The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  The turbulent middle of the fourteenth century broke the prejudice in which English was held; it began to flex its muscles. Calamity was its patron. The Black Death first reached English shores before John Gower turned twenty, in the twenty-first year of Edward III’s reign. In August of 1348 it arrived from France at Weymouth. It devastated Bristol, and in the early part of 1349 overtook London and East Anglia. It was still at large in Scotland and Ireland in 1350. Consider what it was like, to learn each day of dead or dying friends, to see bodies carted through the streets or heaped in a tangled mess at corners. It was an especially disgusting illness that started with hard lumps and tumors, then scalding fever, gray patches on the skin like leprosy. Then the cough, blood welling from the lungs. A victim had three days: terror, agony, death.

  Langland describes it in a passage that the eighteenth-century critic Thomas Warton says John Milton may have stored away in his mind (in Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 475ff). Langland says:

  All at once there were not enough peasants to work the soil, servants to tend the house, or priests to administer unction and conduct funeral services. No one was immune. Three archbishops of Canterbury and in Norwich eight hundred diocese priests, and half the monks in Westminster, all died in one year. Eight hundred priests. The Church was big; the Black Death was bigger. Women toiled in the fields, harvests were left to rust. Parliament was suspended, courts of law were not convened. It was a time of too much loss for sorrow, too much fear for civil strife. There were more dead than graves to put them in: they were piled in plague pits and covered with lime. If the plague made feast of the poor, it was at least democratic. The powerful were not immune: the king’s own daughter perished.

  Another victim was a big-hearted anchorite who wrote verse, Richard Rolle of Hampole. “Full dear me think He has me bought with bloody hands and feet.” He was a man of soul. A poet-martyr. Perhaps he translated the Psalms. It is hard to establish authentic “texts” by an author unless a number of similar manuscripts survive. Most medieval writers formed schools, their works were copied, added to and altered. Much has been assigned to Richard Rolle that may not belong to him. Why was he such a bad poet, with only some occasional astonishing lines?

  He was born about 1300 at Thornton-le-Dale near Pickering, North Yorkshire. The north of England was the center of English writing—furthest from Norman influence—but it began to lose out to the Midlands. Oxford was becoming focal, especially after the foundation of Balliol College around 1263. Rolle went to Oxford at a time when the friars still led exemplary lives. He learned Latin, disliked ordinary philosophical writers and loved scripture above all else. At nineteen he returned home, anxious about his soul, intending to become a hermit. He preached. The Dalton family set him up as a hermit on their estate. (Hermits were not unusual in the medieval world; they were licensed and controlled by bishops.) He never became a priest but may have been in minor orders. His authority was spiritual. After some years he moved to a new cell close to a hermit called Margaret Kirby; then to Hampole, near Doncaster. Cistercian nuns looked after him. On Michaelmas Day 1349 the Black Death took him. The nuns petitioned for him to be made a saint.

  His verses—if they are his—express personal feeling simply. He began in the old alliterative tradition but progressed to rhyme. His followers imitated what was an easy style. What is his, what did he borrow or translate, and what belongs to his follower William Nassyngton? When we think we’re admiring Rolle we may be admiring Nassyngton’s imitation; but then there is not much to admire in Rolle or his followers. Already poets—even holy poets—are practicing techniques of false attribution: getting their work read by borrowing the authority of a revered name. Publishers began to practice this subterfuge two hundred years later, but it’s as well to remember that they learned that deception, and others, from religious poets.

  Rolle especially loved the Psalms: “grete haboundance of gastly [ghostly, i.e., spiritual] comfort and joy in God comes in the hertes of thaim at says or synges devotly the psalmes in lovynge of Jesus Crist.” He wrote a Latin commentary; then another followed by English versions. It is hard to extrapolate a system of belief from his work, but his doctrine of love is not like other mystics’: he is alive to the world he only half inhabits. The good works a man does in this world praise God. Injustice offends caritas, and such acts particularly rile God.

  His Latin works display, a friendly critic says, “more erudition than eloquence.” The surviving verse in English includes a paraphrase of the Book of Job, a Lord’s Prayer, seven penitential psalms, and the almost unreadable The Pricke of Conscience. It must have been readable once, for it has been widely preserved in manuscript. Warton copied it out and said: “I prophesy that I am its last transcriber.” In seven parts, it treats of man’s nature, of the world, death, purgatory, Judgment Day, hell’s torments and heaven’s joys. The verse is awkward to scan: a basic iambic tetrameter measure with six, seven and sometimes (depending on the voicing of the final e and how regular you want the iamb to be) ten syllables to the line, and from three to five stresses. It raises the crucial problem of all the old poems: there’s so much variation between manuscripts that it’s impossible to say what the poet intended.

