Those Curious Collective Nouns

 

     The examples here are largely, but not entirely, included in Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks.  Like Lipton, I do not use the Middle English since entertainment rather than philology or literary criticism is my goal. 

 

     We commonly use collective nouns: a bunch of keys, a row of houses, a group of lakes.  The majority of such terms are readily transferable in reference; one might equally speak of a bunch of flowers, a row of beans, or a group of actors.  Some are narrower in usage, including many which have to do with animals: a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions.   There are herds of various beasts, but all are plant-eating mammals.  Pack may be used of other animals, but is strongly associated with wolves, and pride is used exclusively of lions.  Certain of the collective nouns are similarly specific to a certain species, but in addition seem unusually artful, sometimes a bit precious.  The best-known of this class is probably “a murder of crows,” which seems quaint enough to be suspicious.

     Many of these collective nouns refer to animals, and they strike the reader as self-consciously clever because many were indeed invented as a special fanciful vocabulary in the late Middle Ages.  Familiarity with these neologisms was then an index of how au courant a courtly pretender might prove to be.  Though all words have a sort of poetry, especially for readers who know their etymologies, these terms, mostly to do with hunting, were from the first showpieces, meant to impress and amuse.

     James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks (1968) listed many of this special variety of collective nouns, bringing widespread publicity to a somewhat obscure linguistic phenomenon and demonstrating that the imaginative appeal of these neologisms had survived the centuries.  Though I saw the book everywhere back then, I never read it, taking it for a novelty gift, presenting these overly cutesy terms with quaintly old-fashioned illustrations.  I thereby missed until today reading Lipton’s well-informed introduction which provides a satisfying explanatory background.

     Often applying a new meaning to an existing word (“a prickle of porcupines” or “a skulk of foxes”), these morsels of wit were recorded in “courtesy books,” manuals laying down the rules for genteel behavior and sometimes in specific lists of “terms of venery,” a word rarely used today and easily confuised with its exact homograph which in fact has an altogether different meaning and origin.  One “venery” is derived from Latin venari, “to hunt,” the source as well of the English term venison, which once referred to the flesh of any large animal.  (The other venery, with roots in Venus, the goddess of love is the one Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he advised his [illegitimate] son, “rarely use venery but for health or offspring.”)

     Since the reliefs of royal hunts in Assyria and Egypt, nobles whose business was war had whiled away months of peace by practicing their equestrian and archery skills in hunting.  (Compare the brandishing of firearms by today's neo-fascists.)  Killing beasts is a mark of power as is killing people, but in time the bloody pastime of hunting had acquired an aesthetic dimension.  One was to behave with savoir faire even in butchery.  In Gottfried’s Tristan when King Mark first encounters the hero, he is impressed by two of Tristan’s accomplishments.  He notes that Tristan uses “words polished and well-chosen,” and is besides such a skilled and innovative practitioner in cutting up a deer that the king immediately offers to make him master of the hunt.  Both skills prove him “courtois.”

     Manuals began to appear to teach aristocrats and those who wished to be aristocratic the prized qualities of cultivation, elegance, and sophistication.  Best-known of such volumes was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) which defined the ideals of behavior that marked a true nobleman, including skill at loving women, playing music, making witty conversation, dressing well, and a host of other “aesthetic” accomplishments.  Castiglione was far from the first to compose such a self-help guide.  The earliest in England is the Book of the Civilized Man by Daniel of Beccles, also known as the Liber Urbani, which appeared circa 1200.  The “terms of venery,” of which a few, including a special vocabulary for animal droppings, had been printed earlier, for instance in William Twiti’s L'Art de vénerie (1328), gained popularity with The Book of St Albans (ca. 1452).  This volume, which contained essays on hawking and heraldry as well as hunting, included seventy collective nouns.  This book anticipated Emily Post in that it was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Berners.  Later writers copied and expanded her list and in 1595 Gervase Markham republished the St. Albans book with his own comments as The Gentleman's Academie, in 1595, bringing its content a new audience.

     The terms of venery and associated collective nouns illustrate several significant aspects of what might be called linguistic sociology.  They exemplify the employment of words not in common usage to establish a subculture, in this case the feudal ruling class, the nobility.  Just as inner city youth use a distinctive jargon, scholars ornament their monographs with currently fashionable academic jargon, and military people signal their vocation with a special argot, courtiers made lexical choices that testified to their identity as cultivated members of the ruling class.

     Apart from this social function, the terms are witty after the manner of other artful uses of language, such as riddles, jokes, and poetry.  Some suggest similes.  A pod of seals is so named due to the resemblance between a group of animals, especially when slumbering on the beach, and a pod of peas.  A group of whales is a gam, the word used as well for a social encounter of two ships in the open sea.  A “siege of herons” is so named because of the animals’ patient observation of shallow waters watching for prey.

     Many sorts of metonymy are represented.  A “slate of candidates” is current yet today, though few are aware that it was first used because of politicians’ names being displayed on slates in front of town halls. 

     Some are so familiar that they make little impression.  We know a “swarm of bees” “host of angels.”  Mysteries may yet linger about even well-known expressions.  “Bevy” is first recorded in the fifteenth century describing either quails or women, apparently derived from French bevée, perhaps from the birds frequenting ponds and the ladies drinking parties.  A "school of fish” may be a corruption of “shoal” (=shallows) or may have independently arisen from school meaning classroom.   

     Sometimes the word has shifted in sound or become obsolete so that its origin is not evident, as in “a clowder of cats” said to derive from the word cluster.  “A singular of boars” oddly contradicts itself, as the French sanglier is derived from Latin singularis porcus, a lone hog, used for a solitary individual wild boar.  A “kindle of kittens” sounds very cute with its source in the Middle English kindlen, to give birth and “covey of partridges” from the Latin cubare, to lie down, describing nesting habits. 

     The sound of doves strikes many as sounding sad.  This is the source not only of the name “mourning dove” but of the collective “a dule of doves” from the French deuil (lamenting).  Similarly, a “murmuration of starlings” refers to the sound made by the swarming of the birds.  Hair-splitting definitions were sometimes propounded.  While a “committee of vultures” is at rest, a “kettle” of them is in flight, and a “wake” of them is feeding. 

     Among the amusing social terms, describing people rather than animals, are the unimaginative doctrine of doctors and school of clerks and the somewhat more amusing “sentence of judges” and “draught of bottlers.”  Others are more pointedly satirical: a “superfluity of nuns," an “impatience of wives,” and a “disworship of Scots,” not to mention the strong but clumsy “abominable sight of monks.”  One might speak also of “a riffraff of knaves,” “a squat of daubers” (those who repair hedgerows and fences), a “diligence of messengers” (from which the coach called a diligence derives its name), and a “skulk of thieves” (a collective they share with foxes).  Perhaps the funniest, though it is somewhat obscure is an “incredibility of cuckolds.”

