English Poetry in the Fifteenth Century

Introduction

Dwarfed by the mighty accomplishments of Geoffrey Chaucer at one end and the great Elizabethans at the other, fifteenth century poetry has often seemed to stretch like a lesser plain between mountain ranges. There is some truth to this view: By no standard was this a distinguished age in the history of English verse. The English Chaucerian tradition, running from John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve to Stephen Hawes, can boast no major poet and only a paucity of significant minor ones, and rarely did fifteenth century works in the well-established popular genres of metrical romance, saint’s life, and lyric match the high achievements of the century before. Indeed, the best-known literary productions of the 1400’s—the prose Arthurian romance of Sir Thomas Malory and the dramatic cycles of the Corpus Christi season—belong to genres other than poetry. Poetry in this period may have suffered a general undervaluation owing to comparisons that it cannot sustain.

If one approaches fifteenth century poetry with chastened expectations and sensitivities attuned to the artistic aims of this period as distinct from others, one can find work of real interest and value. For example, although the age found little original stimulus in matters of poetic form, the carol attained its fullest development during this time, and the ballad was beginning to take shape. Finally, at the turn of the century, three Scots “makars”—Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—produced verse of a sufficiently high order to warrant labeling the reign of James IV a brief “golden age” of literary Scotland.

Historical context

Although it is always hazardous to speculate on the connections between history and artistic felicity, it remains true that the political and social climate in the fifteenth century did not favor literary achievement. The international stage was still dominated by the Hundred Years’ War with France; Henry V’s successful invasion, crowned by the victory of Agincourt in 1415, committed his successors to a costly, protracted, and ultimately futile defense of this new French territory against the onslaughts of Joan of Arc and the French king. Meanwhile, in England itself the weakness of Henry VI encouraged factionalism and intrigue, which finally erupted in the Wars of the Roses between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. It was a nation tired of war and depopulated of much of its nobility that welcomed the restoration of civil order in 1485 with the crowning of Henry VII and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty.

This political turbulence severely disrupted the patronage system on which art throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance had always relied. Early in the century, Henry V had encouraged literary production, as had his brother, Humphrey of Gloucester. However, the decimation and financial impoverishment that subsequently exhausted the aristocracy could hardly serve to foster an atmosphere of courtly refinement such as had supported Chaucer and John Gower. Indeed, it is notable that the fifteenth century witnessed a contraction in most aspects of intellectual and cultural life. Architecture, the visual arts, philosophy, and theology all declined; only in music did the English excel, principally through the harmonic innovations of John Dunstable (1370?-1453). At the same time, the role of the poet seems to have been evolving from that of an entertainer in the tradition of medieval minstrelsy to one of an adviser to princes. Thus the prestige of erudition rose while the indigenous oral traditions fell further into disrepute.

Social context

The rise of the middle class was another factor in the determination of literary tastes. Though depressed economically by the disorders in the middle of the century, this constituency ultimately gained in power as the aristocracy depleted its own ranks and resources. Simultaneously, education and literacy were spreading down the social pyramid. The gradual infiltration of Humanism from the Continent, particularly during the 1480’s and 1490’s, had as yet made no impression on the literary sensibility: What this new, conservative readership demanded was the familiar and time-honored—such as the lives of saints, or works of the revered Chaucer. This appetite fueled extensive copying of manuscripts, an activity culminating, as chance would have it, in a technological revolution when William Caxton established England’s first printing press in 1476. The advent of widespread printing, following Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type for the printing press, radically and permanently altered the availability of literary works and finally established the written text as the principal medium of poetic exchange.

Genres and versification

In their cumulative effect, these factors produced a literary conservatism that persisted throughout the century. Poets of this era turned to their own native tradition, particularly to Chaucer and Gower, for their models and stimulus, a practice contrasting radically with that of Chaucer himself, who wove into his verse many continental influences. Thus Chaucer’s meters, the iambic pentameter and tetrameter, and his rhyme patterns, notably the ballade (ababbcbc) and rhyme royal (ababbcc) stanzas and the couplet, were widely imitated, even by poets with a most imperfect grasp of what they were imitating. These same poets likewise admired the poetic diction and the rhetorical elevation that Chaucer and Gower had standardized. This influence produced the inflated sententiousness, the rhetorical pomp, and the “aureation” (use of polysyllabic Latinisms) that modern readers often deplore in the verse of Lydgate and his followers.

