Apart from his provenance, only more general facts can be deduced about the author. He appears to have had rather more than a basic schooling and to have read widely in Latin, French and English. As the notes to the poems will illustrate, he not only knew the Bible (in its Latin Vulgate form) extremely well indeed, but could also cope with demanding Latin verse, for Cleanness and Patience show him to have been familiar with Latin verse paraphrases of the Bible.30 He had certainly read with close attention the French texts that formed the core of well-thought-of and polite literature at this period: he accurately paraphrases a passage from Le Roman de la rose, citing its continuator by name, at lines 1057–64 of Cleanness, a poem for which he also used a French text of Mandeville’s Travels; and Sir Gawain shows him to have read intensively and extensively in French chivalric romance (especially the lengthy cycle of prose romances known as the Vulgate Lancelot, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and probably also those of the Anglo-Norman Hue de Rotelande31). His familiarity and ease with French loan words, including some highly rare and specialized ones, likewise suggests a man widely conversant with French.
Since the descriptions of such things as castle architecture, hunts and the products of goldsmithery are highly detailed and technical, the poet must also have had at least access to courtly and sophisticated environments, though in what capacity, and whether ecclesiastical or secular, it is hard to tell. The familiarity with the Bible and biblical verse, and the use of a homiletic structure in Cleanness and Patience, might suggest he had a clerical education, but, if so, he must have remained in minor orders, for the death of a daughter (the theme of Pearl, a poem narrated in the first person) indicates that he was not celibate, as priests were required to be. When he refers to Church sermons and rituals, he certainly places himself with the congregation rather than with the officiating priest (‘The prest us schewes’, Pe 1210; cf. Pa 9). And, since some of his theological statements are distinctly eccentric (see Foreword to Cleanness, pp. 91–2), it is hard to imagine him as an academically trained theologian. It may be that a clerical training either gave way to, or was supplemented by, some secular activity, since he might have had family or personal connections with the jewellery and/or mercery trades (see Foreword to Pearl, pp. 9–10), which, since jewels were often stitched into costumes, were closely connected.32
Of his personal life, he tells us two things, one probably, the other certainly, true. He indicates in Patience that he had known poverty (35, 46, 528), which would not be surprising for a cleric who could not progress beyond minor orders. The claim functions partly as a captatio benevolentiae [courting the good will of the hearer], for the poet does not want to dis-implicate himself from the patient endurance of adversity which he preaches. But the rhetorical stratagem would sadly backfire if he were known to be in comfortable circumstances. For things at this period were not as they are today, when a dust jacket can give information on an actual author, between whom and the ‘I’ of his fiction there can be wide discrepancies. Such inconsistencies at this time would have caused confusion to no artistic purpose. Many poems (the present ones included) may have circulated first or exclusively among a local audience, and it is unlikely that the wry claim to personal experience of poverty in Patience is one that such an audience would have known to be false.
These and other considerations apply with even more force to the autobiographical ‘fact’ the poet attributes to himself in Pearl: the death of a nearly-two-year-old daughter. It was and is still sometimes argued that this claim is not necessarily true. But the poem would make no sense at all if it were false: the text owes its emotional power precisely to the assumption that the poet is himself deeply, personally and painfully implicated in the situation he represents, that his ‘I’ really is ‘I’. Elegies, including medieval ones (such as Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, occasioned by the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, and Boccaccio’s Olympia, an elegy on his lost daughter Violante), presuppose that the death mourned and other purported ‘facts’ are real. That is one of the rules of the genre. The dream-vision mode of Pearl is also importantly relevant here. This was the framework by which a poet signalled that the forthcoming matter had no ‘authority’ in the form of history or a pre-existing story, the events having therefore as much or as little authority as a dream of his own, which might be fantasy or vision (the several different categories into which dreams were at this period divided was useful here).33 It is thus in a dream which the poet classifies as a veray avysyoun [true vision: 1184] that the meeting with the spirit of the poet’s dead daughter is depicted as occurring: i.e. it is not something that history books will vouch for, but has a kind of higher truth. From these same rules of the genre it followed that the narrating ‘I’, the sole authority for the content of the poem, represented the poet and that any biographical data given were to be taken as reflecting real life.34 This explains why it was most often in the context of the dream-vision that vernacular poets identified themselves, giving their actual names and introducing other details of their real lives. For instance, the dreamer in Chaucer’s House of Fame is addressed as ‘Geffrey’ (729) by the eagle, who likewise alludes to his work as a customs official (652–3).35 The conventions governing both elegy and dream-vision thus indicate that the ‘I’ who speaks as a bereaved father in Pearl is one with the poet himself.
The poems are here presented in the order in which they appear in the manuscript (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain), since that is as likely as any other to reflect the order of composition. It is often in elegy that a talent for verse is first prompted to sustained formal organization of itself. ‘The Death of Friends, first gave my Muse a Birth’, claimed one later poetess,36 implying that it was not uncommon for an amateur talent to attempt at such moments a first major original work. The poet of the highly accomplished Pearl had plainly written before, but it may well have been at the death of his daughter that he first endeavoured to write something that should be worthy of being recorded and preserved. The Book of the Duchess seems similarly to be the earliest recorded work of Chaucer that has come down to us, though he may well have translated part of the Romaunt of the Rose and composed at least some ‘balades, roundels, virelayes’ (Legend of Good Women F423) before that. Of the remaining long-line alliterative poems in the present manuscript, it makes sense that the two exercises in the ‘classic’ form of the metre, Cleanness and Patience, should have preceded Sir Gawain, where that metre receives innovative refinement. And, as between the two verse homilies, it likewise makes sense to assume that a line like ‘Godes glam to him glod, that him unglad made’ (Pa 63) should have come to the mind of a poet who had already used the alliterative metre to produce the more predictable collocation found at C 499, ‘Then Godes glam to hem glod that gladed hem alle’. The poet was certainly, even in Cleanness, already a master of the collocational and lexical repertoire and manoeuvres of the alliterative metre, which he everywhere handles with expressiveness and virtuosity.
DIALECT AND INFLECTIONS
Since, in the preceding section, some significance has been attached to provenance, the non-specialist might like to have an idea of the kind of evidence on which localization in the North-West Midlands is based, and of how that dialect differs from the London English of Chaucer. Some of the chief northern characteristics of the poem texts are: