Songs of the Ridings | Page 6

now beginning to be realised. "A literature which
leaves large areas of the national activity and aspiration unexpressed is
in danger of becoming narrow, esoteric, unhealthy. Areas of activity
and aspiration unlit by the cleansing sun of art, untended by the loving
consideration of the poet, will be dungeons for the national spirit,
mildewed cellars in which rats fight, misers hoard their gold, and Guy
Fawkes lays his train to blow the superstructure sky-high."(3)
There was a time when poetry meant much more to the working men of
England. In the later Middle Ages, above all in that fifteenth century
which literary historians are fond of describing as the darkest period in
English literature, the working man had won for himself what seemed a

secure place in poetry. Narrative, lyric and dramatic poetry had all
opened their portals to him, and made his life and aims their theme.
Side by side with the courtly verse romances, which were read in the
bowers of highborn ladies, were the terse and popular ballads, which
were chanted by minstrels, wandering from town to town and from
village to village. Among the heroes of these ballads we find that
"wight yeoman," Robin Hood, who wages war against mediaeval
capitalism, as embodied in the persons of the abbot-landholders, and
against the class legislation of Norman game laws which is enforced by
the King's sheriff. The lyric poetry of the century is not the courtly
Troubadour song or the Petrarchian sonnet, but the folk-song that sings
from the heart to the heart of the beauty of Alysoun, "seemliest of all
things," or, in more convivial mood, accounts good ale of more worth
than a table set with many dishes:
Bring us in no capon's flesh, for that is often dear,
Nor bring us in no
duck's flesh, for they slobber in the mere, But bring us in good ale!

Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
For our blessed Lady
sake bring us in good ale.
Most remarkable of all is the history of the drama in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. The drama was clerical and not popular in its origin,
and when, in course of time, it passed out of the hands of the clergy it is
natural to suppose that it would find a new home at the King's court or
the baron's castle. It did nothing of the kind. It passed from the Church
to the people, and it was the artisan craftsmen of the English towns,
organised in their trade-guilds, to whom we owe the great cycles of our
miracle plays. The authors of these plays were restricted to Bible story
for their themes, but the popular character of their work is everywhere
apparent in the manner in which the material is handled and the
characters conceived. The Noah of the Deluge plays is an English
master joiner with a shrewish wife, and three sons who are his
apprentices. When the divine command to build an ark comes to him,
he sets to work with an energy that drives away "the weariness of five
hundred winters" and, "ligging on his line," measures his planks,
"clenches them with noble new nails", and takes a craftsman's delight
in the finished work:

This work I warant both good and true.(4)
In like manner, the Shepherds of the Nativity plays are conceived and
fashioned by men who, fortunate in that they knew nothing of the
seductions of Arcadian pastoralism, have studied at first hand the habits
and thoughts of English fifteenth-century shepherds, and paint these to
the life.
Thus, at the close of the Middle Ages, narrative, lyric and dramatic
poetry seemed firmly established among the people. Not unmindful of
romance, it was grounded in realism and sought to interpret the life of
the peasant and the artisan of fifteenth-century England. The
Renaissance follows, and a profound change comes over poetry. The
popular note grows fainter and fainter, till at last it becomes inaudible.
Poetry leaves the farmyard and the craftsman's bench for the court. The
folk-song, fashioned in to a thing of wondrous beauty by the creator of
Amiens, Feste and Autolycus, is driven from the stage by Ben Jonson,
and its place is taken by a lyric of classic extraction. The popular drama,
ennobled and made shapely through contact with Latin drama, passes
from the provincial market-place to Bankside, and the rude
mechanicals of the trade-guilds yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's
players. In the dramas of Shakespeare the popular note is still audible,
but only as an undertone, furnishing comic relief to the romantic
amours of courtly lovers or the tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont
and Fletcher, and still more with Dryden and the Restoration dramatists,
the popular element in the drama passes away, and the triumph of the
court is complete.