Background. For a thousand years England had been vulnerable to invasion from the Continent

For a thousand years England had been vulnerable to invasion from the Continent. But the last invaders changed all that. They were the Normans, descended from Germanic tribes that had in­vaded a broad stretch of northern France early in the tenth century. They adopted the French language and owed nominal allegiance to the French king. For this reason their ruler had the title of duke. But he was, in tact, more powerful than many kings. For more than 200 years thereafter members of the royal court and the upper class spoke French. Only the common people continued to speak En­glish. By about 1300, however, English had again become the chief national language but in the altered form now called Middle En­glish. Middle English included elements of French, Latin, Old En­glish, and local dialects.

When the English king Edward the Confessor died without an heir in 1066 the Norman duke William claimed the English throne. Bui, as always, there were other contenders. William invaded En­gland and won a decisive victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Norman Socicty

William, now called «the Conqueror», proceeded to transform England. He declared that every inch of English soil belonged to him. Much of it he gave to his men, but only in exchange for a promise of absolute loyalty. Englishmen who wished to retain their lands had to repurchase them from the king.

To ensure his firm control, William compiled an exacting sur­vey of every bit of property on the island, recorded in the «Domes­day Book» (1086). He ejected the old Anglo-Saxon leaders and substituted his own people.

Most of the people were serfs, permanent servants of the Nor­man lords. To them they owed obedience, the performance of spe­cific duties, and taxes.

There was also another important segment of society, large in number and significant in influence - the clergy. The Church owned vast tracts of land, maintained its own separate legal system, its own taxes (tithes), and communicated with ecclesiastical leaders in

Rome and on the Continent without consulting the king or his min­isters. It supervised the education of most of the people who were educated, and continually competed in political matters with civil authority.

In the Norman English society William initiated, there were tliree languages. The Norman rules spoke and wrote French. The clergy and the members of the legal profession spoke and wrote Latin. The common people and the old, displaced English nobility still spoke an evolving version of Anglo-Saxon.

Medieval Literature

For the history of English literature, the Norman invasion meant the disappearance of almost any record of literary activity for over a century. But this docs not mean that English literature died. It must be kept in mind that until what must be called «recent» histo­ry, literature has primarily been oral. In both Anglo-Saxon and medieval times very few people could read at all and those who did, read aloud.

They did this for good reasons. People then lived in clusters, not in the tiny groups typical of our modem day. Whether it was in the hall of a noble lord's castle, the great refectory room of a mon­astery, or by the kitchen fire of a country cottage, people worked, ate, and lived together. For them entertainment almost always meant singing or listening to someone tell a story. Both, of course, are forms of literature. So literature, the primary entertainment, was usually a shared experience.

The Norman invasion did not stop English literature; it only temporarily prevented people from writing it down. When, about a century later, literary works reappear, the surviving copies have a verse and style which suggest that during the period in between, vigorous literary traditions continued in their oral form.

What were they? Here arc some typical examples. For the no­bility the retelling of heroic adventures about King Arthur, Charle­magne, and Alexander the Great. For the clergy, and through them for everyone, sermons and saints' lives. For the common folk, bal­lads and cards. As medieval culture evolved, these forms and many others developed.

And the English language itself developed. Over the course of the four centuries which followed the Norman invasion, the Ger­manic Anglo-Saxon language, so alien to us that no modem En­glish speaker can read it without training, began to combine with Norman French into a synthesis of the two, which by Chaucer's day looked much like the modern language. As this process evolved, the Latin terms of the lawyer and scholar continually entered the language. In this way Modem English came into being.

Most medieval literature is now lost. What has survived is var­ied in form and content and tells us about the vitality of that era in many ways.

First, there are the folk ballads. These song lyrics, probably in­vented by humble singers for people of small communities, have survived for centuries by word of mouth. No one knows who made them up, or when.

