We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

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. By the late 1100s, thanks to the Plantagenets, southern England was firmly part of the wider European culture dominated by the French. One strongly gets the sense in the poem that the other British, to the north and west, are no longer regarded as ‘one of us’ but as incomprehensible and threatening barbarians. As today, a divide is opening up across the archipelago. The owl, who is of course heard all over the place, attacks the nightingale for sticking to the soft southern landscape:

      You never sing in Irish lands

      Nor ever visit Scottish lands.

      Why can’t the Norsemen hear your lay,

      Or even men of Galloway?

      Of singing skill those men have none

      For any song beneath the sun.

      Why don’t you sing to priests up there

      And teach them how to trill the air?

      To this, the nightingale replies with a ferocious description of the other British:

      The land is poor, a barren place,

      A wilderness devoid of grace,

      Where crags and rocks pierce heaven’s air,

      And snow and hail are everywhere –

      A grisly and uncanny part

      Where men are wild and grim of heart,

      Security and peace are rare,

      And how they live they do not care.

      The flesh and fish they eat are raw;

      Like wolves, they tear it with the paw.

      They take both milk and whey for drink;

      Of other things they cannot think,

      Possessing neither wine nor beer.

      They live like wild beasts all the year

      And wander clad in shaggy fell

      As if they’d just come out of hell.

      This is a poem still encrusted with the letters and spellings, as well as much of the archaic language, of an English we can no longer understand. That’s terribly sad, because in its energy, humour and eye for detail it stands up well to Chaucer himself. It’s interesting too because it ignores what was rapidly becoming the central story the British were telling about themselves.

      At some point after the Norman Conquest, the people of Britain begin to spin new and more ambitious theories about their origins. The tales of the ancient Greeks and Romans had never quite disappeared, so along with the Bible there were ideas about the origins of humanity and civilisation preserved in the monasteries and courts. But the world of the ancient heroes and the Jews of the Bible must have been worryingly disconnected from the here-and-now of medieval Britain: did ‘we British’ emerge merely from barbarian tribes, or was there a more noble and respectable descent? Presumably this didn’t much worry the fishermen of the east coast or the peasants of Wiltshire, but it certainly concerned baronial and royal courts.

      So now we get chronicles which connect Britain to the earliest times of all. The Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a Latin history of the kings of Britain. It begins with the Trojan wars, and claims that the British Isles were settled by the descendants of Virgil’s hero Aeneas – his great-grandson Brutus arrived via the Devon settlement of Totnes, giving his name to Britain, and so on. Geoffrey, writing in around 1136, was regarded as a terrible liar by some of his contemporaries, but this notion of a connection reaching back to the Trojans proved long-lasting and popular. It probably began in Welsh and other oral literatures now lost to us. There is also a long tradition of romances and stories based on Danish or German originals, which linger in the oral tradition until they pop up as popular ballad-like poems, stanzaic or metrical romances, in the 1300s. These are ‘Horn’, ‘Guy of Warwick’, ‘Bevis of Hampton’ and the like. They were well-known in Chaucer’s time, and in Shakespeare’s, and in the case of ‘Bevis’, well into the early modern age. But they are little-known now, and perhaps for good reason. They tend to be all action, with the slaying of numerous foreign enemies – Saracens or Muslims above all – flesh-eating boars and dragons, and treacherous emperors and knights. Blood, gore, the ravishing or saving of maidens, sudden and unlikely reversals of fortune, and a hero with almost supernatural powers … They tell us, at least, that the British have always loved a good story, and have never been keen on foreigners.

      The opening of a north-western poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, written 250 years after Geoffrey of Monmouth, tells us that as soon as Troy had been reduced to ashes, Aeneas and his descendants spread across the west, with Romulus founding Rome and Brutus, charging across from France, founding Britain: his dynasty eventually produced King Arthur. Many of the popular romances, translated into English from Norman French, are about the doings of Arthurian knights. Arthur also features in the Original Chronicle of a Scottish priest, Andrew of Wyntoun. He says that it was Brutus who first cleared Britain of giants and founded its human story: his three sons then divided the islands between them. Wyntoun, with impressive ambition, tries to write a history of modern Scotland that connects it without a break to the creation of the world by God. It’s important to him that the Scots arrived in Britain before the English. So he tells a complicated tale about a hero, Gedyl-Glays, who marries the daughter of a pharaoh, Scota, and settles in Spain. Their descendants occupy Ireland and thence arrive in Scotland, clutching the Stone of Destiny.

      All of this stitching together of biblical history, the ancient myths, Arthur and the modern story of the British may not matter much to us today, but it was incredibly important to the medieval mind. It gave people in the rainy northern isles a sense of belonging to the wider human story, an essential dignity. And whether it was the Scottish priest in his tiny monastery by the edge of a loch, or the anonymous, magically gifted northern English poet who wrote