Background: The Anglo-Saxons 450-1100

Along with a new religion, the Christian missionaries brought

education and culture. Schools grew up as monasteries were built.
Young Anglo-Saxons learned not only the Scriptures but also the
writing of the Roman Virgil and of the ancient Greeks. The coming of
Christianity had a marked influence on literature, as the monks in the
monasteries recorded the poetry that had been passed down orally from
generation to generation by the mead-hall entertainers.
In spite of the widespread effects of Christianity on the AngloSaxons, they clung tightly to many of the superstitions and customs
from their pagan past.

Anglo-Saxon Literature

Britain, as a place, was first mentioned by ancient Greek writers.

To the Greeks, Britain was a legendary place-remote and mysterious.
The Romans found the island occupied by Celtic Britons, who were
related to the Celtic peoples of Western Europe conquered by the
Romans. During the fifth century, when the Roman Empire was
crumbling, the Romans withdrew, leaving the Celtic peoples to find
their own means of defense.
Despite a brief period of military success under the leadership
of the individual who became the King Arthur of medieval legend, the
culture of the Romanized Celts of Britain had collapsed by 600 under
the attacks of a variety of enemies, principally German tribes from
across the North Sea. For the following two hundred and fifty years
(600-850), the Anglo-Saxonsa multitude of wealthy, independent
lords and kingsfought among themselves, with many kingdoms
rising and falling.
To add to the plight of the Anglo-Saxons as they fought to
protect their own petty kingdoms, Viking Danes began to attack during
the second half of the ninth century. Under the leadership of Alfred the
Great, (871-899), and, later, his grandson, Athelstan (925-940), the
Danes were defeated, but the country was not united under an AngloSaxon king until the middle of the eleventh century. However, their
unified land did not survive for very long. In 1066 they were once
again invaded. Their conquerors, the Normans from across the English
Channel, instituted their own culture, thus bringing to a close the
Anglo-Saxon epoch of English history.

Anglo-Saxon Culture
When the Anglo-Saxons came to England, they brought with
them a relatively well-developed society organized around the family,
the clan, the tribe, and finally the kingdom. The eorls (erlz), the ruling
class, and the ceorls (cherlz), bondsmen whose ancestors were former
captives of the tribe, made up the two classes of Anglo-Saxon society.
Although he was considered to be an absolute ruler, the king relied
heavily on advice from a council, the witan ("wise men"). For example,
in the selection from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, King Edwin consults his witan before converting to
Christianity. The center of the Anglo-Saxons social life was the mead
hall. As part of the celebrations in the mead hall, professional singers
or bards, called scops, entertained by recounting stories of brave heroes
and by serving as resident poet and chronicler for the king and his
tribe. These entertainers were responsible for preserving much of the
literature of the time by keeping it alive until it was written down by
Church scholars after Christianity came to England.
Until the end of the sixth century, the Anglo-Saxons worshiped
various pagan godsgods associated today with Norse mythology.
Christianity did not have much impact on these pagan people until a
missionary named Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to
convert King Ethelbert of Kent in 597. Within one or two generations
Christianity had spread throughout England.

English literature had its beginnings while the Anglo-Saxons

were still on the Continent. When they conquered the Celts, they
brought with them a rich tradition of oral literature steeped in their
customs and pagan beliefs and rituals. This literature focused on the
telling of the brave and heroic deeds of the warriors possessing
attributes they valued and wished to emulate. The only surviving fulllength epic in Old English from this tradition is Beowulf. The influence
of the epics was sustained throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. As late
as the tenth century, Christian writers produced two very excellent
imitations of the battle scenes of the old heroic epics: The Battle of
Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon. Both of these epics recount
clashes between the English and the Viking Danes.
Two other important types of Anglo-Saxon poetry are the lyric
and the riddle. The lyric presents a more personal and emotional form
of poetry than the epic. The riddle, a form of poetry in which an object
or person is described in a rather ambiguous manner, demonstrates the
Anglo-Saxon fascination for manipulating words. In the lyrics and the
riddles, the Anglo-Saxons expressed their terror of the northern winter,
their awareness of the transitory nature of human life, and their
reverence and fear of the sea because of its immensity, its mystery, and
its cruelty.
Unlike Anglo-Saxon poetry, which exemplifies the highly
imaginative nature of the Anglo-Saxons, the highly utilitarian prose
writing from this period had its origins in the Church with the priests
and monks. Because Latin was the language of the Church and because
it was considered to be the language of educated men, the earliest prose
writing was in Latin. The earliest recognized prose writer was the
seventh-century scholar Bede. Bede's Ecclesiastical History was
translated into Anglo-Saxon by Alfred the Great, who was the most
influential prose writer of this period. One of Alfred's greatest
accomplishments was the encouragement that he gave for the
continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year accounting
of the events of English history. As Bede's Ecclesiastical History is a
valuable source for Church history, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives
an accurate ac count of the secular events in English history.
Because Anglo-Saxon literature was preserved in a very
disorganized fashion, because much of it was never written down at all,
and because only four manuscripts of the poetry have survived, much
of the life and literature of these people who inhabited England for
approximately six centuries still is a mystery. Archaeologists and
literary scholars have many questions that are yet unanswered about
this Anglo-Saxon civilization. One question that certainly has not been
satisfactorily answered for many is what role the monks played as they
recorded the literature. Were they merely recorders or were they using
the literature to inculcate Christian principles and values? What is
certainly known about Anglo-Saxon literature is that it is imaginative,
heroic, exciting, and rich in tradition. And like the literature of any era,
its poetry and prose reveal much that is worth knowing about its
creators.

Background: The Medieval Period 1100-1500

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 held the title of duke. But he was, in fact, more
powerful than many kings.
When the English king Edward the Confessor died without an
heir in 1066 the Norman duke William claimed the English throne. But,
as always, there were other contenders. William invaded England and
won a decisive victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Norman Society
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
three languages. The Norman rulers 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 does 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 modern 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 verve
and style which suggest that during the period in between, vigorous
literary traditions continued in their oral form.
What were they? Here are 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 carols. 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 modern 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
our language. As this process evolved, the Latin terms of the lawyer
and scholar continually entered the language. In this way Modern
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. From the surviving works this book offers three brief but
typical selections.
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.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Quite different are the poems of
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. 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.
Our final selection comes from a different world. During the
century following Chaucer's death, England tore itself apart in the civil
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 his knights.
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. This initiated a major change in English
literature. Now books didn't have to be laboriously copied by hand.
Soon, they would be relatively cheap. 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 with the thoughts and
feelings of another person speaking from the printed page.