     Lipton quotes an exchange from Sir Nigel, a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle set in the fourteenth century that imagines the social context in which these terms of venery were significant.  A certain experienced knight, Sir John, quizzes Nigel on his knowledge of this special vocabulary, telling him that “no man of gentle birth” would fail to know these terms, but that “none can say that they know [them] all.”

      Finally, the modern enjoyment in resurrecting these words indicates a taste for the curious and antiquarian similar to that of over-educated Victorian clergymen, people who do rubbings of old gravestones, even the proprietor who calls his store Ye Olde Something Shoppe. The popularity of Lipton’s book in the ‘sixties suggests that era’s sympathy for unfettered imagination.  And what other motive might there be for you, dear reader, to have spent a few moments with this brief disquisition?  The wits of over half a millennium ago are, it seems, entertaining still. 

Every Reader’s Chaucer

 

     This Every Reader’s Poet, the twenty-first, differs somewhat from other essays in the series.  Though Every Reader’s Poets assumes no knowledge of literature among its readers, aiming at simply acquainting people with a few of the most well-known works by canonical poets, the “Every Reader’s Chaucer” presents challenges unlike any other.  Since Chaucer wrote over six hundred years ago, his language is significantly different from modern usage.  Modernizations convey much information, but no poetry.  I have therefore included below the original Middle English texts and my own prose translations.  I recognize that, even apart from the hurdle the language presents to those new to it, I use rather long samples of Chaucer’s poetry.  Only the ambitious and particularly curious, perhaps, will attempt to make their way through this post, but I prefer to make the reader’s task rewarding, even if it turns out to be a bit arduous as well.   

 

     Geoffrey Chaucer is certainly the most widely-read and influential medieval English poet.  Everyone knows his Canterbury Tales and specialists are aware of his voluminous other works, including narratives like his monumental Trojan story Troilus and Criseyde and allegories like The Parliament of Foules as well as translations of Boethius and Romance of the Rose and the scientific Treatise on the Astrolabe.  Remarkably, he produced this considerable oeuvre while working at full-time government jobs including positions as Comptroller of Customs and Clerk of the King’s Works, as well as serving in Parliament.  Though his own family was of middle-class origin he regularly frequented the court. He received pensions and grants from  the throne beginning with a daily gallon of wine from Edward II, later converted to cash, and patronage continued under Richard II and Henry IV.  Some historians think it likely that he acted as a spy during his European travels.

     Through Chaucer’s time, French was the language of English royalty (and of British legal courtrooms as well).  Poets might choose to write in Latin, Norman French, or English.  Gower, whose dates are close to Chaucer’s, wrote major works in each.  Latin, of course, was associated with scholarship and the great authors of antiquity, while French could boast of greatest current social prestige.  For Chaucer to choose to write in English was an unusual choice, but his use of the language established it for literary usage, inspiring his contemporary Thomas Hoccleve to call him "the firste fyndere of our fair langage."

     Though he advanced the role of their native language in poetry, he also decisively influenced English poets to use Continental models of prosody.   Old English verse like Beowulf had been accentual and alliterative.  Fluent in Latin, competent in French, and knowing some Italian as well, Chaucer imported European verse forms that subsequently came to dominate English poetry, including rhyme, accentual syllabic meters, and, in particular, iambic pentameter.  Most poets who followed Chaucer chronologically followed these aspects of his poetic practice as well.

     Thus the forms of Chaucer’s poetry will seem more or less familiar to modern readers, but his language is likely to look a bit daunting at first.  He falls between Shakespeare’s use of what linguists call Early Modern English, usually readable for today’s readers with a few words glossed, and Old English, which is definitely a foreign language for twenty-first century readers.  At the end of the poet’s life final letter e was just beginning to be elided and the Great Vowel Shift from European values to those in English today was underway, significantly changing the sound of the spoken word.   We need not be concerned with the details of these changes apart from acknowledging that the modern reader of Middle English will face real difficulties at first.  Readers who do not throw up their hands and retire from the field will find that, in a short time indeed, they will read Chaucer with pleasure.  The ease of reading a modernization sacrifices  too great a share of the poetry.  To encourage reference to the original text, I here transcribe the Middle English and provide a following prose translation meant only to facilitate a return to Chaucer’s own words.  Even a first-time reader of Middle English, will, with a bit of effort, find Chaucer intelligible before long. 

    The “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales provides a description of the company that had assembled to travel together the sixty miles or so the visit the shrine of St. Thomas.  Such a trip is a device to bring together people of widely varying social classes, amounting really to a microcosm of English society.  Along with the pilgrims’ individual stories, which cover a wide range from  the courtly to the ribald, from the literary to the colloquial, the narration as a whole is a kind of encyclopedia of English types of the era, a comprehensive catalogue of the period’s sociology as well as of human psychology.  Novels as we know them were not to be written for several hundred years, but Chaucer is almost novelistic in his portrayals of his characters.  The depiction, for instance, of the Wife of Bath when she is first introduced, implies a great deal about her in a brief passage. 

 

A Good Wif was ther of biside Bathe,                           

But she was som-del deef, and that was scathe.

Of clooth-makyng she hadde swich an haunt

She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.

In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon

That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon;              

And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she

That she was out of alle charitee.

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground;

I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound

That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.                      

Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,

Ful streite y-teyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.

Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.

She was a worthy womman al hir lyve;

Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve,          

Withouten oother compaignye in youthe;

But ther-of nedeth nat to speke as nowthe.

And thries hadde she been at Jérusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge strem;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,               

In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne.

She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.

Upon an amblere esily she sat,

Y-wympled wel, and on hir heed an hat                   

As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;

A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,

And on hire feet a paire of spores sharpe.

In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe;

Of remedies of love she knew per chauncé,           

For she koude of that art the olde daunce.

                                                         (445-476)

 

 

There was a good wife who lived near Bath, but she was somewhat deaf, and that was a pity.  She was so good at cloth-making that she surpassed the producers in Ypres and Ghent.  In her parish no one else could go to make an offering before her.  If anyone beat her, she was so angry she lost all charitable feeling.  Her kerchiefs were very finely woven, I dare swear that what she wore on her head on Sunday weighed ten pounds.  Her stockings were a fine scarlet red, tightly tied and shoes quite supple and new.  She was a respectable woman all her life.  She had married five husbands by the church door, not counting her boyfriends in youth of which we need say no more.  She had visited Jerusalem three times and had been through many a strange body of water.  She had been at Rome and at Boulogne, at St. James in Galicia and at Cologne.  She knew much about wandering the byways.  She was gap-toothed to tell the truth and sat easily on a pacing horse.  On her head over a good wimple she wore a hat as broad as a buckler or shield and around her big hips she had an overskirt while on her feet she had sharp spurs.  In society she knew well how to laugh and gab.  She happened to know many remedies for love, for she knew well the ways of that old dance.