However, fifteenth century poets adopted larger poetic forms as well. The many allegories and dream visions of the period clearly model themselves on Chaucer’s work and that of his contemporaries. Other genres, such as the romance and lyric, continued to draw upon the same reserve of verse forms, topoi, story patterns, and subjects. Nowhere is the conservative character of the period better revealed than in the inclination toward verse translation. Of course, this was nothing new: The Middle Ages always had great respect for authority, and most writers—even the best—worked from sources. The sheer bulk of fifteenth century translation obtrudes nevertheless, particularly in the number of major works that fall into this class. Lydgate’s 36,365-line The Fall of Princes 1430-1438, printed 1494), for example, was his longest poetic effort. Further, with the exception of Gavin Douglas’s version of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), seldom do the translations, despite their frequent expansion and supplementation of the originals, stand as significant poetic works in their own right; John Walton’s competent yet poetically uninspired rendering of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (523; The Consolation of Philosophy, late ninth century) represents the best that the age produced. However sympathetically perceived, this widespread tendency to rely on the matter and inspiration of the past must ultimately be admitted as a weakness in much fifteenth century poetry, translated or otherwise. Rarely do the versifiers exhibit the ability of great traditional poets to return to and re-create the myths embedded in the traditional material.

The Chaucerian tradition

In the late fourteenth century Chaucer, drawing on the French tradition of courtly love and allegory that he found in Le Roman de la rose (thirteenth century), translated part of it as Romaunt of the Rose (The Romance of the Rose, complete translation 1900), and brought courtly poetry in England to its fullest perfection. His precedent inspired many imitations; allegories, love-debates, and dream visions throughout the fifteenth century attempted to recapture the Chaucerian magic. Although several of these labors show talent, one finds in this tradition little innovation or development beyond the point that Chaucer had reached.

Chaucer’s first and historically most significant heir was John Lydgate (1370?-1451?), the prolific monk of Bury St. Edmunds whose influence and prestige over the next two hundred years rivaled those of his master. Written in almost every form and mode available to him, Lydgate’s poetic corpus is staggering in its volume and variety: Taken collectively, his many allegories, romances, histories, courtly love poems, fables, epics, lyrics, hymns, prayers, didactic and homiletic works, and occasional pieces total some 145,000 lines. Lydgate’s debt to Chaucer and the courtly love tradition appears most plainly in his early work of the first decade of the 1400’s. Complaint of the Black Knight (wr. c. 1400; pb. 1885) features lovers’ complaints in a dream-vision garden setting; in the 1,403-line The Temple of Glass (wr. c. 1403; pb. 1477), the poet in a dream visits a temple, styled after Chaucer’s House of Fame (1372-1380), in which Venus joins a love-distressed knight and a lady. To this early period also belong versions of seven of Aesop’s fables, representative of several didactic works in this vein composed by Lydgate at various times. Tales of Mariolatry loosely strung amid much digressive material constitute the 5,932-line The Life of Our Lady (wr. c. 1409; pb. 1484), another early work, and the harbinger of many later efforts in the genre of the saint’s legend.

Lydgate’s major works were the prodigious translations completed in his later years. Undertaken at the behest of Henry V, the The Hystorye, Sege, and Dystruccyon of Troye (wr. c. 1420; pb. 1513; better known as Troy Book) rendered Guido delle Colonne’s Latin prose history of Troy into 30,117 lines in decasyllabic couplets. The tale of Oedipus and the rivalry of his two sons furnished the matter of the 4,176-line The Siege of Thebes (wr. c. 1422; pb. 1496), a tale embedded in a narrative frame attaching it to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400). Begun in France in 1426 and probably completed two years later, the 24,832-line The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (wr. c. 1426; pb. 1899-1904) translates and slightly expands Guillaume de Deguileville’s fourteenth century Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (c. 1340). The lengthy and popular Fall of Princes (pb. 1494), composed for Humphrey of Gloucester between 1431 and 1439, generously renders into English Laurent de Premierfait’s version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355-1374; The Fall of Princes, 1431-1438), a compendium of medieval “tragedies” of men of greatness whom fickle fortune humbled. In addition to these major works, one finds myriad shorter pieces of every description poured forth profusely throughout the poet’s long career.

