Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/526

and social life. It brought a new and invigorating influence to bear upon the English genius, though in the immediate present of the eleventh century it seemed a crushing disaster for the nation. For nearly one hundred and fifty years the race, the language, and the literature of the people were apparently stifled. It seemed as if everything became Norman-French. But as long as the down-trodden English kept life in them the springs of poetry and art could not dry up; and though Robert of Gloucester says that only "low men" held to English at this time, yet there were a good many of these "low men", and we have proof that the native population had still their songs and their wandering bards, while in certain of the monasteries the monks went on chronicling events in their mother tongue much as they had done when a Saxon king had ruled England.

William Shakespeare
After the So-called “Chandos” Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London

The continuity of native verse and prose was never really broken, and just as the English race was at last to absorb its foreign conquerors, and to gain infinitely more than it had suffered from them, so English language and literature were by the same means to be enriched and ennobled to an extent no one then looking on could have dreamed of.

Yet at first literature was apparently silenced, and until the beginning of the thirteenth century there is no writing of much importance except the "Old English Chronicle", which ends in 1154. There was, of course, writing in Latin and in French, and the French was even looked upon by some as likely to be more enduring than the Latin. But the Latin writing was in reality no enemy to English; it was the tongue, then as now, of the Church, and it was the medium for communication between scholars and the language of nearly all books of scholarship. The native work, however, never quite disappearing, revives unmistakably at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and between that date and the death of Chaucer in 1400 there is produced a great mass of literature of endless variety but of varying value.

We come then to the Middle Ages, called "of Faith"; the age of the Crusades, "of cathedrals, tournaments, old colored glass, and other splendid things"—the age to which, in times of dryness, artists, lovers of romance, as well as pious souls of all kinds, have often looked back and have drawn from it fresh inspiration. It has stimulated in modern times new and noble movements in art and in poetry, and its power of inspiration is not yet exhausted. It was an age of contrasts, of faith and of unbelief, of extraordinary saintliness and of strange wickedness, of reverence and of ribaldry. It was the great Catholic age, when the sacred robe of the Church, spotted though it might be in places through human frailty, was still unrent, whole, and she herself was everywhere acknowledged in Europe as the Divinely appointed mother of men. The history of English literature from the beginning of its revival in the thirteenth century is first that of transition (up to about 1250) then of development for about eighty years, in which the work is largely anonymous, finally, a period of achievement, the second half of the fourteenth century, in which individual writers of power begin to emerge, and among them one supreme artist, Geoffrey Chaucer. We trace, too, during these ages the rise of the drama in the miracle-and morality-plays.

On the threshold of the revival stand two works: "The Brut" (1205), a poem of 30,000 lines concerning the history of Britain, written by Layamon, a patriotic English priest of Worcester; full of more or less historical stories, partly translated from French sources and written in an alliterative meter; and it gives us the first account in English of King Arthur, the British hero. The second, a religious work, "The Ormulum", a series of metrical homilies upon the daily Gospels of the Church, was written by Ormin, an Augustinian canon. After this the stream of English literature is continued in poems of great variety, of which many are lyrics. In "The Owl and the Nightingale", a delightful poem standing at the end of this "transition period", we have a happy combination of old and new elements which have already begun to form a fresh native poetry. Nor had prose been idle; one of the most interesting books of the time is the "Ancren Riwle" (q.v.), a series of exhortations on their rule for a community of Dorsetshire nuns.

Passing on over these fifty years we are met by a further outpouring of literary work, abundant and various, if not remarkably original, poetry always taking the chief place. The main kinds of literature in this period of quick development are romances; tales; religious works (legends of saints, treatises and homilies on morality and religion); the great book called "Cursor Mundi"; historical writings; lyrics of love and religion, and songs of political and social life. In all this, French influence is very strong, but there gradually appear among it English elements which are now beginning to hold of the thirteenth century, and their own. The romances concerned with the adventures of well-known heroes are most prominent among all this literature, and the these in some cases are translated directly from the French, though never without English touches. The religious work of this time is edifying, but the prose homilies and treatises are sometimes very long and commonplace. Yet a simple faith and tender piety, together with a most sane sense of humor and some imagination, make the religious writings not unfrequently attractive, even from the literary point of view. But regarded as literature, the lyrics of the thirteenth century are perhaps the most remarkable. They are native, and though they bear the marks of artistic culture in their matter, they remind us more of the country than the town. There is a real though un-self-conscious love of nature in them, and the promise of that peculiar and fine quality of the later English lyric which is one of the glories of our literature. Nature, love, and religion are the inspiration of these little medieval poems.

This multitudinous work formed a discipline and preparation, and resulted in the achievements of the latter half of the century. The period 1360 to 1400 is marked by a strong reassertion of the national spirit, and in literature there is a curious reappearance of the Old English alliterative verse after 300 years of apparent neglect. Amongst other poems in this meter there are four by an anonymous writer of high