Medieval English Literature Part 5

At thi burch at thi bare Sainte Nicholaes bring us wel thare.

'Bare' here means shrine, literally, but G.o.dric is thinking also of the name of the 'burgh', the city of Bari to which the relics of the saint had been lately brought.

Religious lyric poetry is not separate from other kinds, and it frequently imitates the forms and language of worldly songs. The _Luve Ron_ of the Friar Minor Thomas de Hales is one of the earliest poems of a type something between the song and the moral poem-a lyric rather far away from the music of a song, more like the lyrics of modern poets, meant to be read rather than sung, yet keeping the lyrical stave. One pa.s.sage in it is on the favourite theme of the 'snows of yester year'-

Where is Paris and Heleyne That were so bright and fair of blee!

This is earlier in date than the famous collection in the Harleian MS., which is everything best worth remembering in the old lyrical poetry-

Betwene Mersche and Averil When spray beginneth to springe.

The lyrical contents of this book (there are other things besides the songs-a copy of _King Horn_, e.g.)-the songs of this Harleian MS.-are cla.s.sified as religious, amatory and satirical; but a better division is simply into songs of love and songs of scorn. The division is as old and as constant as anything in the world, and the distinction between 'courtly' and 'popular' does not affect it. In the older court poetry of Iceland, as in the later of Provence and Germany, the lyric of scorn and the lyric of praise were equally recognized. The name 'Wormtongue' given to an Icelandic poet for his attacking poems would do very well for many of the Provencals-for Sordello, particularly, whose best-known poem is his lyrical satire on the Kings of Christendom. It depends, of course, on fas.h.i.+on how the lyrical attack shall be developed. In England it could not be as subtle as in the countries of Bertran de Born or Walter von der Vogelweide, where the poet was a friend and enemy of some among the greatest of the earth. The political songs in the Harleian ma.n.u.script are anonymous, and express the heart of the people. The earliest in date and the best known is the song of Lewes-a blast of laughter from the partisans of Simon de Montfort following up the pursuit of their defeated adversaries-thoroughly happy and contemptuous, and not cruel. It is addressed to 'Richard of Almain', Richard the king's brother, who was looked on as the bad counsellor of his nephew Edward-

Sir Simon de Montfort hath swore by his chin, Hadde he now here the Erl of Warin Sholde he never more come to his inn With shelde, ne with spere, ne with other gin To helpe of Windesore!

_Richard! thah thou be ever trichard,_ _Trichen shalt thou never more!_

This very spirited song is preserved together with some others dealing with later events in the life of Edward. One of them is a long poem of exultation over the death of the King's Scottish rebels, Sir William Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser; the author takes great pleasure in the treatment of Wallace by the King and the hangman-

Sir Edward oure King, that full is of pite The Waleis' quarters sende to his owne countre On four half to honge, here mirour to be Ther upon to thenche, that monie mihten see And drede: Why nolden hie be war, Of the bataile of Donbar How evele hem con spede?

The same poet gibes at a Scottish rebel who was then still living and calls him a 'king of summer' and 'King Hob'-

Nou kyng Hobbe in the mures gongeth.

This King Hob of the moors was Robert the Bruce, wandering, as Barbour describes him, over the land. There is another very vigorous and rather long piece on a recent defeat of the French by the Flemings at Courtrai-

The Frenshe came to Flaundres so light so the hare Er hit were midnight, hit fell hem to care Hie were caught by the net, so bird is in snare With rouncin and with stede: The Flemishe hem dabbeth on the hed bare, Hie nolden take for hem raunsoun ne ware Hie doddeth off here hevedes, fare so hit fare, And thare to haveth hie nede.

This style of political journalism in rhyme was carried on later with much spirit, and one author is well known by name and has had his poems often edited-Lawrence Minot, a good workman who is sometimes undervalued.

Lawrence Minot has command of various lyrical measures; he has the clear sharp phrasing which belongs generally to his northern dialect, and he can put contempt into his voice with no recourse to bad language. After describing the threats and boasting of the French, when Minot remarks

And yet is England as it was,

the effect is just where it ought to be, between wind and water; the enemy is done for. It is like Prior's observation to Boileau, in the _Ode_ on the taking of Namur, and the surrender of the French garrison-

Each was a Hercules, you tell us, Yet out they marched like common men.