Time has not smiled on Lydgate’s literary reputation over the last two hundred years. Chief among his alleged sins is his prolixity, but critics also remark a prosodic weakness (especially in the prevalence of “broken-backed” lines), a tendency toward syntactic incoherence, and an infatuation with rhetoric and aureation. Other readers, however, finding these condemnations unduly harsh, note a human empathy, passages of lyric smoothness, and occasionally felicitous imagery, and a few have competently defended the poet’s often-slandered craftsmanship. Although it is probable that Lydgate’s poetic star will never rise to its former ascendency, it is also likely that future generations will find in his work merits that its amplitude has sometimes tended to obscure.

Thomas Hoccleve

Less important historically yet in some regards more interesting is Thomas Hoccleve (1368?-1430?), a clerk of the Privy Seal whose attempts to secure patronage and pecuniary recompense would seem to have been less successful than desired. His magnum opus, the Regement of Princes (1412), occupies 777 stanzas of rhyme royal after the three-stanza envoi dedicating the work to Henry, prince of Wales. The body of the Regement of Princes, conflating material from three Latin sources, urges the young prince by means of exemplary tales to aspire toward virtue and to eschew vice. However, the most characteristic portion is the 288-stanza prologue, which amounts to an elaborate begging plea with many melancholy digressions and allusions to contemporary conditions. This autobiographical strain, allied with the many topical references and the poet’s endearing love for Chaucer, whom he seems to have known personally, endows Hoccleve’s verse with a human and historical interest that constitutes his main claim on posterity. On the other hand, his work lacks serious artistic intention, a sense of structural design, and stylistic distinction. Along with several shorter pieces, his other main poems are La Male Règle (1406), the Letter of Cupid (1402), and an autobiographically linked series including the Complaint (1422), the Dialogue with a Friend (1422), the Tale of Jereslaus’ Wife (1422), Knowing How to Die, and the Tale of Jonathas.

James I

Three other early “Chaucerians” require mention. Foremost among them is James I of Scotland (1394-1437), who spent most of his childhood as a prisoner of the English. Composed during his captivity, The Kingis Quair (1423-1424; better known as The King’s Choir) pays tribute in 197 stanzas of rhyme royal to Lady Joan Beaufort, whom James married the next year (1424). In the poem the young monarch, complaining about his bad fortune, sees a beautiful woman through his cell window and is smitten with love. That night in a dream he visits Venus, Minerva, and Fortune, the last of whom promises the betterment of his affairs; on this hopeful note he awakes. Betraying a clear debt to Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” and Lydgate’s The Temple of Glass, The King’s Choir was written in the Scots dialect with Midlands admixtures and so occupies an important role in the emerging Scottish tradition.

Other writers and works

Another captive nobleman, Charles d’Orleans (1391-1465) sprang directly from the French courtly tradition, writing in its language and traditional idiom. The main English translation, which Charles may have authored, is a three-part sequence of ballads and rondels dealing conventionally with the progress of several love affairs.

One further work from this early period was Sir John Thomas Clanvowe’s The Boke of Cupide (1391). This May-time dream vision is dominated by a debate between a cuckoo, who slanders lovers, and a nightingale, who lauds them; the nightingale prevails, and the dream concludes with an assembly of birds. Composed in an unusual five-line stanza (aabba), this poem recalls such earlier works in the bird-debate tradition as the thirteenth century Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1250) and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (1380).

The allegorical tendency found in The Temple of Glass emerges again in a group of poems from the later fifteenth century, most of which were at one time or another apocryphally attributed to Chaucer. One of the finest of these, The Flower and the Leaf, depicts through the eyes of a female narrator an amusing incident involving the followers of the Leaf (the laurel) and the followers of the Flower (the daisy). Skillfully composed in 595 lines of rhyme royal, The Flower and the Leaf invests its lightly allegorized narrative with much charm of image and detail. Somewhat heavier in its allegorical machinery, the 756-line Assembly of Ladies features such characters as Perseverance, Diligence, Countenance, Largesse, Remembrance, and Loyalty. Less courtly and more didactic, the Court of Sapience, sometimes attributed to Stephen Hawes, confronts a traveler with a more scholastic variety of allegorical personifications—such as Peace, Mercy, Righteousness, Truth, and the seven arts. Hawes’s The Pastime of Pleasure, composed shortly before its publication in 1509, recounts the allegorical adventures of Graunde Amour on his road toward knightly perfection and the love of La Belle Pucel. Another early sixteenth century work, The Court of Love, far more skillfully narrates Philogenet’s visit with Alcestis and Admetus at the Court of Love and recounts his successful wooing of Rosiall; the action closes with a celebration and bird-songs of praise. Thoroughly Chaucerian in form and intention, these poems mark the end of the courtly tradition in medieval English literature.

