Holland's Influence on English Language and Literature

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Chapter XIII On the Stories of King Arthur, and the French Romances of Chivalry in England

The stories of King Arthur were written originally, as far as we know, in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth about the year 1140. From Latin, this collection of Welsh and English legends was translated into French verse by a Frenchman called Wace. And from the French they were translated into English by the well-known Layamon in his Brut. Now the French language was the official language in England from the time of the Norman Conquest in the year 1066, till the year 1362, when English was made the language of the law courts, and the year 1386 when English displaced French in the schools. During three hundred years (from 1066 till 1362), the French language was the language of the upper classes in England - the language of those classes who read books and studied literature. During those three centuries it was the French romances of chivalry, telling the stories of King Arthur, and his round table, of Charlemagne, of Alexander the Great, and the story of the siege of Troy, which formed the reading and the main literature of the higher educated classes in England. Now, in composing these French romances of chivalry, including many of the Arthurian legends, the Southern Netherlands had a good share. Not only did many of the stories originate in the Netherlands, where the cradle of the Carolingians was to be found at Herstal, and where

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Charlemagne had his residence at Ninwegen, but some of the best poets who told these romances lived there. Chrétien de Troyes, one of the most famous of these poets, lived for some years at the court of the Count of Flanders; he died about the year 1175; and he wrote at least five Arthur romances, entitled Erec and Enide, Cligès, Le Chevalier de la Charette (Lancelot), le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), and le conte du Saint-Graal (Perceval).¹ Other poets, as Adam de la Halle and Jehan Bodel, lived at Atrecht in the Southern Netherlands. The setting of many of these romances is in the Netherlands, and no doubt the civilization and the conditions of the Low Countries have been a prevailing influence for the poets who lived there.²

How far the works of Jacob van Maerlant (1235-1300) had influence in England is not yet decided. We know that there was all the time a close and frequent intercourse between the Netherlands and England. We know that Maerlant, whose poems, now all printed, cover not less than 226,000 lines, criticized the corruption of the clergy, and the oppression of the poor under the feudal system, long before William Langland in 1362 did the same in England, by writing his ‘Vision Concerning Piers, the Ploughman’; we know that Maerlant translated the Bible, in rhymed verse, into the Dutch vernacular long before Wicliff translated the Bible into English in 1380. But how far this reformatory and democratic movement in the Netherlands was the cause of the same movement in England more than half a century later, remains for historical and literary research to discover.

1 W.J.A. Jonckbloet, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, I, 117.

2 For further information see the quoted works of Jonckbloet and Kalff.

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The same we must say about any probable influence of the literary movement in the Southern Netherlands on Chaucer. We know that Chaucer was well acquainted with France and Italy; that he was not at all a stranger on the continent; that very probably he may have visited Flanders, and have come in contact with the literary circles in the Netherlands; but here also is a field still to be explored and about which we can only conjecture, not decide. We know that Chaucer was closely connected with the court of Edward III, and even that he bore arms in Edward III's expedition into France, while Edward was very familiar with the Flemish cities, and with the Count of Holland, who brought him to the throne, and whose daughter, Philippa, he married; we know that he made a treaty with them, and tried to persuade his Flemish supporters to accept his son, the Black Prince, as their sovereign. But historical and literary researches in this field have hardly been begun, and we can only infer from the well-known general conditions and relations that some considerable influence may have been exerted.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when modern democracy arose in the free cities of the Southern Netherlands, where at that time wealth and luxury was being accumulated, when the religious movement of the Reformation took the leadership of this democracy, there was a development of literary life in the Netherlands of which one hardly gets an adequate idea. The literary societies, called Chambres de Rhetorique, were so numerous, and so flourishing, in every one of the Flemish cities, and the miracle plays and morality plays - those precursors of our modern drama - were written in such numbers that their influence on the whole people, and on the lit-

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erature of other nations, especially of England, must have been much larger than as yet is generally known. We know, for instance, that one poet, by the name of Thomas de Kasteleyne, wrote more than one hundred plays, and that the land-jewels, where sometimes more than thirty guilds of Rhetoric met in competition, were great attractions at that time, when, according to all historians, England was very far behind in civilization, in industry, in trade, in art and in literature.