to Wryte and Pronounce French (1521), though a less favourable specimen of his prose style, is of greater historical interest as an early instance of those efforts towards a decorated prose (Kunstprose) in the vernacular which will engage our attention in a later chapter. The following passage from his Prologue shows the ‘ink-horn’ terms already in operation:
Many and dyuers lettred men experte in sondry scyences have done theyr deuoyr to inclere the dulnesse and wylfull ignoraunce of theyr countrees natyfe; and to brynge this theyr entrepryse to effect some haue wryten in solute language maternall of our englyshe tonge, some in the same language hath coarted theyr style in meter. . . .
But his poetry has no intrinsic value. It is disputed whether the Castell of Labour (1503) is by him or no: but if it is not by Barclay it is by someone equally bad. The opening exhortation, ‘Subdue you to payne to rede this tretyse’ is fully justified. The original by Pierre Gringoire, published in 1499, is not absolutely without merit. It is a prosaic allegory in which the economic anxieties of the usual Dreamer are, at the advice of Reason, allayed by the sound, if not very original, scheme of working for his living. There is some humour in the idea of making the Dreamer’s wife sleep soundly all night while he sustains a very unpleasing conversation with such visitors as Necessity, Distress, and Poverty. But the translator is a bungler. He turns the elaborate decasyllabic stanza of Gringoire into rhyme royal and when Gringoire later changes to octosyllabics he at first continues with his long lines. Then gradually he becomes aware that the original has somehow changed and begins to shorten his line: sometimes (but almost certainly by accident) hitting true octosyllables. It is as if he were working in his sleep.
Even worse, in so far as it is longer, is the Ship of Fools (1509). It is almost shocking to find that the same year saw the publication of another English version of Brant, by one Watson: concerning which all but specialists will probably be content with Father Pompen’s hair-raising assurance that it is inferior to Barclay’s. Barclay works chiefly from Locher’s Latin though he also makes use of the French text of Rivière: he would have us believe that he knew German but that seems to be a lie. He admits to being no strict translator of any text, ‘some tyme addynge some tyme detractynge’. Two or four lines of Locher will usually be muffled up in a whole stanza. He introduces much local colouring, substituting praise of Henry VIII for praise of the emperor, interpolating a compliment to James IV (some traditions make Barclay a Scot), lampooning one Mansell of Ottery, or attacking Skelton with the very true boast
It longeth not to my scyence nor cunnynge
For Phylyp the Sparowe the Dirige to synge.
In such a huge mass of verse it is inevitable that many passages, worthless in themselves, should have an accidental interest for a modern reader, and it is these (with the woodcuts) that make the reading of it tolerable. It is pleasant to meet in that distant age the book collector who loves his volumes
Full goodly bound in pleasant coverture
Of domas, satyn, or els of velvet pure,
but never reads them. The piece on ‘Unprofitable Study’ is humanistic in its attack on scholasticism. A revolution in medicine is brought vividly home to us when we read of patients who ‘followeth Ryot’ by ‘receyuynge colde water’ when the doctors have strictly ordered them to limit themselves to ale and wine. ‘Of them that make Noyse in the Chirche’ shows us a scene that would startle our own less pious age: hawks and even cuckoos are brought to Mass, young gallants stroll to and fro before the altar, dogs are everywhere, and the gossiping does not cease even at the consecration. Witches, unexpectedly for a modern, differ from true physicians in neglecting the astrological side of medicine: in their empiric ignorance they demand ‘What nedes it note the synes or firmament?’ The new discoveries in geography are astonishingly used—and this also may be a humanist touch—as a proof that geography is a folly: ‘Ferdinandus that late was Kynge of Spayne’ has found out ‘plenty and store’ of countries that no geographer had ever heard of—which just shows how silly it is to study geography. The Turkish peril (a background to ‘Renaissance’ Europe which we too easily forget) is stressed and a new crusade called for. The interest of such things as these often wins for an old text unmerited praise. But they owe nothing to art: if the matters touched on were modern they would be nothing. As poetry Barclay’s translation is nothing. Out of these thousands of lines one alone clings to the memory: that about hanged men ‘Wauynge with the wether whyle their necke wyll holde’. Yet even there the image may owe as much to popular speech as to Barclay; hanged men ‘wauer with the wynde’ in ‘The Nut Broun Maid’ and elsewhere.
In 1523 came the Mirrour of Good Maners, translated from a dull poem De Quatuor Virtutibus in elegiacs by Dominicus Mancinus. It is a little, a very little, better than the Ship of Fools, the four-beat anapaestic rhythm occurring so often that I am almost inclined to think it may have been, in some dim and fitful fashion, intended. But the assurance at the beginning of the poem is a pretty accurate statement of its merits:
The sad and wyse husband this treatise may recite
Vnto his wyfe, not hurtynge her courage with delite.
With the Egloges we come to the unmistakable impact of the renascentia: these are pastorals en règle, dialogues between Cornix, Minalcas, and the like, with satire on current abuses, and an elegy. It will be noticed, however, that while the presence of the elegy conforms to classical example, the elegy itself is a pure specimen of medieval allegory in its last decay. For the rest of his matter Barclay draws on two sources. One of them is the Courtiers’ Miseries (Miseriae Curialium) of Aeneas Sylvius, a bitter prose satire on life at the imperial court. To a modern this does not seem very suitable for treatment in the manner of Theocritus or the Bucolics; but Barclay’s other source was Mantuan and that, properly understood, explains the mystery.
The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, first printed in 1498, mark the final stage of a perversion in the pastoral which had been begun by Virgil himself. In him a real imaginative vision of idealized, yet not excessively idealized, rusticity is ever present, but allegorical and even polemical elements play a considerable part. These elements were unfortunately emphasized till in Mantuan we have the extraordinary spectacle of a literary impulse almost exactly like that of Juvenal expressing itself through a medium originally devised for the purposes of refreshment and escape. That ‘dread voice’ in Lycidas to which Johnson objected is not a foolish novelty of Milton’s but rather his glorious transfiguration of a well-established, and singularly unhappy, tradition—just as the exquisite idealism of Drayton is a triumphant escape from it. Mantuan was immensely popular, and can still be enjoyed: but the enjoyment has nothing to do with Arcadia or Sicily. It has three sources. Firstly, we enjoy the success with which, every now and then for a few lines, he imitated the externals of Virgil:
Vos quibus est res ampla domi, quibus ubera vaccae
Plena ferunt, quibus alba greges mulctralia complent.
Secondly, we enjoy the pointed dialogue, the repartee. And thirdly, we enjoy the invective. These pleasures came in the humanistic age to pass for the proper pleasures of pastoral poetry. And thus it comes about that many a medieval poet who had never read the Bucolics nor ever heard of eclogues might—in a ‘Robyn and Makyn’, a ‘Nut Brown Maid’, or a ballad—be far nearer to Theocritus in spirit than a scholar of the renascentia who was steeped in Mantuan. It is another instance of that fatal flaw in humanism which draws a veil over Greek literature in the very act of discovering it; that urban and bookish limitation which sees in an ancient text everything rather than the radical, obvious, and universal pleasures which it was intended to give.
