Select Search
World Factbook
Roget's Int'l Thesaurus
Bartlett's Quotations
Respectfully Quoted
Fowler's King's English
Strunk's Style
Mencken's Language
Cambridge History
The King James Bible
Oxford Shakespeare
Gray's Anatomy
Farmer's Cookbook
Post's Etiquette
Brewer's Phrase & Fable
Bulfinch's Mythology
Frazer's Golden Bough
All Verse
Anthologies
Dickinson, E.
Eliot, T.S.
Frost, R.
Hopkins, G.M.
Keats, J.
Lawrence, D.H.
Masters, E.L.
Sandburg, C.
Sassoon, S.
Whitman, W.
Wordsworth, W.
Yeats, W.B.
All Nonfiction
Harvard Classics
American Essays
Einstein's Relativity
Grant, U.S.
Roosevelt, T.
Wells's History
Presidential Inaugurals
All Fiction
Shelf of Fiction
Ghost Stories
Short Stories
Shaw, G.B.
Stein, G.
Stevenson, R.L.
Wells, H.G.
Reference
>
Cambridge History
>
From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance
>
Later Transition English
>
The Proverbs of Hendyng
Middle English Lyrics
The Deeds of Hereward
CONTENTS
·
VOLUME CONTENTS
·
INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS
·
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes
(190721).
Volume I. From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance.
XVII.
Later Transition English
.
§ 2.
The Proverbs of Hendyng
.
The
Proverbs of Hendyng,
Marcolves sone, are to be found in the MS. that contains the above lyrics and may, therefore, be mentioned here. They appear to have been collected from older material in their present form before the close of the thirteenth century; and they recall the wisdom literature to which reference has already been made in dealing with Old English proverbs
15
and with the poems attributed to Alfred. These proverbs are obvious summaries of the shrewd wisdom of the common folk, which is as old as the hills, and not confined to any one race or country:
Tel thou never thy fo that thy fot aketh,
Quoth Hendyng
Dere is botht the hony that is licked of the thorne;
and they enshrine many phrases that are still common property:
Brend child fur dredeth,
Quoth Hendyng;
but their main interest for us lies in the form of the stanzas which precede the proverb, and which consist of six lines rimed
aabaab;
here it is evident that the nebulous outlines of earlier attempts have taken shape and form out of the void, and become the ballad stanza; the unrimed shorter lines are now linked by end-rime, and the reciter from memory is aided thereby.
7
The literature of the Middle Ages was of a much more universal, or cosmopolitan, character than that of later timesit will be remembered that the book in which Paolo and Francesca read that day no more was the book of
Lancelot
and not a tale of Riminiand one of the reasons for this width of range was that letters were in the hands of a few, whose education had been of a universal, rather than a national, type. English literature, in the vernacular, had to compete for many a long year not only with Latin, which, even so late as the days of Erasmus, was thought to have a fair chance of becoming the sole language of letters,
16
but also, though in a rapidly lessening degree, with Norman-French, the language of all who pretended to a culture above that of the common folks. And it is to Latin, therefore, that we have often to turn for evidence of the thoughts that were beginning to find expression, not only among monastic chroniclers and historians, but also among social satirists and writers of political verse. At first the amusement of those only who had a knowledge of letters, the writing of Goliardic verses and political satires in Latin, became models for the imitation of minstrels and writers who set themselves to please a wider circle, and who made themselves the mouthpieces of those who felt and suffered but could not express.
8
Note 15
. Cf.
A Fathers Instruction, ante,
p. 46.
[
back
]
Note 16
. Cf. also, its long use in legal documents: To substitute English for Latin as the language in which the Kings writs and patents and charters shall be expressed, and the doings of the law-courts shall be preserved, requires a statute of George IIs day. Maitland, in Traills
Social England,
vol. 1.
[
back
]
CONTENTS
·
VOLUME CONTENTS
·
INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS
·
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Middle English Lyrics
The Deeds of Hereward
Shakespeare
·
Bible
·
Strunk
·
Anatomy
·
Nonfiction
·
Quotations
·
Reference
·
Fiction
·
Poetry
©
19932020
Bartleby.com
· [
Top 150
] ·
Subjects
·
Titles
·
Authors
·
World Lit
·
Free Essays