 

 

     Though medieval England was, of course, a patriarchal society, the example of the Wife of Bath proves that a determined woman could enjoy significant autonomy.  Her skill at weaving provided a secure economic base, and her pride at having achieved a certain affluence is evident in her wish to make a show of her offerings in church.  For her Christian charity was incidental to social rivalry and the conspicuous display of wealth.  Thus her clothing also conveys status with elaborate headwear for religious services where she would be seen by all (like some contemporary church ladies).  Her physical vigor is suggested by her having outlived five husbands, not to mention her earlier boyfriends, though she always kept her behavior within bounds, remaining a “worthy woman.”  Her restless energy is also indicated by her extensive travels.  Few people made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land even once, but she has done it three times as well as having visited the chief shrines of Europe.  Though physically imperfect with her partial deafness and gap-teeth, she has lived a full and adventurous life.  Her joie de vivre is indicated by her pleasure in conversation and even more in her character as a lover, one who knows well “that old dance.”

     The many concrete details in her depiction all contribute to a unified and convincing picture of a woman who makes the most of her possibilities, letting neither her husbands’ deaths nor her physical imperfections limit her pleasure in living the good life.  These characteristics are further developed in the tale she later tells, as well as in its prologue, twice as long as the story itself, but virtually all are at least implied in these thirty-one lines of verse in the Prologue.

     Though Chaucer’s fame rests on his long poems, chiefly The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, he did leave a number of shorter pieces, among them a love poem, the “Balade to Rosamounde.”  The ballade form was one of the three patterns (the “formes fixes”) developed in fourteenth century France, but the versification was not the only Continental convention Chaucer naturalized for Britain.  The poem’s content, a courtly love lament in which the lover extravagantly praises his beloved while complaining of her coldness, had appeared in poetry since ancient times, but it had been particularly cultivated among the Troubadours, trouvères, and Minnesinger of Europe since the beginning of the twelfth century.  Chaucer explicitly declares his use of such “courtly” conventions by saying he acts “curtaysly.”

 

 

Madame, ye ben of al beaute shryne

As fer as cercled is the mapamounde,

For as the cristal glorious ye shyne,

And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.

Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocounde

That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,

It is an oynement unto my wounde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

 

For thogh I wepe of teres ful a tyne,

Yet may that wo myn herte nat confounde;

Your semy voys that ye so smal out twyne

Maketh my thoght in joy and blis habounde.

So curtaysly I go with love bounde

That to myself I sey in my penaunce,

"Suffyseth me to love you, Rosemounde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce."

 

Nas neuer pyk walwed in galauntyne

As I in love am walwed and ywounde,

For which ful ofte I of myself devyne

That I am trew Tristam the secounde.

My love may not refreyde nor affounde,

I brenne ay in an amorous plesaunce.

Do what you lyst, I wyl your thral be founde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

 

 

Madame, you are a shrine of beauty itself, as much as exists through the map of the world, for you shine like glorious crystal, and your full cheeks are like rubies, besides which you are so merry and jolly that when I see you dance at a party it is a balm to my wounds.  Though you do not make love to me in return, though I weep a bowlful of tears, may that woe not confound my heart.  Your becoming voice that you use so softly makes my thoughts abound in joy and bliss.  So I proceed courteously bound by love that I say to myself in penance, “Let me love you, Rosamond, though you to me give no love back.”  Never was pike so covered in aspic as I am covered in love and wounded.  For this reason I often declare to myself that I am a second Tristan.  My love may not cool down or be destroyed, I burn always in the delight of love.  Do as you please, I wis you would recognize your slave, though to me you give no love in return. 

 

 

     The superlatives, cast in imagery of precious stones, resemble those in dream visions.  The poet’s praise of the woman is thus otherworldly, miraculous, verging on supernatural.  She herself constitutes a “shrine” to a sort of divine beauty.  The second stanza describes the lover’s frustration as a sort of semi-religious penance.  The third stanza compares him, besotted by love, to a fish served in aspic, and then balances this striking and novel image with a reference to Tristan, tragic protagonist of one of the most well-known medieval legends.  The question of to what extent such conventions reflected actual behavior remains debated, but such artificial lyric conventions convey the very real helplessness one may experience with overmastering desire and the mystic power of sexual love.  Chaucer here defines the note later to be elaborated at great length by Elizabethan sonneteers and modern country music composers.

     Such love was not, however the only variety of eros that Chaucer depicts.  The first of the pilgrims’ stories is the knight’s very refined and courtly tale and, after his conclusion, the host asks the monk to follow, but the miller, sufficiently drunk that he has difficulty staying in the saddle, intrudes, wanting to be next.  When the host asks him to allow his “better” to precede him, he threatens to leave the company, promising his tale will be “noble.”  The host then relents and the miller tells an altogether  vulgar story about two lusty youths and an old carpenter’s young wife.  Nicholas, a student, rooms with the carpenter and, noticing that the wife “hadde a likerous ye,” (“had a lecherous eye”), one day when the husband is away, “prively he caughte hire by the queynte” (“he intimately grabs her by the cunt”), and the two plot a tryst. 

     Without describing the details of their rather elaborate plot, it is enough to know that a parish clerk, Absolon, also has his eye on the fair wife and gives her gifts, but she does not care for him, preferring the poor clerk.  He approaches her window at night, asking for a kiss and Nicholas and Alison enjoy a hearty laugh when Absolon is tricked into kissing her bare ass in the dark

 

 

Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys,

For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd.

He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd,

And seyde, "Fy! allas! what have I do?"

 

 

Back he jumped, and thought it was amiss, for he knew well that a woman has no beard.  He felt a rough and long-haired thing, and said, “Fie!  Alas! What have I done?”

 

 

When he returns, Nicholas and Alson assume that the trick will work equally well a second time, but Absolon surprises them.

 

 

This Nicholas was risen for to pisse,

And thoughte he wolde amenden al the jape;

He sholde kisse his ers er that he scape.

And up the wyndowe dide he hastily,

And out his ers he putteth pryvely

Over the buttok, to the haunche-bon;

And therwith spak this clerk, this Absolon,

"Spek, sweete bryd, I noot nat where thou art."

This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart

As greet as it had been a thonder-dent,

That with the strook he was almoost yblent;

And he was redy with his iren hoot,

And Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot.

Of gooth the skyn an hande-brede aboute,

The hoote kultour brende so his toute,

And for the smert he wende for to dye.

As he were wood, for wo he gan to crye,

"Help! Water! Water! Help, for Goddes herte!"

 

 

Nicholas had got up in order to piss and thought he would improve the joke and make him kiss his ass before he escapes.  So he rapidly open the window and stealthily puts out his ass, the whole buttock up to the haunch-bone.  And with that this clerk, this Absolon, speaks, “Speak, sweet bird, I don’t know where you are.”  This Nicholas then lets fly a fart as great as a crack of thunder so that he was almost blinded by the stroke.  And he (Absolon) was ready with his hot iron  and off goes the skin for a hand’s breadth around.  The hot plow blade so burned bis butt he thought he would die with the pain.  He began to cry like a crazy person, “Help!  Water!  Water! Help, for god’s heart!”

