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Unit 1: Development of Prose Writing through the Literary Ages

structure of the alliterative long line. Rime occurs scarcely at all. Sometimes the rhythm of the line Notes
has been satisfied at the expense of an unusual word-order, but otherwise there is little in the text
to warn the reader that he is not reading prose but verse. We can scarcely suppose that Taystek
refrained from writing his treatise in a more regular verse style either from ignorance or inability.
Quite probably he felt that ordinary alliterative verse, familiar to all in secular romance and story,
was not appropriate for official instruction in the serious concerns of the religious life. And to
have spoken to his audience merely as man to man, in the language of daily communication, was
of course not to be thought of. It would be vain to seek for evidences of a genuinely creative
attitude towards prose style in so crude a stylist as Taystek. To the worn-down verse which he
employed, he added nothing in the way of stylistic ornament, except perhaps the frequent use of
synonymous word-pairs, such as of witt and of wisdome (p. 2), withouten travaile or trey (p. 4), to
knowe and to kun (p. 4), comandes and biddes (p. 20), ordayned and bidden (p. 22), hiding or helyng
(p. ,50).
This was a trick of style not unknown to prose writers of the Old English period, and one which
became almost a constant feature of oratorical and artistic prose of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Needless to say these word-pairs were used because of their appropriateness to the
rotund oratorical style which the various writers affected, not at all for the sake of logical clearness
or with any theories of the etymological origins of the words thus paired.

1.6 Richard Rolle

A much more skillful writer of prose and of prose poetry than Taystek was Richard Rolle, called
of Hampole from the place of his death and burial. Although Richard Rolle died in the year 1349
at about the age of fifty, his influence was especially strong in the last quarter of the fourteenth
century. At that time a revival of his fame took place, and with the popular growth of interest in
religion and theology, Rolle was annexed by the reformers to their party. In one of the transcriptions
of Rolle’s English Psalter, dating from this time, the writer complains that the Psalter has been
Lollardized and thus “ymped in with eresy.” Various disciples who followed Rolle’s methods in
writing became active in the last quarter of the century. Of these the most important were William
Nassyngton, Walter Hylton, and Juliana of Norwich. Doubtless there were other members of this
group whose names have been lost, and whose works, if they have survived, are not distinguishable
from the writings of the better known representatives of the school.
Rolle began his career in a dramatic manner. He had left Oxford at the age of nineteen, having
spent his time there mainly in the study of the Bible and having become dissatisfied with the
scholasticism which at that time held sway in the university. He returned home, and shortly after,
dressing himself up in a costume made from a white and a gray gown of his sister’s and a hood
of his father’s, and frightening off his sister, who thought that he had gone mad, he ran away and
became a hermit. For the rest of his life Rolle led the life of a recluse, occupying himself with
preaching, writing, and meditation, and according to his own testimony, passing through the
various formal stages of mystical experience. He was not in holy orders, was not a priest or a
monk, and though his whole life was passed in pious and religious activities, in the eyes of the
church he was a layman. At first he appears to have attempted to spread his views by oral
preaching, but perhaps he was limited in these endeavors because he was not a priest and so could
not preach from church pulpits. Quite probably, however, he preached anyway, very much as
Wiclif’s poor priests did later, speaking to the people wherever he found them. Later he turned to
writing, and in the composition both of verse and of prose treatises, he seems to have found a
congenial and effective mode of expression.
As a thinker, Rolle makes no pretensions to a philosophic system. “His system is religious life, not
theory.” His prose pieces, consisting of prayers, meditations, sentences, epistles, tracts, translations
from Bonaventura, Richard of St. Victor, and other mystics, are generally structureless and unrelated

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