第2章　中古英语时期与乔叟

(1066-1485)

1What was the social and class reality of the Anglo-Norman Period?

Key: The Normans, who came from the northern part of France, were in origin Scandinavian. They brought with them the French language, customs and culture to England, where they protected their feudal monarchy by a strong military power. William the Conqueror divided the land of England among his followers who became barons, while the defeated Anglo-Saxons worked as serfs and peasants for them and were cruelly exploited and oppressed.

Norman-French was made the official language of the state, while English was ignored. But there was no way to impose a foreign language upon a whole nation without wiping out the greater part of the population. The lowly people kept to English and gradually the invaders were assimilated.

2Tell the three divisions of romances according to subject matter and give an example of the Matter of Britain.

Key: Romances can be divided according to their subjects into three groups: Matter of France, Matter of Rome and Matter of Britain.

As the Matter of Britain, one of its most well-known stories is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a piece written in about 1375-1400 by an unknown poet.

3Name two more well-known writers of this period and their achievements besides Chaucer and his literary works.

Key: John Ball and John Wyclif (c.1320-1384) were well-known writers of this period.

John Ball, as we’ve shown previously in this chapter, was mainly remembered for his preaching of equality. Wyctif translated the Bible into English against the rules of the church to benefit the common people. His translation was a great contribution and many later translations consulted his version. In his allegorical poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, a poem in the form of dream vision of more than 7,000 lines, Langland protests against feudal tyranny and criticises the corruption of the church.

4Say as much as you know about Chaucer’s life and works.

Key: To organize your answer according to the textbook.

5Comment on the artistic features of The Canterbury Tales.

Key: (1)Not only the characters represent the classes they come from, but each also possesses an individual personality. The characters are as important a part of the poem as the tales told by them. The poet tries to give a comprehensive picture of the English society of his time and arranges to present a colorful gallery of pilgrims that covers a great range of social life.

(2)He is well-skilled in mild and subtle irony to create humorous effects. He was a broad-minded humanist and had sympathy for people at large. He treats his characters kindly on the whole, using gentle satire and irony to criticise vanity, ill-manners, deceptive tricks and all sorts of follies and human weaknesses.

(3)Although the story-tellers are very different and the stories are diverse, a unity is achieved through the device of the framed story that is Chaucer’s invention of a pilgrimage as the occasion of all the story-telling and thus makes it realistic. The pilgrimage frame offers the possibility for comparison and contrast of characters and their interplay.

(4)The metrical scheme of The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s chief contribution to English poetry. He is the poet who introduced to England the rhymed stanzas of many kinds from French poetry, especially the heroic couplet. He changed the alliterative verse of the Anglo-Saxons to metrical verse which has since been used and developed by generation after generation of English poets till today.

6Sum up Chaucer’s achievements and contributions.

Key: Chaucer’s greatest achievements rest with his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer learned from both French and Latin poetry and then worked out a unique style for the English poetry that had absorbed nourishments from the more advanced European poetry of the time and at the same time reserved its Anglo-Saxon poetic features. And the realism and humanistic concerns demonstrated in his works looked forward to the coming English Renaissance. Chaucer’s literary career was also closely related with the development of English. There were several dialects in the spoken English of Chaucer’s time. But because he used the English of the London dialect to compose poetry, it became a literary language that is a language rich and expressive enough to use for literary purposes. Today, we call the English used and developed by Chaucer and his contemporaries Middle English, which was the foundation of modern English.

Quiz

I. Fill in the blanks: (30%)

1The first settlers of the British Isles were _____, and Britain got its name from a branch of this people called _____. But later they were driven to live in _____, _____ and _____.

Key: Celts

Britons

Scotland

Wales

Ireland

2The _____, _____ and _____were _____ tribes originally living on the Continent .They moved to the British Isles and became the ancestors of the _____ people.

Key: Angles

Saxons

Jutes

Germanic/Teutonic

English

3The most important event of the Old English Period was _____, which took place in the year

Key: Norman Conquest

1066

4The Roman Catholic Church sent _____ to England in 597 _____ the English people to Catholicism.

Key: St. Augustine

to convert

5Name two poems of this period apart from Beowulf: _____, and _____.

Key: Any two of the poems of the period mentioned in the text

e.g. Widsith, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, etc.

6Beowulf is an epic of _____ ines, and it tells the events that took place on _____ before they moved to the British Isles.

Key: Alliterative

the Continent

7After the Anglo-Saxon English took in loan words from _____ and _____ and lost most of its _____ and many of its grammar rules, it was called.

Key: French

Latin

feclions (flexions)

Middle English

8Romance can be divided into three kinds according to subject matter. They are _____, and _____.

Key: Matter of France

Matter of Rome

Matter of Britain

9Romances of the English subject are tales about _____ and his _____.

Key: King Arthur

Round-Table Knights

10John Wyclif was a translator of _____, William Langland wrote _____ and the most famous English ballads are those about _____.

Key: The Bible

[The Vision of] Piers Plowman

Robin Hood

Ⅱ. Mark the following statements as true (T) or false (F): (10%)

1The two centers of Christian culture in the Old English Period was in Canterbury and Northumbria.

Key: T

2Caedmon belonged to Northumbrian School, whereas the Venerable Bede was a member of the Canterbury Abbey in south England.

Key: F

3The first English national epic poem is Widsith.

Key: F

4Old English poetry is distinguished by its use of alliteration and kennings.

Key: T

5Chaucer is the greatest lyrical poet of the Middle English Period.

Key: F

6The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s masterpiece, but it is unfinished with only 24 tales written.

