Civilization of the British Isles appears to have begun auspiciously. By the Stone Age, as historian Simon Schama explains in his BBC documentary series A History of Britain, natives on the British Isles had already built villages and come together in numbers for safety ("Beginnings"). The recently unearthed Neolithic village at Skara Brae, on the island of Orkney, testifies to early British natives' ingenuity in creating a secure world:
These dwellings are not huts, but true houses, built from the sandstone slabs that lie all around the island, and which gave stout protection to the villagers here at Skara Brae from the biting Orcadian winds...Once [the villagers had] settled in their sandstone houses, they could harvest red bream and the mussels and oysters that were abundant in the shallows. ("Beginnings")Over the following millennia, Schama asserts, inhabitants of the British Isles continued to tame the wilderness, replacing wild forests with "a patchwork of well-tilled fields" ("Beginnings") and building, with what must have been well-organized communal labor, the vast circles of standing stones that still dot the British countryside. Those years may have been exceptionally peaceful ones for the native populace, since the ocean itself surrounded the land and protected it from outside conquest.
That initial stability ended with the arrival of the Roman legions, but Roman conquest brought the isles something they may have lacked before: the beginning of unification. In the first century A.D., the isles gained a name-Brittania-and an identity, as a province of the Roman Empire ("Beginnings"). The Romans brought their own language, culture, architecture, and, eventually, religion with them. Four hundred years of Roman rule passed before "the withdrawal of the Roman legions during the fifth century, in a vain attempt to protect Rome itself from the threat of Germanic conquest, left the island vulnerable to seafaring Germanic invaders" ("Middle Ages" 4). The ensuing conquest of the native Britons "extended over decades of fighting" ("Middle Ages" 4), and the Anglo-Saxons' eventual victory wrought dramatic changes not only to the governance of the British Isles, but also to its language. "The Anglo-Saxon invaders," the editors of the first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write, brought with them not just their Germanic language, which heavily influenced the Old English of the early Middle Ages, but also "a tradition of oral poetry" ("Middle Ages" 5) discernible in the surviving literature of the British Isles.
Of that literature, the epic poem Beowulf serves as a clear expression of early Britons' need to impose order on the world. "The oldest of the great long poems written in English" ("Beowulf" 29), Beowulf is commonly thought to have been written sometime between the first half of the eighth century and the tenth century. It tells the tale of the pagan Danish king Beowulf and his triumphs over three monsters, and can be read in part as an elegy for the stern practicality of an earlier age, when kings unrestrained by the Christian doctrines of humility and forgiveness imposed order on their world with brute strength.
The idea of "order" depicted in Beowulf is a simple one, appropriate for a still-young society whose people had recently endured centuries of conquest and war. "Order," in the world of Beowulf, means safety from the unknown. Among the men of Beowulf, safety springs in large part from knowledge of other men and their places in society. The warriors of Beowulf follow a code of honor which demands elaborate rituals of courtesy and detailed proclamations of kinship and alliance, seemingly evolved to separate ally from enemy. Upon his arrival on the shores of Hrothgar's kingdom, for instance, the warrior Beowulf announces first his lineage and inherited allegiance before stating his purpose. That lineage and allegiance, much more than his boastful claims of martial valor, win him audience with the king: "My lord, the conquering king of the Danes," Hrothgar's attendant tells Beowulf, "bids me announce that he knows your ancestry" (Beowulf 42) and welcomes him into Hrothgar's mead-hall.
The mead-hall itself leads to the symbolic imposition of order apparent in Beowulf's structure. In the world of Beowulf, where monsters menace the wilderness outside the walls men build, the mead-hall seems to stand for order, safety, and sustenance. Grendel, the first monster Beowulf faces, can be read as an embodiment of fear of the wilderness. He lurks unseen on the moors at night, his attacks on Hrothgar's men symbolically as well as actually violating the safety and sanctity of the mead-hall. Beowulf's defeat of Grendel is thus also a victory won by man over the wilderness. This defeat leads into Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother. Known by no other name, she makes her lair at the bottom of a swamp, from which Beowulf's men retrieve Grendel's body, "a strange lake-birth" (Beowulf 65), and may represent the fear of uncontrolled female emotion and power. Upon Grendel's death, this monstrous mother "had sallied forth on a savage journey,/grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge" (Beowulf 62). Her vengeance for her son leads to the slaughter of more of Hrothgar's men. Beowulf's triumph over her, then, stands for the triumph of the rational male over the irrational female. Mankind's ability to overpower the forces of nature has its limitations, however. No man has yet managed to triumph over death. In Beowulf, death, this last and unconquerable unknown, appears as "a dragon on the prowl/from the steep vaults of a stone-roofed barrow" (Beowulf 80). Ever the mighty warrior, even in old age, Beowulf does at last defeat the dragon, but this final battle costs him his life. He goes to his grave celebrated for "his heroic nature and exploits" (Beowulf 100), but he goes to his grave nevertheless.
