We British: The Poetry of a People

The Gawain story is, on the surface, a simple one. Arthur and his knights are feasting at Christmas, looking for a seasonal game to play. Then the door blows open and a green giant arrives, not very jolly …

a dreadful man,

the most in the world’s mould of measure high,

from the nape to the waist so swart and so thick,

and his loins and his limbs so long and so great

half giant on earth I think now that he was;

but the most of man anyway I mean him to be,

and that the finest in his greatness that might ride,

for of back and breast though his body was strong,

both his belly and waist were worthily small,

and his features all followed his form made

and clean.

Wonder at his hue men displayed,

set in his semblance seen;

he fared as a giant were made,

and over all deepest green.

He calmly rides, on his huge green horse, into the hall with a strange challenge: one of the knights can have a free go at beheading him with an axe, and if the giant survives, the knight must take a blow in return, not flinching, a year from now. They are understandably nervous, but Sir Gawain takes up the challenge, and slices off the giant’s head. He promptly gets to his feet, picks it up, pops it under his arm and walks out. As he leaves, the severed head calmly and mockingly repeats the deal. Fast forward a year, and Gawain has set out on his quest through freezing dark forests to find the giant and offer his neck to the axe. He is riding through a landscape full of monsters and challenges, but also a real Britain:

He had no friend but his steed by furze and down,

and no one but God to speak with on the way,

till that he neared full nigh to northern Wales.

All the Isle of Anglesey on the left hand he held,

and fared over the fords by the forelands,

over at Holyhead, till he reached the bank

in the wilderness of Wirral – few thereabouts

that either God or other with good heart loved.

On Christmas Eve, he finally finds a mysterious castle that seems to float in a green landscape untouched by winter. He is welcomed by its lord, Bertilak. Over the next three days Gawain will stay in the castle and they will exchange gifts. But Bertilak’s wife tries hard to seduce our hero while her husband is away hunting. He doesn’t give way, except for kisses and accepting a green garter from her. Then he rides off to find the giant at his Green Chapel. The first time he kneels for the axe he flinches away, and the giant mocks him. The second time, the giant misses. The third time his blade cuts Gawain, but only slightly. He reveals himself as Bertilak, who has known all along about the attempted seduction – a test of Gawain’s nobility which he (almost) passed. Gawain returns to Arthur’s court to tell his story.

Laid out like that, the poem is a straightforward enough magical romance – the monster, the wicked lady, the tempted hero, the test, the happy outcome. It is structured around triplets – three journeys, three scenes in court, three tests, and so on. It’s a longer version of the kind of story we can imagine being told around hundreds of medieval hearths. But what my account misses is everything that is really important here – the contrast between the warm, luxurious, succulent world of the castles and the bare, icy, threatening landscape of cliffs and forests beyond; the psychological subtlety of erotic temptation struggling with Christian morality; the genuine menace of the green knight as he mocks Arthur’s court. These aren’t idealisations or symbols but real people, caught up in a world of magical threats and spiritual redemption that feels very much like the world of the early 1400s. Here, for example, is Gawain snug in bed in Bertilak’s castle, as his wife tries to seduce him one morning while her husband is out hunting the deer:

Thus larks the lord by linden-wood eaves,

while Gawain the good man gaily abed lies,

lurks till the daylight gleams on the walls,

under canopy full clear, curtained about.

And as in slumber he lay, softly he heard

a little sound at his door, and it slid open;

and he heaves up his head out of the clothes,

a corner of the curtain he caught up a little,

and watches warily to make out what it might be.

It was the lady, the loveliest to behold,

that drew the door after her full silent and still,

and bent her way to the bed; and the knight ashamed,

laid him down again lightly and feigned to sleep.

And she stepped silently and stole to his bed,

caught up the curtain and crept within,

and sat her full softly on the bedside

and lingered there long, to look when he wakened.

The lord lay low, lurked a full long while,

compassing in his conscience what this case might

mean or amount to, marvelling in thought.

But yet he said to himself: ‘More seemly it were

to descry with speech, in a space, what she wishes.’

Then he wakened and wriggled and to her he turned,

and lifted his eyelids and let on he was startled,

and signed himself with his hand, as with prayer, to be

safer.

With chin and cheek full sweet,

both white and red together,

full graciously did she greet,

lips light with laughter.

‘Good morning, Sir Gawain,’ said that sweet lady,

‘You are a sleeper unsafe, that one may slip hither.

Now are you taken in a trice, lest a truce we shape,

I shall bind you in your bed, that you may trust.’

All laughing the lady made her light jests.

This is as vividly imagined, and as sexy, as any modern novel. Chaucer himself couldn’t have done it better, and it’s a fit entrant, perhaps, for the Good Sex Awards. Here, by contrast, is a description of Bertilak’s men slicing up the animals he’s killed while out hunting. As you enjoy it, remember that we, like Gawain, are waiting for the moment, which cannot be far off, when he has to present his own neck to the green giant’s blade … This isn’t really just about dead deer.

Some that were there searched them in assay,

and two fingers of fat they found on the feeblest.

Then they slit the slot, and seized the first stomach,

shaved it with sharp knives, and knotted the sheared.

Then lopped off the four limbs and rent off the hide,

next broke they the belly, the bowels out-taking,

deftly, lest they undid and destroyed the knot.

They gripped the gullet, and swiftly severed

the weasand from the windpipe and whipped out the guts.

Then sheared out the shoulders with their sharp knives,

hauled them through a little hole, left the sides whole.

Then they slit up the breast and broke it in twain.

And again at the gullet one then began

rending all readily right to the fork,

voiding the entrails, and verily thereafter

all the membranes by the ribs readily loosened …

We are, all of us, only animals in the end, fragile bags of slithering flesh; if Gawain is tempted by the sins of the flesh, we have a horrible presentiment about where it will end for him. The symbolism of this poem is rich enough to keep whole departments of English academics hard at work for decades. The green giant is closely related to the ‘green man’ myths of Saxon England – in a way, he stands for authentic, menacing Britishness against the Frenchified civilisation of the beautiful castles. But the beheading test comes from ancient Welsh and Irish sources. The poem is partly about Christians trying to live in a world that remains unredeemed and pagan: there are complicated symbolic games based on the pentangle of Christian truth, and almost every aspect of Gawain’s armour and clothing has a specific meaning. The whole story takes place at Christmas, the time of Christ’s birth, and is therefore saturated with spiritual promise. In the end, our hero is redeemed. Yet beyond all that, this is a story about scared, horny human beings trying to enjoy themselves, do the right thing, and stay safe in a cold, dangerous world. There’s nothing else like it in English.

That includes the other poems thought to be by the same poet – the moving Christian reflection on the death of his two-year-old daughter, ‘Pearl’, and two other religious poems, ‘Patience’ and ‘Cleanness’. But for the great Christian poem of this period we have to travel due south from the Wirral, to the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It’s there that a shadowy figure, probably a cleric at Oxford, called William Langland, set his allegory of virtue and corruption, Piers Plowman. It has nothing to do with the world of Arthur or knightly virtues; it’s an angry poem about the here-and-now of an England where corrupt clerics and greedy priests have far too much power. It’s the first poem we’ve discussed which could be called in any real sense political. Like the work of the Gawain poet, in order to understand it most of us now need it translated – though only just. This is how it famously begins:*

In a summer season when soft was the sun,

I clothed myself in a cloak as I shepherd were,

Habit like a hermit’s unholy in works,

And went wide in the world wonders to hear.

But on a May morning on Malvern hills,

A marvel befell me of fairy, methought.

I was weary with wandering and went me to rest

Under a broad bank by a brook’s side,

And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the waters

I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry.

Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,

That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.

As I looked to the east right into the sun,

I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;

A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,

With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight

A fair field full of folk found I in between,

Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,

Working and wandering as the world asketh.

