The alliterative movement was primarily confined to poets writing in northern and northwestern England, who showed little regard for courtly, London-based literary developments. It is likely that alliterative poetry, under aristocratic patronage, filled a gap in the literary life of the provinces caused by the decline of Anglo-Norman in the latter half of the 14th century. Alliterative poetry was not unknown in London and the southeast, but it penetrated those areas in a modified form and in poems that dealt with different subject matter.
William Langland’s long alliterative poem Piers Plowman begins with a vision of the world seen from the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, where, tradition has it, the poet was born and brought up and where he would have been open to the influence of the alliterative movement. If what he tells about himself in the poem is true (and there is no other source of information), he later lived obscurely in London as an unbeneficed cleric. Langland wrote in the unrhymed alliterative mode, but he modified it in such a way as to make it more accessible to a wider audience by treating the metre more loosely and avoiding the arcane diction of the provincial poets. His poem exists in at least three and possibly four versions: A, Piers Plowman in its short early form, dating from the 1360s; B, a major revision and extension of A made in the late 1370s; C (1380s), a less “literary” version of B, apparently intended to bring its doctrinal issues into clearer focus; and Z, a conjectured version that calls into question the dating for A, B, and C. The poem takes the form of a series of dream visions dealing with the social and spiritual predicament of late 14th-century England against a sombre apocalyptic backdrop. Realistic and allegorical elements are mingled in a phantasmagoric way, and both the poetic medium and the structure are frequently subverted by the writer’s spiritual and didactic impulses. Passages of involuted theological reasoning mingle with scatological satire, and moments of sublime religious feeling appear alongside forthright political comment. This makes it a work of the utmost difficulty, defiant of categorization, but at the same time Langland never fails to convince the reader of the passionate integrity of his writing. His bitter attacks on political and ecclesiastical corruption (especially among the friars) quickly struck chords with his contemporaries. Among minor poems in the same vein are Mum and the Sothsegger (c. 1399–1406) and a Lollard piece called Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed (c. 1395). In the 16th century, Piers Plowman was issued as a printed book and was used for apologetic purposes by the early Protestants. Courtly poetry
Apart from a few late and minor reappearances in Scotland and the northwest of England, the alliterative movement was over before the first quarter of the 15th century had passed. The other major strand in the development of English poetry from roughly 1350 proved much more durable. The cultivation and refinement of human sentiment with respect to love, already present in earlier 14th-century writings such as the Harley Lyrics, took firm root in English court culture during the reign of Richard II (1377–99). English began to displace Anglo-Norman as the language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and signs of royal and noble patronage for English vernacular writers became evident. These processes undoubtedly created some of the conditions in which a writer of Chaucer’s interests and temperament might flourish, but they were encouraged and given direction by his genius in establishing English as a literary language. Chaucer and Gower
Geoffrey Chaucer, a Londoner of bourgeois origins, was at various times a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant. His poetry frequently (but not always unironically) reflects the views and values associated with the term courtly. It is in some ways not easy to account for his decision to write in English, and it is not surprising that his earliest substantial poems, the Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) and the House of Fame (1370s), were heavily indebted to the fashionable French courtly love poetry of the time. Also of French origin was the octosyllabic couplet used in these poems. Chaucer’s abandonment of this engaging but ultimately jejune metre in favour of a 10-syllable line (specifically, iambic pentameter) was a portentous moment for English poetry. His mastery of it was first revealed in stanzaic form, notably the seven-line stanza (rhyme royal) of the Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382) and Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), and later was extended in the decasyllabic couplets of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women (1380s) and large parts of The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400).
Though Chaucer wrote a number of moral and amatory lyrics, which were imitated by his 15th-century followers, his major achievements were in the field of narrative poetry. The early influence of French courtly love poetry (notably the Roman de la Rose, which he translated) gave way to an interest in Italian literature. Chaucer was acquainted with Dante’s writings and took a story from Petrarch for the substance of “The Clerk’s Tale.” Two of his major poems, Troilus and Criseyde and “The Knight’s Tale,” were based, respectively, on the Filostrato and the Teseida of Boccaccio. The Troilus, Chaucer’s single most ambitious poem, is a moving story of love gained and betrayed set against the background of the Trojan War. As well as being a poem of profound human sympathy and insight, it also has a marked philosophical dimension derived from Chaucer’s reading of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, a work that he also translated in prose. His consummate skill in narrative art, however, was most fully displayed in The Canterbury Tales, an unfinished series of stories purporting to be told by a group of pilgrims journeying from London to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket and back. The illusion that the individual pilgrims (rather than Chaucer himself) tell their tales gave him an unprecedented freedom of authorial stance, which enabled him to explore the rich fictive potentialities of a number of genres: pious legend (in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Prioress’s Tale”), fabliau (“The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” and “The Reeve’s Tale”), chivalric romance (“The Knight’s Tale”), popular romance (parodied in Chaucer’s “own” “Tale of Sir Thopas”), beast fable (“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and “The Manciple’s Tale”), and more—what the poet John Dryden later summed up as “God’s plenty.”