Barclay’s Egloges are, like the rest of Barclay, bad. Some homely pictures, as that of the old shepherd with his hair starting through his torn hood and a wooden spoon in his hat, must have given some pleasure even in his own day, and naturally give more now. There are many lines which would sound well in quotation; but when you replace them in their context and see with what rubble they are surrounded you must conclude that their merits were due to chance. The real importance of the book is that it shows how a work which is humanistic in design may remain completely medieval in manner, and also how little tendency the humanism of that time had to kindle poetic imagination or mend poetic art. It may also be suspected that Barclay’s hard words—frowise, quacham, and kempes—have some responsibility for the odd language in the Shepherds Calendar.
All Barclay’s works are outweighed in value by the few poems which Thomas More wrote in his youth. These are quite free from traces of humanism. The ‘Merry Jest’ about a sergeant disguised as a friar is written correctly enough in a jerky dimeter and begins in true medieval fashion with nine successive variations on the proverb ex sutore medicus. It is a dull trifle and has none of that superb mastery of comic anecdote which More was later to reveal in his prose. But the lamentation on the death of Queen Elizabeth (1503) is of real value, and the next piece, the verses for the Book of Fortune, is perhaps better. Here, on a characteristically medieval theme, and in firmer metre, we have something like an anticipation of Spenser’s court of Philotime in the underworld, and allegorical figures which are not much below Sackville’s. Few things even about More are more impressive than the merit of these two poems. They are quite off his own beat: they owe nothing to his humour or to his classical scholarship; they succeed not by anticipating any new conception of poetry but by momentarily restoring the medieval kind to something of its former value.
But when all’s said John Skelton (1464?–1529) is the only poetry of that age who is still read for pleasure. Skelton was a translator, a laureate of more than one university, tutor to Henry VIII, the satirist and later the client of Wolsey, and a jest-book hero in Elizabethan tradition. Pope’s epithet of ‘beastly’ is warranted by nothing that ought either to attract or repel an adult; Skelton is neither more nor less coarse than dozens of our older comic writers. His humanism is a little more important than his supposed beastliness, but it did not amount to much. It led him to translate ‘Tully’s Familiars’ and (from Poggio’s Latin version) Diodorus Siculus, at some date before 1490. These translations, which still remain in manuscript, are said to abound in neologisms, often successful, and it is plain from such scraps of Skelton’s prose as are accessible in print that he was a lover of ink-horn terms. But his humanism extended only to Latin and he was one of those who opposed the study of Greek at the university and called themselves ‘Trojans’. One of his objections to Greek learning is of great historical interest. He complains that those who learn Greek cannot use it in conversation, cannot say in Greek
How hosteler fetche my hors a botell of hay. (Speeke Parot, 150.)
This shows that the very conception of a dead language, so familiar to us, was to Skelton a ridiculous novelty. The process of classicization which was finally to kill Latin seemed to him merely the improvement of a living tongue.
If the list of his own works which Skelton gives in the Garland of Laurel is accurate he must have been one of our most prolific authors, and his lost books must have outweighed in volume those which have survived; indeed his Of Man’s Life the Peregrination, if it was really a version and a complete version of Deguileville’s Pelèrinage, would have done so by itself. But it is hard to believe that so busy and erratic a genius ever completed such a task. In what follows I must naturally base my judgement on the extant works; but it should be remembered that we know Skelton only in part and the part we do know is by no means homogeneous. We cannot be sure that the recovery of the lost works might not seriously modify our idea of him.
In his earliest surviving pieces Skelton appears as a typical poet of the late Middle Ages: a poet no better than Barclay and, in my judgement, inferior to Hawes. His elegies on Edward IV (1483) and on the Earl of Northumberland (1489) reveal nothing of his later quality. We may probably assign to the same period (and certainly relegate to the same oblivion) three heavily aureate poems addressed to the Persons of the Trinity, a poem on Time, and an amatory ‘Go Piteous Heart’. The only effect of all these is to set us thinking how much better they did such things in Scotland.
With the Bouge of Court (probably written in 1498 or 1499) we reach work which is of real value, but we do not reach the fully ‘Skeltonic’ Skelton. The Bouge is just as characteristic of the late Middle Ages as the previous poems; the difference is that it is good. There is no novelty, though there is great merit, in its satiric and realistic use of the dream allegory. The form had been used satirically by Jean de Meung and Chaucer and had always admitted realistic detail; in the Flower and the Leaf and the Assembly of Ladies it had offered almost nothing else. The merit of Skelton lies not in innovation but in using well an established tradition for a purpose to which it is excellently suited. The subject is a perennial one—the bewilderment, and finally the terror, of a man at his first introduction to what theologians call ‘the World’ and others ‘the racket’ or ‘real life’. Things overheard, things misunderstood, a general and steadily growing sense of being out of one’s depth, fill the poem with a Kafka-like uneasiness. As was natural in Tudor times the particular ‘world’ or ‘racket’ described is the court; but almost any man in any profession can recognize most of the encounters—the direct, unprovoked snub from Danger (‘She asked me if ever I drank of sauces cup’), the effusive welcome of Favell, the confidential warnings of Suspect, the apparently light-hearted good fellowship of Harvy Hafter (but the very sight of him sets your purse shivering), and the downright bullying of Disdain. It ends in nightmare with the hero leaping over the ship’s side: his name, which is Drede, gives the keynote to the whole dream. The metre is chaotic, but the poem almost succeeds in spite of it.
So far, if my chronology is correct, we have seen Skelton working along the lines marked out for him by his immediate predecessors. He was to do so again in the Flyting ‘Against Garnesche’ (1513–14), in The Garland of Laurel (1523), and in the huge morality play of Magnificence (1515–16) which I surrender to the historians of drama. But in the next group of poems which we must consider we are confronted with a different and almost wholly unexpected Skelton. The pieces in this group cannot be accurately dated. Philip Sparrow was certainly written before 1509. ‘Ware the Hawk’ was obviously written while Skelton was resident at Diss, and therefore probably between 1502 and 1511. The ‘Epitaphe’ (on ‘two knaves sometime of Diss’) cannot be earlier than 1506 when the will of one of the ‘knaves’ was proved. The ‘Ballad of the Scottish King’ and its revised version ‘Against the Scots’ must have been composed in the year of Flodden (1513). The Tunning I cannot date, for the fact that the real Alianora Romyng was in trouble for excessive prices and small measures in 1525 does not much help us.
The most obvious characteristic of all the poems in this group is the so-called Skeltonic metre; ‘so-called’, for by some standards it is hardly a metre at all. The number of beats in the line varies from two (‘Tell you I chill’) to five (‘To anger the Scots and Irish keterings with all’) with a preference for three. The rhyme is hardly ever crossed and any given rhyme may be repeated as long as the resources of the language hold out. In other words there is neither metre nor rhyme scheme in the strict sense; the only constant characteristic is the fact of rhyming. Scholars have shown much learning in their attempts to find a source for this extraordinary kind of composition. Short lines with irregular rhyme have been found in medieval Latin verse, but they do not show the Skeltonic irregularity of rhythm. More recently attention has been drawn to the rhyming passages in later medieval Latin prose; and in an earlier chapter we have noticed something faintly like Skeltonics in such Scotch poems as Cowkelbie Sow and ‘Lord Fergus’ Gaist’. This is not the only affinity between Skelton and his Scotch contemporaries; his ‘Lullay, Lullay’ (not to be confused with the noble carol) and his ‘Jolly Rutterkin’ may be regarded as poor relations of the comic lyric about low life which we find in the Scotch anthologies. Skelton himself would rise from the grave to bespatter us with new Skeltonics if we suggested that he had learned his art from a Scotchman: but these affinities may suggest (they certainly do not prove) some common tradition whose documents are now lost but from which the lower types of early sixteenth-century poetry, both Scotch and English, have descended. But whatever view is finally taken it remains true that there is nothing really very like Skeltonics before Skelton, and that his practice alone gives them any importance. Hints and vague anticipations there may have been, but I suspect that he was the real inventor.
The problem about the source of Skeltonics sinks into insignificance beside the critical problem. A form whose only constant attribute is rhyme ought to be intolerable: it is indeed the form used by every clown scribbling on the wall in an inn yard. How then does Skelton please? It is, no doubt, true to say that he sometimes does not. Where the poem is bad on other grounds the Skeltonics make it worse. In the ‘Ballad of the Scottish King’ the rodomontade of the non-combatant, the government scribbler’s cheap valiancy, is beneath contempt, and qualifies the poet for the epithet ‘beastly’ far more than Elinor Rumming; and in the revised version the sinister hint that those who disliked the ‘Ballad’ must be no true friends of the king adds the last touch of degradation. Here the looseness of the form does not help matters: it aggravates the vulgarity. This can be seen by turning to the similar poem on ‘The Doughty Duke of Albany’ (1523) where the Envoy, by dint of its strict trimeter quatrains, is much more tolerable than the main body of the poem. Where thought grovels, form must be severe: satire that is merely abusive is most tolerable in stopped couplets. But, of course, there would be no problem if all Skelton’s Skeltonic poems had been on this level. The real question is about Elinor Rumming and Philip Sparrow. I am not at all sure that we can find the answer, but we may at least eliminate one false trail. They certainly do not please by the poet’s ‘facility in rhyme’ considered as virtuosity. On Skelton’s terms any man can rhyme as long as he pleases.
In modern language the kind to which Philip Sparrow belongs may roughly be called the mock-heroic, though the term must here be stretched to cover the mock-religious as well. Requiem is sung for the pet bird. At the appropriate place in the poem, as in Lycidas, the mourner remembers that ‘her sorrow is not dead’ and asks
But where unto shuld I
Lenger morne or crye?
Solemn execration is pronounced on Gib our cat (mountain mantichores are to eat his brain) and on the whole nation of cats. She calls on the great moralists of antiquity to teach her how to moderate her passion. Thus, superficially, the humour is of the same kind as in the Rape of the Lock: much ado about nothing. But Pope’s intention was ostensibly corrective; if Skelton had any such intention it got lost early in the process of composition. It may indeed be thought that something of the same kind happened to Pope, that he loved, if not Belinda, yet her toilet, and the tea-cups, and the ‘shining altars of Japan’, and would have been very little pleased with any ‘reform of manners’ which interfered with them. But if such love for the thing he mocks was one element in Pope’s attitude, it is the whole of Skelton’s. Philip Sparrow is our first great poem of childhood. The lady who is lamenting her bird may not really have been a child—Skelton’s roguish reference to the beauties hidden beneath her kirtle (itself a medieval commonplace) may seem to suggest the reverse. But it is as a child she is imagined in the poem—a little girl to whom the bird’s death is a tragedy and who, though well read in romances, finds Lydgate beyond her and has ‘little skill in Ovid or Virgil’. We seem to hear her small reedlike voice throughout, and to move in a demure, dainty, luxurious, indoor world. Skelton is not (as Blake might have done) suggesting that such ‘sorrows small’ may be real tragedies from within; nor is he, in any hostile sense, ridiculing them. He is at once tender and mocking—like an affectionate bachelor uncle or even a grandfather. Of course, he is not consistently dramatic and by no means confines himself to things that the supposed speaker could really have said: a good deal of his own learning is allowed to creep in. The mood of the poem is too light to require strict consistency. It is indeed the lightest—the most like a bubble—of all the poems I know. It would break at a touch: but hold your breath, watch it, and it is almost perfect. The Skeltonics are essential to its perfection. Their prattling and hopping and their inconsequence, so birdlike and so childlike, are the best possible embodiment of the theme. We should not, I think, refuse to call this poem great; perfection in light poetry, perfect smallness, is among the rarest of literary achievements.
In the Tunning of Elinor Rumming the metre has a more obvious and, I think, less fruitful appropriateness to the subject. Skelton here lets himself loose on the humours of an inn presided over by a dirty old ale wife. Her customers are all women, confirmed drinkers, who mostly pay for their beer in kind—one brings a rabbit, another her shoes, another her husband’s hood, one her wedding ring. We have noisome details about Elinor’s methods of brewing, and there are foul words, foul breath, and foul sights in plenty. The merit of the thing lies in its speed: guests are arriving hotfoot, ordering, quarrelling, succumbing to the liquor, every moment. We get a vivid impression of riotous bustle, chatter, and crazy disorder. All is ugly, but all is alive. The poem has thus a good deal in common with Peglis to the Play or Christis Kirk on the Green: what it lacks is their melody and gaiety. The poet, and we, may laugh, but we hardly enter into the enjoyment of his ‘sort of foul drabs’. It is here that the metre most fully justifies Mr. Graves’s description of Skelton as ‘helter-skelter John’. The shapeless volley of rhymes does really suggest the helter-skelter arrival of all these thirsty old trots. But there is much less invention in it than in Philip Sparrow. The technique is much more crudely related to the matter; disorder in life rendered by disorder in art. This is in poetry what ‘programme music’ is in music; the thing is legitimate, it works, but we cannot forget that the art has much better cards in its hand.
If I see these two poems at all correctly, we may now hazard a guess at the answer to our critical problem. The Skeltonic, which defies all the rules of art, pleases (on a certain class of subjects) because—and when—this helter-skelter artlessness symbolizes something in the theme. Childishness, dipsomania, and a bird are the themes on which we have found it successful. When it attempts to treat something fully human and adult—as in the Flodden poem—it fails; as it does also, to my mind, in ‘The Duke of Albany’ (1523) and the unpleasant ‘Replicacioun’ (1528). The other poems in which Skelton has used it most successfully are Colin Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (1522).