Besides the songs of attack, there are also comic poems, simply amusing without malice-such is the excellent Harleian piece on the _Man in the Moon_, which is the meditation of a solitary reveller, apparently thinking out the problem of the Man and his thorn-bush and offering sympathy: 'Did you cut a bundle of thorns, and did the heyward come and make you pay? Ask him to drink, and we will get your pledge redeemed'.

If thy wed is y-take, bring home the truss; Set forth thine other foot, stride over sty!

We shall pray the heyward home to our house, And maken him at ease, for the maistry!

Drink to him dearly of full good bouse, And our dame Douce shall sitten him by; When that he is drunk as a dreynt mouse Then we shall borrow the wed at the bailie!

A Franciscan brother in Ireland, Friar Michael of Kildare, composed some good nonsensical poems-one of them a rigmarole in which part of the joke is the way he pretends to rhyme and then sticks in a word that does not rhyme, asking all through for admiration of his skill in verse. As a poetical joke it is curious, and shows that Brother Michael was a critic and knew the terms of his art. There are many literary games in the Middle Ages, nonsense rhymes of different sorts; they are connected with the serious art of poetry which had its own 'toys and trifles'-such feats of skill in verse and rhyming as Chaucer shows in his _Complaint of Anelida_. Tricks of verse were apt to multiply as the poetic imagination failed-a subst.i.tute for poetry; but many of the strongest poets have used them occasionally. Among all the artistic games one of the most curious is where a Welsh poet (in Oxford in the fifteenth century) gives a display of Welsh poetical form with English words-to confute the ignorant Saxon who had said there was no art of poetry in Wales.

The stanza forms in the Harleian book are various, and interesting to compare with modern stanzas. There is an example of the verse which has travelled from William of Poitiers, about the year 1100, to Burns and his imitators. Modern poetry begins with William of Poitiers using the verse of Burns in a poem on _Nothing_-

The song I make is of no thing, Of no one, nor myself, I sing, Of joyous youth, nor love-longing, Nor place, nor time; I rode on horseback, slumbering: There sprang this rhyme!

Two hundred years after, it is found in England-

Her eye hath wounded me, y-wisse, Her bende browen that bringeth blisse; Her comely mouth that mighte kisse In mirth he were; I wolde chaunge mine for his That is her fere!

The romance stanza is used also in its original lyrical way, with a refrain added-

For her love I cark and care For her love I droop and dare For her love my bliss is bare And all I waxe wan; For her love in sleep I slake, For her love all night I wake For her love mourning I make More than any man.

_Blow, northern wind!_ _Send thou me my sweeting!_ _Blow, northern wind!_ _Blow! blow! blow!_

Technically, it is to be noted that some of those poems have the combination of a six-line with a four-line pa.s.sage which is frequent in French lyrics of all ages, which is also found in the verse of _The Cherrie and the Slae_ (another of Burns's favourite measures), and also in some of Gray's simpler odes. It is found in one of the religious poems, with the six lines first, and the four lines after, as in Burns.

The common French pattern arranges them the other way round, and so does Gray, but the const.i.tuent parts are the same.

Now shrinketh rose and lily flower That whilom bare that sweete savour, In summer, that sweete tide; Ne is no queene so stark ne stour, Ne no lady so bright in bower That death ne shall by glide; Whoso will flesh-l.u.s.t forgon, And heaven bliss abide, On Jesu be his thought anon, That thirled was his side.

This poem is a good text to prove the long ancestry of modern verse, and the community of the nations, often very remote from definite intercourse between them. And there is one phrase in this stanza which goes back to the older world: 'bright in bower' is from the ancient heroic verse; it may be found in Icelandic, in the Elder Edda.

The fifteenth century, which is so dismal in the works of the more ambitious poets (Lydgate, and Occleve, e.g.), is rich in popular carols which by this time have drawn close to the modern meaning of the name.

They are Christmas carols, and the name loses its old general application to any song that went with dancing in a round. In the carols, the art is generally much more simple than in the lyrics which have just been quoted; they belong more truly to the common people, and their authors are less careful. Yet the difference is one of degree. The only difference which is really certain is between one poem and another.

