Middle English Literature

Since the year 1169 and the Anglo-Norman "conquest," literature in Middle English started being written in Ireland. Its surviving quantity is comparatively small, but some is of premier historical and literary importance. It also exhibits an idiosyncratic combination of word spellings that permits us to identify it as medieval Hiberno-English, a distinctive written dialect of late Middle English.

One reason for the relative lack of surviving texts is the fact that from the late twelfth century to the fifteenth, English in Ireland was always a minority language, even if that of the powerful minority congregating in and around the colonial centers and the walled towns. (The other principal vernacular introduced after 1169, Anglo-Norman French, seems by the late fourteenth century to have been in substantial decline.)

The poetry of some major Middle English authors was imported, including William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criaseyde (the latter appears in a 1526 catalogue of the library of the earl of Kildare). Some ambitious Middle English prose translations were also undertaken by Irishmen, including in 1422 one done by James Yonge of Dublin of the French Secreta Secretorum. At about this time an anonymous translator also rendered into English the late twelfth-century Latin Expugnatio Hibernica of Giraldus Cambrensis.

However, the most important Middle English literary collection to have survived is contained in London, Harley MS 913, an anthology mainly of verse on religious and satirical topics, compiled probably by a Franciscan friar in Waterford circa 1331. Some of his items were imported, but many are indigenous, one of the most striking being The Land of Cokaygne, a surreal account of monastic hedonism in which abbeys are built of food, and geese fly ready-cooked into the open mouth. (Compare this edible architecture with the motif of the land of food appearing in the late twelfth-century Gaelic story Aisling Meic Con Glinne.) Outside the Harley anthology, Middle English poetry from Ireland is not otherwise extensive. Middle English lyrics are known from Kilkenny and from Armagh, for example, but their quantity is small.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, however. The field of drama is similar, where the chance survival of part of the text of The Pride of Life, the earliest known morality play in English, suggests that a dramatic tradition formerly existed that was far broader and sturdier than this solitary, sophisticated play might otherwise lead us to suspect.

Bibliography

Bliss, Alan and Joseph Long. "Literature in Norman-French and English." In A New History of Ireland II: Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534. Edited by Art Cosgrave. 1987.

Dolan, Terrence. "Writing in Ireland." In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Edited by David Wallace.1999.

Fletcher, Alan J. Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland. 2000.