The lyric

The term “lyric” suggests to most modern readers a highly individualized expression of some personal feeling in concrete language treating a subject of the poet’s choice, yet this notion proves misleading in the case of the medieval English lyric. Although this body of poems indeed concerns itself with feelings, the individuality of the poet has been largely effaced; thus most of the surviving pieces are anonymous, not merely because the names of the authors are unknown (with a few exceptions, such as John Audelay and James Ryman), but in the nature of the expression. Moreover, the subjects, the basis on which these poems are usually classified, belong to a common cultural word hoard that also provides much of the standard imagery and diction. The consequence is a poetic genre expressive of what might be called “public experience”—moods, thoughts, and emotions defined and recognized in the public mind.

The essential continuity of the English medieval lyric from its beginnings in the mid-thirteenth century to the closing of the Middle Ages reveals itself in the persistence of certain lyric types, such as the Passion poem (treating Christ’s Passion), the hymn to Mary, and the praise and complaint of lovers. The fifteenth century brought its share of changes. One new development was a growing literary self-awareness with a corresponding loss of freshness and spontaneity, characteristics that had distinguished early English lyrics from their more artificial French counterparts. New motifs came into prominence, such as the Marian lament; other poems elaborated old themes to greater lengths with an increasingly aureate diction.

The fifteenth century’s most distinctive contribution lay in the flowering of a relatively new lyric form, the carol. Medieval English lyrics in general, employing a variety of metrical and stanzaic patterns, share no defining formal characteristics. The carol differs in this regard: R. L. Greene, the editor of the standard anthology, defines this lyric type as “a song on any subject, composed of uniform stanzas and provided with a burden.” Sung at the beginning and repeated after every stanza, the burden is a group of lines, most often a couplet, that usually signals a major theme or subject in the poem. Some claim that the carol originated as a dance song. In any event, it is clear that during the fifteenth century the carol was developing a connection with the Christmas season; many explicitly celebrated the Nativity in a manner familiar to modern readers from Christmas carols of the present era. The genre was not restricted to this subject, however; one of the most beautiful and haunting of all carols is a Passion elegy whose burden runs, “Lulley, lulley, lulley, lulley;/ The fawcon hath born my mak away.”

Medieval lyrics are usually classified on the basis of subject into two groups, the religious and the secular, with the religious poems being far more numerous. The most popular subject was the Virgin, whose cult still flourished in the late Middle Ages. Some of these Marian poems, adopting the conventions of secular love verse, proclaimed her inexpressible beauty, or praised her bodily parts, or begged for her mercy, or presented her with a Valentine’s Day offering. More often, however, these lyrics derived from the Latin liturgical tradition. Many such pieces celebrated various of the Virgin’s five joys—the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Assumption; “The Maiden Makeles” is a particularly famous Nativity song. God and Christ were often the objects of address; “Close in my Breast thy Perfect Love” harks in its intimate tenderness back to the fourteenth century mystical tradition of Richard Rolle. Christ’s Passion provided another major subject in poems that tended toward a more extended narrative treatment and greater didacticism than in previous periods. In one common and distinctive type of Passion poem, Christ himself addresses humanity directly from the Cross. A new fifteenth century trend introduced the theme of Mary’s compassion and her participation in Christ’s suffering. Lyrics in the planctus mode give expression to her grief; other poems present this theme through dialogues between the Virgin and Son.

