Fossier, R. (ed.) The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Volume III: 1250–1520. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) [ISBN 0521266467].
Keen, M.H. England in the Late Middle Ages: A Political History. (London: Routledge, 2003) [ISBN 0415272939]. Valuable account of the political history of the period.
Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. (New York: Ballantine, 1996) [ISBN 0345910907]. An immense work of scholarship that covers the big events of history in a very readable narrative.
Brereton, G. Froissart: Chronicles. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978)
[ISBN 0140442006]. Froissart interviewed eyewitnesses for this contemporary account of the lives and times of the Hundred Years’ War.
Coleman, Janet English Literature in History 1350–1400. (London: Hutchinson, 1981) [ISBN 0091441005]. Valuable material on literacy and education, and on social unrest reflected in literature.
Additional reading suggestions are given in the reading list at the beginning of this guide.
It is important for you to note that there are no guaranteed set topics for study in this area, in the same way as there are set texts. The areas covered by the questions in this section will vary from year to year. These questions are largely comparative and general in nature, and they range over a variety of levels. Some of the questions involve comparing the use of the traditional topoi in two or more texts; some require you to consider the literary effects of historical, social and cultural movements over two or more texts; other questions might ask for an analysis of an area or subject shared by two or more texts. Perhaps the most useful way to prepare for this section is to get into the habit of thinking across texts – that is, comparing the treatment of common themes, subjects and motifs, comparing different examples of the same genre, comparing literary techniques and modes. And it goes without saying that the more widely you can read within the set texts for this subject and beyond, the easier it will be for you to move to this level of generalised thinking about later medieval literature.
Here we will be studying the interaction between texts and the wider historical context. This area is connected to several of the topics outlined in the Introduction to this subject guide. The material in this section will be extremely wide-ranging.
The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales paints a picture of medieval society that outwardly presents an image of social harmony and unity within diversity. But closer reading also shows the underlying tensions. The fourteenth century has been characterised by medieval historians as an age of crisis and, certainly in the fifteenth century, the crisis was no less acute. A whole civilisation was in a state of transition. The period is characterised by the breakdown and fragmentation of an old order. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, there was little sense of the rebirth of a new order that we see with hindsight.
Activity
In what ways does the General Prologue to the Tales reflect the period in which it was written?
The piece reflects in the first place the influence of the Gothic vision. One of the strongest principles of Gothic aesthetic is the principle of plenitudo (Latin for ‘fullness’) – the belief that God had created the cosmos according to the principle of fullness, that he had created the largest number of possible varieties of creatures because of his delight in diversity for its own sake. The universe was beautiful precisely because it contained the largest diversity possible. The Gothic concept of beauty embraces wholeness as diversity, encyclopedic breadth of range, difference, juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous – in contrast to the Romanesque and classical or neo-classical styles, which tend to emphasise harmony as conformity, symmetry, wholeness as perfection. Here you may want to investigate the meanings of the word ‘Gothic’.
The period of High Gothic culture is usually placed in the thirteenth century. At this time, Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae (a Summation of Theology) presented a synthesis of the classical philosophy of antiquity with Christian spirituality, a blend of reason with faith. Medieval idealism was always nostalgic and retrospective – people of this period looked back to a Golden Age, in contrast to the tendency in the twentieth century to place utopia in the future, as in futurism, Marxism, etc.
Activity
This sense of nostalgia and the accompanying sense of the inevitability of decline is found perhaps most powerfully in Malory’s Morte Darthur, but can you also detect it in the shift from the Knight’s Tale to the Miller’s Tale, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or any of the other works you have studied?
This forms a great contrast to the more modern belief in evolution and the inevitability of progress. There was some historical reality to the sense of decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The great synthesis of medieval culture was already a thing of the past.
The General Prologue and many other works of the period contain a subtle sense of change and loss, but are also very much celebrations of their time and place.
Activity
Notice the concreteness of time and place in works as diverse as the General Prologue to the Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The General Prologue begins at a specific inn in Southwark (the Tabard – this was an actual inn in Southwark in the time of Chaucer, though sadly it has not survived, and we know that it had at least one Harry Baily running it). The pilgrims journey via Greenwich, Deptford, and along the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. You can still trace their journey on a map of England.
Activity
Can you trace any other journeys in works of the period?
Intellectually, the contrast with earlier medieval art is powerful. Dante, for example, begins his great poem of the High Gothic period, the Divine Comedy, in an unspecified dark wood – presumably on earth – but shifts almost immediately to Hell, then Purgatory and finally Heaven. Life on earth and human characters are seen sub specie aeternitatis (literally: ‘under the gaze of eternity’; that is, from the heavenly point of view). This contrasts with the increasing concern with earthly experience and the relatively realistic and concrete depiction of earthly life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The here-and-now quality of the General Prologue is part of an intellectual revolution that manifested itself from the twelfth century onwards, a movement towards a freer secular mentality, sharpened by the new interest in Aristotelian philosophy (note that Chaucer’s Clerk is an Aristotelian). Peter Abelard and Thierry of Chartres argued for faith in human reason as a tool and the understanding of the universe as its object.
