The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (43 page)

Ten romances suggests that Isabella is keen on reading. But this is not the full story. Not only does she borrow books from her friends, she takes books from the royal lending library. This contains at least 340 titles and is housed in the Tower of London.
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As a younger woman, she borrows romances for herself and titles such as
The History of Normandy
and Vegetius’s text on warfare for her sons. Edward III is not a bookish man but he can read and write and values books highly. Once, in 1335, he pays a hundred marks
(£66
13s 4d) for a single volume. Various people give him presents of books throughout his
life, and these are added to the royal library. A member of his household fetches one when the king calls for something to be read to him in his chamber.

This is what book ownership means for the aristocracy: hundreds of valuable secular manuscripts in English and French, and religious manuscripts in Latin being lent, borrowed, and read aloud. Joan, Lady Mortimer, has four romances with her at Wigmore in 1322. Thomas, duke of Gloucester (youngest son of Edward III), has forty-two religious books in his private chapel at Pleshey in 1397 and eighty-four other books elsewhere in the castle, including romances such as
Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), Hector of Troy, The Romance of Lancelot,
and
The Deeds of Fulk Fitzwarin.
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Thomas’s wife is from the Bohun family, earls of Hereford, who are among the greatest patrons of book illustration of the whole century, so these are not just books which are good to listen to—many of them are wonderful to look at too. Many bishops are similarly surrounded by reading material. Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham, has so many books in his library that you have to climb over stacks of them to get to his desk. It takes five carts to take them all away after his death in 1345.
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Literature is a means to delight the mind and embolden the spirit. It is therefore not surprising that it is available outside noblemen’s households. Pick up a book like the Auchinleck manuscript, written in the 1330s; it contains no fewer than forty-four texts in English for a well-educated Londoner to read to himself or to his wife, or for a well-educated wife to read to her husband. Flick through at random: you will come across a short account of
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin,
then the story of
Sir Degaré, The Seven Sages of Rome, Floris and Blancheflour
(a romance),
The Sayings of the Four Philosophers, The Battle Abbey Roll
(a list of names of Norman knights who fought at Hastings), and the famous romance
Guy of Warwick.
Later you might read the short poem
In Praise of Women,
or the romance
Arthur and Merlin,
or
Sir Tristrem
(Tristan and Isolde), or
Sir Orfeo
(Orpheus and Eurydice). Perhaps historical tales are more to your liking? In which case you can turn to the life of Richard the Lionheart, or the life of King Alexander the Great. The whole book is a veritable library in one volume, with entertaining texts for all the family
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Although literature is something shared across the centuries, the way people actually read varies considerably. All medieval books are
manuscripts—printed books do not arrive in England until the earliest imports in the 1460s—so it is worth paying the extra money for a really good, clean text which you can read clearly, whether it be in English or French. Because they are manuscripts, they all tend to be valuable, so they are not the sort of things you pick up lightly. Ladies may have reading parties in the gardens of aristocratic houses, being read to as they sit on the grass surrounded by flowers and trees. But reading otherwise takes place indoors. Communal readings may take place in the hall, but private readings to the lord and his family alone, or with invited guests in the lord’s solar chamber, are also common. Those doing the actual reading may well be hampered by the lack of light. Candles certainly put a strain on readers’ eyes. Because of this, some wealthy individuals have wooden-rimmed spectacles (invented by Italians in the late thirteenth century). The studious bishop of Exeter, Walter Stapledon, who dies in 1326, leaves a pair of spectacles in his will.

The result of all these difficulties with light, text, audience, valuable manuscripts, and spectacles is that reading is not something idly done. Literature has more of the character of a performance than a moment of quiet reflection. This is where the enjoyment of storytelling comes in. As only a twentieth of the rural population can read, literature is still a minority activity. Most storytelling is done by minstrels, or storytellers traveling with minstrels, who recite their stories from memory. Nor can you separate this oral tradition from written culture and say the two are different. Lords might listen to a story being read to them from a book, or they might equally listen to a minstrel in the hall recite a tale from memory. And just as some stories move from the written word to being performed from memory, so there are stories which begin as oral tales told at fairs and end up being written down. The stories of Robin Hood are a good example. If you wander around the forests of Yorkshire in the years leading up to 1318, you will meet people who appear to be of the Robin Hood fraternity. You may even meet an outlaw called John Little, who, in 1318, takes part in a robbery with members of the Coterel gang.
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You may even meet a real “Robin Hood”—real in the sense that several men of that name are living in and around the manor of Wakefield in the decade before 1318.
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Probably none of these men will live up to your expectations of a bunch of expert archers, clad in green, led by a smiling hero with a highly
refined social conscience. But within fifty years of the Coterel gang turning to crime, the deeds of Robin Hood and Little John are being celebrated up and down the country. The poet William Langland describes one of his characters in about 1377 as being able to recite rhymes about Robin Hood and the earl of Chester. Not until the next century will any Robin Hood stories be circulated in a
written
form. Thus literature and the oral tradition swap stories, to the benefit of both, and to the entertainment of the people who cannot necessarily afford books themselves.

History books are popular in the fourteenth century—especially those written with their prospective audiences in mind. First and arguably foremost of such works is the chronicle composed towards the end of the century by Jean Froissart, a Hainaulter who spends much of his life in England. He knows Edward III and Queen Philippa personally, and he writes poems as well as history (all in French). His great chronicle is written to celebrate the extraordinary deeds of English and French knights. No other writer summons up the flavor and romance of chivalric deeds quite as well. Another entertaining writer is Jean le Bel, Froissart’s compatriot and inspiration, whose work details the early part of the reign of Edward III. Similar compelling knightly histories are to be found in books by Sir Thomas Gray, who writes a chronicle while imprisoned in Scotland in the 1350s; by Robert of Avesbury who writes about the deeds of Edward III; and by an anonymous herald, who writes about the Black Prince.

Most popular of all the available history books is the
Brut.
This racy chronicle, first written in French in about 1300 and translated into English towards the end of the century, is a history of Britain from its legendary origins to the fourteenth century. It incorporates a great deal of romance literature. For example, a large portion of the book consists of stories of Merlin and King Arthur. But actual events start to creep into this wonder-filled narrative with the coming of St. Augustine in
597;
by 1300 the book has assumed the form of a series of tales of recent history, reported reasonably faithfully and written in an informative but entertaining fashion. It becomes so popular that several of those who get hold of copies start keeping them up to date,
effectively writing their own chronicles. Hence the book spawns a whole new tradition of history writing. Hundreds of manuscript copies of this work are in private libraries by the end of the century, in the original French, in English, and even a few in Latin. Only one historical work is anywhere near as popular: the
Polychronicon
of Ranulph Higden, a monk of Chester, whose multivolume history of the world appeals to the laity as well as to the clergy, especially after John Trevisa translates it into English in 1387.

There is one other form of nonfiction which is also read for pleasure. Travel writing is a narrow genre which has great fascination for people as they sit around their fires of an evening. If you should join them you might be surprised to realize that it is not the late thirteenth-century journey of Marco Polo being related—manuscripts of his travels are relatively slow to reach England—but that of Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville is supposedly an Englishman from St. Albans, whose travel book is circulated in French in the second half of the century. Like Polo, he also claims to have visited the Far East, but really his knowledge comes from other writers and his own imagination. Or, rather, the imagination of the man who dreamt him up, for “Sir John Mandeville” is the literary creation of a French cleric, who invents the character and fleshes out his travels with details from older Arabic works. His relationship with his readers is like that between a saint’s relics and the pilgrims who venerate them. The real value is not a matter of objective truth. When esquires and knights hear how they may find their way to Constantinople and Jerusalem, to Babylon, Egypt, Tartary Persia, and ultimately China and India, they are drawn in. They imagine that they too can visit these wonderful places and see these fantastic riches. They picture four thousand barons drawn up in the presence of the great khan. They wince at hearing how, in the market of Cairo, men and women are traded like beasts. They shudder on hearing that, when a man dies on the island of Rybothe, the custom is for his son to decapitate his body and for priests to chop his corpse up into small pieces to feed to wild birds. Such tales are really romances; they play upon the willing suspension of disbelief as much as any tale of King Arthur. But they are important for the same reason that Arthur’s tales are important. They are inspirational as well as enjoyable. Columbus will one day acknowledge his debt to Sir John Mandeville. And within a hundred years of Mandeville’s travels being
translated into English, an English ship will land on the shores of North America. The captain, John Cabot, will announce he has found the land of Mandeville’s “great khan.”

The fourteenth century is not just the cradle of English poetry, it is its first golden age—or, at least, its first since the Conquest. Early in the century the most popular French pieces, like the old Breton lays, are translated into English versions. These are normally about a thousand lines in length and deal with a tale of King Arthur’s court. The most popular titles are the anonymous
Sir Orfeo, Sir Tristrem,
and
Sir Degaré,
and Thomas Chester’s
Sir Launfal.
The much-loved French classic
Roman de la Rose
is translated into English a little later (in part by Chaucer). But the real glory lies in the original English poems. These really are of quite an extraordinary range, especially considering how recent the idea of writing in the English language is. On the one hand you have the clumsy poems of the ardent nationalist Laurence Minot: hymns in praise of Edward Ill’s military victories in Scotland and France between 1333 and 1352. On the other you have the technical brilliance of the author of
Gawain and the Green Knight.
In between you may come across devout writers like Richard Mannyng. His twelve-thousand-line poem,
Handling Sin,
has a powerful literary directness—”the tavern is the devil’s knife”—and is much more than a vehicle for mere moralizing.

Such is the wealth of talent that it is difficult to know where to begin to describe the century’s greatest literary creations. But one way to proceed is to draw up a shortlist for the title of the most creative writer of them all. So, with due acknowledgment of the high quality of many writers who do not fall among the top four of the century, the following should give you something to go on when looking for great literature in fourteenth-century English.

A friend of Chaucer, who describes him as “moral Gower,” he is from a family of Kentish knights—although not a knight himself. He comes to London at a relatively young age and dedicates himself to writing.

What is remarkable is that he does not just write in English, he also writes poems in French and Latin—and these are not just occasional pieces to show off. His satirical Latin poem
Vox Clamantis
(The Voice of One Clamoring) extends to more than ten thousand lines, commenting on the state of England. It takes the form of a great dream-vision in which the Peasants’ Revolt is likened to a terrible apocalyptic night. All the world is turned upside down. Tame animals become wild, wild animals become frenzied, domestic animals become disobedient, and the peasantry rises. The poet flees from London as they advance, hacking and slaying people with their farm implements. As for his French poems, these include his two books of ballads and his earliest full work,
Mirour de l’Omme
(Mirror of Man). The
Mirour
extends to nearly thirty thousand lines on the origin and nature of sin and the spread of corruption through the world.

Gower’s great achievement as far as English literature goes is his
Confessio Amantis
(Lover’s Confession). Part of the reason for his success is his attentiveness to his audience’s tastes. Although you might think that writing a poem more than thirty thousand lines long is no way to endear himself to his readers, he has a good theme—a complaint about the discord of love—and he elaborates on it in a series of elegant stories and digressions. He states in the prologue that those who try to write pure wisdom manage only to dull men’s wits, and for this reason he declares his intention is to write a book “somewhat of lust and somewhat of lore, that of the less or of the more, some may delight in what I write.” This is good advice to writers in all ages.