 

 

     The conclusion, for the story goes on to detail the carpenter’s disgrace, causes “everyone to laugh at this contention” (“every wight gan laughen at this stryf”).  Far from the lofty, idealistic, self-discipline of the ballade, this story is the sort the French call a fabliau, a novel genre with few roots in earlier European literature. Fabliaux typically employ earthy humor with a very indelicate view of love-making and an eye more toward entertainment than didacticism. In such passages moderns may hear the vernacular voice of medieval England directly. 

     Though Chaucer was innovative, he was in some ways a typical  medieval poet.  For instance, though he wrote gritty and realistic stories in colloquial language, he also cultivated the art of rhetoric and wrote a number of allegorical dream visions with no pretense of resemblance to everyday lived experience.  His Parlement of Foules (Parliament of Fowls).  In this story the narrator falls asleep reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio) and himself dreams that Scipio himself is leading him through the heavenly realms were, after passing through a temple of Venus, he comes upon a meeting of all the birds called that they might each  choose a mate.  The  following passage illustrates the allegorical technique of personifying abstractions. 

 

 

Tho was I war of Plesance anoonright,

 And of Array, and Lust, and Curteisye,

 And of the Craft that can and hath the might   220

 To doon by force a wight to doon folye:

 Disfigurat was she, I nil nat lie.

 And by hemself under an ook, I gesse,

 Saw I Delit that stood by Gentilesse.

 

 I saw Beautee withouten any attir,                     225

 And Youthe ful of game and jolitee,

 Foolhardinesse, and Flaterye, and Desir,

 Messagerye, and Meede, and other three—

 Hir names shal nat here be told for me;

 And upon pileres grete of jasper longe                230

 I saw a temple of bras yfounded stronge.

 

 Aboute that temple daunceden alway

 Wommen ynowe, of whiche some ther were

 Faire of hemself, and some of hem were gay;

 In kirteles al dischevele wente they there:         235

 That was hir office alway, yeer by yere.

 And on the temple of douves white and faire

 Saw I sittinge many an hundred paire.

 

 Bifore the temple-dore ful sobrely

 Dame Pees sat with a curtin in hir hond,              240

 And by hir side, wonder discreetly,

 Dame Pacience sitting ther I foond,

 With face pale, upon an hil of sond;

 And aldernext withinne and eek withoute

 Biheeste and Art, and of hir folk a route.              245

 

 

Then I was aware of Pleasure nearby, and of Ornament, Desire, and Courtesy, and of the Cunning that can have the power to force people to act foolishly.  She was disfigured, I will not lie, and, by himself, under an oak, I guess, I saw Delight that stood by Nobility.  I saw Beauty, lacking any clothes, and Youth, full of sport and jolliness, Foolhardiness, and Flattery, and Desire, Message-sending, and  pay-offs and three others I shall not mention.  And, with big pillars of lengthy jasper, I saw a temple of brass with strong foundation.  About that temple plenty of women were always dancing all over, of which some were fair themselves and some in fine outfits.  They went there with disorderly gowns .  That was their role always, year by year. And on the temple I saw white and pretty doves sittings, many a hundred pair.  In front of the temple door Dame Peace sat, a curtain in her hand, and, by her side, marvelously discreetly I found sitting, with a pale face on a hill of sand, and right next to her, both within and without, Promise and Subtlety and their entourage.

 

 

     Here his picture of love is more objective, more philosophical, than in the Ballade, but still quite genteel when compared to the down-to-earth desire of the Wife of Bath.  He suggests that love is rarely ideal; it may be motivated by fancy dress, lust, and the use of refined formulas, but it leads people to act foolishly.  This love is therefore to some extent “disfigured,”  Delight, significantly, is sitting alone though not far from the conventions of courtesy that ease human relations.  He mentions then naked Beauty and energetic Youth, likely guarantees of joy in love, but associated here with foolishness, flattery, and the desire that leads to crazy behavior.  The reader can imagine the gambits of lovers by his references to messengers and bribes as well as “three other things I will not mention here.”  One may only guess at such unnamed factors.  Though this locus of love is to some extent disorderly, yet the scene includes as well Dame Patience, the Promise (of a favorable outcome), artfulness, and their followers.

     Whereas the description of the Wife of Bath had been, in a way, realistic and novel-like, implying likely plot-lines for the life of such a woman, and the Balade is a lyric outcry as though direct from the heart, and the Miller’s Tale is a dirty joke, with the allegory of The Parlement of Foules the reader finds an essayistic analysis of love's nature in general.  Together these four texts provide a realistic view, than an idealized one, then a low and comic one, and finally an analytic sketch from top to bottom.

     Chaucer is an encyclopedic artist, like Homer and Shakespeare, aand his own personality is occluded as he strives to present the panorama of lived experience.  No single tone contains his vision; he seeks to cover alevels of society and to embrace self-contradictory themes.  Whereas today poetry is often considered a matter of self-expression and individuality and innovation are prized, Chaucer wrote at a time when precedent and imitation were prestigious and his own practice managed to transform English literature while maintaining a substantial loyalty to tradition at the same time.  The fact that he produced a very large body of sophisticated work while also taking an active professional role apart from writing suggests not only his own considerable talents, but the cultural gap between his era and modernity.  Today it is scarcely possible to imagine a government official who is a poet; then literary accomplishment was thought a desideratum for all gentleman. 

     The task of reading his words in the original Middle English may seem at first demanding, but, for the student who takes the trouble, it yields the great pleasure of hearing Chaucer’s voice directly, across the centuries, in some instructive ways strange, in others very like ourselves.

