The term alliterative revival refers to a renewal of
interest in ALLITERATIVE VERSE among late 14th-century MIDDLE ENGLISH poets. OLD ENGLISH verse had
been governed by strict rules of stress and alliteration, but after the Norman Conquest of 1066 introduced French literature and French tastes into
the English courts, alliterative poetry in English
became rare, at least in written texts, with many
English poets turning to rhymed metrical verse as
a result of the French influence.
Still alliterative English verse seems never to
have died out completely: LAYAMON used alliteration in his Brut (ca. 1200), and the five religious
prose texts from the early 13th-century West Midlands known collectively as the KATHERINE GROUP
make extensive use of alliterative prose. Judging
from these scattered remains, it seems likely that an
oral tradition of alliterative verse in English survived into the 14th century.
As written texts in English began to appear in
the late 14th century, there was a strong revival of
the use of alliterative verse, particularly in the west
and the northwest of England. It has been suggested that such poetry was a nationalistic reaction
against French poetic forms. Important texts included in this tradition are LANGLAND’s PIERS
PLOWMAN and the anonymous poems SIR GAWAIN
AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, PEARL, WINNER AND
WASTER, The PARLEMENT OF THE THREE AGES, and
THE ALLITERATIVE MORTE ARTHURE, among others.
Although there is much more variation among
these poems than in the more strictly rule-bound
Old English verses, one still finds lines of four
strong stresses, a clear caesura, and alliteration
linking the two half lines.
Bibliography
Lawton, David, ed. Middle English Alliterative Poetry
and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays. Cambridge, U.K.: Brewer, 1982.
Moorman, Charles. “The English Alliterative Revival
and the Literature of Defeat,” Chaucer Review 16
(1981): 85–100.