Last updated 20/06/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2016
Critical approaches to alliterative poetry can and do include all the approaches imposed on literature in general. But to these must be added approaches particular to the fact that we confront a body of literature defined by a distinctive, some would say peculiar, metrical form. Alliterative poetry has been accorded a separate status precisely because it is alliterative, flourished in a relatively short time-frame, and is associated with a geographic region. For most of this century, the Alliterative Revival has reigned as an historical fact — a nationalistic metrical response, fostered by the North West Midlands baronial families, to the increasing power of the Court in the East Midlands and the pernicious influence of foreign, mainly French fashions, particularly poetic. In the last fifteen years, and at a galloping pace in the last ten, we have seen one of the massive certainties of literary history first quietly mined by the late Elizabeth Salter, and then besieged, assaulted, and overrun by an increasing band of scholarly invaders numbering among them Norman Blake, Derek Pearsall, T. Turville-Petre, and David Lawton. The Theory of the Alliterative Revival, once a Castle of Truth, now lies in ruins, picked over by its destroyers for useful material with which to build a new Tower on a Tofte. While the orthodox view of the alliterative revival has been disestablished, and no single creed has yet emerged as an authoritative substitute, there is currently underway a major re-assessment of alliterative poetry, which has both been caused by and also generated a substantial increase in scholarly knowledge of the field. The questions that have been posed and continue to be explored are mainly of the following kind: Was there a revival or simply a continuation? How and where was this revival/continuation generated and located? Should we distinguish sub-groups of alliterative poetry according to metrical variants? How do we scan alliterative verse? What are the origins of or influences on the metres and rhythms of the great alliterative works of the late fourteenth century?
1 The definitive expression of this view is Hulbet's, J. R. ‘A Hypothesis Concerning the Alliterative Revival,’ Modern Philology 28 (1931) 405–22, though elements of the theory are common in earlier scholarship.Google Scholar
2 Salter, Elizabeth, ‘The Alliterative Revival,’ Modern Philology 64 (1966) 146–50; 233–37.Google Scholar
3 Blake, Norman, ‘Rhythmical Alliteration,’ Modern Philology 67 (1969) 118–24.Google Scholar
4 Pearsall, D. A., Old English and Middle English Poetry (Routledge History of English Poetry 1; London 1977) ch. 6; ‘Alliterative Poetry,’ and ‘The Origins of the Alliterative Revival,’ in The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century , edd. Levy, B. S. and Szarmach, P. E. (Kent, Ohio 1981).Google Scholar
5 Turville-Petre, T., The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge 1977) ch. 2.Google Scholar
6 Lawton, David, ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Cambridge 1982).Google Scholar
7 Ibid. 1.Google Scholar
8 Salter, Elizabeth, Fourteenth Century English Poetry (Oxford 1983), in her chapter ‘Mappings,’ shows that alliterative verse was far more prevalent and widespread, geographically and socially, than is usually claimed, and concludes: ‘All evidence points to the fact that knowledge of a variety of alliterative verse styles was almost as widespread in the earlier fourteenth century as knowledge of non-alliterative styles … the refinement and sophistication of the rhymed couplet at the hands of Chaucer, and of the unrhymed and alliterative line at the hands of some anonymous western and northern poets, are parallel phenomena of the age’ (82). See also Bennett, J. A. W., ‘Survival and Revivals of Alliterative Modes,’ in Leeds Studies in English ns 14 (1983) ‘Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Salter’ 26–40: ‘In the period 1350–1380, then, the main drift, the dominant trend of vernacular verse was towards alliteration, with tail rhyme a very poor second … merely to choose to write in English was to recognise the possibilities of native verse’ (29–30).Google Scholar
