Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  John Dryden described the Catholic communion as the “milkwhite hind, immortal and unchanged,” but it is perhaps more significant that in The Hind and the Panther he chose to write a beast fable established upon medieval models. The real continuity lies in theme, cadence and form rather than in public professions of devotion. The Catholicism of Alexander Pope emerges forcibly in his self-created role as a social and political satirist, but more apposite is the fact that he chose to translate the poetry of Chaucer. As Hippolyte Taine attested of Pope’s verse, “the old imagination exists . . . nourished, as before, by oddities and contrasts . . . it needs a succession of expressive figures, unexpected and grinning, to pass before it . . . it prefers this coarse carnival to delicate insinuation.” The author of The Dunciad, in other words, possessed a Catholic imagination.

  Thomas Chatterton’s school in Bristol was built upon the ruins of a Carmelite convent, and so it is not inappropriate that in his Rowley poems he resurrected the world of medieval Catholicism. William Morris was described as possessing a “medievalised mind and turn of thought,” like so many of his contemporaries. From where else did Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King emerge? It is a question of affinity.

  Throughout this study there will be signs and tokens of what Hippolyte Taine called “the old imagination”—whether in the music-hall or in the pantomime, in the writings of Tolkien or the novels of Anthony Burgess, in the tradition of “magic realism” in English fiction or in the paintings of Graham Sutherland. The allegories and bestiaries of the medieval English imagination re-emerge some centuries later in George Orwell’s Animal Farm as well as in the beast fables of Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne. In similar fashion, the comic transvestism of the mystery plays continues to flourish in the contemporary pantomime. Mummers’ plays continued into the modern era, while the dancing of the mystery dramas was sustained in the “jig” at the close of Tudor plays and the more ceremonial steps of the seventeenth-century masque.

  No study of the English imagination can ignore the fact that the medieval English theatre was revived to striking effect in the twentieth century. A study of this curious phenomenon has suggested that “more medieval drama has been produced in the twentieth century than in its own time” and in the closing decades of the last century there was “a performance of almost every extant medieval text.”9 The lacuna of five hundred years might as well not exist. The Catholic culture of fifteen hundred years could not wholly die. Its inheritance is buried just below the surface of our own time.

  Women and Silence

  Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip Sidney, circa 1590. Miniature by Nicholas Hilliard

  CHAPTER 25

  The Female Religion

  In 1907 Elizabeth Robins, an American-born novelist, declared: “If I were a man, and cared to know the world I lived in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy—the weight of that long silence of one-half of the world.” The silence is that of the female.

  In England, as in the rest of Europe, women were instructed in silence by the Church; by biblical dictate, they could not preach. Even after that Church had been reformed, the relationship between public speech and public obloquy was continually reaffirmed. In 1675 Richard Allestree composed a treatise entitled The Ladies Calling in which he remarked that “this great indecency of loquacity in women” is “a symptom of a loose, impotent soul, a kind of incontinence of the mind.” Thus it has been suggested that “female silence” was a sign of “female chastity.” 1 Female speech is by its very nature dangerous and lubricious. It partakes of the body, and indeed draws the lineaments of the body into language; that is why male novelists and dramatists enact female speech as a continuous flow of words which, in the mouths of Mistress Quickly and Mrs. Malaprop and Mrs. Nickleby and a thousand successors, has its rational elements subverted and discomposed. There were a thousand images, too, of prattling women in medieval and sixteenth-century drama. Female gossip, in English law, connoted subversion and wantonness; if a man called a woman a “whore” he could defend himself by professing that he implied “whore of her tongue” rather than “whore of her body.” As one tract put it, “More shall we see fall into sinne by speech than silence.” There was every reason, then, “for construing a woman’s closed mouth as a sign for that vaginal closure”2 which rendered a woman’s body the private property of her male partner.

  Yet the silence itself is interesting; as Elizabeth Robins intimates, it might even be threatening. Silence might be the token of anger; it might be filled with resentment. It might be the silence of oblivion and of disregard, or what Virginia Woolf in an essay upon women’s writing described as “the accumulation of unrecorded life” as if the silence represented a negative energy. The silence might be fruitful, like the silence of the mystic or the visionary. It might be filled with the explored riches of the interior life. Yet more often than not silence was a token of exile and isolation.

  The first Anglo-Saxon poems composed by a woman dwell upon these solitary themes. Tentatively entitled “The Wife’s Lament” and “Wulf and Eadwacer,” these poems might provide a suggestive introduction to subsequent women’s writing in English. The female narrator in “Wulf and Eadwacer” laments her separation from her lover in lines of plangent loss:

  Thaet mon eathe tosliteth thaette naefre gesomnad waes uncer giedd geador

  Or, in a contemporary version, “that can easily be sundered which was never united, our mutual song.” “The Wife’s Lament” is similarly suffused with suffering experience:

  Ich this giedd wrece bi me ful geomorre mirre sylfe sith

  “I make this song of my deep unhappiness, of my own fate.” There has been much speculation about the male authorship of these poems, as if somehow there were no possibility of female Anglo-Saxon poets with access to scriptoria or writing materials. In fact the history and condition of Anglo-Saxon women, at least those of high birth, suggest precisely the opposite. “The Wife” identifies herself as a woman and writes in the Old English feminine gender; it takes a peculiar illogic to ascribe the poem to a monk or male scop. If we enter the “earth-hall” in which the Wife is compelled to dwell, we may find in the dust of that place a ring inscribed in the Anglo-Saxon manner: “A lady owns me. May he be cursed who steals me from her.”

