We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

German, French and Latin learning. English queens were notable early sponsors of what became French literature. Britain in this period was very much part of Europe, and its dynasties were interlinked with those of France, Sweden and Hungary. The cowherds spoke Anglo-Saxon; but on the coasts and in the towns you would have heard a chatter of Norse, Latin, French – and Welsh too. For the people speaking the old British or Celtic languages hadn’t gone away. What was their poetry like? Mostly oral, of course, and therefore mostly lost, of course. We have infuriatingly few fragments to go on, but there is an Irish poem about a fair in County Wexford, around the time of the Norman Conquest, which gives some idea of early non-English poetry in these islands:

      There are the Fair’s great privileges:

      trumpets, harps, hollow-throated horns,

      Pipers, timpanists unwearied,

      poets and meet musicians.

      Tales of Find and the Fianna, a matter inexhaustible,

      sackings, forays, wooings,

      tablets, and books of lore,

      satires, keen riddles:

      Proverbs, maxims …

      … The Chronicle of women, tales of armies, conflicts,

      hostels, tabus, captures …

      Pipes, fiddles, gleemen,

      bone-players and bag-pipers,

      a crowd hideous, noisy, profane

      shriekers and shouters.

      They exert all their efforts

      for the king of seething Berba:

      the King, noble and honoured,

      pays for each art its proper honour.

      That’s a translation, of course, by Professor Thomas Owen Clancy of Glasgow University. He makes it sound great fun – like a modern literary festival on acid. Not everybody in the so-called dark ages was having a miserable time.

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       Knights in Green Satin

      It took hundreds of years for the elite language of Norman French to begin to mingle with the tongues of the Anglo-Saxons. For a long time, looking for English poetry we have to rely on very short lyrics, which nonetheless can remind us that Britain was a multi-ethnic place:

      Ich am of Irlande

      And of the holy lande

      Of Irlande

      Gode sire, pray Ich thee

      For of saynte charite

      Come and daunce with me

      In Irlande

      Oh, all right then. The lyrics of early medieval Britain are full of music and dancing, celebrations of spring and love. It’s as if the shuddering, ice-bound, rainy islands of so many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts had been transformed. Up to a point, they had been. Historians talk about the early-medieval warm period, when the world’s climate was 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