9 Burrow, J. A., Ricardian Poetry (London 1971) 27.Google Scholar
10 Borroff, Marie, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven 1962).Google Scholar
11 Benson, Larry D., Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, N.J. 1965).Google Scholar
12 Jacobs, N., ‘Alliterative Storms: A Topos in Middle English,’ Speculum 47 (1972) 695–719.Google Scholar
13 Lawton, D. A., ‘The Destruction of Troy as Translation from Latin Prose: Aspects of Form and Style,’ Studia Neophilologica 52 (1980) 259–70.Google Scholar
14 Pearsall, Derek A., Old English and Middle English Poetry 160–76.Google Scholar
15 Salter, Elizabeth, Fourteenth Century English Poetry ch. 4: ‘Alliterative Verse and Piers Plowman.’ Google Scholar
16 The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, edd. Panton, G. A. and Donaldson, D. (EETS os 39, 56; London 1869, 1874); hereafter = DT. Google Scholar
17 Guido de Columnis (delle Colonne), Historia destructionis Troiae , ed. Griffin, N. F. (Medieval Academy of America 26; Cambridge, Mass. 1936).Google Scholar
18 Jacobs, art. cit. ; Lawton, , ‘Destruction of Troy as Translation.’ Google Scholar
19 Lawton, 270.Google Scholar
20 Jacobs, art. cit. Google Scholar
21 See Appendix, I, infra. Google Scholar
22 de Columnis, Guido 34–35.Google Scholar
23 Ibid. 253–54.Google Scholar
24 The Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Brock, E. (EETS os 8; London 1865, rev. 1871); hereafter = MA. Brock's edition is preferable here because it is the least emended version of the Thornton ms.Google Scholar
25 Le Roman de Brut de Wace, ed. Arnold, Ivor (SATF; Paris 1938–40) 2 vols. It is my view that Wace, more or less as we have him in Arnold's edition, is the direct source, not Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia. See Finlayson, J., ed., Morte Arthure (York Medieval Texts; London 1967) 31–32.Google Scholar
26 See Finlayson, , ‘Rhetorical Descriptio of Place in Morte Arthure,’ Modern Philology 61 (1963) 1–11.Google Scholar
27 Wace, : ‘Par matin vindrent au rivage / La ou il sorent le passage’ (lines 335–36). Sir Ferumbras: ‘Erlich on pe morrwenynge pe kyng aras’ (46).Google Scholar
28 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edd. Tolkien, J. R. R. and Gordon, E. V., rev. Davis, Norman (Oxford 1968); hereafter = GGK. Google Scholar
29 Stevens, John, Medieval Romance (London 1973) 17.Google Scholar
30 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, trans. Trask, Willard (2nd ed.; Princeton 1957) 102.Google Scholar
31 See Appendix, II, infra. Google Scholar
32 Spearing, A. C., Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge 1985) 132.Google Scholar
33 Borroff, op. cit. 129.Google Scholar
34 Benson, op. cit. 158.Google Scholar
35 Ibid. 165.Google Scholar
36 See Appendix, III a), infra. Google Scholar
37 See Borroff, 101; and Appendix, III b), infra. Google Scholar
38 Ibid. 102.Google Scholar
39 Norman Blake, F., English Language in Medieval Literature (London 1977) 99.Google Scholar
40 Quoted earlier in this article.Google Scholar
41 See Appendix, III c), infra. Google Scholar
42 See Appendix, III d), infra. Google Scholar
43 See Spearing, A. C., Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London 1964) 39–45.Google Scholar
44 Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, ed. Skeat, Walter W. (Oxford 1886) Vol. I. The Skeat Parallel-Text has been used here for ease of reference. Comparisons with Kane's A-Text, Donaldson's and Kane's B-Text, and Pearsall's C-Text confirm that my findings stand no matter which editions are used. Hereafter PP = Piers Plowman. Google Scholar
45 Turville-Petre, op. cit. 59.Google Scholar
46 Salter, , Fourteenth Century Poetry 99.Google Scholar
47 Turville-Petre, 71.Google Scholar
48 Burrow, 34.Google Scholar
49 Ibid. 33.Google Scholar
50 Ibid. 34.Google Scholar
51 Talbot Donaldson, E., Piers Plowman: The C-Text and its Poet (New Haven 1949) 44.Google Scholar
52 See Pearsall, Derek, ed., Piers Plowman: C-Text (London 1978) 106 n. 175.Google Scholar
53 Auerbach, 91.Google Scholar
54 A version of this paper was delivered at the conference of the International Association of University Professors of English in York, England, September 1–6, 1986.Google Scholar