Aristotelian influence helped to develop an empirical interest in natural phenomena and created a climate in which the earliest sciences were to be born. These neo-Aristotelians were known as the moderni (Latin for ‘moderns’), who looked at the present and were interested in this world; they were opposed to those who studied the antiqui, the ‘ancients’. Compare the view of Chaucer’s Monk:
…this ilke Monk leet olde thynges pace
And held after the newe world the space…
(General Prologue 175–76)
There is, here, briefly, a sense of a new world coming into being. But to contemporaries, the transition to it was often experienced as chaotic. The late medieval period has been characterised as an age of crisis. It was a time of exhausting wars for England, both foreign and domestic, with economic recession and internal disasters on an unprecedented scale. It was also a time of scandal and corruption in the Church.
The pilgrimage of the General Prologue offers a sociological survey of fourteenth-century English society.
Activity
Its broad range does not, however, stretch to the highest echelons of the aristocracy – why might that be?
The Prologue makes it clear that the structure of values contained within the concepts of ‘feudalism’ and ‘Christendom’, which had held Europe together politically, intellectually and spiritually for nearly a thousand years, was already beginning to fragment and dissolve.
Chaucer’s first grouping of pilgrims – Knight, Squire and Yeoman – evokes the old feudal order, based on the hierarchy of monarch, land owning aristocracy and serfs bound to the land. But if the Knight is a land owner, he has not been the manager of that land, as he has been away for many years on the Crusades.
Activity
You may wish to do some reading on knighthood and chivalry, both in social reality and in literature, during the period. See ‘Suggestions for further study’ at the end of this chapter. In your reading, both of the General Prologue and of the historical studies, try to get a sense of who was actually managing the land owned by the knights and how well they were doing it. What was the level of agricultural prosperity at the time? What was the economic situation? How did this affect the lives of ordinary people, particularly the peasants who formed the base of the social pyramid, and the foundations of English economic life?
The Squire reinforces the fact that war was the expected life activity of the aristocracy. The Squire’s campaigns, unlike those of his father, are taken from the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
War is one of the great areas where we see medieval realities part company from the ideals of the period in most dramatic fashion. Froissart’s glamourising of the brutal business of medieval warfare was borrowed from medieval romance. But the chronicles brought a new realism to its depiction, which in turn influenced the romances.
Activity
As you read the accounts of warfare and chivalry in various texts of the period, try to determine how realistic or idealised their presentations of medieval knights are.
If you wish to read a text that borrows much realistic detail about the looting, pillaging and mass destruction of the campaigns of Edward III in France, take a look at:
The Alliterative Morte Arthure, in Larry Benson (ed.) King Arthur’s Death (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986) [ISBN 0859892670]: especially ll.3032–3043 and 3150–3161.
You might also want to think about the notion of the ‘just war’ and the involvement of the Church, especially in relation to the religious wars of which Chaucer’s Knight is a veteran and the wars at the beginning and the end of the Morte Darthur.
You could look too at the financial costs of the wars and the effects of these on the economic and political situation. How was the war in France financed, and how was the money collected? What effects did this have on the relationship between the king and his subjects? In particular, you may be interested in looking at the changing role of parliament as a result of this.
From 1348 onwards, the situation of the people was exacerbated by the terrors of the Black Death, a plague from which Chaucer’s Physician, at least, had greatly profited.
Activity
Read accounts of the plague in your textbooks; you might also want to look at Boccaccio’s account in the Decameron, from the Introduction to the First Day; in Boccaccio: The Decameron. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) [ISBN 0140442693]. In what ways might this epidemic have influenced people’s views of life and death in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Do you find evidence for the so-called ‘cult of death’ in late medieval art? Think about the depictions of death in texts of the period – Arcite’s death in the Knight’s Tale, the lyrics, or the great death scenes at the end of the Morte Darthur, for example. How is death presented in the period?
One pragmatic result of the plague was the scarcity of labour, which at first brought about a sharp rise in wages. This led to the first concerted attempt of an English government to freeze wages and prices – the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349; this was followed by various statutes attempting to keep wages of labourers artificially low.
Activity
What were the effects of the plague and these statutes of labourers on the working classes, serfdom and the structures of feudalism?
In particular, these events are an important part of the lead-up to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. What were the causes of the Peasants’ Revolt? Is it possible to see the Revolt as a political movement, or is it just a series of riots, a violent reaction against oppressive circumstances? Trace the course of the Revolt and its final outcome. Did it achieve anything, in the short- or long-term?
As you read texts on this period, you will become increasingly aware of the class divisions, not only within medieval society, but also within the literature itself.
