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The first English Literature

The first Englishmen were foreigners. They came to England from abroad when
England was already inhabited by a long-settled race and blesses by a fairly advanced
civilization. These Britons were ruled for a few centuries by the Romans, and Britannia
or Britain was the most westerly and northerly province od the Roman Empire. The
Romans brought their language (of which traces still survive in the names of the towns
of England).
The time of the fall of the Roman Empire is also the time of the migration of
peoples from the East of Europe such peoples as the Goths and Vandals, who
themselves broke the power of Rome. Their language is called Old English.
The invasions and settlements were completed by the end of the seventh century.
The legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the round table tell of defenders of the
old Roman civilization fighting a brave rearguard action against the new barbarians. The
Angles and Saxons and, along with them, the Jutes were barbarians perhaps only in the
sense that they were not Christians.
By the end of the sixth century, the new masters of England had become a
Christian evangelists from came over to convert them . And all of the records of the
early literature of the Anglo-Saxons belong to a Christian England, written by clerks in
monasteries. The literature was oral, passed by word of mouth from generation to
generation. This literature is almost exclusively a verse literature There is prose, but this
is not strictly literature history, theology, letters, biography and the names of the
writers of much of this prose are known.
The oldest poem in the English language is Beowulf. It was not composed in
England, but on the continent of Europe: the new settlers brought it over along with
their wives, goods, and chattels. It was not written down till the end of the ninth century.
It is warlike and violent poem of over three thousand lines. The Anglo-Saxon monks
who wrote had the blood of warriors in them, they were sons and grandsons of Vikings.
Much of the strength and violence of Beowulf derive from the nature of Old English
itself. That was a language rich in consonants, fond of clustering consonants together, so
that the mouth seems to perform a swift act of violence. Compared with the softer
languages of the East and South, Old English seems to be a series of loud noises.
The line is divide into two halves, and each half has two heavy stresses. Three
(sometimes four, occasionally two) of the stresses of the whole line are made even more
emphatic by the use of head-rhyme. Head-rhyme means making words begin with the
same letter, which is not always the same thing as beginning with the same sound). In
the twentieth century some poets have abandoned ordinary rhyme and reverted to Old
English practice. Certainly the use of head-rhyme seems natural to English verse and it
even plays a large part in everyday English speech. The need to find words beginning
with the same sound means often that a poet has to call some quite common thing by an
uncommon name. A lot of Old English words thus have the quality of riddles.
The poem composed by Caedman is perhaps the first piece of Christian literature
to appear in Anglo Saxon England and it is especially notable because, according to the
Venerable Bede, it was divinely inspired.
There is a larger body of verse on Christian themes, sometimes beautiful, but
generally duller than the pagan, warrior poems. There are two great poems The
Seafarer and The Wanderer whose resigned melancholy and powerful description of
nature will speak strongly through the strange words and the heavy-footed rhythms.
Resigned melancholy is a characteristic of much Old English verse.