Turning to the secular lyrics, one finds in the fifteenth century, as in most ages, a preponderance of love songs. All the expected types appear: praise to a lady and enumeration of her beauties, complaints about her cruelty and fickleness, laments on a lover’s absence, and epistles, such as the one that opens “Go, litull bill, and command me hertely/ Unto her.…” Some lyrics take the form of antifeminist diatribes; others are plainly pornographic. One interesting anonymous series, The Lover’s Mass, tastefully mimics the liturgy in fine love poems bearing such titles as the Introibo, Kyrie, and Gloria. A dramatic framework informs the highly praised “Nut Brown Maid,” a debate between a woman and an earl’s son disguised as a knightly outlaw which culminates in a self-revelation and a marriage offer. Other types of secular lyrics include drinking songs, charms and gnomes, and poems on historical events. In the meditations on fortune and worldly happiness, one can once more discern a growing religious tone in the contemplation of human affairs, a tone that emerges explicitly in the songs on death, the penitential confessions, and the homilies on virtue and vice. Cutting across this entire dichotomy of the secular and the religious are lyric types distinguishable by their objects of address. Poems addressed to the reader tend toward didacticism; lyrics addressing a third party (such as the Virgin or a human beloved) define themselves between the polarities of celebration and of complaint or petition. An appreciation for both strains, the didactic and the celebratory, is an essential prerequisite to any competent reading of medieval lyrics.

Romances

During the fifteenth century two forms of popular narrative overlapped as the metrical romance declined and the ballad rose to supplant it. Though the relationship between these genres remains unsettled, both were probably circulated orally, and the traveling minstrel performers may have provided a line of continuity between them. This context of oral performance helps to explain in both cases the frequent verbal and narrative formulas that overly sophisticated readers are likely to condemn as “trite” and “stereotyped.” At the same time, differences in subject matter and narrative technique clearly distinguish the two forms.

The first English romances appeared in the middle of the thirteenth century, at the very time when this aristocratic form had begun its decline in France. Descended from the chanson de geste, the French romance was a tale of knightly adventure that celebrated the ideals of bravery in battle, chivalric honor, courtesy, and service to a lady. Showing little concern for verisimilitude or psychological realism, these stories pitted their shallowly portrayed heroes against frequently supernatural and fabulous adversaries in a string of encounters joined less by a sense of “organic unity” than by a technique of narrative interlace. The English romances were regularly “translations” of such French works and exhibit many of these same characteristics. They also borrow most of their stories from the French cycles, specifically the “matters” of Britain (including the Arthurian cycle and unrelated “English” tales such as Haveloc written in the early thirteenth century), France (the Charlemagne cycle), and antiquity (including the cycles of Alexander, Troy, and Thebes). Other tales deal with the Orient, and a few bear no relation to any major cycle.

Fifteenth century romances have been relatively neglected in favor of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1469, printed 1485), the greatest of the many prose narratives published by Caxton, yet the metrical romance persisted as a popular form: According to the Wells Manual, some thirty can be dated roughly from the fifteenth century, with a growing number from Scotland in the later decades. Lengths ranged from 516 lines in the cases of The Grene Knight, an unhappy condensation of the Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400), to the 27,852 lines of Henry Lovelich’s Merlin, a translation of the prose French Vulgate. The most common verse patterns were rhyming octosyllabic couplets and tail-rhyme stanzas, although occasionally other forms, such as the rhyme royal or ballade stanza, made their appearance. Although the alliterative revival had passed its prime, alliterative tendencies still persisted in Northumbria and Scotland, yielding late in the century such Middle Scots works as Golagrus and Gawain (c. 1500) and The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (c. 1475).

In their choice of subjects, fifteenth century romancers followed the established channels described earlier. One of the best-known Arthurian romances is the stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1360), a 3,969-line account of Lancelot’s role in Arthur’s downfall. Most of the romances from the Arthurian cycle depict the deeds of Gawain, who in the English tradition (unlike the French) remained for the most part a model knight. Two of the best Gawain romances are The Avowynge of King Arthur, Sir Gawan, Sir Kaye, and Sir Bawdewyn of Bretan (c. 1425), which follows each knight’s separate path of adventure, and Golagrus and Gawain, whose plot hinges on a noble act of self-effacement by Gawain. After the Arthurian cycle, the next most popular source of lore for romance was the life of Alexander. The Alliterative Alexander Fragment C (c. 1450) verges on the epic; far more leisurely and episodic in its narrative style, the 11,138-line Scottish Alexander Buik (1438) is surpassed in length by another bulky Middle Scots poem, Gilbert Hay’s 20,000-line Buik of Alexander. In other areas, the wars of Troy and Thebes inspired a handful of romances, two by Lydgate; a small group, including only The Taill of Rauf Coilyear and a Middle English Song of Roland (c. 1100), belong to the Charlemane cycle; five or six others, such as Eger and Grime (c. 1450) and John Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes (c. 1448), treat miscellaneous subjects. By 1500, the 250-year-old English metrical romance tradition had, with a few minor exceptions, reached an end.