  The Wife laments the loss of her “husband” or “man” or “friend” who has been forced by his kinsfolk to leave her; she is now living in a strange land, and has been banished to a “barrow” or “earth-cave” in a barren landscape. Throughout she emphasises her private circumstances—“I tell this story . . . I tell of my own experience”—where the pattern of feeling determines the formal shape of the elegy. As its editors have stated, events are narrated “in an order which subordinates them to the dramatic expression of the woman’s lament” as “appropriate to the flux of her feelings”; 3 the use of parallelism and contrast, so much part of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, “emphasises focal points in the woman’s orientation of her feelings.”4 One exemplary study of the subject, Christine Fell’s Women in Anglo-Saxon England, has noticed “the evidence of emotional effect” in both poems and has remarked that “there is little enough of this kind of poetry in Old English,”5 which suggests a defining mood or tone. One literary historian has suggested that “The Wife’s Lament” indicates “an exile from the centre of power,”6 which can be construed as masculine power; could not the whole threnody of desire and separation be part, then, of a more general anger and desolation?

  It is not necessary to repeat the old commonplace of the female writer as the medium for “feeling” rather than “thought” (as if there were any true distinction between them), but the dramatic rendition of sorrow and the emphasis upon suffered experience in these two Old English poems are at least suggestive. The “Wife” is also a traveller, albeit a reluctant one, who has settled in a strange land; subsequent narratives will confirm that the theme of exile and travel, whether mental or physical, is a constant feature of English w
omen’s writing.

  The role and nature of women in Anglo-Saxon society were far more secure and far more powerful than in subsequent cultures. Before the Conquest of 1066, the pattern of female virtue consisted of wisdom, liberality and nobility; under the Anglo-Norman dispensation her qualities consisted principally of beauty and coquettishness. The Old English word “hlaford,” or lord, could equally apply to a woman, and all the available evidence from Anglo-Saxon England suggests that “women were then more nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age.”7 The status of the female had more practical applications, also. Within a marriage “the finances are held to be the property of husband and wife, not of the husband only” and in the codes of Aethelbert “a woman had the right to walk out of a marriage that did not please her.”8 The penalty for fondling a woman’s breasts was the large fine of sixpence.

  It is not too difficult to find, therefore, the context for a female bard. In Old English, “mann” could be used of both sexes. The word for fate in that language, “wyrd,” is a feminine noun which in a fragment of poetry is deemed to “weave” the events of the world. It has its place within the two principal elements which determine Old English descriptions of the female, that of the “peace-weaver” and that of the “shield-maiden.” This is not some piece of antique lore merely. A central theme of this study has been one of unacknowledged continuity with the Anglo-Saxon past; this ancient dichotomy in the description of women, maintained by females as well as males, has deeply imbued the English sensibility. It is perhaps worth remarking, also, that one Old English charm invokes the powers of “eorthan modor” or mother earth.

  One of the “shield-maidens” was Aethelflaed, “ famosissima regina Saxonum,” who according to William of Malmesbury “protected her kinfolk and terrified aliens”; one of the “peace-weavers” was Abbess Hilda, who encouraged learning and devotion in her foundations at both Hartlepool and Whitby. It was customary for an abbess to administer the “mixed” or “double” houses of monks and nuns, perhaps as an atavistic remembrance of the period when the Germanic tribes worshipped a principal goddess. The nuns themselves, in foundations such as that of Barking, were widely noted for their learning and for their assiduous work in the areas of grammar, metrics and the holy scriptures. They were known, too, for their study “of the historians and the entries of chroniclers.”9 Their importance now lies, however, in an exemplary historical role connecting female identity and indeed female power with religion. It is a matter of historical resonance, echoing through the later careers of Margery Kempe and Christina Rossetti. One of the great students of the scriptures, albeit from a secular perspective, was Mary Ann Evans alias George Eliot; she translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu into English as well as Feuerbach’s disquisition upon Christianity. There is a real affinity between her and the Anglo-Saxon nuns who can be presumed to have been engaged in similar works of translation.