Speaking generally about the carols one may say truly they are unlike the work of the Chaucerian school; the lyrics of the Harleian book in the reign of Edward I are nearer the Chaucerian manner. It is hardly worth while to say more, for the present.

And it is not easy to choose among the carols. Some of them are well known to-day-

When Christ was born of Mary free In Bethlehem that fair city Angels sang loud with mirth and glee _In excelsis gloria_.

Ballads in the ordinary sense of the term-ballads with a story in them, like _Sir Patrick Spens_ or _The Milldams of Binnorie_-are not found in any quant.i.ty till late in the Middle Ages, and hardly at all before the fifteenth century. But there are some early things of the kind. A rhyme of _Judas_ (thirteenth century) is reckoned among the ballads by the scholar (the late Professor Child) who gave most time to the subject, and whose great collection of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads has brought together everything ascertainable about them.

By some the ballads are held to be degenerate romances; and they appear at a time when the best of romance was over, and when even the worst was dying out. Also, it is quite certain that some ballads are derived from romances. There is a ballad of the young _Hynd Horn_ which comes from the old narrative poem of _King Horn_ or of _Horn Childe_. There is a ballad version of _Sir Orfeo_, the 'Breton lay' which has been described in another chapter. But there are great difficulties in the way of this theory. In the first place, there are many ballads which have no romance extant to correspond to them. That may not prove much, for many old romances have been lost. But if one is to make allowance for chances of this sort, then many old ballads may have been lost also, and many extant ballads may go back to the thirteenth century or even earlier for their original forms. Again, there are ballads which it is scarcely possible to think of as existing in the shape of a narrative romance. The form of the ballad is lyrical; all ballads are lyrical ballads, and some of them at any rate would lose their meaning utterly if they were paraphrased into a story. What would the story of _Sir Patrick Spens_ be worth if it were told in any other way-with a description of the scenery about Dunfermline, the domestic establishment of the King of Norway, and the manners at his Court? Further, the theory that the ballads are degenerate romances is unfair to those ballads which are known to be descended from romances. The ballad of _Hynd Horn_ may be derived from an older narrative poem, but it is not a _corruption_ of any old narrative; it is a different thing, in a lyrical form which has a value of its own.

'Corruption', 'degeneracy', does not explain the form of the ballads, any more than the Miracle Plays are explained by calling them corruptions of the Gospel.

The proper form of the ballads is the same as the _carole_, with narrative substance added. Anything will do for a ring dance, either at a wake in a churchyard, or in a garden like that of the _Roman de la Rose_, or at Christmas games like those described in _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_. At first, a love-song was the favourite sort, with a refrain of _douce amie_, and so on. But the method was always the same; there was a leader who sang the successive verses, the fresh lines of the song, while the other dancers came in with the refrain, most often in two parts, one after the first verse, the second after the second-

When that I was and a little tiny boy _With a heigh-ho, the wind and the rain_, A foolish thing was but a toy _And the rain it raineth every day_.

The narrative ballad was most in favour where people were fondest of dancing. The love-song or the nonsense verses could not be kept up so long; something more was wanted, and this was given by the story; also as the story was always dramatic, more or less, with different people speaking, the entertainment was all the better. If this is not the whole explanation, it still accounts for something in the history, and it is certainly true of some places where the ballad has flourished longest.

The _carole_ has lasted to the present day in the Faroe Islands, together with some very ancient types of tune; and there the ballads are much longer than in other countries, because the dancers are unwearied and wish to keep it up as long as may be. So the ballads are spun out, enormously.