Gamelyn: An Outlaw’s Ethics

     The master storyteller Chaucer himself seems to have fancied the story of Gamelyn. Literary scholars have also traced its relations to Robin Hood tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the William Tell legend. Variously described in terms of its affinities to balladry and romance, studied for what it reveals about medieval law, the primary appeal of the plot is its action. The righteous hero moves from one crisis to another and, though he is sufficiently vulnerable to keep the audience engaged like a character of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, he is usually capable of vanquishing any number of foes.
     An outlaw’s ethics must be problematic. Someone who has been judged criminal, who has been ousted from civil society for misbehavior, has appearances at any rate against him. Yet Robin Hood’s status as hero is known to everyone, and there were in his day many comparable figures, Adam Bell and Earl Godwin among them. The greenwood may have been dangerous for travelers, but it was also an arena of freedom beyond the reach of unjust feudal authorities. Some outlaws in the English Middle Ages as well as in other times and places have become heroes, “social bandits,” in Hobsbawm’s phrase, seen as allied with the people in opposing an oppressive regime.
     Gamelyn’s perspective is governed by his audience’s socio-economic class. While Robin Hood was regularly identified as a yeoman, neither aristocrat nor peasant, Gamelyn is a member of the land-owning gentry. He is nonetheless as a younger brother vulnerable to exploitation by a coalition including his own brother, the most prominent clerics of the region, and a corrupt legal system. Elements of explicit social protest include criticism of such central pillars of feudalism as the nobility, the church, and the law, but the king’s own judgement is approved, and, in the end, Gamelyn’s reconciliation with the throne sets everything to rights. [1]
     The social order is in question from the very opening when the dying John of Boundes finds that his neighbors, men whom he calls “good men that lawe conne of londe,” (63) mean to controvert his wish to leave property to each of his sons. The sheriff later supports the younger John with concern for neither the law nor ethics. When the younger John binds Gamelyn to a post in his hall, claiming he is insane, he appeals in vain to the clerics feasting there who respond with gratuitous asperity, interested only in currying favor with his wealthy brother. Gamelyn declares “Cursed mote he worth both flesshe and blood,/ That ever doth priour or abbot eny good!" (487-8) Most dramatically, in the scene of the trial of his brother Ote, he realizes the fantasy of the revolutionist and literally brings his elder brother, now become sheriff, the judge, and all twelve jurymen into the role of defendants and summarily executes the lot, declaring by the way “sorwe have that rekke!” [“Sorrow to any who are sorry about it!”] (877)
     Once the outlawed Gamelyn gains access to the King, however, his problems are over. The king not only pardons him and the other outlaws, but awards them “good offices.” (890) The author is not indicting the whole feudal system, only the wicked who must be brought into line by the crown.
     In contrast to the widespread corruption the poet describes in Gamelyn’s neighborhood, the outlaw chief is presented in wholly positive terms. Though his initial words “I am ware of gestes God send us goode” (635) may be taken as either sincerely hospitable or as an ironic welcoming of victims, when Gamelyn tests his host’s courtesy, anticipating “He wil yeve us mete and drink and do us som gode.” (659) the outlaw chief does proceed to treat Adam and Gamelyn most civilly. He “bad hem ete and drink and that of the best.” (676) In this open-hearted generosity in hospitality rituals, the outlaw king recalls Gamelyn’s own extravagant hosting in Fitt 3.
     The sympathetic reader who is not thinking in terms of action movie conventions is likely to be taken aback by the summary killing of the porter at the outset of Fitt III. Gamelyn wreaks angry vengeance, fundamentally opposing his dishonest brother, but incidentally leading him to break the doorkeeper’s neck and toss him in a well. While the action may seem excessive in view of the porter’s trivial and ineffective attempt to keep him out, it is most expressive of his uncontrollable might when roused. Like an old-fashioned swashbuckler or a more recent martial arts adept, he scatters his foes on either side. This is perhaps the earliest form of hero.
     When his elder brother proves impossibly selfish and deceitful, and the local ecclesiastics collude in his wrongdoing, Gamelyn enthusiastically shouts “Save wel the crownes and do hem no harmes,/ But breke both her legges and sithen her armes" (519-20) after which he and Adam pummel the churchmen. Gamelyn proceeds to break his brother’s neck with a single blow, callously telling him "’Sitte ther, brother,’ . . . ‘For to colen thi body as I did myn.’" (535-6)
     His final outburst of violence occurs when at the trial where his brother Ote is being held in his place, when he summarily convicts and executes the judge and jurymen as well as his long-offending brother John. So far is the narrator from considering any of this violence to be excessive or unnecessary, he interjects (passionately if parenthetically) “(sorwe have that rekke!)” (877) (“misery to anyone who cares!}.
     This emphasis on the hero’s strength and fighting abilities is wholly consistent with the king’s eventually not only pardoning him and his outlaw band but awarding them enviable positions. Such muscle is more usefully hired than fought. As a hero of popular culture, Gamelyn excels in scenes of dramatic if almost unbelievable unreflecting action. His ethics are those of the common man: an unthinking acceptance of social norms under most circumstances, a wish to regard oneself as honorable, an honor undamaged, indeed magnified by extravagant violence. The morality is based on the social controls of pride and shame rather than on prescriptive mandates. Gamelyn, one feels certain, would never have turned outlaw had he not been wronged, but his titanic energy must make him seem a somewhat unpredictable associate. The pleasure of those following his story arose perhaps in part from admiration for a strong warrior and in part relief that one need not deal with such a one.
     Gamelyn has a fully happy ending, complete with “a wyf bothe good and feyr” (898), as do most popular works, because this story is meant to be light entertainment, as reassuring as tragedy is unsettling. [2] In fact the heroes of neither action narratives nor tragedies is likely to be concerned with moral choices. A work like Gamelyn simply reaffirms people’s prejudices while one like Oedipus Tyrannos looks beyond right and wrong into the abyss of existence itself. Gamelyn is neither a moral paragon nor an evil-doer as much as he is a regular guy, albeit more daring and capable than his admirers.


1. The reader will recall how the masses who joined in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381allowed themselves to be deceived by King Richard. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the crowds assembled outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg confident that the beneficent Czar would hear their pleas until his troops opened fire.

2. Thus often the Hollywood adaptations of plays and novels tend to rosier denouements as in almost all the generally excellent films made of Tennessee Williams plays during the 1950s.

