We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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the weasand from the windpipe and whipped out the guts.
Then sheared out the shoulders with their sharp knives,
hauled them through a little hole, left the sides whole.
Then they slit up the breast and broke it in twain.
And again at the gullet one then began
rending all readily right to the fork,
voiding the entrails, and verily thereafter
all the membranes by the ribs readily loosened …
We are, all of us, only animals in the end, fragile bags of slithering flesh; if Gawain is tempted by the sins of the flesh, we have a horrible presentiment about where it will end for him. The symbolism of this poem is rich enough to keep whole departments of English academics hard at work for decades. The green giant is closely related to the ‘green man’ myths of Saxon England – in a way, he stands for authentic, menacing Britishness against the Frenchified civilisation of the beautiful castles. But the beheading test comes from ancient Welsh and Irish sources. The poem is partly about Christians trying to live in a world that remains unredeemed and pagan: there are complicated symbolic games based on the pentangle of Christian truth, and almost every aspect of Gawain’s armour and clothing has a specific meaning. The whole story takes place at Christmas, the time of Christ’s birth, and is therefore saturated with spiritual promise. In the end, our hero is redeemed. Yet beyond all that, this is a story about scared, horny human beings trying to enjoy themselves, do the right thing, and stay safe in a cold, dangerous world. There’s nothing else like it in English.
That includes the other poems thought to be by the same poet – the moving Christian reflection on the death of his two-year-old daughter, ‘Pearl’, and two other religious poems, ‘Patience’ and ‘Cleanness’. But for the great Christian poem of this period we have to travel due south from the Wirral, to the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It’s there that a shadowy figure, probably a cleric at Oxford, called William Langland, set his allegory of virtue and corruption, Piers Plowman. It has nothing to do with the world of Arthur or knightly virtues; it’s an angry poem about the here-and-now of an England where corrupt clerics and greedy priests have far too much power. It’s the first poem we’ve discussed which could be called in any real sense political. Like the work of the Gawain poet, in order to understand it most of us now need it translated – though only just. This is how it famously begins:*
In a summer season when soft was the sun,
I clothed myself in a cloak as I shepherd were,
Habit like a hermit’s unholy in works,
And went wide in the world wonders to hear.
But on a May morning on Malvern hills,
A marvel befell me of fairy, methought.
I was weary with wandering and went me to rest
Under a broad bank by a brook’s side,
And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the waters
I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry.
Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,
That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.
As I looked to the east right into the sun,
I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;
A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,
With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight
A fair field full of folk found I in between,
Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,
Working and wandering as the world asketh.
Some put them to plow and played little enough,
At setting and sowing they sweated right hard
And won that which wasters by gluttony destroy.
So here we are again in a recognisable English landscape – a gentler, more rolling landscape than that of the forested north-west, but like it a landscape being reshaped and restructured by belief. A hilltop becomes a tower, a symbol of Christian truth; a dale becomes a dark dungeon, standing for evil and the underworld. Between them, unheeding, are all the plain people of England, the kind of busy crowd a medieval writer would rarely come across, except at a fair. And we are away, in a country ravaged by unfairness, in which the poor sweat and the rich guzzle. Langland compares the poor to mice being torn by cruel cats. He’s clearly a man who knows London and the ways of the wealthy, corrupt clerics and their allies. His vision, however, gives us a social portrait of the British of a kind we haven’t had before. Here, for instance, he’s having a go at lawyers – a favourite target of radical writers over the centuries.
There hovered an hundred in caps of silk,
Serjeants they seemed who practised at Bar,
Pleading the law for pennies and pounds,
And never for love of our Lord unloosing their lips.
You might better measure the mist on the Malvern hills,
Than get a sound out of their mouth unless money were showed.
Barons and burgesses and bondmen also
I saw in this crowd as you shall hear later.
Bakers and brewers and butchers a-many,
Woollen-websters and weavers of linen,
Tailors and tinkers, toll-takers in markets,
Masons and miners and men of all crafts.
Of all kinds of labourers there stood forth some;
Ditchers and diggers that do their work ill
And spend all the day singing …
Cooks and their knaves cried ‘Pies, hot pies!
Good pork and good goose!’
So, roadworkers standing around leaning on their shovels rather than getting on with it, and takeaway food … The joy of Piers Plowman is often how extraordinarily modern it feels, behind the cloak of a medieval religious sermon. But it isn’t modern; this is a view of the world in which everything has a religious meaning and significance. A poem like this one can remind us how different life must have felt when, for instance, events as banal as high winds and bad weather were thought to be a sign from God:
He proved that these pestilences were purely for sin,
And the south-west wind on Saturday at even
Was plainly for pure pride and for no point else.
Pear-trees and plum-trees were puffed to the earth
For example, ye men that ye should do better.
Beeches and broad oaks were blown to the ground,
Turned upwards their tails in token of dread
That deadly sin at doomsday shall undo them all.
This world is not our world, yet Piers Plowman keeps its wild vitality when Langland feels obliged to be explicit about the terrible behaviour he is condemning. It’s not all the corruption of the rich, but also the swinish behaviour of the ordinary Briton. Here for instance is Gluttony hard at the beer in his local pub, drinking away with ratcatchers, roadsweepers, fiddlers, horse dealers and needle sellers:
There was laughing and lowering and ‘Let go the cup!’
They sat so till evensong singing now and then,
Till Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill.
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