The history of ballad poetry in Western Europe, if one dates it from the beginning of the French _carole_ fas.h.i.+on-about 1100-is parallel to the history of pure lyric, and to the history of romance. It is distinct from both, and related to both. There are many mysterious things in it. The strangest thing of all is that it often seems to repeat in comparatively modern times-in the second half of the Middle Ages-what has been generally held to be the process by which epic poetry begins. There is reason for thinking that epic poetry began in concerted lyric, something like the ballad chorus. The oldest Anglo-Saxon heroic poem, _Widsith_, is near to lyric; _Deor's Lament_ is lyric, with a refrain. The old Teutonic narrative poetry (as in _Beowulf_) may have grown out of a very old sort of ballad custom, where the narrative elements increased and gradually killed the lyric, so that recitation of a story by the minstrel took the place of the dancing chorus. However that may be, it is certain that the ballads of Christendom in the Middle Ages are related in a strange way to the older epic poetry, not by derivation, but by sympathy. The ballad poets think in the same manner as the epic poets and choose by preference the same kind of plot. The plots of epics are generally the plots of tragedies. This is one of the great differences between the Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the later romances. It is a difference also between the romances and the ballads. Few of the romances are tragical. The story of Tristram and the story of King Arthur are tragical; but the romantic poets are beaten by the story of Tristram, and they generally keep away from the tragedy of Arthur. The ballads often have happy endings, but not nearly so often as the romances; in the best of the ballads there is a sorrowful ending; in many there is a tragical mistake; in many (and in how few of the romances!) there is a repet.i.tion of the old heroic scene, the last resistance against the enemy as in Roncevaux or in the _Nibelunge Not_. _Chevy Chase_ is the ballad counterpart of _Maldon_; _Parcy Reed_ or _Johnny of Braidislee_ answers in the ballad form to the fight at _Finnesburgh_, a story of a treacherous onset and a good defence. Parcy Reed, beset and betrayed, is more like a northern hero than a knight of romance.

The mystery is that the same kind of choice should be found in all the countries where ballads were sung. The English and Scottish ballads, like the English romances, are related to similar things in other lands. To understand the history of the ballads it is necessary, as with the romances, to compare different versions of the same matter-French or German, Italian, Danish.

Many curious things have been brought out by study of this sort-resemblances of ballad plots all over Christendom. But there is a sort of resemblance which no amount of 'a.n.a.logues' in different languages can explain, and that is the likeness in temper among the ballad poets of different languages, which not only makes them take up the same stories, but makes them deal with fresh realities in the same way. How is it that an English ballad poet sees the death of Parcy Reed in a certain manner, while a Danish poet far off will see the same poetical meaning in a Danish adventure, and will turn it into the common ballad form? In both cases it is the death of a hero that the poet renders in verse; deaths of heroes are a subject for poetry, it may be said, all over the world. But how is it that this particular form should be used in different countries for the same kind of subject, not conventionally, but with imaginative life, each poet independently seizing this as the proper subject and treating it with all the force of his mind?

The medieval ballad is a form used by poets with their eyes open upon life, and with a form of thought in their minds by which they comprehend a tragic situation. The medieval romance is a form used originally by poets with a certain vein of sentiment who found that narrative plots helped them to develop their emotional rhetoric; then it pa.s.sed through various stages in different countries, sinking into chapbooks or rising to the _Orlando_ or the _Faerie Queene_-but never coming back to the old tragic form of imagination, out of which the older epics had been derived, and which is constantly found in the ballads.

Probably the old ballad chorus in its proper dancing form was going out of use in England about 1400. Barbour, a contemporary of Chaucer, speaks of girls singing ballads 'at their play'; Thomas Deloney in the time of Elizabeth describes the singing of a ballad refrain; and the game lives happily still, in songs of _London Bridge_ and others. But it became more and more common for ballads to be sung or recited to an audience sitting still; ballads were given out by minstrels, like the minstrel of _Chevy Chase_. Sometimes ballads are found swelling into something like a narrative poem; such is the famous ballad of _Adam Bell, Clim o' the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee_, which has a plot of the right sort, the defence of a house against enemies. _The Little Geste of Robin Hood_ seems to be an attempt to make an epic poem by joining together a number of ballads. The ballad of _Robin Hood's Death_ is worth reading as a contrast to this rather mechanical work. _Robin Hood's Death_ is a ballad tragedy; again, the death of a hero beset by traitors. Red Roger stabbed Robin with a grounden glave ('grounden' comes from the oldest poetic vocabulary). Robin made 'a wound full wide' between Roger's head and his shoulders. Then he asks Little John for the sacrament, the housel of earth (he calls it 'moud', i.e. 'mould') which could be given and taken by any Christian man, in extremity, without a priest-

'Now give me moud,' Robin said to Little John, 'Now give me moud with thy hand; I trust to G.o.d in heaven so high My housel will me bestand.'