  The extant manuscripts cannot now be distinguished by gender, but the work of an English nun named Hygebury has been identified. Two other nuns, Leoba and Berhtgyth, composed religious poetry and were equally renowned for their learning “in liberali scientia.”10 Yet Berhtgyth’s letters also “reveal intense loneliness and a sense of isolation,” 11 while on missionary work in Germany, which may suggest that the nuns were more willing or better prepared to evoke their private experience as well. The association between poetry and the life of the nun is in any case a potent one. Thus in the sixteenth century Aemilia Lanyer depicts herself “as defender and celebrant of an imagined community of good women, sharply distinguished from male society and its evils.” 12

  The hagiographical tradition of female saints and martyrs is significant in this context; the first books about women, often written by women, emphasised their preternatural power of courage and endurance in the face of otherwise unendurable pain. These devotional lives were also read by women; the power of this communal activity may then be said to have coloured the later status of women as besieged and afflicted victims of predominantly male power. The visionary fervour of Mary Wollstonecraft, or of Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst, was perhaps in part inspired by latent folk-memories from the time of the Anglo-Saxons; it was a period, after all, when “the inclination to hold women in reverence remained, and found expression in the readiness with which they revered women as saints.”13 It is an invisible power of suggestion and association, comparable with the persistence of legend; it was reported that Hilda transformed the snakes along the Whitby coast into ammonites, and those same minerals are to this day popularly known by local people as “snake stones.” The images persist.

  The changed and inferior status of women in England after the Conquest materially affected their literary expression, and scholars have long noticed the paucity of women’s writing in Middle English; what literature there is, is of a devotional nature. Two or three lives of saints, in Anglo-Norman, can be attributed to nuns; certain hagiographies are also dedicated to female patrons, whether sacred or secular. Two of these lives are of St. Audrey and of St. Catherine, and we may place them within the context of an audience of “noble” women who journeyed easily from a lay state to a spiritual vocation. The narratives define what has been described as “career virginity,” where the refusal of marriage or of an inheritance leads ineluctably to a religious commitment and to a life among other women; it was a way of eschewing male power and of avoiding the network of male associations and references that characterised a feudal state. The theme of rejection, however carefully veiled (in more than one sense), is of enormous consequence in the continual struggle of the female voice to be heard.

  We may note here the formidable presence of Marie de France, who, despite the evidence of her name, was an Anglo-Norman poet living in England. She is best known for her lais, over half of which concern the plight of women married to men whom they do not admire or reverence; they are caught “in unhappy and unpromising marriages,” while also restrained by “chivalric demands and ambitions.”14 In other circumstances they might have become anchorites or nuns, sustained by a diet of hagiographical literature, but Marie de France’s characters are filled with passionate sentiment. She is concerned “with the inner life of the emotions,”15 exemplified in her own case with the words of the prologue in the lais :

  Who ever has received knowledge and eloquence in speech from God should not be silent or conceal it, but demonstrate it willingly.16

  In the context of the late twelfth century, this is a bold declaration. Marie’s themes are equally significant, of course, dwelling upon “women’s need to free themselves, by the mind and will, from oppressive situations.” 17 She might almost be anticipating Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, who, despite their diverging genius, would surely have recognised a common maternity. Marie de France is concerned, too, with “problems of daily reality” and with “the truth that is revealed by experience” 18 rather than that relayed by authoritative tradition or masculine chivalric ideals. In that sense her work may be deemed characteristic.

  One scholar of the early medieval period has suggested that the relative dearth of material is the result of the fact “that each woman writer has to wield her pen as an experimenting individual rather than as the fully official inheritor of a tradition.”19 This is not in itself a local problem; there never was a recognised or recognisable female “tradition,” so that individual female writers have had to discover it within themselves. They have always been isolated. Aphra Behn and Virginia Woolf are in that sense the true inheritors of a medieval dispensation. The absence of any imaginative line or bond—the fact that most female writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not know the works that preceded them—may in part explain that recourse to living experience and to individual feeling which is characteristic of many later English women writers. It is not a question of female sensibility as opposed to male sense, but rather a necessary compensation for the absence of a written tra
dition.

  Only in this context, therefore, can we comprehend the literature of female piety in the medieval period; it is predominantly a record of spiritual experience. The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are in that sense emblematic, particularly in their determination to celebrate the claims of bodily experience and physical sensation over doctrinal matters. The Wife of Bath, in Chaucer’s poem, declares, “By God! If wommen hadde writen stories”; to which Julian of Norwich replies, “Botte for I am a woman, schulde I therfor leve that I schulde nought telle yow of the goodenesse of God?” When Julian explains to her readers, no doubt themselves predominantly female, that “I am a womann, leued, febille and freylle,” it ought to be recalled that her most notable contribution to medieval religious writing is her revival of the concept of God as the Mother and Christ as the mother of humankind. She invokes “Mother Jesus” vouchsafed in “tendernes of love.” It has been suggested that “she developed the theology of divine motherhood far beyond any previous writer” in terms of initial creation, redemption and spiritual nourishment with the milk of grace. 20 The emphasis is once more upon the experience of loving and even, by implication, upon the experience of childbirth as the feminine version of Genesis. Private revelation and personal experience may thus be a substitute for the authority of the Church. In the case of Julian these more private sources of authority are extended and amplified by her own knowledge of the scriptures and of patristic literature; it has been demonstrated that she used her own translations of the Vulgate, and was well acquainted with all relevant Latin and vernacular writing. It has also been concluded that she was well versed in all the devices of rhetoric, and employed its colores to embellish her argument. Her favourite expedients include rhyme and alliteration, which in turn raise an interesting matter of inheritance.