Some put them to plow and played little enough,

At setting and sowing they sweated right hard

And won that which wasters by gluttony destroy.

So here we are again in a recognisable English landscape – a gentler, more rolling landscape than that of the forested north-west, but like it a landscape being reshaped and restructured by belief. A hilltop becomes a tower, a symbol of Christian truth; a dale becomes a dark dungeon, standing for evil and the underworld. Between them, unheeding, are all the plain people of England, the kind of busy crowd a medieval writer would rarely come across, except at a fair. And we are away, in a country ravaged by unfairness, in which the poor sweat and the rich guzzle. Langland compares the poor to mice being torn by cruel cats. He’s clearly a man who knows London and the ways of the wealthy, corrupt clerics and their allies. His vision, however, gives us a social portrait of the British of a kind we haven’t had before. Here, for instance, he’s having a go at lawyers – a favourite target of radical writers over the centuries.

There hovered an hundred in caps of silk,

Serjeants they seemed who practised at Bar,

Pleading the law for pennies and pounds,

And never for love of our Lord unloosing their lips.

You might better measure the mist on the Malvern hills,

Than get a sound out of their mouth unless money were showed.

Barons and burgesses and bondmen also

I saw in this crowd as you shall hear later.

Bakers and brewers and butchers a-many,

Woollen-websters and weavers of linen,

Tailors and tinkers, toll-takers in markets,

Masons and miners and men of all crafts.

Of all kinds of labourers there stood forth some;

Ditchers and diggers that do their work ill

And spend all the day singing …

Cooks and their knaves cried ‘Pies, hot pies!

Good pork and good goose!’

So, roadworkers standing around leaning on their shovels rather than getting on with it, and takeaway food … The joy of Piers Plowman is often how extraordinarily modern it feels, behind the cloak of a medieval religious sermon. But it isn’t modern; this is a view of the world in which everything has a religious meaning and significance. A poem like this one can remind us how different life must have felt when, for instance, events as banal as high winds and bad weather were thought to be a sign from God:

He proved that these pestilences were purely for sin,

And the south-west wind on Saturday at even

Was plainly for pure pride and for no point else.

Pear-trees and plum-trees were puffed to the earth

For example, ye men that ye should do better.

Beeches and broad oaks were blown to the ground,

Turned upwards their tails in token of dread

That deadly sin at doomsday shall undo them all.

This world is not our world, yet Piers Plowman keeps its wild vitality when Langland feels obliged to be explicit about the terrible behaviour he is condemning. It’s not all the corruption of the rich, but also the swinish behaviour of the ordinary Briton. Here for instance is Gluttony hard at the beer in his local pub, drinking away with ratcatchers, roadsweepers, fiddlers, horse dealers and needle sellers:

There was laughing and lowering and ‘Let go the cup!’

They sat so till evensong singing now and then,

Till Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill.

His guts ’gan to grumble like two greedy sows;

He pissed a pot-full in a paternoster-while;

And blew with the bugle at his backbone’s end,

That all hearing that horn held their nose after

And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze.

It’s perhaps only the fact that the amount of time taken to piss out so much beer is measured not in minutes but by how long it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer that reminds us that this beery scene comes from a very different England.

I hope by now I’ve convinced you that medieval poetry in English is a bigger and more exciting field than just Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet that portly, self-deprecating, white-bearded London civil servant is unavoidable, a mountain in our landscape – the man who transforms English poetry more than any other in the medieval period. His great contemporaries Gower and Lydgate have virtually disappeared from the common culture, but Chaucer is different, and always has been. He was published in Tudor times and appropriated, despite his Catholic world, by the new England of the Protestant reformers: Shakespeare certainly knew his work.