Two Early Ballad Tales of Robin Hood

     The story of Robin Hood is remarkable for its longevity. The films and television shows based on the medieval outlaw have proliferated to the present day, not to mention such phenomena as the Robin Hood Foundation (whose goal is to “end poverty in New York”), Robinhood (a “zero-commission stock broker”), the Robin Hood Brewing Company, and the like. These latter-day uses of his name only emphasize the unsurprising fact that the meanings of stories about him have varied over the years.
     Some of those that might appear to be firmly rooted in history are in fact of fairly recent origin. For instance, the association of Robin Hood with the virtuous King Richard against the villainous John and with the Saxon nobility who resent domination by tyrannical Norman lords gained currency only with Scott’s immensely popular Ivanhoe (1820). [1] Late versions often credit him with noble birth (such as the 17th century broadside of “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” which calls Robin the Earl of Huntington), though the earlier texts regularly exhibit hostility to the gentry. Two of the earliest ballad tales, “Robin Hood and the Monk” and “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” both extant in manuscripts dated to the mid-fifteenth century but recording older songs, suggest an archaic background of myth, ritual, and magic against which complaints arise against the wealthy aristocracy and clergy.
     The stories are, like all folk tales, first of all entertainment. They regularly feature suspense and reversals while, in the popular manner, always ending in the defeat of the bad guys. Robin’s role as a trickster figure resembles countless figures worldwide. Disney was not only complying with “funny animals” conventions when he portrayed Robin Hood as a fox in his 1973 film. Readers had long noticed similarities between the tales of Renard and those of Robin Hood. The most popular trickster figure of the Middle Ages is particularly appropriate for the subversive elements of Robin Hood’s story. As an outlaw guile and cunning are essential to his cause. Disguise and trickery play a markedly greater role than force. In “Robin Hood and the Monk,” Robin behaves rather churlishly toward Little John, refusing to pay a bet which he had himself proposed. When he is captured after attending mass alone, [2] his party manages to free their leader by impersonating the monk and page (whom they had killed) before the king and then acting as the king’s emissaries toward the sheriff. In “A Gest of Robin Hood” the entire tone is light-hearted (in spite of deaths) and several characters employ subterfuges. Robin anticipates a victim as though he were awaiting a dinner guest. (“Gest,” 24) Little John manages to find service with the sheriff and later the king himself (named as Edward) dresses as a monk to locate the band of thieves and finds himself striking Robin after besting him at archery.
     Robin Hood, like Renard, provided a vehicle for social protest. In many ways he is a prime example of what Hobsbawn called “social bandits.” [3] The “Gest” concludes with the lines “For he was a good outlawe,/And dyde pore men moch god.” (1823-4) He will steal neither from yeomen nor men who have little nor from any company that includes women. He exempts as well small farmers and even knights and squires should they be “gode felawe[s].” (“Gest,” 53, 973, 39-40, 51, 55-6) Indeed, he will give or lend money to those in need. An early 15th century clerical author refers to him as “much praised," [4] yet various judicial records use his name to indicate a dangerous miscreant or a murderer. He enumerates his local foes as “bisshoppes” and “archebishoppes,” as well as “the hye sherif of Notyingham.” ( “Gest” 56, 58)
     The early ballads assume a very specific social focus. Their authors and presumably their audiences identify as yeomen, not as peasants or bourgeois. Though “yeoman” was an elastic term in the fifteenth century [5], Robin’s animus against the wealthy is evident. He demands payment from the knight (“Gest” 148) yet gives him money when he finds him poor. His sympathy multiplies when it turns out that the knight has been impoverished by a “ryche abbot.” (215) In “Monk” Robin is fingered by a “grete-hedid [i.e. arrogant] munke” (75) who later is decapitated unceremoniously in the safety of the greenwood. (203)
     Robin Hood is, however, very conventional in his piety and in his loyalty to the crown. He endows a chapel to Mary Magdelene and goes on pilgrimage. (“Gest,” 1757, 1767) In “Monk” he is described as one who “has servyd Oure Lady many a day,” (133) and he is apprehended only because he insists on attending Mass (and refusing to take an adequate company). In the “Gest” he is said to attend mass daily (32) and to be especially devoted to Mary. (35) The Marian emphasis acquires an edge in “Gest” however, when he indulges in considerable play over the concept that the loan he made to the poor knight has been cosigned by the Virgin Mary, entitling him to collect the purse from any passing monk. (“Gest,” 259, 940) Surely in his era his religiosity, if not his witty (seemingly cynical) elaboration of it, would be a natural concomitant with virtue in general.
     The Robin Hood texts are meant for a popular audience (the story-teller addresses his listeners on occasion), Robin has some courtly characteristics, though these early poems have no love interest. “Robyn coud his courteysy.” (1539) In certain ways he follows the rules of his culture more scrupulously than do his antagonists. He is captured in “Monk” only because his enemies ignored the tradition of sanctuary within a church (83-86), while the Sheriff in the “Gest” is said to violate such civilized rules as those governing hospitality (1186).
     In spite of the fact that he identified as a “traytur” (“Monk,” 91) He regularly expresses his obedience to the nation’s leader and falls to his knees when he recognizes the king. (“Gest,” 1620) Indeed, he reconciles with the crown and is pardoned. Declaring loyalty to his sovereign, he lives for a short while in town. The king even decides he would like some outfits of Lincoln green for his own men. (“1669 ff.) After a time he notices he is spending money and his archery skills are in decline. (1741) Given a week away, he does not ever return and apparently lives in the forest for twenty-two years. It is as though his essential wildness was not possible to contain for more than a short while.
     The archaic mythic layer of the Robin Hood stories is signaled by the emphasis on the wild forest setting which acquires an almost numinous quality in the tales. Robin is clearly associated with “green man” or “wild man of the woods.” [6] The “Monk” begins “In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,” and the date turns out to be Whitsun or Pentecost, an important springtime holiday for the Middle Ages closely paralleling the pagan Beltane, which included a fair, festivals, dancing, and the rule of a King and Queen of the May. [7] These figures, themselves derived from more ancient pagan deities and among the clearest vestiges of pre-Christian survivals were replaced in many villages by Robin Hood and Maid Marian. [8] The forest’s green, adopted by the band of thieves for their costume (Lincoln green, produced from woad and weld [9]) is mentioned repeatedly in an almost incantatory refrain. Surely the passage in which Robin is called a green “ryght fayre harte,” a “mayster-herte” (“Gest,” 738, 752) sounds like a reference to a theriomorphic deity obscured by time. Since Thomas Wright’s speculations in early Victorian essays, Robin Hood has been linked to the Celtic Cernunnos, the Greek Pan, even the Germanic Odin, while to Margaret Murray he was the high priest of a witches’ coven. [10] The cliché of the “merry men” was still novel in the fifteenth century. Flush with the joy of nature and the reverdie of the springtime Robin’s men are lifted by a sort semi-divine afflatus.


Hit befel on Whitson
Erly in a May mornyng,
The son up feyre can shyne,
And the briddis mery can syng.

"This is a mery mornyng," seid Litull John,
"Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man then I am one
Lyves not in Cristianté.
“Monk,” 9-16


     Surely this joyful and sensual impression of the gathering energies of the organic world about them underlies the nature introductions of a thousand medieval poems. Telling tales of such an inspiriting flush of élan vital doubtless acted as a sort of mild recreational sympathetic magic for the medieval audience.
     Though Robin Hood was yet to acquire a lover or an aristocratic pedigree, these early texts provide powerful examples of the character’s potential for expressing social discontent against the rich and criticism of the religious hierarchy not long after the era of the Peasant’s Revolt and of Wyclif. Much of the brooding, if belated, numinous glow the ancients saw in the natural world survives in these lively and colloquial tales.



1. The dating to Richard’s realm derives from William Stukeley, the eighteenth century divine and antiquary who studied Stonehenge so long he began to fancy himself a druid. Scott may also have been influenced by the Scots role in the United Kingdom (Union was hardly more than a hundred years earlier and the battle of Colloden less than that). Was it a similar sympathy for the underdog that was expressed in Ivanhoe’s highly sympathetic depiction of the Jews Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca?

2. Robin was alone because he insisted on entering town accompanied only by Little John who left him after his leader churlishly refused to pay a bet he had proposed and lost. The hero is not portrayed as a perfect valorous and powerful fighter. His lapses in judgment often generate action and early ballads show him defeated in scuffles with random tradesmen and acting unfairly to his own followers.

3. See Eric Hobsbawm Primitive Rebels 1959 and Bandits 1969. In the introduction of the former Hobsbawm refers to “the classic Robin Hood who was and is essentially a peasant rebelling against landlords, usurers, and other representatives of what Thomas More called ‘the conspiracy of the rich.’” (page 4)

4. Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Chronicle says they were “commendit gud.”

5. Deriving from the simple expression “young man,” the term originally meant an attendant on a nobleman. According to the OED, it came to be used for a “mediocre” individual, neither aristocracy nor peasant, but it was not commonly used for the bourgeois residents of cities engaged in trade or professions. I am reminded of the American phenomenon in which virtually everyone considers him or herself “middle-class.”