Beowulf provides a glance into a savage past already gone by the time of its writing. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, attitudes towards martial valor and the harsh rule of pagan heroes had changed. The author of William the Conqueror's obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, pays some lip service to the effectiveness of William's harshness towards his enemies: "No one dared do anything against his will...Any man of property could travel safely throughout the kingdom...No man dared to kill another...And if a man raped a woman, he immediately lost those parts with which he took pleasure" (116). He also, however, points out that "Truly in [William's] time men suffered much hardship and very many injuries" (116), attributes William's final illness to punishment for the wretchedness of making war on King Philip of France, which led to the burning of Mantes and its churches and the deaths of two churchmen by fire (115), and finishes the obituary with a poem vilifying William's greed, severity, and arrogance (116-117). The British Isles no longer needed the kind of king who sought to avenge blood with blood. England now needed a more sophisticated form of order, one created by the pen, rather than the sword.
During the Anglo-Norman era, increased literacy allowed rulers to begin keeping detailed records of the kingdom. "[William the Conqueror]," his obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles states, "ruled over England and because of his management contrived that there was not a hide of land in England that he did not know who owned it and what it was work; and he set it down in his record" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 116), the Domesday Book, "a census and survey of land ordered by William" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 116). Literacy, even the limited literacy of the Middle Ages, served as a powerful tool for the imposition of order on the population. As D. R. Woolf writes, “[historian] Michael Clanchy makes [the argument that oral discourse was increasingly structured by and around texts in] England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, concentrating on the proliferation of documents in government, church and daily life” (Woolf 162).
Under Norman rule, English literacy and English language received a valuable boost. The language received a wealth of new loan words from the Old French language of the Norman conquerors, while more lay members of the ruling class began to read and write. Scholar Edward J. Kealey writes:
[During the reign of Henry I, from 1100-1135,] Benedictine monasteries trained their own oblates, but sometimes took in lay students. Austin priories attracted young scholars, like Thomas Becket at Merton, who never contemplated becoming canons. Others wishing to rise in the world might become clerks and attend classes run by masters attached to cathedral chapters. (347)This increase in literacy began the process of the diversification of voices and ideas within British literature. Additionally, "the English Crown's French territories were enormously increased in 1154 when Henry II [married Eleanor of Aquitaine and] acquired vast provinces" ("Middle Ages" 7). With this acquisition, as well as the Crusades taking place in the same century, England, once an object of conquest, began to emerge as a conqueror. The world and minds of the English people were expanding, and with them, the English concept of order.
That concept of order now extended beyond the basic concerns for physical survival and spiritual salvation. During the Anglo-Norman period, the French rulers of England gave English audiences a new genre of literature, known as romance. Romance was "the principal narrative genre for late medieval readers...It developed ways of representing psychological interiority with great subtlety" ("Middle Ages" 8). The romances, which primarily narrated the adventures of legendary kings, knights, and their ladies, such as King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and Guinevere, provided not only entertainment, but guidelines for an increasingly sophisticated code of conduct: chivalry. Thinkers and artists of the Anglo-Norman period turned their talents to imposing order on men's behavior with an eye to making society pleasant and harmonious. Thus, the chivalric code demands not only courage and loyalty, traits traditionally encouraged to ensure the safety of society and individuals, but also faithfulness, courtesy, compassion, and reverent treatment of ladies, behaviors which made society more pleasant.
As a model of chivalric ideals, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight excels. This narrative poem by an unknown author begins in King Arthur's legendary court, Camelot, where "with feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth./There true men contended in tournaments many,/...In peerless pleasure passed they their days,/The most noble knights known under Christ,/And the loveliest ladies that lived on earth ever" (Gawain 163). Into this revelry enters the mysterious Green Knight, with a strange challenge: someone in the court must attempt to chop his head off with his axe, and should the Green Knight survive, come to seek him in one year, so that the Green Knight can do the same to his challenger. Arthur himself nearly accepts the challenge for honor's sake, but, displaying the courage and the loyalty to one's king that are two of the central tenets of chivalry, Gawain volunteers himself.
Over the course of his ensuing adventure, Gawain finds opportunities to demonstrate the entire catalog of chivalrous qualities: "Ever faithful.../Was Gawain in good works.../To his word most true/And in speech most courteous knight" (Gawain 175), who possessed "beneficence boundless and brotherly love/And pure mind and manners, that none might impeach/And compassion most precious" (Gawain 176). Promoted by this and similar poems, which employed stories of love drawn from the Arthurian legend with which the Continent was enamored, the chivalric code evolved into the elaborate manners of the court and aristocracy. Those courtly manners endured for centuries. Judith M. Richards describes their prevalence in the Tudor court of Elizabeth I, hundreds of years later:
By 1559 [the first year of Elizabeth I's reign] there was nothing particularly distinctive...about invoking the language of love to describe the bonds between Tudor monarch and Tudor subject. The language of political love had evolved gradually beside the much older language of the duties and obligations of true and natural subjects, bound to their rightful monarch by natural and therefore divinely ordered ties. (135)A code of behavior borrowed from the French literary tradition of the romance became a constant feature of the English court.
While the chivalric code refined the manners of the aristocracy, English politics and culture were beginning to distinguish themselves from that of other nations not only by geographical specifics, but by language. In 1362, English was first used in the law courts and Parliament ("Middle Ages" 23), supplanting French and Latin as England's national language. Other changes were taking place as well, drastically altering the order of English society. "By the late fourteenth century...[the three 'estates' of nobility, church, and commoners] were layered into complex, interrelated, and unstable social strata among which birth, wealth, profession, and personal ability all played a part in determining one's status in a world that was rapidly changing economically, politically, and socially" ("Geoffrey Chaucer" 213-14). These changes "profoundly influenced" ("Geoffrey Chaucer" 214) the work of English author Geoffrey Chaucer.
Born into the mercantile middle class, Chaucer rose to a successful career in civil and diplomatic service for the court. His work, including the Canterbury Tales, which depicts narrators of diverse social classes rather than a socially homogenous succession of aristocrats, reflected the shifting and blurring of social classes in his era. The Canterbury Tales did more than that, however. By writing in English, Chaucer helped to "greatly enhance the prestige of English as a vehicle for literature of high ambition" ("Middle Ages" 2). This further reinforcement of the English language, and thus the English national identity, at last completed the work begun by the Romans in the first century A.D. The islands once known as Brittania, first colonized, then conquered, then Normanized, had truly become Britain, and the British people, who had once had to exert themselves to impose order over the most basic physical aspects of their existence, had now, with the emergence of their own language as the national language, achieved control over their own expression and intellectual lives.
The fruits of this development of the British national identity and love of order become apparent upon examination of the later riches of Britain's literary output. In many of Shakespeare's masterpieces, such as King Lear, disorder and efforts to repair it produce unforgettable dramatic incident and exploration of character. John Donne's poems illuminate his quest to bring order to the tumult of conflicting physical and religious passions on a personal level even as religious and secular interests clashed in the British public sphere. Thinkers like Sir Thomas More and Francis Bacon presented new methods of creating order through their vastly different descriptions of utopia, while Thomas Hobbes proposed absolute monarchy as an attempt to curb what he saw as the naturally disordered state of mankind. Finally, nearly a thousand years after the composition of Beowulf, the ideological disorder of the Restoration inspired writers to tackle the momentous issues of liberty, slavery, and women's rights in vehicles as diverse as Locke's Two Treatises of Government, James Thomson's Ode: Rule, Brittania, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and the writings of women as different from one another as gardener's daughter Mary Leapor and court lady-in-waiting Frances Burney. While the British thinkers and writers never did achieve perfect order, their attempts to do so have given the world a wealth of literary and intellectual genius. And in the process, they have truly made their world their own.
Works Cited
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The. David and Simpson 115-117. Print.
"Beginnings." A History of Britain. Writ. Simon Schama. Narr. Simon Schama. BBC, 2000. DVD.
"Beowulf." David and Simpson 29-34. Print.
Beowulf. David and Simpson 34-100. Print.
David, Alfred and James Simpson, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A, 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.
"Geoffrey Chaucer." David and Simpson 213-216. Print.
Kealey, Edward J. “Anglo-Norman Policy and the Public Welfare.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), 341-351. Web. 9 December 2009.
"Middle Ages to ca. 1485, The." David and Simpson 1-23. Print.
Richards, Judith M. “Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor.” The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 133-160. Web. 14 December 2009.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. David and Simpson 162-213. Print.
Woolf, D. R. “Speech, Text, and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense of the Past in Renaissance England.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), 159-193. Web. 13 December 2009.
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