DA CHAUCER ALLA

RESTAURAZIONE
Maria Grazia Nicolosi
A.A. 2023-2024
THE NORMAN CONQUEST
 THE NORMAN CONQUEST

The Normans, led by William the

Conqueror, defeated the English army led
by Harold at the Battle of Hastings in
Southern England.
The 70-metre long “Bayeux Tapestry”
commissioned by William to celebrate his
victory is an ideological statement both
narrative and didactic. William’s
involvement in English affairs is
presented as part of a providential
scheme by which a holy English king
(Edward the Confessor) is rightfully
succeeded by an appointed Norman heir,
one claiming his rights in the face of a
Bayeux tapestry, scene 57: faithless and perjured usurper. It suggests
Harold’s death a continuity of English kingship under a
new monarch.
 A NATIONALISTIC NARRATIVE
“[...] four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood
of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common
language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which
still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under
all the consequences of defeat.”
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 1819

In reality the Normans were originally “Norsemen”,

Scandinavian settlers who raided France as they had done in
Northumbria in the ninth century.
When they invaded France they were defeated in the Battle of
Chartres (911), and the Frankish King, Charles III, signed a
treaty giving them Rouen and the area of Upper Normandy.
Within a century, they intermarried, adopted French ideals
and customs and turned into one of Europe’s most
intellectually refined people.
 THE ANGLO-NORMAN RULE

When William settled in England, the Normans were

hardly the “heathens” who had sacked Northumbria
over a century previously. They brought to England an
intellectual curiosity and a cosmopolitan vision of the
world.
The invasion removed the English ruling class and
replaced it with a foreign monarchy and a foreign
aristocracy which brought about a complete
transformation in the social, cultural and political
organisation of English life.
 THE ANGLO-NORMAN RULE

The Norman conquest also marked the end of Old

English as more and more French words and idioms
were absorbed.
Latin remained the language of the Church and
learning while French became the language of the
aristocracy (though intermarriage and exchanges with
servants meant that they had to engage in some
bilingualism). There were also various dialects of the
Celtic language still spoken in areas like Cornwall,
Scotland and Wales.
 ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE
The Anglo-Norman aristocracy was especially enamoured with
the many Celtic legends that had been passed down for
hundreds of years.
Literature during this time concerned itself with mainly three
subjects: religion, courtly love, and knightly adventures.
The Norman feudal aristocracy brought from France the
chansons de geste, which branched out into three major
series:
 ‘matter’ of Rome (classical legend)
 ‘matter’ of France (often tales of Charlemagne and his
knights, or stories against the advancing Saracens)
 ‘matter’ of Britain (King Arthur’s stories, or tales dealing
with knightly heroes)
 ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE

Two influential poets are likely to have worked

in England:
1. Marie de France (fl. 1160-90) author of twelve
brief lais, adapted from Breton stories (Lanval
only refers explicitly to King Arthur).
2. Chrétien de Troyes wrote a now lost version
of the Tristan legend.
 ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE

Thomas of England, Marie de France and Chretien de

Troyes all were influenced by the stories of the ancient
Celtic oral tradition. It was these three writers who
were mainly responsible for the rise of the “romance”
genre. They took some inspiration from the court of
Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (who had
been the wife of Louis VII of France and was very well
educated and liberal for her time) but, mostly, they
were inspired by a remarkable tale of a King named
Arthur which was included in the Historia Regum
Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) (1137) by
the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth.
 TIMELINE
The most important historical events or changes occurring in the 14th century
were the following:
 1315-1318: The “Great Famine”
 1337-1453: The Hundred Years War with France for control of the French
throne
 ca. 1348: The Black Death
 1330s-1380s: The Oxford theologian John Wycliffe affirming the Bible to
be the “supreme authority”, which inspired the foundation of the Lollard
Movement
 1362: King Edward’s stricter Sumptuary Laws and poll tax to fund the
Hundred Years War
 1362: use of English in legal courts, in Parliament and in schools and the
rise of national consciousness
 1381: The Peasants’ Revolt (also called the “Wat Tyler Rebellion” or “The
Great Rising”)
 1382: First translation of the Bible into Middle English
 Decline of the feudal system
 THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR (1337-1453)

English kings, since the times of Henry II (Plantagenet-

Angevin), held lands in France and sought to expand
their territories across the Channel; when French
nobles refused to recognize Edward III’s claim to the
French throne, a war broke out that would last 116
years. In the Battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356)
the expert use of the longbow and leadership of
Edward the Black Prince ensured English victory. The
English would go on to have additional battlefield
victories, notably at Agincourt in 1415, but by 1450 the
tides had turned and the borders of modern-day
France began to take shape as the English retreated
back to their island.
 THE BLACK DEATH (ca. 1348)