And indeed, we all know our Chaucer, don’t we – jokes about farts and fat women, the long-winded knights, parsons and the other pilgrims as they jolt and bicker their way towards Canterbury, this Chaucer who is the essence of unabashed celebratory Englishness, and the father of English poetry. These days when we say ‘Chaucerian’ we seem to mean simply lecherous and drunk. But a prolonged swim in the ocean of English verse this extraordinary man produced reminds us that his world was much more European than simply English, and that he saw himself as the inheritor and passer-on of Latin, French and Italian culture. Indeed, everything in Chaucer looks not just south to Canterbury, but south to the Continent too. If the Gawain poet stands for the wintry north, and Langland with his crowd of folk sprawls across the Midlands, Chaucer is emphatically the poet of London. His victory is also the victory of London over the rest of Britain.

London in Chaucer’s time, almost as much as London today, depended upon trade and intercourse with Europe. The courts of Chaucer’s three kings – the Plantagenets Edward III and Richard II, and the Lancastrian Henry IV – were all deeply intertwined with French affairs. The to and froing of clerics, official embassies, artisans, merchants and bankers made London feel different from (and superior to) anywhere else in Britain. Chaucer himself came from a family of merchant wine-sellers, and spent his life on the fringes of the court. He served in the army in France, and was ransomed; he was connected to John of Gaunt through marriage; he received money as the king’s valet and was sent abroad on royal commissions. He made repeated trips to France and Italy, where he may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio; he worked as a civil servant, responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames, and received money from three different monarchs, neatly negotiating the complex and lethal politics of the medieval monarchy. Chaucer was, in short, what we would call a member of the London political establishment, as smoothly elite as Langland was rebelliously crude.

His early poetry owes a lot to the traditions of French courtly romance; later he would pick up the newly fashionable poetry of Florence and northern Italy; and only in later life, when he was well established, would he turn to the stories and idioms of the urban English. It’s an unfair and ungenerous thought, but perhaps, along with his duller contemporary John Gower, he was simply too successful for the greater good of British poetry, helping push out the language and the alliterative techniques used further north.

Chaucer’s earlier poetry, with strong French influences, isn’t much about the contemporary world of medieval England. These early poems are fun, and make light work of the heavy learning they are based on; but they’re not the Chaucer we know today. As he moves from French influence to Italian, with a longer, more flexible line, and steadily greater vocabulary, he comes more into focus. First in his almost novel-like poem of love betrayed, Troilus and Criseyde, and then in the Tales themselves, this small, sharp-eyed bureaucrat proves himself above all a brilliant observer – of everything from clothing to the twists and turns of how we fool ourselves.

But the more you read of Chaucer, the more you realise that his medieval characters are not much like us. They experience a complicated, religion-saturated existence. Saints are real, and Purgatory looms for sinners. Daily life is governed by the movement of the planets, and explained by a complex web of folklore. Living so close to animals, birdlife and flora, the Chaucerian English find allegory in everything. As Chaucer shows us in his ‘Parliament of Fowls’, every bird has its own stories and its own meaning:

The noble falcon, who with his feet will strain

At the king’s glove; sparrow-hawk sharp-beaked,

The quail’s foe; the merlin that will pain

Himself full oft the lark for to seek;

There was the dove with her eyes meek;

The jealous swan, that at his death does sing;

The owl too, that portent of death does bring;

The crane, the giant with his trumpet-sound;

The thief, the chough; the chattering magpie;

The mocking jay; the heron there is found;

The lapwing false, to foil the searching eye;

The starling that betrays secrets on high;

The tame robin; and the cowardly kite;

The rooster, clock to hamlets at first light;

The sparrow, Venus’ son; the nightingale,

That calls forth all the fresh leaves new;

The swallow, murderer of the bees.*

And on and on … But it isn’t just birds that have special meanings in the medieval world. Almost everything carries a story, even – from the same poem – different kinds of wood:

The builder’s oak, and then the sturdy ash;

The elm, for pillars and for coffins meant;

The piper’s box-tree; holly for whip’s lash;

Fir for masts; cypress, death to lament;

The ewe for bows; aspen for arrows sent;

Olive for peace; and too the drunken vine;

Victor’s palm; laurel for those who divine.