Up to the middle of the ninth century, all the poetry of England was recorded in
the Northumbrian dialect. But in those days as any monk would say, nothing was
permanent, and the ninth century sees the end of Northumbria as the home of learning
and the library of England. The Danes invaded England and sacked. Northumbria as the
Goths had sacked Rome. The monasteries were looted, the precious books were ripped
to pieces for the rich ornament, the monks fled or were slaughtered. Now Wessex, the
kingdom of Alfred the Great, became Englands Cultural centre.
Alfred is an important figure in the history of English literature. He was not an
artist, but he knew how to write good clear prose. Also, with helpers, he translated much
Latin into English and so showed writers of English how to handle foreign ideas. And
also, because of his concern for education and books, Alfred may be said to have
established the continuous cultural tradition of England despite the foreign invasions
which were still to come.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wa record of the main happenings of the country, kept
by monks in seven successive monasteries, and covering the period from the middle of
the ninth century to 1154, when Henry II came to the throne. This is ther first history of
a Germanic people, in some ways the first newspaper, certainly the most solid and
interesting piece of Old English prose we possess. And in it we see Old English moving
steadily towards Middle English, that transitional language which is slowly to develop
into the tongue of our own age.
Our brief story ends at the close of the first thousand years of the Christian era.
The Coming of the Normans
Norman means North-man. The Normans were, in fact, of the same blood as the
Danes, but they had thoroughly absorbed the culture of the late Roman Empire, had
been long Christianized, and spoke that offshoot of Latin we call Norman French. Thus
their kingdom in France had a very different set of traditions from those of the country
they conquered. You may sum it up by saying that the Norman way of life looked
south.
So, the first piece of Norman writing in England is a catalogue of the kings property,
for William saw himself as the owner of the country. He owned the land and everything
in it, but granted land to the nobles who had helped him achieve his conquest, and so set
up that feudal system which was to transform English life.
With the coming of the Normans, their castle, their knowledge of the art of war, the
Anlgo-Saxons sank to a position of abjectness which killed their culture and made their
language a despised thing. Old English literature dies (though in the monasteries the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ticks away and with the common people the old poems are still
half-remembered) and, to take the place of Old English literature, the Normans produce
little of value. They wrote a literature which was neither one thing nor the other
neither a true English literature nor a true French literature. Living in England, they
were cut off from French culture, and the kind of French they used lost its purity, its
flexibility something that always happens to a language when it is exported to a
foreign land and has no opportunity for refreshing itself through frequent contacts with
the mother-country. The Anglo-Saxons who tried to use the language of the conqueror

were not very skillful. And so Latin rather than Norman French or old English
tended to be employed as a kind of compromise. In the twelth and thirteenth centuries
we find songs and histories in Latin, some of the latter throwing a good deal of light on
the changing mythology of England.
Time passes. The Normans learn the language of the English and some of the English
learn the language of the Normans. But English, not Norman French, is to prevail. We
see slowly developing a kind of English that enriches itself with borrowings from
Norman French; we see the words creeping into books, often introduced with translation
into Old English. The date of the beginning of the Normans interest in the language of
the conquered is 1204.
There was a good deal of religious writing works like the Ormulum, a translation of
some of the Gospels read at Mass, made by the monk Orm about 1200. Thre is the
Ancreme Riwle advice given by a priestto three religious ladies living not in a convert
but in a little house near a church. This is rather charming, and it seems that, for a time
in the literature of England, there is an awareness of woman as woman a creature to be
treated delicately. There is a connection with the devotion to the Blessed Virgin, mother
of Christ, a cult which the Normans brought over, practiced by them in prayers.
Chivalry as something womankind was devoted to was killed by Cervantes (Dom
Quixote). There is the Pricke of Conscience, probably written by Richard Rolle about
1340, which deals with the pains of hell in horrifying detail.
Of the non-religious works in Middle English, one can point first to certain lyrics,
written with great delicacy and skill, but signed by no name, which still have power to
enchant us and still, in fact, are sung. This is known everywhere, together with its
delightful tune.
Longer poems are The owl and the nightingale the story of a dispute between the two
birds as to which has the finer song. Contained in the same manuscript as Pearl is a
remarkable work written in the Lancashire dialect called Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight. It describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a
challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who challenges any knight to strike him
with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and
beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head and
reminds Gawain of the appointed time. In his struggles to keep his bargain Gawain
demonstrateschivalry and loyalty until his honour is called into question by a test
involving Lady Bertilak, the lady of the Green Knight's castle.
The poem is written (appropriately enough) in head-rhyme, in language which shows
little Norman influence nut is nevertheless notable for a lightness of touch, a certain
humor, and great power of description.
Of the works of the fourteenth century we must mention a very estrange book of travel
written by a certain Sir John Mandeville probably the name is fictitious.

Finally I must mention William Langland (1332-1400), the last writer of any merit to
use the Old English technique of head-rhyme for a long poem. The Vision of Piers
Plowman attacks the abuses of the Christian Church in England, but also calls upon the
ordinary people the laity to cease their concern with the things of this world and to
follow the only thing worth following holy Truth. The ploughman who gives his
name to the poem appears before the field full of folk which represents the world, and
shows them the way to salvation. The poem is allegorical.

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