  Miracles occurred at Hampole when the nuns tried to have Rolle canonized. His fame revived just before the Peasants’ Revolt, when Lollard influence was increasing. (Lollard, from lollen, to loll or idle, was applied to street preachers.) His writings were exploited by reformers. Around 1378 his commentary on the Psalms was reissued with Lollardish interpolations. No one knows who revised it: some point the finger, implausibly, at John Wycliffe. Though not a poet, though his works are as confused in attribution as Rolle’s, though exploited, celebrated and reviled for centuries after his death, Wycliffe is one of the tutelary spirits presiding over our history. He made it possible not only for King David to sing in English—there were English versions of the psalter before Rolle—but for Moses and Jesus and God to use our vernacular, for the Bible as a whole to land on our shores in our own language. Suddenly English is good enough for Jesus. It has become legitimate.

  The Black Death returned again and again. “Servitude was disappearing from the manor and new classes were arising to take charge of farming and trade.” Thus G. M. Trevelyan tells it, making it part of an abstract process, draining it of human anguish and spiritual vertigo. “Modern institutions were being grafted on to the mediaeval, in both village and town. But in the other great department of human affairs—the religious and ecclesiastical, which then covered half of human life and its relationships—institutional change was prevented by the rigid conservatism of the Church authorities, although here too thought and opinion were moving fast.” They were provoked by the intransigence of men who governed and profited by the Church. These visionless administrators alienated free spirits and the intellectually dissatisfied. The voice of Wycliffe begins to become audible. Church corruption is attacked by Chaucer, by Langland and (more gently) by Gower; but Wycliffe drives it home from the pulpit and in his writings, forcefully to the lay heart, and to the very heart of the Church. The Church is no more corrupt than other institutions, but its corruption is privileged, sanctioned and directed from abroad. The laity is more educated than in the times of Anselm and Thomas à Becket. The Church all the same prefers to ignore discontent and keep its monopolies and privileges intact.

  Customs of fiefdom that constrained peasants on the land and preserved the feudal order of society no longer held. Too few men remained to do the work: survivors began to realize their worth, and then their power. They wanted more than they’d had: mobility, food—they even wanted wages. Peasants began to band together, recognizing power in community. The rich grew less secure in privilege. They sensed that they were dependents. Up to a third of the population perished in two years. When the plague returned in 1361, it was a plague of children. That year cattle suffered a new disease as well. The fever touched souls: many thought God spoke through that fire.

 
Reformers found a voice. Some spoke English. Before then, nobles and merchants had taught their children French from the cradle: “And provincial men will liken themselves to gentlemen, and strive with great zeal for to speak French, so as to be more told of”—a kind of social bona fides. But under Edward III change began, accelerating under Richard II. “This manner was much used before... and is since then somewhat changed. For John Cornwall, a master of grammer, changed the lore in grammerschool and construction of French into English... so that now, the year of our Lord a thousand three hundred four score and five, of the second kyng Richard after the Conquest nine, in all the grammerschools of England children leaveth French, and construeth and learneth in English, and haveth thereby advantage in one side, and disadvantage on another. Their advantage is that they learneth their grammer in less time than children were accustomed to do. Disadvantage is that no children of grammerschool conneth no more French than can their left heel, and that is harm for them if they should cross the sea and travel in strange lands.”

  The plague was a catalyst. But transformation was not easy. One version of English could be more remote from another than French was. A northern and a southern man, meeting by chance or for business, would resort to French because their dialects were mutually incomprehensible, as much in diction as in accent. English, a bastard tongue, starts to move in the other direction from Latin. Latin broke up, but English began to coalesce. Dialects started to merge into an English language when scribes and later printers got to work and London usage became the idiom for written transactions. Those who made language public and portable, in the form of broadsheets and books, brought it, and eventually us, together. After a hundred years a young maid of Dundee and an old man of Devizes could hold a kind of conversation, not necessarily in limericks.

  Much more than half our vernacular literature was northern before that time. Perhaps it still is, except the north has learned to parler more conventionally. English in its youth was hungry. The Normans imposed French but English was voracious even before they came, and in the courts of Cnut and Ethelred, when the Conquest was some way off, adjustments took place, influences from the Continent resolving the knots of a congested Old English idiom. We swallowed French (digestion altered us). The Conquest meant that English in its various forms had to gobble up faster. Written texts can be more conservative than speech: there is authority in formality. It is a risk to use the language of the day for important matters because it’s in flux and you never know which dialect, which bits of diction or patterns of syntax, will prevail.

  Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon reflects how “it seemeth a great wonder how English, that is the birth-tongue of Englishmen, and their own language and tongue, is so diverse of sound in this land,” while Norman French, a foreign idiom, is the lingua franca of the islands. In Trevisa’s own translation, which makes sense when read aloud, Higden writes: “For men of the est with men of the west, as hyt were vnder the same party of heuene, acordeth more in sounyng of speche than men of the north with men of the south. Therefore hyt ys that Mercii, that buth men of myddel Engelond, as hyt were parteners if the endes, vnderstondeth betre the syde longages, Northeron and Southeron, than Northeron and Southeron vnderstondeth eyther other.” But it’s the “Southeron” language that prevails. The “Northeron,” Higden says, is scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng—harsh, piercing and grating. The birthplace of a prejudice.

  Foreign affairs continued to be conducted during the plague as if there was no crisis at home. Skirmishes, battles and wars in France, Spain and Scotland, cruelty and piracy on every side. There was death by disease and on the field. England was certainly part of Europe. Sick at home, Englishmen went abroad to bring back wealth; they were preparing for their defeat. Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by Richard II, a boy who grew to a colorful, corrupt majority. Demands on poor and common people grew: demands for tax, service, subjection. The Peasants’ Revolt had urgent causes, though it was too early in history for the masses to rise successfully against a king. It was high time—Richard II knew it quite as well as Gower—for the court and the masters to learn to speak and sing in the language of their people.

  Fortunately there was more to build on than Richard Rolle of Hampole. There was Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, the English ballads and dozens of vulgar translations of French works. There are poems the scholars will never find, ballads and lyrics, elegies, poems of moral precept, religious meditations, lives of saints... Were they lost because they weren’t worth keeping, or because they were so constantly used that they were thumbed to pieces? Parchment wasted with the hungry love of reading eyes, recitation, with handing back and forth between poets and scholars and minstrels. Were they lost when, at the Reformation, great libraries were burned, or emptied out and sold to the local gentry—as the wicked and wonderful biographer and gossip John Aubrey remembers with pain—to be twisted into plugs for wine casks, sliced into spills to start fires, or cut in convenient sheets as bog parchment?

  Reading English in the first half of the fourteenth century was a furtive activity, frowned on by authority. When Edward III came to the throne English was revalued; from being the underdog’s tongue it became the chosen instrument of Geoffrey Chaucer. Robert Manning of Brunne had used what would become Chaucer’s and Gower’s tetrameters almost fifty years before, with a mechanical awkwardness that Gower corrected. Handlyng Sinne was based on a French work by the English writer William of Wadington, the Manuel de Pechiez—a book Gower used too. Manning explained his purpose in his Chronicle of England, completed in 1338:

  The lines are end-stopped, little breathless runs. One can respond to them but their value is local. Crude stuff, the language not up to much, but it starts clearing a space. The same is true of the Scot John Barbour’s vast limping history The Bruce, begun in 1372, where the lines do not pause but halt on a proud and assertive (if sometimes approximate) rhyme, often achieved with great violence to the word order. Yet he, too, prepared the way and Scots still have his book in their library of classics, though I suspect few actually read it, apart from schoolchildren who endure their “distinctive heritage” being rammed down their throats.

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  About Michael Schmidt

  MICHAEL SCHMIDT was born in 1947 in Mexico. He studied at Harvard and read English at Oxford. He has taught at the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Glasgow, and was writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2012-2015). He is the editor of PN Review, a leading British literary journal, which he founded in 1972, and is founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press, which has published poetry since 1969.

  Michael has edited several anthologies, notably The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English and the Carcanet introductory New Poetries series. He has published several collections of poetry, two novels, and substantial literary histories including The Novel: A Biography and The Lives of the Poets. He has also translated Aztec poetry and poems and essays by the Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz.

  Also by Michael Schmidt

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  First published in the UK in 2004 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  This edition published in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © 2004 by Michael Schmidt

  The moral right of Michael Schmidt to
be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN (HB) 9781784975975

  ISBN (E) 9781784975968

  Jacket image: Dolphin fresco, Knossos, Crete, c.1600bc © Ralf Siemieniec / Shutterstock.com

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