Activity
Take time to survey the texts you have read in terms of these social divisions. Which social classes and groups does the writer represent in the text?
What attitudes does he convey, and how does he treat each of these classes or groups? Does the genre of the text include the perspective of a particular class? Does this affect the ways in which it presents that class or others?
There are other social groupings apart from class. In particular, you may be interested in gender and the position of women in medieval society. Chapter 6 of this subject guide focuses on women in the later Middle Ages in more detail.
As the General Prologue makes clear, the Church provides another large social grouping in medieval society, as well as being one of its most powerful institutions. You may wish to investigate the state of the Church in the later Middle Ages, both within Europe as a whole and in England in particular.
Activity
Read accounts of:
What were the effects of papal power politics on the authority of the Church? Does this affect the way the Church and religion are presented in the texts you have studied? Compare the presentation of religion and the Church in the works you have read by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, Malory and Henryson. Do you find evidence for a breakdown in the authority of the Church in the period? What are the attitudes towards authority in general during the period?
Divisions in national allegiance brought about by the Schism – where the traditional enemies of France (England, Germany, Flanders) sided together against France, Spain and Scotland – foreshadowed the geography of the Reformation and the religious fragmentation of Europe. A new order is already discernible, emerging from the ruins of the old feudal Christendom. In England, the break with Rome was preceded by the break with France. Whereas at the beginning of the period French language and culture dominated England, by the end of the period, the law courts and even the court of the king had become predominantly English-speaking, and we witness the first flowering of English vernacular literature.
Activity
You may like to trace the growth in the sense of national identity from the gentle Englishness of the opening lines of the General Prologue to the passionate nationalism of Malory; you might also be interested in tracing the corresponding development of nationalism in Scotland. You could compare the Scottishness of Henryson with the Englishness of the other writers.
Henryson belongs to a group of writers usually called the Scottish Chaucerians. In what ways did Henryson construct a Scottish identity for his works and how does it differ from the ambience of those works written in England? Does his use of language (he is, after all, writing in English, albeit in a Scottish dialect) help or hinder this process?
The breakdown of the old order, with its great religious and political synthesis, was accompanied by a slow and gradual shift of focus from the universal and archetypal to the particular, the individual and the local. The universalities of allegory were slowly being replaced by the concrete naturalism and psychological insight of the great writers of the period. Chaucer’s work institutes a period of Christian humanism in English literature, arguably extending through Malory, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans to Milton, where Christian values provide a spiritual background against which is explored the experience of human beings in their journey through life on this earth.
Having completed this chapter, and the relevant reading and activities, you should be able to:
1. Have you found any evidence that the literature of the later Middle Ages reflects the historians’ view of this period as an age of crisis? You should illustrate your answer with reference to at least two works you have studied from the period.
2. ‘The history of medieval philosophy can be seen as a gradual promotion of the individual, accompanied by a steady depreciation of the universal, until the point is reached in the fourteenth century when the real world offers its teeming diversity to our gaze.’ Do you see any evidence for this process in the literature you have studied from the period?
3. ‘There are no heroes in the literature of the later medieval period: it is a profoundly unheroic age.’ Discuss, with reference to two or more works you have studied from the period.
4. Is there any room for originality within the medieval convention of retelling traditional tales? You should refer to two or more works in your answer.
On Gothic culture, see:
Camille, Michael Gothic Art: Visions and Revelations of the Medieval World. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996) [ISBN 0297833723].
Mâle, Emile Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982)
[ISBN 0691003475].
Martindale, Andrew Gothic Art. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979)
[ISBN 0500200580].
For a more detailed account of the development of late medieval philosophy, read:
Leff, Gordon Medieval Thought. (NJ: Humanities Press, 1983)
[IBSN 0391029541].
Marenbon, John Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction. (London: Routledge,1991) [ISBN 041506807X].
On the subjects of knighthood and chivalry, see the following:
Jackson, W.H. (ed.) Knighthood in Medieval Literature. (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1981) [ISBN 0859910946].
Keen, M. Chivalry. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)
[ISBN 0300031505].
Vale, M. War and Chivalry. (London: Duckworth, 1981) [ISBN 0115610422].
On the subject of the Hundred Years’ War, see the following texts (whose details are provided at the beginning of the chapter):
Brereton, G. Froissart: Chronicles.
Keen, M.H. England in the Late Middle Ages.
Tuchman, B.W. A Distant Mirror.
For an interesting account of the Black Death, see:
Introduction to the First Day in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Translated by G.H. McWilliam. (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1972) [ISBN 0140442693].
On the subject of women in the Middle Ages, you might like to read the following:
Bennett, Judith ‘Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide’ in Aers, David Culture and History 1350–1600. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) [ISBN 0745007899].
Sheehan, Michael ‘The Wife of Bath and her Four Sisters’ in Andrew, Malcolm Critical Essays on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991) [ISBN 0335096018].