Free The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg Page A

forward a line in literature that ran through Shakespeare’s sonnets to Romantic love poetry, to the popular song lyrics of today. It is impossible to weigh, to quantify the effects of such ideas at the time. It is indisputable, though, that those imported, French, courtly ideas sank deep wells into our ways of thinking how we ought to and could behave and be in and out of love.
    Eleanor’s favourite troubadour was Bertrand de Born and his most famous work is “Rassa tan cries e monte e poia.” The poet sings about the physical attractions of his noble lady (body as white as hawthorn flower, breasts firm, back like a young rabbit’s — admittedly the last may have lost some of its erotic power in the last seven hundred fifty years) and ends by singing:
    pois m’a pres per chastiador
prec li que tela car s’amor
et am mais un pro vavassor
qu’un comte o duc galiador,
que la tengues a dezonor.
    since she has taken me for her counsellor, I pray that she holds her love dear and shows more favour to a worthy vassal than to a count or duke who would hold her in dishonour.
    It is a long way from Beowulf. That sinewy alliterative epic of high poetry which showed the dreams and nightmares of Old English society was replaced by a subject and a way of thinking about life which the author(s) of Beowulf would have found totally foreign.
    The first medieval biography of an English layman was of the Knight William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, a professional soldier, royal adviser, champion of tournaments and Regent of England. It is a poem of more than nineteen thousand lines, written in the early thirteenth century. It is written in French. English, well fit for the task, was not considered adequate even for the biography of an Englishman.
    Yet the English written word did not entirely disappear. In the first hundred fifty years it lived on in the margins, much as the English dialects did after the triumph of eighteenth-century Enlightenment drove them outside the pale of “literature” to the lower reaches of society.
    In the late twelfth century, for instance, there was a book called Ormulum written by the monk Orm (a Danish man) who lived in North Lincolnshire. He wanted to teach the faith in English and his verses were to be read aloud. Here is Orm’s description of his book:
    This book is called Ormulum
Because Orm it wrought [made] . . .
I have turned into English
[the] gospel’s holy lore,
after that little wit that me
my Lord has leant [granted]
    Ã¾iss boc iss nemmned Orrmulum
forrþi þat Orrm itt wrohhte . . .
Icc hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh
Goddspelles hallghe lare
Affterr þatt little witt þat me
Min Drihhtin hafeþþ lenedd
    This is local, it is near the Fen lands of Hereward the Wake, one of the last Saxons to stand up to the Normans; it is in that long tradition of devoted clerics who have used local freedoms to good effect. It is touching and important but there is the feeling that it is in a bywater, not part of a countrywide push to make the gospels accessible to ordinary men, more an isolated endeavour, even the end of a line.
    A poem, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” was written at almost exactly the same time, largely in a south-eastern dialect. It is attributed to Master Nicholas of Guildford:
    I was in a summery valley, in a very secluded corner. I heard an owl and a nightingale holding a great debate. The argument was stubborn and violent and strong, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud.
    Ich was in one sumere dale
In one suþe digele hale
Iherde Ich holde grete tale
An hule and one nihtingale
at plait was stif an starc an strong
Sumwile softe an lud among
    The rhyming scheme is French or French-inspired, four-beat lines in rhyming couplets. This does not of course make it any less of a poem and, according to many scholars, a remarkable poem. It is written in English, which stands as proof of a continuing readership for written English. Yet