Middle English or Anglo- Norman Period (1100- 1500)

The age was called Anglo- Norman period as The Normans, who were residing in Normandy (France) defeated the Anglo-Saxon king at the battle of hasting (1066) and conquered England. Apart from this there were other important event which took place during the time period.

·         Wycliffe’s bible

·         Hundred years of war

·         Black death

·         Peasant revolt

These events will be discussed below in detail.

 The Wycliffe Bible

John Wycliffe (1329–1384) was an Oxford professor and theologian who became concerned with the growing power, corruption, and wealth that he observed in the papacy and in the Roman Catholic Church. Wycliffe (also spelled Wyclif or Wiclif) began speaking and writing against the church’s errors, teaching that salvation was only available through the suffering of Christ, not the power of the church.
Wycliffe was convinced that the English people needed a Bible that they could understand in their own language. In 1380, he completed the first English translation of the New Testament, and two years later the entire Bible was completed.  Approximately 60 years before the invention of the printing press, the Wycliffe Bible was published and copied by hand.
The Catholic Church condemned the Wycliffe Bible. Anyone caught reading it was subject to heavy fines. Some of Wycliffe’s supporters were burned at the stake with the Wycliffe Bible hung around their necks. However, the prohibition seems to have only made people more interested in reading the banned book. Not only did the English people become more interested in the Bible, but their desire for literacy also increased.

Today, the Wycliffe translation of the Bible is readily available online both in Middle and Modern English. Wycliffe Bible Translators, an organization dedicated to translating the Bible into the language of every people group on earth, continues the work that Wycliffe began almost 750 years ago.

HUNDERED YEARS OF WAR

The name the Hundred Years’ War has been used by historians since the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe the long conflict that pitted the kings and kingdoms of France and England against each other from 1337 to 1453. Two factors lay at the origin of the conflict: first, the status of the duchy of Guyenne (or Aquitaine)-though it belonged to the kings of England, it remained a fief of the French crown, and the kings of England wanted independent possession; second, as the closest relatives of the last direct Capetian king (Charles IV, who had died in 1328), the kings of England from 1337 claimed the crown of France.

The root causes of the conflict can be found in the demographic, economic, and social crises of 14th-century Europe. The outbreak of war was motivated by a gradual rise in tension between the kings of France and England about Guyenne, Flanders, and Scotland. The Hundred Years' War is commonly divided into three phases separated by truces: the Edwardian Era War (1337–1360); the Caroline War (1369–1389); and the Lancastrian War (1415–1453).

The Caroline War was the second phase of the Hundred Years' War between France and England, following the Edwardian War. It was so-named after Charles V of France, who resumed the war nine years after the Treaty of Brétigny.

Understanding the Black Death

Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it. No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another–according to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick”–and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar The Black Death arrived in Europe by sea in October 1347 when 12 Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina after a long journey through the Black Sea. The people who gathered on the docks to greet the ships were met with a horrifying surprise: Most of the sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those who were still alive were gravely ill. They were overcome with fever, unable to keep food down and delirious from pain. Strangest of all, they were covered in mysterious black boils that oozed blood and pus and gave their illness its name: the “Black Death.” The Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbour, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the mysterious Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe–almost one-third of the continent’s population.

Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick. Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites. Shopkeepers closed stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as people. In fact, so many sheep died that one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool shortage. And many people, desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones.

God’s Punishment?

Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment–retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness. By this logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win God’s forgiveness. Some people believed that the way to do this was to purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakers–so, for example, many thousands of Jews were massacred in 1348 and 1349. (Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.)

The peasant’s revolt:

The Peasants' Revolt started in Essex on 30 May 1381, when a tax collector tried, for the third time in four years, to levy a Poll Tax. The war against France was going badly, the government's reputation was damaged, and the tax was 'the last straw'.

The peasants were not just protesting against the government. Since the Black Death, poor people had become increasingly angry that they were still serfs. They were demanding that all men should be free and equal, for less harsh laws, and a fairer distribution of wealth.

When the Black Death swept Europe in 1348-1351 it left about 30% of the population dead. This greatly affected the English peasants because there was a labour shortage and food was scarce. Even some thirty years later, life had not returned to normal -the settled and structured country life of the Middle Ages was disrupted, and discontent was rife amongst the poor.

Historians have identified a number of factors which caused the Peasants' Revolt:

• Three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, peasants were still villains who belonged to their lords under what some people think of as the feudal system.

• The Black Death (1348 - 1350) had killed many people. This meant there was a shortage of workers and wages went up. Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers (1351), which set a maximum wage and said that people would be punished with prison if they refused to work for that wage. This meant poor people stayed poor.

• After 1369, the war against France began to go badly. This would have made people despise the government.

• In 1377 Richard II – a boy of 10 – became king and his uncle, John of Gaunt, ran the country. This meant that the government was weak.

• John of Gaunt introduced a Poll Tax to pay for the war against France. The Poll Tax had to be paid by everyone over the age of 15 no matter how much money they earned. In March 1381, the government demanded the third Poll Tax in four years. When people avoided paying this, Parliament appointed commissioners to make them pay.

The Result of the Peasants Revolt

·         Parliament gave up trying to control the wages the landowners paid their peasants.

·         The hated poll tax was never raised again.

·         The Lords treated the peasants with much more respect. They made more of them free men i.e. they were not owned as part of the land. This benefited in the end, as free men always work much harder.

·         This marked the breakdown of the feudal system, which had worked well during the early Middle Ages, but was now becoming outdated as attitudes were beginning to change.

The miracle and morality plays were another important features of the middle ages:

Bible stories, theme- the struggle between the power of good and evil for the mastery of the soul of the man. In these moral plays the protagonist is always an abstraction; he is mankind, the human race, the pride of life, and there is an attempt to compass the whole scope of man’s experience and temptations in life, as there had been a corresponding effort in the miracle plays to embrace the complete range of sacred history, the life of Christ, and the redemption of the world.

CHAUCER (1340?  …. 1400)

Father of English poetry.

He made fresh beginning in English literature. He disregarded altogether the old English tradition. His education as a poet was two-fold. Part of it came from French and Italian literature, but part of it came from life.

His work- “Canterbury tales”, which is a collection of stories related by the pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Thomas becket at Canterbury. These pilgrims represent different sections of contemporary English society, and in the description of the most prominent of these people in the prologue Chaucer’s powers are shown at their very highest. All the characters are individualized, yet thoroughly typical quality gives unique value to Chaucer’s picture of men and manners in the England of his time. Also, by drawing finished and various portraits in verse, he showed the way to the novelists to portray characters.

Chaucer removed poetry from the region of the metaphysics and theology, and made it hold as “it were the mirror up to nature”. He thus brought back the old classical principle of the direct imitation of nature.

After Chaucer there was a decline in English poetry for about one hundred years. The years from 1400 to the renaissance were a period bereft of literature, there were only a few minor poets, the imitators and successors of Chaucer, who are called the English and Scottish Chaucerian’s who wrote during this period. The main cause of the decline of literature during this period was that no writer of genius was born during those long years. Chaucer’s successors were Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Skelton Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas. They all did little but copy him, and they represent on era of mediocrity in English literature that continues up to the time of the renaissance.