However, as Chaucer’s other poems make clear, this is a world in which numerous divine influences, including the gods of ancient Rome and Greece, are still felt and thought to be potent. At a social level there is a huge, complicated and expensive hierarchy of priests, nuns and their servants, always present. For the upper classes there is of course a chivalric honour code which matters more than life itself.

Yes, as every schoolchild knows – or used to know – Chaucer’s characters have bawdy appetites, are corrupt or cruel, and regularly fart. But as every student soon learns, this is a false familiarity. With its iron hierarchies of class and caste, its guilds, beggars, religious con-artists and its sense that allegory is ubiquitous, Chaucer’s England is closer to the more remote parts of Hindu India than to anywhere in today’s Britain. Far from being the rollicking essence of Englishness, his characters spent a great deal of their time overseas – as did Chaucer himself. His knight, for instance, has fought in Alexandria in Egypt, in Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain and North Africa, as well as modern-day Turkey and Syria. For Chaucer’s religious characters, Rome is the real capital of the world. Or take that most famous and homely of the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury:

A good WIFE was there from next to BATH,

But pity was that she was somewhat deaf.

In cloth-making she was excellent,

Surpassing those of Ypres and of Ghent.

… Her kerchiefs were finely wove I found;

I dare to swear those weighed a good ten pounds,

That on a Sunday she wore on her head.

Her hose were of a fine scarlet red,

And tightly tied: her shoes full soft and new.

Bold was her face, and fair and red of hue.

Had been a worthy woman all her life;

Husbands at the church-door she had five,

Besides other company in her youth –

No need to speak of that just now, in truth.

And thrice had she been to Jerusalem;

She had crossed many a foreign stream.

At Boulogne she had been, and Rome,

St James of Compostella, and Cologne,

And she knew much of wandering by the way,

Gap toothed was she, truthfully to say.

We remember the five husbands, the jolly clothing, even the gap in her teeth – she starts to feel almost like a female Falstaff – but how often do we remind ourselves that the wife of Bath spent so much time gallivanting across Europe?

So why, some people will be wondering, is Chaucer still so vastly popular when so many medieval poets have faded from view? The great trick he pulls off in The Canterbury Tales is, as different characters tell different stories, discovering a multitude of voices. So the pious and learned Chaucer can mimic a foul-mouthed miller; and it’s through this ventriloquism that we hear (we hope) the voices of the ruder, cruder medieval British. We also get that wonderful, concrete description Chaucer is so famous for. ‘The Miller’s Tale’ starts with that oldest of stories – the foolish older man, in this case a carpenter, who has taken for his wife a much younger and sexier teenager called Alison. We know what’s going to happen next. A lecherous student called Nicholas becomes Alison’s lover, and persuades the carpenter that he has had a vision of the future. There is going to be a second flood, like Noah’s; to escape drowning, the carpenter agrees to be suspended in a tub, usefully well out of the way of the two lovers. But it turns out there is a third man, Absalon, who works for the parish priest and is also in love with Alison:

Up rose this jolly lover, Absalon,

And gaily dressed to perfection is,

But first chews cardamom and liquorice,

To smell sweet, before he combs his hair.

Then he goes to Alison’s window and begs for a kiss. She, the minx, has other ideas. What follows is filthy, but is also one of the most famous scenes in Chaucer:

Then Absalon first wiped his mouth full dry.

Dark was the night like to pitch or coal,

And at the window out she put her hole,

And Absalon, had better nor worse than this,

That with his mouth her naked arse he kissed

Before he was aware, had savoured it.

Back he started, something was amiss,

For well he knew a woman has no beard.

He felt something rough, and long-haired,

And said: ‘Fie, alas, what have I done?’

‘Tee-hee!’ quoth she, and clapped the window shut,

No waxing, it seems, in medieval London. But now the story takes a darker hue. Absalon vows to take his revenge. He heats up a poker red-hot and returns to the window. He begs Alison for another kiss, in return for which he will give her a present:

First he coughed then he knocked withal

On the window, as loud as he dared

Then Alison answered: ‘Who’s there,

That knocks so? I warrant it’s a thief!’