Key: T

7Modern English is developed from the London dialect of the Middle English Period, which is a great contribution made by Chaucer to the English language.

Key: T

8Most of the English popular ballads have their origin in the French folklore.

Key: F

9The Normans were interested in the Cycle of King Arthur because they wanted to prove they were lawful heirs to the Celtic ancestors of Britain.

Key: T

10Chaucer’s humanistic ideas anticipate the English Renaissance.

Key: T

Ⅲ. Explain the following literary terms: (15%)

1epic

Key: epic: A long narrative poem recounting in elevated style the deeds of a legendary hero, especially one originating in oral folk tradition.

2alliteration

Key: alliteration: the repetition of initial consonant sounds in each verse line, usually two alliterating words in the first half-line and one in the second half-line or vice versa, e.g. “True is the tale (caesura) I tell of my travels, / Sing of my seafaring (caesura) sorrows and woes.”

3iambic pentameter

Key: iambic pentameter: A common meter in poetry consisting of an unrhymed line with five feet or accents, each foot containing an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable.

4romance

Key: romance: a medieval tale based on legend, chivalric love and adventures, or a prose narrative treating imaginary characters involved in heroic, adventurous, or mysterious events remote in time and place

5ballad

Key: ballad: a short narrative poem in rhythmic verse, often sung by minstrels to the accompaniment of music of the exploits of warriors, the adventures of lovers, mysteries of fairyland, and various humorous incidents

Ⅳ. Choose one from each of the following two groups of questions and write a short essay of about 300 words to the first and about 500 words to the second: (45%)

Group one：(20%)

1Give a historical review of the Old English Period

2Say something about the transition from Old English to Middle English and the historical elements that had brought about the transition.

Key: 1. The Britons

In about BC 600 Celts, who inhabited the upper Rhineland, started to migrate to the British Isles, and among them the Britons, a branch of the Celts, came to the Isles in BC 400 to BC 300, from whom Britain got its name. At the time of migration, the Celtics were tribal people at the early stage of the Iron Age.

2The Roman Conquest

Troops led by Julius Caesar of the Roman Empire invaded the British Isles, defeated the Celts and ruled there from BC 55 to AD 407, bringing with them the slave system. The Roman reign over Britain went on for four and a half centuries, but the Britons never ceased fighting against them. At the beginning of the 5th century, the Roman Empire declined and in AD 410 all their troops were withdrawn.

3The English Conquest

After the Romans, the Teutonic or Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes moved to live in the British Isles. This happened in about AD 450. They drove the Celts to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, settled down themselves and named the central part of the island England, that is the land of Angles. They became the masters of England and the ancestors of the English people. By the end of the 6th century there had been established seven Saxon kingdoms in England, and a feudal society gradually replaced the primitive tribal life. And the three dialects spoken by them naturally grew into a single language called Anglo Saxon, or Old English, which is quite different from the English we know today.

4Religious Belief

Both the earliest Celtic settlers and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes came to England as heathens. They worshipped their own gods that were related to the mythology of Northern Europe. It was in the year of 597 that Pope Gregory the Great of the Roman Catholic Church sent St. Augustine to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons. King Ethelbert of Kent was the first to be converted and he founded in Kent the Canterbury Abbey.

Group one：(25%)

1Analyse the theme(s) and artistic features of Beowulf

2Comment on Chaucer’s achievements and contributions with examples from his works.

Key: 1) Geoffrey Chaucer’s Literary Achievements

Geoffrey Chaucer, the great English writer, was born in around 1340 in London. He is regarded as the Father of English literature. His literary career can be divided into three periods. The first period is the works in French; the second is in Italian; and the third is in English.

In the phase of French influence, he did translations from French authors, e.g. the famous Romance of the Rose, and experimented with rhythm and structure though mostly following the conventional images and ideas. He favored and wrote allegorical visions and satires in the manner of the middle Ages. The most significant work of this period is The Book of Duchess (1370), an elegy in which Chaucer uses the vision in a dream as his vehicle to lament the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, and to console her husband and Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt, the Duke.

In the phase of Italian influence, he showed an effort to learn from the Italian great poets such as Dante. But the Italian poet who influenced him most is Boccaccio, the author of Decameron. The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde (c.1385) are poems of this phase. Among them, Troilus and Criseyde is the most representative, which is a 5-book poem telling the tragedy of a young Trojan hero Troilus, who fell in love with Criseyde. But shortly after they became lovers, Criseyde was returned by the Trojans to her father, a traitor who had left Troy for the camp of the Greeks. Criseyde fell in love with the Greek warrior Diomede and Troilus died in a fight with the Greeks.

The English phase, or the phase of realism, in which his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales was created. The Canterbury Tales is the most important and famous one, which was written in the rest time of his life. The poem is a collection of stories told by pilgrims who were going to Canterbury for pilgrimage and it covers all the major types of medieval literature such as the courtly romance, folk tale, beast fable and so on. Chaucer described characters of different classes. We can view the whole British society at that time from these stories. All his works help to shape English literature.

2) Chaucer’s contribution:

Chaucer learned from both French and Latin poetry and then worked out a unique style for the English poetry that had absorbed nourishments from the more advanced European poetry of the time and at the same time reserved its Anglo-Saxon poetic features. And the realism and humanistic concerns demonstrated in his works looked forward to the coming English Renaissance.

Chaucer’s literary career was also closely related with the development of English. There were several dialects in the spoken English of Chaucer’s time. But because he used the English of the London dialect to compose poetry, it became a literary language that is a language rich and expressive enough to use for literary purposes. Today, we call the English used and developed by Chaucer and his contemporaries Middle English, which was the foundation of modern English.