Poetry after Chaucer and Gower: Courtly poetry
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
The numerous 15th-century followers of Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range
of courtly and moralizing topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic
accomplishment of their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer’s works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The
Assembly of Ladies” (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century verse
of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the ardent but endlessly
frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady were cultivated as part of the “game of
love” depicted in numerous courtly lyrics. By the 15th century, vernacular literacy was spreading
rapidly among both men and women of the laity, with the influence of French courtly love poetry
remaining strong. Aristocratic and knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d’Orléans (captured at
Agincourt in 1415), his “jailer” William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir Richard Ros
(translator of Alain Chartier’s influential La Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and
imitated among the gentry and in bourgeois circles well into the 16th century.
English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrimsJohn Lydgate and the Canterbury
pilgrims leaving Canterbury, miniature from a manuscript containing The Troy Book and The
Siege of Thebes, c. 1455–62.
Both Chaucer and Gower had to some extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and
the active seeking of patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to be his
disciple, dedicated The Regiment of Princes (c. 1412), culled from an earlier work of the same
name, to the future king Henry V. Most of Hoccleve’s compositions seem to have been written
with an eye to patronage, and, though they occasionally yield unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve’s aspiration to be
Chaucer’s successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if not necessarily in literary merit,
by the formidable oeuvre of John Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate,
too, was greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage and produced
as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in their day. A staunch
Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy Book (1412–21) and Life of Our Lady to Henry V and
his Fall of Princes (1431–38; based ultimately on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium) to
Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also essayed courtly verse in Chaucer’s manner
(The Complaint of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass), but his imitation of the master’s
style was rarely successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer’s
“eloquence,” by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his diction. Their own
painfully polysyllabic style, which came to be known as the “aureate” style, was widely imitated
for more than a century. In sum, the major 15th-century English poets were generally
undistinguished as successors of Chaucer, and, for a significant but independent extension of his
achievement, one must look to the Scottish courtly poets known as the makaris (“makers”),
among whom were King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar.
Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the
typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable provincial writers turn
out to have had their own local patrons, often among the country gentry. East Anglia may be said
to have produced a minor school in the works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John
Metham, among others also active during the middle of the century. Some of the most moving
and accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols (songs with
a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life, the coming of death, the
sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The author of some distinctive poems in this
mode was John Audelay of Shropshire, whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative
movement. Literary devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the poem “I sing of a maiden that is makeless
[matchless].”
Popular and secular verse
The art that conceals art was also characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the
period, outside the courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called
tail rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and Gawain, from the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes;
Sir Launfal, after Marie de France’s Lanval; and Sir Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs,
versified tales, folk songs, ballads, and others form a lively body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is fortuitous. The
manuscript known as the Percy Folio, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of such material,
may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval itinerant entertainer. In addition to a
number of popular romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in “Sir Thopas,” the
Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like those collected
from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of medieval origin of the poems
collected in Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98) is debatable.
Several of the Robin Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the
characteristic laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen in the
enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London grocer’s
commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different vein, is The Nut-Brown
Maid, an expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy.
Political verse
A genre that does not fit easily into the categories already mentioned is political verse, of
which a good deal was written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt Carol
shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically English note of insular
patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436) on
another typically English theme of a related kind: “Cherish merchandise, keep the admiralty, /
That we be masters of the narrow sea.”
Later Middle English prose
The continuity of a tradition in English prose writing, linking the later with the early
Middle English period, is somewhat clearer than that detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for
example, continued to be copied and adapted to suit changing tastes and circumstances. But
sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the
author of Sir Gawayne are not to be found in prose. Instead came steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of secular prose in any
quantity.
Religious prose
Of the first importance was the development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless
impressive kind of contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew
the more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier, 14th-century predecessor Richard Rolle,
and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses in the style and content of his
work. It is of particular interest to note that the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th
century, though in very different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe. Julian, often regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of
mystical experiences in 1373 about which she wrote in her Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
one of the foremost works of English spirituality by the standards of any age. Rather different
religious experiences went into the making of The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–36), the
extraordinary autobiographical record of a bourgeoise woman, dictated to two clerks. The nature
and status of its spiritual content remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and
vivid realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest.
Another important branch of the contemplative movement in prose involved the translation
of Continental Latin texts. A major example, and one of the best-loved of all medieval English
books in its time, is The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410), Nicholas Love’s
translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love’s work was
particularly valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies of the
Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement
generated a good deal of stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards soon came
under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous. A number of English works
have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the first English translation of the Bible to
Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey, but there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard
Bible, which exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey’s work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It later influenced
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, completed in 1525, and, through Tyndale,
the King James Version (1611).
Secular prose
The Travels of Sir John MandevilleIllustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, c.
1372.
Secular compositions and translations in prose also came into prominence in the last
quarter of the 14th century, though their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of
the religious tradition. Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibeus” and his two astronomical translations, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the Planets, were relatively modest endeavors
beside the massive efforts of John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon (c. 1385–87), a universal history, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De
proprietatibus rerum (1398; “On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedia. Judging by the
number of surviving manuscripts, however, the most widely read secular prose work of the
period is likely to have been The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through Asia. Though
the work now is believed to be purely fictional, its exotic allure and the occasionally arch style of
its author were popular with the English reading public down to the 18th century.
The 15th century saw the consolidation of English prose as a respectable medium for
serious writings of various kinds. The anonymous Brut chronicle survives in more manuscripts
than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in fostering a new sense of national
identity. John Capgrave’s Chronicle of England (c. 1462) and Sir John Fortescue’s On the
Governance of England (c. 1470) were part of the same trend. At its best, the style of such works
could be vigorous and straightforward, close to the language of everyday speech, like that found
in the chance survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections were also left by the
Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More-eccentric prose stylists of the period were
the religious controversialist Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose aureate translation of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic exuberance of
his verse.
The crowning achievement of later Middle English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory’s
cycle of Arthurian legends, which was given the title Le Morte Darthur by William Caxton when
he printed his edition in 1485. There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory, who
described himself as a “knight-prisoner.” The characteristic mixture of chivalric nostalgia and
tragic feeling with which he imbued his book gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on
Arthurian themes. The nature of Malory’s artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which
the effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is debatable. Much of
Le Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory evidently
selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he went along. At the same time,
he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a virile and natural English prose that matched
the nobility of both the characters and the theme.