Ballads

David Fowler has argued that in the late Middle Ages, as the medieval minstrels were increasingly denied access to the courts of the higher nobility, the romance converged with the folk song to produce a shorter, simplified, less episodic narrative form that is now called the ballad. While the origins of balladry remain a controversial subject, it is certainly the case that the ballad is one of the few medieval forms that did not perish with the Renaissance and its aftermath, and as such it has a special claim to modern interest. The most thoroughly oral of the genres so far considered, the ballad could be defined as a short narrative poem, usually composed in two- or four-line stanzas, and distinguished by its concentration on a single event or episode. Unlike romances, which characteristically “tell” their stories, ballads tend to “show” their action directly through dramatic dialogue stripped of descriptive scene setting. The ballad style is formulaic: Tags, phrases, motifs, and episodes are repeated throughout the ballad tradition, and the poems themselves have survived in multiple versions. The general impersonality of the formulaic style is reinforced by the absence of a distinctive narrative persona. Although current opinion favors individual and not group composition, in its cumulative effect, balladry strikes one as reflecting the outlook of a community and tradition, not that of some particular person.

Although most extant ballads survive in collections from the seventeenth century and later, many of these poems may have originated in the fifteenth century or even before, for oral traditions have a well-demonstrated ability to transmit story patterns over remarkably long periods of time. The reconstruction of a specific ballad’s evolution remains a speculative and subjective process, however, and there are a mere handful of documentably fifteenth century ballads, most of which narrate the adventures of Robin Hood. The choice of this legendary outlaw as a hero presents a departure from the usual practice of romancers with their knightly, aristocratic adventurers; indeed, later ballads do tend to draw subjects from middle-class life more often than romances had done. This point, however, should not be overemphasized: Ballads and romances retain many similarities of motif, story pattern, and even metrical form; in several cases, such as Hind Horn and King Horn (c. 1250), a ballad and romance relate the same story. However, during the fifteenth century the ballad had begun a life of its own that would lead in its peregrinations down to the modern day to a point far from its medieval origins.

Other fifteenth century poetry

The prestige of the courtly tradition did not obscure the power that religious narrative continued to exercise over the popular imagination. Indeed, collections of saints’ lives of the type represented in the South English Legendary (thirteenth to fourteenth century) and the Golden Legend (c. 1260) enjoyed immense popularity throughout the century, although original composition in this vein was on the decline. Between 1443 and 1447, one of the most prolific of the religious versifiers, Osbern Bokenham, composed a group of thirteen saints’ lives under the title The Lives of Saints: Or, Legends of Holy Women. The versatile Lydgate several times turned his hand to this genre; even John Capgrave, a learned friar who customarily wrote in prose, composed lives of Saint Norbert and Saint Katharine in rhyme royal. One must further note the numerous translations and verse paraphrases of books of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, even if their literary achievement is slight.

A number of shorter poems address themselves to the events or conditions of the day. Major military conflicts such as the Battle of Agincourt and the Wars of the Roses inspired commemorative ballads and lyrics. A spirited series in prose and crude poetry, Jack Upland (c. 1389-1396), Friar Daw’s Reply (c. 1420), and Jack Upland’s Rejoinder (c. 1420), exchange blows on the subjects of friars and Lollardy. London Lickpenny (1515) vividly depicts life in the late medieval metropolis. Other poems in this satirical vein lament the state of the clergy and the general evils of the age.

A considerable bulk of the surviving poetry seems to be little more than versified prose. The Libel of English Policy (c. 1436), for example, makes recommendations on foreign trade policy in couplets and rhymed royal stanzas totaling 1,141 lines. Similarly, pragmatic intentions appear in John Russell’s Boke of Nurture (c. 1460), an instruction on points of etiquette. By far the longest of these poems is Peter Idley’s 7,000-line Instructions to His Son, which gives advice on a variety of subjects.