Romances were adventure stories, usually in verse, about bat­tles and heroes. Medieval romances originated in France during the 1100's. By the end of the 1200's, they had become the most popular literary form in England.

In 1155, a Norman poet named Wace completed the first work that mentioned the Knights of the Round Table, who were led by the legendary British ruler King Arthur. King Arthur and his knights became a favorite subject in English romances.

The greatest writer of the Middle English period was the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. He grew up during medieval England's period of greatest prosperity and influence. A man trained in the royal court and close to the most intelligent and powerful people of his day, Chaucer was able to travel widely throughout Europe and to study the literature of France and Italy. With striking success, he combined his wide-ranging learning with an enthusiastic love for the everyday lives of ordinary English people into his masterpiece, «The Canterbury Tales» (late 13(X)'s), an unfinished collection of comic and moral stories. Pilgrims tell the stories while passing the time during a journey from London to a religious shrine in the city of Canterbury. This is a poem which the learned could admire for its careful development of current literary forms, while ordinary listeners could relish its comedy, adventure, and pathos.

It became one of the most popular poems of its day. Chaucer intro­duced a rhythmic pattern called «iambic pentameter» into English po- eiry. This pattern, or meter, consists of 10 syllables alternately unac­cented and accented in each line. The lines may or may not rhyme. Iambic pentameter becamc a widely used meter in English poetry.

When in April the sweet shavers fall

And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all

The veins are bathed in liquor of such power

As brings about the engendering of the flower,

When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath

Exhales an air in every grove and heath

Upon the tender shoots, and the young sun

His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,

And the small fowl are making melody

That sleep away the night with open eye

(So nature pricks them and their heart engages)

Then people long to go on pilgrimages

And palmers long to seek the stranger strands

Of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands,

And specially, from every shire's end

In England, down to Canterbury they wend

To seek the holy blissful martyr, quick

To give his help to them when they were sick.

(From Geoffrey Chaucer: «The Canterbury Tales», translated by Ncvill Coghill.)

Chaucer's friend John Gower wrote verse in Latin and English. His «Confessio Amantis» (about 1390) is a Middle English poem that uses Biblical, medieval, and mythological stories to discuss the problems of romantic love. A religious and symbolic poem called «Piers Plowman» has been attributed to William Langland, though as many as five persons may have contributed to it. Three versions of the poem appeared in the late 1300's. Like the works of Chaucer and Gower «Piers Plowman» provides a fascinating glimpse of En­glish life during the 1300's.

Early English drama developed from brief scenes that monks acted out in churches to illustrate Bible stories. The sccnes grew into full-length works called «mystery plays» and «miracle plays».

Mystery plays dealt with events in the Bible, and miracle plays with the lives of saints. Eventually, craft and merchant «guilds» (associations) took over presentation of the plays and staged them in town squares.

During the 1400's morality plays' first appeared in English dra­ma. Morality plays featured characters who represented a certain quality, such as good or evil. These dramas were less realistic than the earlier plays and were intended to teach a moral lesson.

During the century following Chaucer's death, England tore it­self apart in the evil warfare of the «Wars of the Roses». The ideals of the medieval knight were all but forgotten in the bitter cruelty of that struggle over which aristocratic faction would govern England. A man who was caught up in the confusion, Sir Thomas Malory, tried to regain the vision of what was already a lost medieval per­fection in his prose retelling of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Malory's was one of the first English books to appear in print. William Caxton, an ingenious English traveler, saw the newly in­vented system of printing from movable type in Germany and set up his own press in London in 1476. Before that time, books and all other literary works had to be slowly and laboriously copied by hand. Printing made it possible to produce far more books and at far lower cost. With books easily obtainable more people could learn to read, and more books would be produced. The experience of literature would soon shift from the breathless group of listeners gathered in a hall or around a fire, hearing an old tale told once more, to the solitary individual, alone wiLh the thoughts and feel­ings of another person speaking from the printed page.