All right minded readers start these two lampoons with a prejudice in favour of the poet: however he writes, the man who defies all but omnipotent government cannot be contemptible. But these poems have a real, and very curious, merit. I would describe it as anonymity. The technique, to be sure, is highly personal; but the effect produced is that of listening to the voice of the people itself. A vast muttering and growling of rumors fills our ears; ‘Lay men say’ . . . ‘Men say’ . . . ‘temporality say’ . . . ‘I tell you as men say’ . . . ‘they crye and they yelle’ . . . ‘I hear the people talke’ . . . What newes? What newes?’ . . . ‘What here ye of Lancashire?’ . . . ‘What here ye of the Lord Dacres?’ . . . ‘is Maister Meautis dede?’ Thus to hand over responsibility to a vague on dit is no doubt a common trick of satirists: but thus repeated, thus with cumulative effect accompanying Skelton’s almost endless denunciations, it acquires a strange and disquieting potency. It may be the truth that Wolsey needed to care for Skelton no more than Bishop Blougram for Gigadibs, and that the forgiveness for which the poet paid heavily in flattery was the forgiveness of tranquil contempt. But our imaginative experience in reading the poems ignores this possibility. In them Skelton has ceased to be a man and become a mob: we hear thousands of him murmuring and finally thundering at the gates of Hampton Court. And here once again the Skeltonics help him. Their shapeless garrulity, their lack of steady progression are (for this purpose) no defect. But he is very near the borders of art. He is saved by the skin of his teeth. No one wishes the poems longer, and a few more in the same vein would be intolerable.
But Skelton’s abusive vein was not confined to Skeltonics. In the astonishing Speke Parot (1521) he had returned to rhyme royal. This poem exists in two widely divergent texts; in the Harleian MS. it is mainly an attack on Wolsey, in the early print, mainly an attack on Greek studies; both are put into the mouth of the Parrot and both are almost wholly unintelligible. The obscurity is doubtless denser now than it was in 1521, but it was there from the beginning and is certainly intentional. Modern scholars have laboured with great diligence, and not without success, to dissipate it, but a critical judgement on the poem cannot be made with any confidence; not that we have no literary experiences while we read, but that we have no assurance whether they are at all like those the poet intended to give us. The very first lines have for me their own whimsical charm.
My name is Parot, a byrde of Paradyse
Ny nature deuysed of a wondrous kynde,
Deyntilye dyeted with dyuers delycat spyse
Till Euphrates that flode dryueth me into Inde . . .
His curiously carven cage, his mirror for him to ‘toot in’, the maidens strewing the cage with fresh flowers and saying ‘Speak, parrot’, the utter inconsequence (as it seems to us) of the statement ‘In Poperynge grew paires when Parot was an egge’—all this delights us scarcely less than the voyage of the Owl and the Pussycat or the Hunting of the Snark. The same crazy sort of pleasure can be derived from lines like
For Ierichoe and Ierseye shall mete together as sone
As he to exployte the man out of the mone
or
To brynge all the sea to a chirrystone pytte.
This raises in some minds the question whether we are reading the first of the nonsense poets, or whether Skelton is anticipating the moderns and deliberately launching poetry on ‘the stream of consciousness’. I believe not. I fear the poem was not meant to be nonsense: it is nonsense to us because it is a cryptogram of which we have lost the key. Our pleasure in it may be almost wholly foreign to Skelton’s purpose and to his actual achievement in 1521; almost, not quite, because unless his mind had been stocked with curious images, even the disorder into which they necessarily fall for us who know too little of the real links between them, would not affect us as it does. His modern admirers are thus really in touch with a certain level of Skelton’s mind, but probably not of his art, when they enjoy Speke Parot.
In the Garland of Laurel (1523) Skelton returns, as far as the main body of the poem is concerned, to the broad highway of medieval poetry. The occasion of the poem was a desire to compliment the Countess of Surrey and certain other ladies: its form, stanzaic allegory: its characters, Skelton as dreamer, Pallas, Fame, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. The catalogue of ‘laureate’ poets is enlivened by a refrain about Bacchus which has a hearty ring, but the only other good passage (that where Daphne, though already tree, quivers at Apollo’s touch) is from Ovid. All that is of value in this production is contained in the seven lyric addresses to ladies which are inserted at the end. Only one of these (‘Gertrude Statham’) is exactly Skeltonic, though ‘Margaret Hussey’ comes near to being so. ‘Jane Blennerhasset’ and ‘Isabel Pennell’ have the short, irregular lines, but there is in both a real rhyme-scheme. ‘Margery Wentworth’, ‘Margaret Tylney’, and ‘Isabel Knight’ are in stanzas. Some of these are very good indeed: what astonished one is the simplicity of the resources from which the effect has been produced. In ‘Margery Wentworth’, which is twenty lines long, the same four lines are thrice repeated. Of the eight lines which remain to be filled up by a fresh effort of imagination, one is wasted (and in so tiny a poem) on rubble like ‘Plainly I cannot glose’. Yet the thing succeeds—apparently by talking about flowers and sounding kind. ‘Isabel Pennell’ captures us at once by the opening lines, which sound as if the ‘baby’ (whether she was really an infant matters nothing) had been shown to him that moment for the first time and the song had burst out ex tempore. After that, the flowers, the April shower, the bird, and ‘star of the morrow gray’ (only slightly improved by the fact that morrow is now an archaism) do the rest. ‘Margaret Hussey’ lives only by the opening quatrain: just as that very different lyric ‘Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale’ (which Cornish set) lives almost entirely on the line which makes its title.
The tenderness, though not the playfulness, of these little pieces is found also in ‘Now sing we’, and also, with much more elaborate art, in the fine devotional lyric ‘Woefully Arrayed’. If this is by Skelton it is the only piece in which he does not appear to be artless.
It may naturally be asked whether this artlessness in Skelton is real or apparent: and, if apparent, whether it is not the highest art. I myself think that it is real. The result is good only when he is either playful or violently abusive, when the shaping power which we ordinarily demand of a poet is either admittedly on holiday or may be supposed to be suspended by rage. In either of these two veins, but especially in the playful, his lack of all real control and development is suitable to the work in hand. In Philip Sparrow or ‘Margery Wentworth’ he ‘prattles out of fashion’ but that is just what is required. We are disarmed; we feel that to criticize such poetry is like trying to make a child discontented with a toy which Skelton has given it. That is one of the paradoxes of Skelton: in speaking of his own work he is arrogant (though perhaps even then with a twinkle in his eye), but the work itself, at its best, dances round or through our critical defences by its extreme unpretentiousness—an unpretentiousness quite without parallel in our literature. But I think there is more nature than art in this happy result. Skelton does not know the peculiar powers and limitations of his own manner, and does not reserve it, as an artist would have done, for treating immature or disorganized states of consciousness. When he happens to apply it to such states, we may get delightful poetry: when to others, verbiage. There is no building in his work, no planning, no reason why any piece should stop just where it does (sometimes his repeated envoys make us wonder if it is going to stop at all), and no kind of assurance that any of his poems is exactly the poem he intended to write. Hence his intimacy. He is always in undress. Hence his charm, the charm of the really gifted amateur (a very different person from the hardworking inferior artist). I am not unaware that some modern poets would put Skelton higher than this. But I think that when they do so they are being poets, not critics. The things that Mr. Graves gets out of Skelton’s work are much better than anything that Skelton put in. That is what we should expect: achievement has a finality about it, where the unfinished work of a rich, fanciful mind, full of possibilities just because it is unfinished, may be the strongest stimulant to the reader when that reader is a true poet. Mr. Graves, Mr. Auden, and others receive from Skelton principally what they give and in their life, if not alone, yet eminently, does Skelton live. Yet no student of the early sixteenth century comes away from Skelton uncheered. He has no real predecessors and no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an unmistakable individual, a man we have met.