The Scottish makars

In the fifteenth century in Scotland, an era concluding in military cataclysm as England crushed James IV and his Scottish forces at the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513, one finds a burgeoning literature with several poets or “makars” of real greatness. John Barbour, in many respects the founder of the English-language poetic tradition in Scotland, had already sounded a patriotic note in The Bruce (c. 1375), an epic romance celebrating the deeds of Robert the Bruce, national liberator and victor at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314). In 1423-1424, James I introduced a courtlier, more Chaucerian strain in The Kingis Quair (1423-1424; better known as The King’s Choir). Two other poems sometimes ascribed to James, Christis Kirk on the Green and Peblis to the Play, initiate a Scottish comic tradition that continues in such works as Sym and His Brudir, The Wyf of Auchtiramuchty, Cockelbie’s Sow, and even the romance The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (c. 1475). Exhibiting the superb mastery of an intricate, interlocking stanzaic pattern, Christis Kirk on the Green and Peblis to the Play are both distinguished for their vividly sketched rustic settings and their rough-and-tumble humor.

Meanwhile, the nationalistic and historical tradition of Barbour was carried on by Andrew of Wyntoun (1350?-1424) in his Orygynale Chronikil of Scotland, a lifeless history of the nation from Creation to the time of writing. Composed in octosyllabic couplets, Wyntoun’s chronicle is best known now as the source of the Macbeth story that William Shakespeare found in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577). By far the most popular and influential Scottish poem of the century was The Wallace, ascribed to a certain Blind Harry and completed before 1488. A companion piece to The Bruce, Harry’s eleven-book heroic romance is based on the life of William Wallace (1272-1305), an unsuccessful Scottish insurgent a generation before Robert the Bruce. The first sustained Scottish work in decasyllabic couplets, The Wallace often irks modern readers with its chauvinistic romanticization, its repetitiveness, and its lack of psychological depth. At the same time, the poem does not lack enthusiasm, and many passages show real poetic power.

Robert Henryson

The work of Robert Henryson (c. 1425-c. 1505) and Dunbar is unrivaled in fifteenth century poetry, Scottish or English. The label “Scottish Chaucerians” attached to these and other Middle Scots poets should be rejected, for it clouds their essential originality. Nevertheless, the poem for which Henryson is best known, The Testament of Cresseid (1532), is a 615-line continuation of the fifth book of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1382) in rhyme royal stanzas. Cresseid, rejected by Diomede, blasphemes against the gods, who accordingly punish her with leprosy. Troilus rides past one day and, pitying the wretched woman, whom he fails to recognize, tosses her a purse; learning the name of her benefactor, Cresseid repents, sends him a ring token, and dies. A poetic tour de force, The Testament of Cresseid presents a stern and uncompromising moral vision in which Cresseid falls as the result of her own wrongdoing; nevertheless, she ultimately finds redemption. Another major effort, the 633-line Tale of Orpheus (1508) interprets the Orpheus myth in a standard allegorical fashion. Of Henryson’s some dozen minor poems, perhaps the best is “Robene and Makyne,” a debate of wooing and rebuttal with an amusing dramatic reversal.

Henryson’s magnum opus was his 2,975-line collection, The Morall Fabillis of Esope, the Phrygian, (1570; also known as Fables; twelve shorter poems of uncertain attribution). The didactic character of these thirteen fables of Aesop is reflected in the twenty to seventy-line moralitas following each one; composed in rhyme royal, the fables show in their ordering an awareness of total design. Henryson’s poetry in general lacks the dazzling stylistic virtuosity of Dunbar’s, although his meticulous craftsmanship cannot be faulted. His greatness lies more in his moral profundity, his detached, ironic humor, and his ability to depict the small and commonplace. In the sources of his learning and the tendency to allegorize, Henryson looks more to the Middle Ages than to the Renaissance; despite the usual Chaucerian influence and a competence in handling aristocratic themes, he belongs more to the parish pulpit than to the court.

William Dunbar

Henryson’s temperamental opposite, William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1525), flourished in the court of James IV during the first decade of the sixteenth century until the demise of his royal patron at Flodden Field. Although he never attempted a work of much more than five hundred lines, his range of form and manner was otherwise matched only by the apparent fluctuations of his mood. “The Thrissill and the Rois” (1503), a dream vision in the Chaucerian allegorical fashion, celebrates the marriage of Margaret Tudor (the “Rose”) and James IV (the “Thistle”). Another allegory of love, “The Goldyn Targe” (c. 1508), launches its poet-narrator into another dream vision before the court of Venus, where he is wounded by the arrows of Dame Beauty. Similar in spirit is “The Merle and the Nightingale,” in which the two birds debate on the subject of love. “The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo” treats love more satirically, as these depraved discussants contemplate sex and their husbands. Satire turns to invective in “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” a distinctively Scottish form in which the poetic contestants hurl at one another volleys of extravagant verbal abuse.