6. See Lady Raglan’s article in The Folklore Journal coined the term "Green Man" in her March 1939 article "The Green Man in Church Architecture"(no. 50, pages 45–57). A related figure is the “jack of the green” of May day festivities.

7. Whitsuntide was one of three week-long holidays for medieval peasants. Whit Monday continues to be a holiday in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and many other countries, as it was until 1967 in the U.K., 1973 in Ireland, and 2004 in Sweden.

8. Marian is unmentioned in the early texts. It seems clear that she was imported through the influence of Adam de la Halle’s late thirteenth century Jeu de Robin and Marion though the play is a dramatized pastourelle in which Robin is simply a shepherd. The coincidence of the name must have been irresistible, though Robin was sometimes used as a generic male name as a modern American might use Joe or Mac.

9. The color was no literary fancy. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene a “woodman” is described as "clad/ Of Lincolne Greene, belay'd with silver lace." (VI, 2, stanza 5)

10. See Essays on Subjects Connected with Literature, Popular Superstitions, and the History of England (1846). Wright had published on the topic of Robin Hood as early as 1837. Margaret Murray’s argument for Robin as god and priest is included in The God of the Witches (1937).

Functions of Alliteration in Thirteenth Century English Lyrics

Effects like those detailed here resemble most of our psychic activity in that they are ordinarily largely subconscious. 

     The continuity of the alliterative tradition in English poetry between the Old English period and the time of the so-called revival in the fourteenth century has been ably documented, [1] and the presence of the same tradition in lyric genres has also been noted and studied. [2] The precise function of alliterating phrases, however, has received little attention, apart from critical discussion of individual poems. Alliteration, like rhyme, is an extremely common way of making language literary and of directing special attention to certain words of the text. 

      The most general function -- that of identifying the aesthetic text -- may be regarded either as an example of a learned cultural sign or as a natural outgrowth of the cultivation of melody. [3] By creating a set pattern, the author sets the bounds of his aesthetic text, reinforces its unity, and marks its difference from other discourse. Examination of thirteenth century English lyrics suggests at least two sorts of functions beyond this primary one of marking off poetry from the non-literary. Once the pattern of recurrence is established, variations on it may appear, including its meaningful absence. Alliteration may also work as a sort of thematic pointer indicating which terms and phrases are particularly significant in the poem. 

     I shall further specify and illustrate each of these uses with texts chosen from Brown's English Lyrics of the Xlllth Century. [4] The poems “Ichot a burde in a bour ase beryl so bryht” (76) and “Ichot a burde in boure bryht” (83) are similar not only in their opening lines. Both use alliteration as a central structuring device and a primary sign of the poetic character of the language (though both use rhyme as well). In each the alliteration binds the whole into a verbal texture of enough homogeneity to make the text discernibly “poetic” and unified. 

     In the inexorable economy of art, however, the alliteration serves, as do rhyme and image-patterns, as a flexible tool that may shape and direct the poem in many ways. In “Ichot a burde in a bour ase beryl so bryht” the alliteration is quite regular. Every line exhibits an alliterative series. Only two sub-patterns are evident. For one thing, the alliteration is constantly varied such that no initial sound is repeated from one line to the next with the exception of the eighth and ninth lines of each stanza which are — in every instance through five stanzas -- bound to each other by the same alliterating sound. This trans-stanzaic alliteration obviously provides a bridge between the extraordinarily sustained rhyme ending of lines one through eight in each stanza and the concluding couplet in the pattern XAAAAAAABB. 

     The second sub-pattern is the occurrence of lines with two different alliterating sounds. This phenomenon appears nine times in the poem and in seven of the nine cases it is in the center of the stanza, in lines two through six. In this poem the central lines of each stanza are catalogues of the objects to which the beloved may be compared and it seems reasonable to treat the “breaking” of some of these lines as increasing the sense of plenitude of the lists. The objects named virtually tumble over each other, and their very multiplicity heightens the praise of the lady since neither any single object nor their aggregation is capable of truly corresponding to the qualities of Annot. [5] 

      Thus the alliteration lends unity and coherence to the poem as a whole while also programming a very particular effect that enacts the poet’s love and generates an answering warmth on the reader or listener. The same sorts of uses of alliteration are observable in “Ichot a burde in Boure bryht.” The entire poem is bound regularly by alliteration. One notes, however, that an unusual number of stanzas either begin or end with alliteration in “1.” This happens in four beginning lines and four concluding lines in the ten-stanza poem. Though by no means as clearly intentional as the foregoing poem’s alliterative bridge, this proportion seems sufficiently high to indicate that some aural effect is likely with the letter “l” as a sort of leit-motif in sound. Indeed, Brown may have been guided by this effect (consciously or unconsciously) when he titled the piece “The Loveliest Lady in Land.” 

      While the “1”s may well remind the reader of the focus of the poem's interest there is a further suggestive possibility. When one examines the total figures for alliterative uses for each letter of the alphabet, the distribution is as follows. 

a 4 

b 11 

c 2 

d 3 

e 0 

f 5 

g 1 

h 5 

i 1 

j 1 

k 1 

l 11 

m 8 

n 2 

o 0 

p 3 

q 0 

r 1 

s 8 

t 2 

u 0 

v 0 

w 4 

x 0 

y 0 

z 0 

     Though it does not appear at beginnings and endings of stanzas, “b” is as common as “1” in total occurrences. Together the two sounds account for 3l%, nearly a third of the alliterating sounds. In the poem’s non-alliterating refrain “Blow northerne wynd,” the word “blow” is repeated five times, indicating the urgency and passion of the lover's emotion. [6] The frequency with which “b” and “1” appear, far beyond what one would expect in a random distribution, is surely some sort of subtext pointing back toward the refrain. [7] 

      The regularity of the alliteration is interrupted in certain places in the poem. In some of these cases (such as the last two lines of stanza four or the fourth line of stanza seven) the non-alliterating line actually has a stressed word with an initial letter identical to that highlighted in the previous alliterating line. It is noteworthy that there is an unusual concentration of non-alliterating lines in stanza four where half the lines do not alliterate. Once the pattern has been established, its violation or absence is a device present to the same extent as the alliteration itself. Without categorically claiming that the fact is explained by this observation, I will merely note that the stanza in question is that portion of the blazon which describes the middle and lower portions of the lady's body. The peculiarity of the lines may be due to the fact that conventions had not instituted equally common phrases to use for this passage or that the lack of alliteration may constitute a sort of negative subtle halo about this stanza suggesting either a self-conscious interruption of the rhetorical flow or a placid calm about which the rest of the description bubbles in turbulence. 