Whatever Skelton’s limitations may be, our respect for him will be increased when we turn to the minor comic and satirical poets of his age. The anonymous Cock Lorell’s Boat, which may belong to the first decade of the century, survives only in a fragment. What we have begins with the embarkation of a crew of choice knaves under Cock Lorell, referred to in 1610 as ‘the most notorious knave that ever lived’. A tale told by a pardoner has gleams of humour and the appearance of ‘Sling-thrifty Fleshmonger’ encourages us with the promise of at least some good names: this promise, however, is not kept. The greater part of the work is mere catalogue and the rhyme scheme with which it opens (a a b c c b) is soon forgotten and replaced by couplets. It can hardly be said to have metre and I cannot find the ‘spirit’ and ‘humour’ for which one of its editors praised it. The Protestant pamphlet Read me and be not Wroth, printed in Strasbourg, 1528, is perhaps a little worse in so far as its attempts to set off serious polemical matter with an appearance of mirth are more pitiable than the Boat’s simple buffoonery. Thus a song will begin ‘In the ioyfull moneth of ioly June’ only to continue
Fyrst to begynne at the spretualtie
Whose lyvynge shulde be example of grace.
When the sugar coating is as thin as this, we feel that we should get on better without it. Another Protestant satire which dates from this period is the pseudo-Chaucerian Pilgrim’s Tale. The part in rhyme royal (ll. 449–550) is wholly unmetrical: but the couplets furnish the nearest parallel we have to the rhythm of Spenser’s Februarie eclogue and may have been its model. Robert Copland’s High Way to the Spyttall House (1536) in couplets that stagger between four and five beats is a little more interesting. It is based on a French prose original, Le Chemin de l’Ospital by Robert de Balzac: but such merits as it has owe more to Copland than to him. The author feigns that on a night when ‘it had snowen and frozen verie strong’ he took shelter in the porch of a hospital (possibly St. Bartholomew’s) and learned a great deal from the porter about beggars and their impostures. There is some real humour in the lines
I saw the beggar pull out xi pens
sayeing to his felowes ‘Se what here is!
Many a knave have I called Mayster for this,’
but as the poem proceeds, the fatal tendency to catalogue takes possession of it. The language is, however, redeemed from dullness by its slangy vitality. Jail-birds are ‘nightingales of Newgate’; hanged men are ‘buryed aloft in the ayre’: beggars who insist on wheaten bread, though bread of any sort is a minor element in their diet, are said to want ‘Whyte thread to sewe good ale’. There is also a rich sprinkling of cant or thieves’ English, especially in lines 900 to 971. The whole poem would have been a world to George Borrow. Jyl of Braintfords Testament, also by Robert Copland, has a promising theme. Jyl is making her will and leaving to several classes of people that same airy legacy which the goodman left the friar in Chaucer: for example to him
that goeth to a fray at the begynnyng
And to a good meal at the latter endyng.
The story of Jyl herself is merely a frame for these types, of which it was easy to extend the list almost endlessly: the doggerel metre and mean knowingness of the one I have quoted is a fair specimen. The main interest of the Testament, as of all these pieces, is that it shows the roots (roots may be excused for being grubby) out of which grew the lower elements of comedy in More’s prose and, later, in the dramatists.
Coverdale’s Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songs (before 1539) is on the border line between the Late Medieval or the Drab. It is nearly regular in metre; perhaps because Coverdale knows what he would be at, but perhaps only because he sticks mainly to octosyllables and they had never been so completely ruined as the longer line. In other respects he is prosaic and of no literary importance. A more interesting transitional poet is John Heywood (1497–1578). Ignoring his dramatic works, which are reserved for another hand, we can distinguish two distinct strains in Heywood’s verse. At times he is, quite unmistakably, a Drab Age poet;
The virtue of her looks
Excels the precious stone;
Ye need none other books
To read or look upon.
All the marks of good Drab are there, the regularity, the short lines, the simple diction, the quietness. On the other hand, he can write:
Beggars should be no choosers: but yet they will.
Who can bring a beggar from choice to beg still?
It might have come from almost any poet dealt with in this chapter. And the interesting thing is that Heywood’s work does not appear to have begun by being Late Medieval and then to have become Drab in obedience to the general movement of the age. On the contrary, my first example comes from a ‘Description of a Most Noble Lady’ probably written in 1534. We are thus led to conclude that Heywood understood regular syllabic scansion from a very early period in his career but continued to the end to prefer the old shambling line for comic and satiric poetry—that is, for the great part of his work. And this incidentally gives some support to the belief, suggested above, that the Late Medieval line is never, or seldom, an unsuccessful attempt at a decasyllable. It is not on that account better; it is only bad for different reasons.
The Drab Age poet in Heywood is represented by a small and not very important body of poems. The ‘Description’, already quoted, has a curious metrical pattern; two stanzas in trimeters to one of eights and sixes, as it were in triads, all through. The clumsiness so common in Drab appears in a line like ‘Whose face yours all blank shall’. The ‘Ballad against Slander and Detraction’ is equally regular and as wooden and gnomic as any minor Tottelian could desire. The Ballad on the marriage of Philip and ‘bloody’ Mary, with its slight irregularities, its symbolic beasts, and its alliterations, reads like a very feeble attempt to imitate Dunbar.
His more characteristic output consists of the Dialogue containing the Number of Proverbs (1546), the various ‘Hundreds’ of Epigrams and Epigrams upon Proverbs issued in 1555, 1556, and 1560, and The Spider and the Fly (1556). The Dialogue (on marriage) is merely a peg on which to hang proverbs. The Epigrams upon Proverbs consisted of proverbs either combated, as in the quotation about beggars above, or pointed with a satirical application to some imaginary hearer. The Epigrams may be almost anything, fables, funny stories, cautionary tales, or maxims. All these works use chiefly the cacophonous, irregular couplet, though we sometimes find octosyllabics or trimeters. The anecdotes are sometimes good anecdotes and may have come from More’s lips in conversation; one would like to think that this was the truth behind Gabriel Harvey’s and Anthony Wood’s belief that More had assisted Heywood. But it is not every man who can carry a bon mot. Heywood’s verse does not help the tales; and where verse does not do good it does harm. In general these vast collections are filled up with stuff that might just win a smile if it were rhymed ex tempore in a merry hour when beards wagged all: served cold in print, and in such quantity, they are (at least to my taste) unendurable. Their value to those interested in the history of the proverb will, however, long keep them from oblivion.
