As literacy spread in western Europe, the international Latin clerical culture was
rivalled, from Iceland to Sicily, by vernacular writing, often on secular themes and
sometimes by laymen. Writers and readers were mostly men, but some of the new
vernacular literature, religious and non-religious, was written for women who had
the time to read but knew no Latin. Some of these vernacular books were about, as
well as for, women; a few were by women, for example Marie de France (late 12th
century) and Julian of Norwich (c.1343–1413/29).
Epic and romance
The change in literary sensibility after 1100 is often characterized as a change from
epic to romance. William I’s minstrel Taillefer is said to have led the Normans ashore
at Hastings declaiming the Chanson de Roland. This chanson de geste (‘song of
deeds’) relates the deeds of Roland and Oliver, two of the twelve peers of the
emperor Charlemagne, who die resisting a Saracen ambush in the Pyrenees. Roland
scorns to summon the aid of Charlemagne until all his foes are dead. Only then does
he sound a blast on his ivory horn, the olifans. Primitive romance enters with some
emotion-heightening detail: three archangels come to conduct Roland’s soul to
heaven; later his intended bride,la bele Aude, appears for a few lines to hear of his
death and die of shock. In treating death, Northern epic is reticent where romance
is flamboyant: compared with Roland’s death, the death and funeral of Beowulf are
sombre, his soul’s destination not clear.
The first extant Middle English writing to be noted here is Layamon’s Brut
(c.1200), a work in the Old English heroic style. This is based on the French Roman
de Brut by Wace, a Norman from Jersey who in 1155 dedicated the work to Eleanor
of Aquitaine.Wace,a canon of Bayeux, had in turn based his work on the Latin
Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1130–6) by Geoffrey of Monmouth(d.1155).In
Geoffrey’s wonderful History, the kings of Britain descend from Brutus, the original
co nquero r of the island of Albion, then infested by giants. This Brutus is the grand-
son of Aeneas the Trojan, from whom Virgil traced the kings of Rome. Brutus calls
Albion ‘Britain’, after his own name; the capital is New Troy, later called London. The
Romans conquer Britain, but the Britons, under Lucius, reconquer Rome. They fight
bravely under King Arthuragainst the Saxon invader, and Arthur is about to conquer
Europe when he has to turn back at the Alps to put down the revolt of his nephew
Mordred. Fatally wounded at the Battle of Camlann, Arthur is taken to the island of
Avalon, whence, according to the wizard Merlin’s prophecies, he shall one day
re turn. Geoffrey stops in the 6th century at King Cadwallader, after whom the
degenerate Britons succumbed to the Saxons.
Geoffrey of Monmouth started something. ‘Everything this man wrote about
Arthur’, wrote William of Newburgh in c.1190,‘was made up, partly by himself and
partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing
the Britons’. The Britons were pleased, as were the Bretons and their neighbours the
Normans. It was in northern France that the legends of Arthur and his Round Table
were further improved before they re-crossed the Channel to the western parts of the
Norman kingdom. The Normans had conquered southern Scotland, Wales and
Ireland, which were now included in the Arthurian story. Geoffrey’s confection was
popular histor y until the Renaissance, and popular legend thereafter. It is in Geoffrey
that we first read of Gog-Magog, of Gwendolen, of King Lear and his daughters, of
King Cole and of Cymbeline, not to mention Arthur, the Round Table and Merlin,
THE NEW WRITING 41romance A kind of story
popular in medieval times,
originally from stories written
in romauns, or vernacular
French; ‘romance’ is the
adjective for languages
deriving from Latin. There are
many romances in the English
language. As a genre term, it
means ‘marvellous story’; its
adjective is also ‘romance’, to
avoid confusion with
‘Romantic’, a late 18th-
century term for writing which
imitates medieval romance.
(The use of ‘romance’ for
‘love-story’ is modern.)Arthur If he was historical,
the British Arthur defeated the
pagan Saxons in battle at
Mons Badonicus (c.510). The
Arthur of literature belongs to
the age of chivalry and the
Crusadesafter 1100.