Dunbar also had his darker moments, as in “The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis” (c. 1503-1508), in which the dreaming poet watches Mohammed preside over the grotesque festivities of his fiendish crew (Christian versus Muslim “infidels” being a common theme during the Middle Ages). “Lament for the Makaris” (c. 1508), with its refrain “Timor Mortis conturbat me” (“the fear of death disturbs me”), evokes the elegiac strain and the theme of the world’s ephemerality that recur again in “This World Unstabille” and “In Winter”; a sonorous musical power adds weight to poems on the Nativity and the Resurrection. Among Dunbar’s numerous remaining shorter poems, many were addressed to the king and the royal family. Some readers find Dunbar deficient in human sympathy and in his vision, but none can deny his imaginative inventiveness, tonal and emotional range, satirical humor tending toward the grotesque, and prosodic and stylistic genius that finds few equals in any period.

Gavin Douglas

Although Gavin Douglas (c. 1474-1522) turned to the classical world for his greatest literary attempt, the generality of his work, like that of his immediate peers and predecessors, belongs more to the Middle Ages than to the humanistic movements then stirring on the Continent and in England. His debt to the Chaucerian tradition appears in his early poems, The Palice of Honour (1501) and King Hart (attribution uncertain), both love allegories in the tired French and Chaucerian manner. His rendering of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), into heroic couplets, completed just before Flodden Field in 1513, was the first; it remains one of the finest of all verse translations of this Vergilian masterpiece. Matching poetic style to social degree, Douglas employed heavy alliteration in passages relating to rustic characters and reserved a “noble” style for aristocratic matters. He also contributed an original prologue to each book. The total result, less a translation than a re-creation of the Roman epic into the Middle Scots language and idiom, exerted a regrettably minor influence on later poetry because of Scotland’s political collapse and the rapid linguistic changes that followed. Flodden Field sounded the death knell to a literary era, but even as it did, English-language poetry was about to experience fresh influences and the revitalization of the Renaissance.

Bibliography

Boffey, Julia, comp. Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology. Annotated edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. New editions of five dream visions. Introductory essays help to put each selection in context, and glossaries and annotations make the Middle English texts more accessible.

Boklund-Lagopoulou, Karin. “I Have a Yong Suster”: Popular Song and the Middle English Lyric. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002. Discusses how serious poets often drew inspiration from popular songs, such as comic ballads, folk songs, ballads about outlaws or historical figures, and ballads of the supernatural. Bibliographical references and index.

Cooney, Helen, ed. Nation, Court, and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth Century Poetry. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. Essays by various scholars focus on the importance of courts and courtiers in the literature of the period. Among the topics discussed are courtly poetry, dream visions, complaints, and lyrics and carols. Bibliography and indexes.

Denny-Brown, Andrea, and Lisa H. Cooper, eds. Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Introduction by the editors; afterword by D. Vance Smith. Eight substantial essays on the background of Lydgate’s poetry, his aesthetics, and his place in literary history.

Hirsh, John C., ed. Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads, and Carols. Annotated edition. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Introduction and commentaries by the editor. This anthology of fifty poems, forty-five of them in Middle English, includes five American versions printed with the originals. Punctuation and capitalization have been modernized, and side glosses explain unfamiliar words. Three appendixes contain additional lyrics. Annotated bibliography.

Mapstone, Sally, ed. Older Scots Literature. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005. The first section of this volume consists of fourteen essays on fifteenth century writers and their works. One of the essays deals with the development of a Scottish “poetical anthology,” and several discuss the poet and fabulist Robert Henryson.

Marshall, Simone Celine. The Female Voice in The Assembly of Ladies: Text and Context in Fifteenth-Century England. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. A study of a secular love poem that continues to interest scholars because it was written from a woman’s perspective. By contrasting it with other fifteenth century texts, Marshall demonstrates how gender conventions influence women writers and readers.

Martin, Joanna. Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424-1540. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2008. A thoughtful examination of the relationship between the relative youth of Scotland’s rulers and the amatory themes found in many of the poetic narratives produced during their reigns, including those by Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Sir David Lyndsay, and the lesser-known writers John Bellenden and William Stewart. Bibliography and index.

Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Explores the political and ideological significance of the medieval exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral, by studying four major works in the Chaucerian tradition (The Canterbury Tales, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes).