more temperate. In Britain it lasted very roughly from 900 to 1300. Monks grew vines in Yorkshire; the Black Death hadn’t been heard of.
Sumer is icumen in,
Llude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springeth the wude nu –
Sing cuccu!
Close to nature, the medieval lyrics brim with references to flowers – primroses, roses, blossom of all kinds – and to the incessant sound of birdsong.
For more than a century after the Norman Conquest, Britain was riven by conflict – Saxon rebellions, wars between the Normans and the Welsh or the Normans and the Scots, and the bloody civil disputes between rivals for the crown. Although a lot of massive building of castles and some cathedrals was done, very little survives in English poetry, and that’s hardly surprising. Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, is generally remembered these days as the man who ordered the killing of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. He won the throne with his sword, and later fought long wars against his children and rebel barons – it was the Plantagenet way – but his reign brought great cultural advances and long periods of peace. He famously reformed and civilised English law. Henry was, like his predecessors and immediate successors, more French than English, Count of Anjou and Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine and so forth, whose empire covered rather more than half of modern France. This matters because France was the centre of European civilisation, going through its glorious twelfth-century renaissance. French literature, with its romances, its new ideology of courtly love and its reworkings of the Arthurian myths, had a huge influence.
Henry’s death is referred to in a very rare survivor of English poetry from this period. It’s a long, difficult poem, mostly read by students these days, which is nevertheless full of the sounds of medieval England – the arguments of peasants, the noise of birds – as well as the authentic stink and prejudice of the time.
It’s called The Owl and the Nightingale, and it was probably written in the late 1100s, somewhere in southern England. There are teasing references to a Nicolas of Guildford, a priest living in the village of Portesham in Dorset. He may have been its author. The poem is a long argument between a nightingale, whose song represents love, lechery and frivolity, and a gloomy, croaking owl. As they argue, the nightingale stands on a sprig of foliage, and the owl on a dreary, ivy-encrusted stump.
At times we might imagine that the nightingale stands for the free English people and the owl for the oppressive Norman ruling class; more likely, the nightingale is an airy French troubadour, and the owl the moralistic representative of religious poetry and attitudes. Certainly, a lot of the argument is about the nature of love – is it mere sexual lust, and who may love whom properly? The early Middle English the poem is written in is too hard to be enjoyed without translation, so here is a modern version, by the former soldier and one-legged champion of Middle English verse, the late Brian Stone. The owl is having a go at the nightingale over her merely physical view of sex, and its effect on the common people:
In summer peasants lose their sense
And jerk in mad concupiscence:
Theirs is not love’s enthusiasm,
But some ignoble, churlish spasm,
Which having achieved its chosen aim,
Leaves their spirits gorged and tame.
The poke beneath the skirt is ended,
And with the act, all love’s expended.
Much of the fun in the poem comes from the side-swipes: the infuriated nightingale attacks the owl for choosing to sing at night in the very place where country people go to defecate, giving us a rare insight into medieval toilet habits:
Perceiving man’s enclosure place,
Where thorns and branches interlace
To form a thickly hedged retreat
For man to bide his privy seat,
There you go, and there you stay;
From clean resorts you keep away.
When nightly I pursue the mouse,
I catch you by the privy house
With weeds and nettles overgrown –
Perched at song behind the throne.
Indeed you’re likely to appear
Wherever humans do a rear.
As to the charge that the nightingale, representing the saucy Continental troubadour and courtly love tradition, is spreading immorality amongst the English people, the songbird first responds that she isn’t to blame for the brutal behaviour of some husbands, who drive their wives to desperate straits:
The husband got the final blame.
He was so jealous of his wife
He could not bear, to save his life,
To see her with a man converse,
For that would break his heart, or worse.
He therefore locked her in a room –
A harsh and savage kind of doom.
This chauvinist husband gets what he deserves. Next, the nightingale goes on to champion the rights of girls to love whom they want. In a culture where the man of the house claimed rights over the women around him, this would have caused a lively chatter of argument among the listeners:
A girl may take what man she chooses
And doing so, no honour loses,
Because she did true love confer
On him who lies on top of her.
Such love as this I recommend:
To it, my songs and teaching tend.
But if a wife be weak of will –
And women are softhearted still –
And through some jester’s crafty lies,
Some chap who begs and sadly sighs,
She once perform an act of shame,
Shall I for that be held to blame
If women will be so unchaste,
Why should the slur on me be placed?
The poem is a self-conscious literary confection, harking back to a long tradition of debate-poetry in Latin and French literature, and using many of the legal tricks and twists of the contemporary law. It doesn’t refer only to the recently deceased Henry II, but to the Pope and a papal embassy to Scandinavia; it’s very much a poem of its time. But for us, it’s perhaps most interesting for the way it illuminates, almost by accident, changing attitudes.