A devastating epidemic
swept across Europe in the
1340s; by 1348, it made its way
to the British Isles which it
devastated financially and
socially by claiming more
than one third of the
inhabitants from all social
classes.
It would take almost a
century for the population to
Triumph of Death and Danse reach its pre-plague numbers.
macabre
 THE BLACK DEATH (ca. 1348)
The epidemic triggered a demographic shift and labour
shortage that the government attempted to address through
wage and price control. The population was so decimated that
the nobility found it difficult to find labourers who were thus
able to negotiate better working conditions.
All the labourers that were left were able to charge higher
wages for their work. During the 1340’s and the 1380’s the
purchasing power of labourers increased by about 40 percent.
Unattended surplus land gave rise to a “middle class” or
“gentry” who used the land for a profit by leasing or buying it
from the nobility.
These social changes ultimately led to the decline of the feudal
order.
 THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT (1381)
The Peasants’ Revolt and the Death of
Wat Tyler
Also called the “Wat Tyler Rebellion”,
or “The Great Rising”, it is
remembered today as the first popular
uprising in English history. The
Hundred Years’ War and the Black
Death brought about an enormous
upheaval of the social order, which
would ultimately lead to this major
uprising across large parts of England
in response to socio-economic
pressures caused by labour shortages
(generated by the Black Death), high
taxes imposed to pay for the Hundred
Years’ War, and stricter sumptuary
laws to prevent the peasant class from
consuming expensive items that were
supposed to be available only to the
upper classes.
 THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT (1381)
A wide spectrum of rural society – artisans, village
officials, serfs – came together to seek a reduction in
taxes, an end to the system of unpaid labour
(“serfdom”) and the removal of law courts as well as
the King’s corrupt senior officials.
While the rebellion was ultimately suppressed
violently, it did give peasants new leverage to negotiate
the terms of their labour: no longer would commoners
tolerate outright servitude but rather a system of lease-
hold agreements was established whereby peasants
paid rent on the land they tilled.
 JOHN WYCLIFFE AND
THE LOLLARD MOVEMENT (1330s-1380s)
The authority of the Roman Church was being questioned as
awareness grew of the widespread corruption within the
ranks of the clergy.
 The Oxford theologian John Wycliffe began to assert that the
Bible was the “supreme authority” rather than the clergy.
He refuted the doctrine of “transubstantiation” in De
Eucharistia (1377-1379) leading to the charge of heresy.
Wycliffe promoted the translation of the Bible into Middle
English to make it available for more people to read.
His questioning of the church and its teachings led to the
formation of the “Lollard Movement”.
 OFFICIAL USE OF ENGLISH
As paid labourers and a middle class emerged,
literacy began to spread as they had to possess
basic reading and writing skills to administer
their business.
In 1362, English became the official language of
the courts for the first time since the Norman
Conquest. As English became widespread, it
began being employed in creative writing as
well.
(from c. 1350)
The chance preservation of a single MS (a crudely
illuminated Black A X at the British Library) has
allowed the discovery of three late medieval
masterpieces:

1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

2. Pearl
3. William Langland’s The Vision of Piers
Plowman (1360s-1380s)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century)

Written by an unknown
author, this adventurous
and erotic romance seeks to
answer the question of what
it means to be chivalrous in
the late Middle Ages. It is
written in alliterative verse,
each stanza ends with a
“bob and wheel” – that is,
one short line (the bob)
with a single stress, followed
by four three-stress lines
(the wheel) of which the
second and fourth lines
rhyme with the bob.
 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century)

THE CHARACTER OF SIR GAWAIN

 Sir Gawain is a knight of the Round Table, nephew to
King Arthur who features in a number of works,
notably Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum
Britanniae, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and the works of
Chrétien de Troyes, as well as the prose cycle Lancelot-
Grail (“Gawain”).
 In Middle English poetry he is usually represented as a
loyal knight but always surpassed by Lancelot, who
was inspired by the power of courtly love, and
Perceval, who won the Grail (Hahn). Here he is
presented as a devout but “humanly imperfect
Christian.”
 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century)

THEMES
 It is important to remember that this text was composed
at a time when Christian and pagan beliefs existed side
by side: as in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, there
appears to be a tension between Christian themes and
pagan symbolism.
 The number three occurs multiple times in the text and
this may allude to the Trinity.
 Key themes are temptation and testing, virtue, hunting,
and the natural world. The green knight is the most
obvious symbol and may allude to the green man of
pagan mythology or the worship of nature in general.
 William Langland
The Vision of Piers Plowman (1360s-1380s)
Considered by critics to be one of the
greatest and most perplexing literary
works in Middle English, of which,
based on contextual clues, William
Langland is thought to be the author. It
is an allegorical narrative poem existing
in three versions stylistically pointing
to a single author:
1)Text A consists of the original short-
form version from around the 1360s;
2)Text B amended and expanded the
poem in the late 1370s;
3)Text C is the last revision of text B
from the 1380s.
 William Langland
The Vision of Piers Plowman (1360s-1380s)
 This allegorical poem revolves around a series of
dream-visions or “passuses,” meaning “steps” in Latin,
in which William Langland expanded the medieval
form of the dream vision to deliver a political message
while embracing the English legacy of alliterative
poetry from the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition.
 Satire of contemporary religious decadence pervades
the text, which mocks secular and religious figures
corrupted by greed. The poem addresses the social
injustices and spiritual predicament of late 14th-
century England and was later printed in the 1500s by
Protestants to defend their religious doctrines.
 William Langland
The Vision of Piers Plowman (1360s-1380s)
 The Vision of Piers Plowman begins in the Malvern Hills
with the main character, Will, laying down to rest and
having two remarkable dreams. In the first dream, there
is an ethereal woman in a grand tower to the east and
opposite a dark dungeon to the west, with a field of
society’s people in-between. The “fair field full of folk,” as
the author calls society, is shown in three different
classes: clergy, nobility, and peasantry, with the corrupt
clergy selling papal pardons to the people. The woman
casts light on Christianity and a straight pathway for
entrance into Heaven, alluding to the many flawed and
varying ways people attempt to gain salvation.