Free Terry Jones' Medieval Lives by Alan Ereira

younger son, the ten-year-old John of Gaunt. The royal ladies were lodged in a convent, from which they would be able to watch the battle.
    Waiting for the encounter, Edward prepared himself and his troops by watching his minstrels perform a German dance, and listening to a knight, Sir John Chandos, singing in French with his minstrels. *3 They were entering as full participants into the world of heroic epic battle, but this King did not see himself as particularly English.
    The battle was indeed heroic. The Thomas went to the bottom, as did the Black Prince’s ship, but the heroes survived and the Spanish lost 14 of their 40 ships. This was, in fact, a more dramatic and bloody victory than the better-known struggle of 1588 against the Spanish Armada. But the poem that recorded what had happened was not in German or French. It was in strikingly powerful English:
    I shall not hold back from telling, and hope to succeed in the task ,
    Of men who were brave with weapons and admirable in armour
    That now are driven to the grave, and dead despite all their deeds
    They sail on the sea bed, fishes to feed
    Many fishes they feed, for all their great vaunting
    They came at the waning of the moon . . . *4
    A new literature was emerging in England, in which the English language was being used in innovative ways, and which bridged the gap between the court and the general population in the most extraordinary way. William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman , a huge allegorical work on the Christian concept of a good life, which first appeared around 1360, was copied and recopied endlessly and was evidently well known by all classes of people – lines from it were used as slogans and signals in the so-called ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ of 1381. Poetry was alive and dangerous.
    Something similar was happening in Wales, where at the beginning of the fifteenth century there was a decree that said: ‘. . .  no rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, be maintained in Wales whom by their divinations, lies and exhortations are partly cause for insurrection and rebellion now in Wales.’
    But the Welsh bardic ‘rimers’ were reaching back into old heroic tradition, finding subversive nationalistic matter in the Welsh versions of Arthurian legends, and using them as sustenance for the national rebellion led by Owen Glendower. In England, the dangerous poets were new men creating a new literature in their own tongue. The old minstrels looked shabby and outdated. The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.
    A DANGEROUS GAME
    Towards the end of the fourteenth century Richard II clearly saw literature as territory to be occupied by the crown as firmly as any physical territory and, having inherited a court poet from his grandfather, gave him every assistance and encouragement. His name was Geoffrey Chaucer, and he was destined to become one of the major figures in English literature – second only to Shakespeare.
    Richard’s court, like that of Charles V in France, tolerated a relaxed easy-going intellectual atmosphere in which satire and lampoons were allowed to flourish. Chaucer took advantage of this to satirize the way the Church had become corrupted and commercialized. For example, he told the tale of a friar who was taken down to hell by an angel and happily observed that he couldn’t see any friars there. He assumed this meant they were all in heaven. Oh no, said the angel, there are plenty of friars down here; and he accosts Satan.
    â€˜Hold up thy tail thy Satanas’ said he
    â€˜Show forth thine arse and let the friar see
    Where is the nest of friars in this place!’
    And ere that