The Spider and the Fly, in rhyme royal, was already in its own century condemned for obscurity. ‘Neither he himself that made it’, says Harrison, ‘neither anie one that readeth it can reach vnto the meaning thereof.’ In recent years it has attracted the attention, not unfavourable, of more than one scholar. We must be especially thankful to those who by abstracts and judicious quotation have enabled us to see that the plot is not without spirit. But what abstracts necessarily leave out is the actual quality of the writing, the shambling rhythms (though you can find here and there a whole stanza that scans) and the unrelieved dullness of the language. Against execution like this all beauties of conception contend in vain; to ask us to admire them is like asking us to admire the fine features of a face covered with a loathsome disease of the skin. Though Heywood the poet cannot be recommended, what we know of the man deserves respect, and he made on his death-bed (then long an exile for his religion) a better joke than he ever put in a book. His kindly old confessor (bonus quidam sacerdos) answered, when he deplored his sins, that the flesh is frail, carnem esse fragilem, and again and again carnem esse fragilem, till at last ‘Marry, Father,’ said the old man, ‘it will go hard but you shall prove that God should a made me a fish’ (Deum arguere videris quod me non fecerit piscem). That is Heywood’s best title to fame; that, and the refrain (if he made it)
All a green willow, willow,
All a green willow is my garland.
II
The reader has already been warned that our ‘periods’ do not apply to the history of prose so clearly as to that of verse: if for no other reason, because the staggering metre which clearly marks out the Late Medieval work in the one art naturally does not occur in the other. In this section I shall mention a few works in prose which are medieval by almost any standard: but the list could easily have been made longer by including authors whom I have in fact reserved for a later chapter.
Vernacular prose history at this period is just beginning to branch off from the records of the city of London. The folio of 1502 under its traditional name of ‘Arnold’s Chronicle’ has probably led many a young student on a wild goose chase which he would have been spared had he known the real title: The Names of the Bayljfs Custos Mairs and Sherefs of the Cite of London. The volume can hardly be classified as a literary text. A little history is worked into its interstices, but it is in fact a miscellany containing lists of city officers, the articles of ‘the charter and liberties’ of London, the ‘ordinaunce for the assise and weight of bred’, various forms of oaths, an article on ‘the lawes and beleve of the Sarasyns’, some recipes, and amidst all this, like a gold ring found lying in an old drawer full of odds and ends, the text of the ‘Nut Brown Maid’.
In Fabyan’s Cronycle (1516) we still find what seems to us a disproportionate attention to the city offices and to city ceremonials, especially as Fabyan (who was an alderman) draws nearer to his own age, but the greater part of the book consists of genuine chronicle. It well illustrates the different fates of prose and verse at the time. It has poetical prologues which might be the work of an infant, but its prose can be read, at least for an hour or so, with pleasure. It is below Pitscottie and perhaps about as good as Major. Here is a specimen on the character of Henry V:
Thys man before the deth of hys father applyed hym vnto all vyce and insolency and drewe vnto hym all riottours and wyidly dysposed persones. But after he was admytted to the rule of the lande, anon and sodainly he became a new man and tourned all that rage and wyldnes into sobernes and sadnes and the vyce into constant vertue. And for he would continewe the vertue and not to be reduced therevnto by the famylyarite of his olde nyse company, he therefore after rewardes to them gyuen charged them vpon payne of theyr lyues that none of them were so hardy to come wythin x myle of such place as he were lodged.
‘To be reduced therevnto’ does not quite work, but it is on the whole a tolerable way of writing. As an historian Fabyan is not quite uncritical. He usually tells us his authorities—‘the englysshe cronycle’, ‘Beda’, ‘Policronyca’, ‘Vincent Historiall’, ‘another wryter called John Froysarde’. He rejects Arthur’s continental victories because neither French nor Latin historians make any mention of them. But he begins, as was then the custom, with Brut and does not reach Hengest till chapter 83. His philosophy of history is a simple Providentialism which leaves him completely agnostic about second causes; the Norman Conquest happened because ‘God of his vnknowen iudgementes to man and by his hygh and hyd counsayle wolde suffer this duke to conquer so noble a lande’. It is a method which saves minor historians from writing a great deal of nonsense and compels them to get on with the story.
Comic prose is represented by two works of very different merit, the Hundred Merry Tales of 1526 and the Howleglass whose date has been disputed. The latter, a version of the German Eulenspiegel (which in 1567 attained the dignity of a Latin rendering, Noctuae Speculum) is a collection of practical jokes. The hero is hardly a character and it is a little oversolemn to inquire into his motives. The author’s motive is to make readers laugh and the hero is his obedient puppet. The jokes are hoaxes and overreachings, usually coprophious and sometimes macabre, for Tyll Howleglass continues to provide (or solicit) laughter even on his bier and in his coffin. Hence a modern reader might even find the book sinister. But there was nothing sinister in the author’s intention, and it is pleasant to find that some of Howleglass’s victims—such as the Bishop of Bremen, though it cost him thirty ‘gildens’—thoroughly appreciate the joke against themselves. No moral question is involved in our liking or loathing for this book: it depends on how strong a man’s stomach is and how long he can go on enjoying stories whose point is always perfectly visible four or five hundred words ahead. My own judgement would be that whatever you can get from Howleglass you can get better from Deloney. But it was popular in its day.
With the Hundred Merry Tales we enter a different world. It smells of Thomas More’s circle with which, of course, John Rastell its printer was connected. One of its stories occurs also in Heywood who has been suggested as a possible author. It is indeed far better than any of Heywood’s known works, but that superiority might be sufficiently accounted for by the difference between bad verse and a good plain prose. It is not original save as a good anthology is original: most of its tales can be found elsewhere. One, ‘The Dumb Wife’, we met in the . But in any story which one happens not to have read before, the point comes like a thunderclap, and even such a drudge as a literary historian, reading on a hard chair in a library, will probably laugh aloud. The manner is just what it should be: imperturbably grave and droll with feigned simplicity. A moral is appended to each story and may be the funniest part of all. A woman is told that a cuckold’s hat is a good charm against some disease that is attacking the pigs; her efforts to borrow one from her neighbours naturally lead to various rebuffs; she resolves to have one of her own by next year and thus be out of her gossips’ ‘danger’ (as we should say ‘be under no obligation to any one’). Moral: ‘it is more wysdome for a man to trust more to his owne store than to his neyghbours gentylnes.’
