As with our earliest poetry, the survival of much medieval verse was essentially a matter of chance; the prejudices of ecclesiastical scribes and librarians, library fires and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries were probably greater enemies than changing literary tastes.
The alliterative line of the Anglo-Saxons survived in narrative and didactic verse until the late fourteenth century. The popularity of Chaucer helped to establish in court circles the newer French and Italian fashion of rhyming syllable-counted verse for both long and short works. Chaucer frequently favoured five-foot lines, with ten (or occasionally nine or eleven) syllables, which was to become a very popular metrical shape in Britain for centuries. He also used syllable-counted four-foot lines. He tried out a variety of interesting stanza patterns such as the rhyme royal of Troilus and Criseyde and elaborate structures for whole poems such as the villanelle. Gradually, from the end of the fourteenth century onwards, the four-foot line fell out of favour for poems on serious subjects.
While poets such as Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the anonymous composer of Gawain and the Green Knight were writing long, narrative poems, others were continuing a tradition, begun apparently in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, of lively rhymed lyrics on a variety of subjects, but especially about sexual love and Christian devotion. The great outpouring of lyrics in English in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is clearly influenced by the practices of both English and continental poets who wrote rhymed lyrics in Latin and French, and often we find deliberate imitations or parodies of the verses of French trouvères. Presumably the inspiration for some of the less elaborate pieces came from the same well of popular music and storytelling that gave rise to early folksongs and ballads.
Here are a few examples of medieval verse from lyrics and from longer works.
Here we have non-rhyming alliterative verse, by some editors printed out in two-foot lines which obscures the fact that although this is a short, occasional poem, it has essentially the same metre as traditional narrative and didactic verse.
At much the same time as Chaucer was writing in rhyme in London, an anonymous poet who probably lived somewhere near the borders of modern Cheshire and Staffordshire was composing an elegant and entertaining account of an adventure of Sir Gawain, one of King Arthur’s knights. The stanzas vary in length from twelve to thirty-seven lines, but each is rounded off with a rhyming bob (a line with a single foot) and wheel (four three-foot lines). Here is a sample from the unrhymed lines.
As we move chronologically through Anglo-Saxon and medieval alliterative poems, we find that, although in most verse the number of feet per line remains constant, the number of syllables per line — and hence the number of polysyllabic feet — increases. This is partly due to developments in the basic spoken language, partly partly due to an abandonment of the frequently metaphorical compound nouns and adjectives popular in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Where in the thirty feet quoted from Beowulf there are only eleven which have more than two syllables, in Swarte Smeked Smithes there are sixteen such feet, and in Sir Gawain twenty-one. There is chronologically in these passages a steady decline in even-feet, from fifteen, to six, to two. There is an increase in the number of short beat-syllables, from two, to seven, to eight. Also, if you analyse the structure of individual feet, noting lengths as well as number of syllables, there are eleven different patterns of foot in Beowulf, and thirteen and eighteen respectively in the later poems. There is altogether more freedom and less smoothness in medieval metre. (I shall comment on the rhymed lines in Sir Gawain later, when discussing Chaucer.)
Although there is a great deal of alliteration in the following lyric, this may have been regarded as decorative rather than essential. The poem is often set out in two-foot lines, as follows, so that only the even-numbered lines rhyme. However, since the alliterative pattern ties the lines together in pairs, we have in effect traditional four-foot lines, but with the additional structural support of end-rhyme.
Although partly dependent on the patronage of royalty and nobility, Chaucer elected to write in English, rather than in scholarly Latin or the French popular at court (Gower, his contemporary, wrote in all three languages). He was, nevertheless, much influenced by continental literature. He visited both France and Italy on diplomatic missions for which he was presumably chosen partly for his skill in languages. Here are the opening passages of one of his earliest compositions and of his best known work.
For comparison, here are some of the rhymed lines from the anonymous Sir Gawain.
To summarize: the two non-Chaucerian rhyming lyrics Ich Herde Men upon Mold and I Saw a Fair Maiden have even more polysyllabic feet than Swarte Smeked Smiths, with nineteen out of thirty feet. They both have twelve different patterns of foot, as against thirteen in Swarte Smeked Smiths. They have respectively only one and three even-feet: Swarte Smeked Smiths has six. Short beat-syllables total three and eight: there are seven in Swarte Smeked Smiths. The two rhyming poems thus, apart from their rhymes, seem to stem from the same metric tradition as late alliterative poems.
When we come to Chaucer there is a big change. The Book of the Duchess has four-foot lines. With the The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, although it is possible to read some individual lines with four beats, it soon becomes apparent that most lines do not work like this, but contain five beat-syllables. It is, in fact, possible to read all the lines as if they contain five feet (although it may well have been the syllables that Chaucer counted in the French fashion, when composing, rather than the beats). In the extract from The Canterbury Tales he has only five different foot patterns altogether and just one foot with more than two syllables. (In the passage from the early Book of the Duchess there are six different foot patterns and four trisyllabic feet.) Only one foot has a short beat-syllable (there are four in the lines from the earlier poem.) However, he is closer to Anglo-Saxon practice than the other medieval poets in one regard: he has a score of nine even-feet in the extract from The Canterbury Tales (but only three in the apprentice piece Book of the Duchess). He is like more modern poets in that his commonest foot, seventeen out of the thirty (sixteen in the earlier poem), is the long-short type. The rhythm of Chaucer’s verse, particularly his later verse, sounds easy and familiar to a modern ear. The scores for thirty feet from the rhymed sections of Sir Gawain (the quoted passage above and lines 758-62 and 780-1) are very similar to Chaucer’s.
During the Middle Ages, then, the alliterative line became looser,
containing more syllables than the Anglo-Saxon line: consequently even-feet
declined in number. Rhymed lyrics retained a similar freedom of rhythm,
except that the number of syllables per line remained fairly constant within
each poem. Almost the opposite happened in the rhymed verse of the well
educated and widely read Chaucer and Gawain-poet: feet almost always
contained two syllables, short beat-syllables declined in number and
even-feet increased. Syllable-counted verse became the educated standard for
poets of the early modern period to build on. Chaucer also introduced, in
his ten-syllabled lines, the five-foot rhythm that was to become so popular
in the Modern English period.