‘Why no’ quoth he, ‘Not so, by my faith;

I am your Absalon, my sweet darling.

Of gold,’ quoth he, ‘I’ve brought you a ring.

My mother gave it me, so God me save.

Full fine it is, and carefully engraved;

This will I give you, if you will me kiss.’

Now Nicholas had risen for a piss,

And thought he would improve the jape:

He should kiss his arse ere he escape.

And he raised the window hastily,

And put his arse outside covertly,

Beyond the buttock, to the haunch-bone.

And then spoke up the clerk, Absalon:

‘Speak, sweet bird; I know not where you art.’

Then Nicholas at once let fly a fart,

As great as if it were a thunder-clap,

The clerk was nearly blinded with the blast;

Yet he was ready with his iron hot,

And Nicholas right in the arse he smote.

Off went the skin a hand’s breadth round and some;

The coulter had so burnt him on his bum,

That for the pain he thought he would die.

Could there be anything further from the bloodthirsty heroics of the alliterative poem about Arthur and his knights than this sordid tale of lower-class shenanigans? But there is an obvious connection which tells us another important truth about our forebears. It’s really rather cruel. The miller, and presumably his listeners, took great delight in the branding of Nicholas, who suffered huge pain, albeit on the backside. Just as the reality of medieval warfare was extremely brutal, and there must have been many hideously deformed and maimed ex-soldiers wandering London, so too ordinary civilian life was cruel. Children tormented animals; old women were publicly burned to death as witches; the decomposing bodies of executed criminals were left hanging in the streets. Despite the intense religiosity, despite hundreds of thousands of priests and monks, despite the noble promises of the chivalric cult, despite assumptions about the afterlife and eternal punishment for sin, this was simply a less civilised country than it is today.

It may seem that I’m making far too much out of what was meant to be simply a coarse, funny poem, but there’s so little in medieval poetry that directly describes life at the time. To the medieval mind, poetry had many purposes. It existed to educate and amuse on long winter nights; to pass on beliefs about religion and courtly, educated behaviour; to build a bridge back to the world of the ancients. But the assumption that poetry should directly reflect the dirty, often cruel and dangerous state of daily life is something that most poets would reject. Their world, apart from relative rarities such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’, is an idealised and allegorical one: poets are forever falling into dreams in which they meet the Platonic representatives of honour, love, duty or whatever it might be.

This dream world would remain hugely popular long after Chaucer died. English poetry directly after Chaucer goes into a bit of a lull. The greatest group of his followers were writing at the end of the 1400s and the beginning of the 1500s in Scotland, and not surprisingly, the poetry of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians is full of dream and allegory, and translations from the classics. But Scotland, independent politically for almost two centuries, was becoming a distinctively different country: its court poets might ape and admire the culture of London, but the country itself was both rougher and more democratic. Scotland had its own chroniclers, and just like their English equivalents they tried to tie its history back to ancient days in the Mediterranean – we have already met Andrew of Wyntoun – but its epic poets emphasise something we don’t hear much of from English poets at this time – freedom.

Since the wars of independence conducted by William Wallace and then Robert the Bruce against the English, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, Scotland had been free. It had adopted a different notion of kingship to England. In 1320 the Scots had sent a letter to the Pope expressing their view that independence from London meant a kind of freedom rare in medieval Europe. The so-called ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ asserted that ‘for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ This is the spirit of the most famous Scottish medieval poem, written by John Barbour, an Aberdonian priest who studied in Oxford and Paris. His huge epic The Brus was completed at the Scottish court in the 1370s, on a commission from the great king’s grandson, Robert II. In the tale of the independence wars, essentially an adventure story, the most famous lines are a reflection on the importance of political freedom:

A! Fredome is a noble thing

Fredome mays man to haiff lyking

Fredome all solace to man giffis,

He levys at es that freely levys.