But no prose writer of that period has deserved nearly so well of posterity as Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners; at least in one of his literary capacities, for he is two-sided. All of his work that is still read with delight shows him as the last of the great medieval translators. The originals which he chooses are chivalrous romance and chivalrous chronicle and his professed motives are the characteristically medieval ones, to eschew ‘ydelnesse’ which is ‘the moder of all vices’ and lest the ‘chyvalrous feates and marciall prowesses’ of ‘tymes past’ should be ‘had clene out of remembraunce’. He has a power, not inferior to Malory’s, of transmitting the valiant and gentle old French prose into English without loss. His apology for not (thank Heaven) presuming to ‘reduce’ it into ‘fresshe ornate polysshed Englysshe’ because he lacks ‘the facondyous arte of rethoryke’ is equally medieval. But that is not the whole story. In his prefaces he attempts the facundious art. Their chief ornament is the multiplication of synonyms: thus in the preface to Froissart he recommends histories because they ‘shewe, open, manifest and declare to the reader by example of olde antiquite what we should enquere, desire, and followe, and also what we should eschewe, auoyde, and vtterly flee’. If this love of rhetoric had found expression only in his prefaces it would almost be forgotten now. But it is the bright day brings forth the adder. Towards the end of his life and in what modern taste must regard as an evil hour, his nephew Sir Francis Bryan put into his hands Bertaut’s 1531 French version of Antonio de Guevara’s Libro del Emperador Marco Aurelio with a request that he would translate it. The Spanish original was, by our standards, an impudent forgery, purporting to be a contemporary life of the great emperor discovered in Cosimo de Medici’s library: the real Meditations being then, and till 1558, safely unknown. The interest turned on the morality, the countless ‘ensaumples’, and the rhetorical style. Guevara said he had sweated to collect ‘sentences’ (that is sententiæ, gnomes) and also to place words and connect syllables. He combined a humanistic faith in the ethical superiority of the ancients with an optimistic belief that we had improved on them in style: ‘so hygh sentences are not founde at this present tyme nor so hygh a style they of tyme past neuer atteyned vnto’. Berners was ready to oblige Bryan; he liked the ‘high and sweete style’. His translation ran into fifteen editions within the century and must share with North’s later version the responsibility of introducing a very questionable model into English literature. The extent and quality of its influence have been matters of controversy. Landmann’s theory that Guevara is the origin of euphuism has been severely, and I think rightly, criticized. It is more the origin of Euphues—that is, not of Lyly’s language but of the floods of facile moralizing. The love of antithesis is common to euphuism and Guevara, but also to many other styles, Hebrew, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. Full-blown euphuism I take to be a genuinely English variation of ‘Renaissance’ rhetoric: but more of this in a later chapter. Perhaps Marco Aurelio’s healthiest offspring in English is the elder Mr. Shandy.
Berners’s excursion into this rhetorical territory should probably not be regarded either as senile decay or as ‘movement with the times’. He had always had his own modest ambitions in that direction: fortunately he liked other things as well. We know that he left at his death a library of eighty books. He was probably omnivorous, and his taste was excellent as long as he did not think about it. To the present day one meets men, great readers, who write admirably until the fatal moment when they remember that they are writing.
The chronology of his works is obscure and does not perhaps matter very much. Of the two romances which he translated, Arthur of Little Britain is not among the best of its kind. Its chivalry is mainly an affair of heraldry and etiquette: there is little real fineness of feeling. The pleasure depends on the pictures offered to the imagination. These often fail because marvels are multiplied till we grow weary, and in this kind of fiction, more than in any other, the half is greater than the whole. But there is a real impressiveness in the voice that cries through the enchanted castle of Porte Noyr, ‘Behold, now the ende’: and a much more spiritual magic in the occult sympathy whereby when the image of Florence in the garden leans forward and lays a chaplet on Arthur’s head, the real lady, leagues away in her father’s palace, begins, she knows not why, to love. The achievement of this adventure is all the better because it has been foretold:
And so on a fayre grene benche she sette her doune betwene the bysshop and Maister Steven and so passed the tyme with many goodli sportes. And than it began to waxe late and the evenynge was very clere and the sterres shone full bryght. Than Maister Steven dyd beholde them a grete space and at the laste he said, Madame, for certayne I know by the course of the planettes that there is a Knyght comynge, &c.
But there are no characters and we have a feeling that the author has taken his work either too seriously or else not seriously enough. In a grave romance there should be more restraint; or conversely, such reckless use of all the ingredients needed a touch of Boiardo’s humour. Huon of Bordeux is on a much higher level. We do not feel that it is simply being made up out of the author’s head. It has those roots in legend and folk-lore without which it is hard for romance to have the necessary solidity. Oberon is a noble invention. He is, in reality, a good being but only Huon’s courtesy reveals the fact: worldly wisdom, in the person of Gerames, had warned him against the ‘crokyd shuldryd’ dwarf with the ‘aungelyke vysage’ in the fifteen leagues’ forest by Babylon. Huon’s faith is rewarded by Oberon’s favour and inestimable gifts: but Huon, light-minded and full of young blood, disobeys every command laid upon him by his elven patron. The execution here is faulty: Huon’s disobediences are crowded too closely together and instead of feeling pity for human frailty we lose patience. So in the end does Oberon. Huon lies bound and starving in the Isle Noysaunt and the fairy is now his enemy; only relenting when one of his own elven knights, Malabrun, offers to suffer Oberon’s wrath in his stead and saves him in the form of a beast. Most wisely this is not elaborated into full-blown allegory: you must not say that Oberon ‘is’ God the Father, Malabrun Christ, and Huon humanum genus. It haunts the recesses of the story as a mere suggestion and makes the story more serious—thus incidentally enabling it at pleasure to be genuinely comic. Our own age is, almost beyond example, hostile to romance: and we may have to wait long before ‘The circular turn shall have ripened alteration’ so far that men can enjoy Huon again. Even now there are things in both romances that must give pleasure. One is the phrasing: the swamp so deep that it seemed to go down to ‘the abysme and swalowe of the earth’; in the castle of Porte Noyr the ‘halles of vehement adventures’; an army on march whose ‘noise seemed to be a new world’; or Huon’s resolution that on a certain adventure ‘None shall go with me but myself and Jesu Christ’. Another is that admirable blend of fantasy in large things with homely and realistic detail in small ones, which produces such whimsically convincing effects. Thus in the Arthur when a magic whirlwind falls upon the pavilions of a great king’s camp ‘there was blowen up into the ayre streamers, towels, and other cloths so high that the sight of them was clean lost’; in Huon after we have been driven on the Isle of Adamant and crashed through the thick fringe of rotted shipping by which its coast is of course surrounded, we descend into a cave and find ‘ten fayre yonge men all of the Fayry’ engaged in baking bread, and then ‘they all ceased of their laboure and busyness and beheld Huon and rubbed off the paste and meal off their hands and fingers’. It is an art that almost every medieval romancer knew but it was soon to be lost for many a year.