    In poem 52 editorially titled “The Thrush and the Nightingale,” alliteration is not structural in the sense of dominating the formal composition, nor is it aesthetic in the sense of being the primary indicator of the poetic quality of the text. It occurs frequently but irregularly through the poem, in very nearly exactly one-third of the lines. The poem is strongly influenced by other alliterative verse, [8] but it is basically organized around patterns of stress and rhyme. Thus in this poem, where the author is at liberty to include and exclude alliteration from any particular line, its uses should be especially revealing. A catalogue of the location of the alliterating phrases shows quite convincingly that they occur randomly in different parts of the stanza: in the first in line 12; in  the second in line 12, in the  third in  line 10; in the fourth in line 10; in the fifth in line 13, and in the sixth in line 11.  It is impossible to posit any manipulation of expectations here. It is true that alliteration tends to cluster at certain points in the text, with nine and ten line passages free from alliteration being succeeded by four or five lines each of which has it, but I have no explanation for this fact. They do not seem especially to collect about climactic passages or thoroughly conventional ones. 

      It is true that certain letters, as in “Ichot a burde in boure bryht,” have far more than a random share of alliterative phrases. In this poem the most commonly alliterating letters each account for about one fifth of the total. These are “n” (with 14 occurrences which amounts to 21%), “s” (13 lines or 19%), and “w” (12 lines or 18%). The next most common letter is “m” with 7 occurrences (almost half the figure for the top three) and after it “f” with 5. In this case there is no ingenious subtext like that I claim for the previous poem. However, the concentration of sounds is not arbitrary either. The most easily analyzed letter of the three is “n.” Virtually all the lines alliterating in “n” do so simply because of multiple negatives. The repeated use of “nis,” “ne,” “nohut,” etc. is a formula of alliterative poetry. Such a line tends toward an insistent no-no-no, echoing perhaps the heat of the poem’s debate. 

     The second most frequently occurring sound is “s.” The collocations with this sound constitute a continuous pattern within the poem, what one might call a micro-convention. From the first “s”-line, number 14 “þat wol shilden hem from shome,” which defines the crux of the argument as the sense of shame in women, the theme is repeatedly restated and developed as the “s” sound recurs as an alliterating word at distant intervals. In line 56, for instance, the very same words carry the alliteration as the nightingale maintains that women “hem-self” “from shome shilde” just as the bird had demonstrated his similar virtue by shielding them. The same theme is restated in lines 132, 175, and 188. 

      This last example “ne shal I neuere suggen shame” connects this thematic series to another, also in “s,” which exemplifies a virtuous use of language in the telling of the story itself or with that fictive projection of the same act, the singing of birds. This theme appears in lines 15, 99, 122, 134, and 168. Thus the reader or listener accumulates a collection of instances in his mind in which the connections between parts of the work and the continuity of the whole are rendered more obvious by aural means. 

     A similar rationale underlies the repetition of “w” in the text. From its first appearance in line 8 “þat on of wele, þat oþer of wo” the choice available to the reader is clear. The entire poem is the working out of a dialectic in which not only two ideas of the nature of women compete, but also two eschatological possibilities. The danger of being one who “werche wo” (line 23) even if one be rich in “worldes wele” (line 47) becomes by the end of the poem an absolute one as the religious theme concludes the poem. Other lines beginning with “w” which develop the woe-wealth dichotomy state a problem which is solved by the mention in line 170 of Mary and Christ. 

     Looking at the list of all words in the text which alliterate (see appended list) one finds several distinct types. There are those in which the two words are similar or identical in meaning. These are very commonly those which are traditional — some indeed, like the “might and main” of line 89 have remained for centuries part of everyday speech. Others are different or opposite in meaning such as the “wele” and “wo” already discussed. This type is especially appropriate for figuring the basic conflict of a poem or situation. In many of the phrases, the two or three words that alliterate are simply items in a series such as noun and verb of a single thought. These are less likely than either pairs of likes or of contraries to be traditional or to be significant topoi which define set themes or values in a crystallized, immediately recognizable way. 

      One finds then, two sorts of alliterating lyrics. Those in which alliteration is used as a generative principle illustrate regularly recurring patterns which constitute the Gestalt of the poem, though even here the systematic repetition through most of the body of a poem does not preclude the development of specific patterns as well. In poetry which is not regularly alliterative, alliteration defines the central themes of the poem (in some instances, at any rate) and links specific passages in the individual text, through the repetition of lines or phrases common to other texts as well, with the tradition out of which it arises. The individual alliterating word pairs or triplets are often either norm-validating (when both are of like meaning and that meaning is culturally significant, such as "meek and mild") or norm-violating or problematic (when they contend in meaning and pose a sort of riddle which the poem seeks to investigate). 

 1. In J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English (Cambridge, 1935). 

 2. See Merle Fifield, "Thirteenth Century lyrics and the Alliterative Tradition," JEGP LXII (1962), 111-118. 

 3. Of course, alliteration is often used in non-literary contexts, but always with an “aesthetic aim” in view. Even vulgarisms like “He don't know shit from Shinola” convey attitude as well as information. 

 4. Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford, 1932). I shall subsequently use Brown's numbers in referring to poems. 

 5. The implication is that she embodies nature while transcending it, a very widespread and ancient theme. See the excursus on “Flos florum” in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford, 1968). 

 6. Does the fact that the northern wind is to bring the beloved suggest something of the paradoxe amoureuse (to use Spitzer's phrase)? Surely much more normal would be the Zephyr as in the “Westron winde, when will thou blow.” 

 7. In terms of fancy, these suggestions hardly compare to the subtexts read by Saussure in Latin poetry. 

 8. Note Brown number 81 where alliteration is structural. The opening line declares the likeness and the difference by being the same except for the first word alliterating “Lenten ys come wip loue to toune.” 

 9. One recalls the conclusion's crescendo in the cuckoo song “Ne swik þu naver nu!” 

Alliterating Words in “The Thrush and the Nightingale” 

 line 2 blostme brides 

4 dewes darkneþ dale 

8 wele wo 1

0 here hoe hende 

13 nightingale none 1

14 shulden shome 

15 skaþe skere 1

8 fendes I-fere 

22 fikele fals find 

23 werche wo 

33 gome grete 

34 nere nout nere 

35 maked mones 

36 nis no 

37 ne nohut 

44 nes non 

45 ne non 

47 weren worldes wele 

53 nis non 

55 meke milde 

56 shame shild 

62 boure I-be 

65 derne dede 

66 soule spille 

77 counnen curteisie 

78 nis nothing 

79 mest murþe mon 

88 witness wawain 

89 might main 

92 nevere non 

99 songes singe 

100 nevere no 

103 muchele murþe 

105 livie longinge 

108 word wide 

109 wide wel wot 

111 nout newe 

114 kepest I-knowe 

115 constantines quene

116 foul fow 

120 war wimmen 

122 sugge songe 

123 wite wide 

124 be briʒttere 

125 day daw 

129 þer þou 

130 þat þou 

131 þer þou 

132 shome shal 

134 seist spille 

135 wo wolde 

137 moni mon 

139 saunsum stronge 

148 laste longe 

151 nis non 

155 ne nohut 

156 ne nammore 

163 werche wo 

166 sitten striven 

168 so seist 

170 wam wes I-wend 

171 maide milde meke 

 173 boren bedlehem 

178 fowel for false 

180 fare filde 1

81 wes woed 

188 suggen shame 

191 ne nevere