If Berners had translated Huon alone, he would have stood immediately below Malory: the two volumes of his Froissart (1524 and 1525) make him Malory’s equal. His translation, if scrutinized closely, will not, indeed, be found to be perfect. He sometimes misunderstands and sometimes makes injudicious abridgements. But taken as a whole it fits the original like a glove. Froissart shares with much old French prose the great virtues of being quite effortless and unflagging. It is the sort of writing which, as W. P. Ker said, is ‘free from any anxiety or curiosity about rules of good taste because it had good taste to begin with’. The temptation is to describe it negatively, to say that it is never clumsy, never affected, never strident, and thus to produce the very false impression that it must be like the style of Defoe. In reality it has none of Defoe’s workday quality. Its smoothness resembles his as little as the smoothness of springy turf resembles that of a well-laid wooden floor. It is half-way to poetry: full of the author’s relish for bright colours, his never-wearying admiration for noble deeds, and his spontaneous tenderness. It is, in one sense, like conversation; but like a conversation in which both tears and smiles may occur and in which there is no check on enthusiasm because it is taken for granted that we all understand one another and that no boorish persons are present. It is this enthusiasm which gives to the book as a whole, however grave or painful the matter may sometimes be, its quality of gaiety and youthfulness.
The world which Froissart presents is in many ways a shocking one. In the twenties when we all cherished pacific hopes, his outlook might have been condemned as a crying example of that ‘false glamour’ which had too long concealed, and yet not quite concealed, the real miseries of war. Now, when we have discovered that the scheme of ‘outlawing war’ has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant, we may be disposed to give Froissart a humbler hearing. He does not conceal the atrocities which, then as now, occurred; the rape of the nuns at Origny Saint Benoiste, the Scotch massacre at Durham, the English soldiers running amuck at Caen, and the Christian barbarities against the Turks at Comette. On the English murder of their prisoners at Aijubarrota his comment is surprisingly, even comically, cold-blooded: ‘Lo, beholde the great yuell aduenture that fell thate Saturday, for they slewe as many good prisoners as wolde well have been worthe, one with another, foure hundred thousande frankes.’ But his disapprovals are not always so strictly economic. Scott’s Claverhouse was not quite truthful when he represented Froissart as wholly indifferent to the fate of harmless and ungentle civilians. ‘God haue mercy on their soules, for I trowe they were martyrs.’ But such things are not his main concern.
His theme is chivalry—the life of the romances reproduced as nearly as possible in the real world—chivalry in all its hardness, all its softness, and all its fantasticality. The hardness has perhaps never been better expressed than in the last words of the Douglas at Otterburn, when Sir John Sinclair ‘demaunded of the erle how he dyd. Right yuell, cosyn, quoth the erle, but thanked be God there hath been but a fewe of myne auncytours that hath dyed in their beddes.’ The softer side, the honour of ladies, is a recurrent accompaniment to the story, like the sound of a brook beside a road. ‘Howsoeuer they blamed or counsailed hym, the gentle knyght wolde neuer chaunge his purpose but sayd he hadde but one dethe to dye, the whiche was in the wyll of God: and also sayd that all knyghts ought to ayd to their powers all ladyes and damosels chased out of theyr owne countreys.’ The garrison in a castle held against the Scots by Sir William Montague were so fortunate as to have with them the Countess of Salisbury, the sagest and fairest lady of all England ‘for by the regarde of such a lady and by her swete comforting a man ought to be worthe two men at nede’. But ladies were not always content only to inspire valiant feats: real life drew closer to the romances than we usually think, and a Britomart or Bradamante had her counterpart at the sea fight off Guernsey when ‘the countesse that day was worth a man; she had the harte of a lyon and had in her hande a sharp glayue wherewith she fought feersly’. As for the fantastical, Cyrano himself could not have overgone the ‘young bachelars’ in the English army who ‘had eche of them one of their eyen closed with a peace of silk. It was sayd how they had made a vowe among the ladyes of their countrey that they wolde nat se but with one eye tyll they had done some dedes of armes in Fraunce.’
These bachelors were young, and I have already mentioned youthfulness as a characteristic of Froissart and Froissart’s world. We misread all medieval romance and chronicle if we miss this quality. Whatever age the knights and ladies may actually be, they all behave as if, like Sidney’s shepherd boy, ‘they should never be old’. The folly, the pathos, and the generosity of youth meet us everywhere: in the ‘damoselles freshly apparayled, redy to have daunced if they might haue leue’; in the crazy wager (‘youthe and lybertie of corage made them to do it’) which sent the French king and the Duke of Touraine riding off a hundred and fifty leagues from Montpellier to Paris; above all in the gay absurdity whereby Ernaulton of Spain, on a frosty day, carried a live and loaded donkey on his back upstairs into hall. Modern historians may trace all these wars to gray, impersonal causes, political or economic. They may thus find truth, but surely not the whole truth; the other half is known to Froissart, as it were, from within—‘the Kyng was as than but in the floure of his youth, desyring nothyng so moche as to haue dedes of armes’. This freshness is not even confined to love and war. It leaps out in Froissart’s conversation with the squire about the enchantment of Sir Peter of Bearn, which came by killing a bear ‘and it might be so that this bere was before some knight chasyng in the forest of Bisquay and peraduenture displeased in that time some god or goddes, whereby he was transformed vnto a bere to do there his penaunce, as aunciently Acteon was chaunged vnto an hart. Acteon, quod the squyer, I pray you shewe me that storie. I wolde fayne here it.’ Note the unspoiled appetite for myth; there was no humanist meddler to tell them that Acteon was ‘classical’.
While Froissart’s temper is thus youthful, his art is mature. The temper can be found again in later writers: indeed there is no better comment on his attitude to war than Montaigne’s praise of a soldier’s life (III. xiii) which delights him by its variety, its free and unceremonious conversation, and the crowd of ‘brisk, young, and noble men’ which it brings together. But the art died. In French medieval romance and chronicle there is a perfect adaptation of means to ends and a perfect understanding between the author and those for whom he wrote, which we hardly find again. In later ages prose as plain as this tends to be a little jejune, and prose as tender and sappy as this tends to be rhetorical. It was the misfortune of medieval England to have achieved no original work of this kind; our debt to Berners and Malory (and let us add, to Caxton, who improved Malory) is all the greater. They made these things ours just in time. To have snatched these ripe fruits of the Middle Ages when the Middle Ages were already over may even have carried a certain advantage with it. They were still fresh in men’s minds at a moment when new forms and new modes of sentiment might otherwise have swept us off our feet; their popularity may have helped to save us from a too complete break with the past. As it was, we started going back to the Middle Ages almost before we had emerged from them. Hence in English literature it is hard to distinguish the last medieval writers from the earliest medievalists, the survival from the revival. Already in Malory there are elements of medievalism: and in Spenser there are still elements really medieval. The humanist repudiation was short-lived. This slowness to abandon, or readiness to reinstate, the old traditions of courtesy and honour may partly explain the speed and success with which the new aristocracy ‘gentled their condition’.