Medieval Pacifism

Abstract

There can be no certain answer to the question, ‘When did Britons acquire a concept of peace?’. The answer may well be ‘Not yet’, since the British Isles, and even England in particular, have been virtually continuously in a state of war, declared or undeclared, since its human origins up until the present day. Peace may have been spoken of as a reality only in a relative sense, after laying down arms in one conflict and before taking them up at the beginning of the next, or as a utopian dream of a past or future golden age. Nature, domesticity and love are states where human beings may find shelter from outright war, but still the collective, public experience inevitably invades these havens. However, to the question, ‘When does peace become an overt subject for poetry in English?’ there is quite a precise answer: in the 1380s. This chapter, in a necessarily sketchy and superficial way, explains such a statement. As elsewhere, ‘poetry’ is generously defined to include texts that one usually finds — if anywhere — on literary courses: inspired writing like philosophy, political polemics and sermons, all apparently in prose and based on the paragraph, but which can rise to passionate heights — as well as the kind of writing rhetorically organised into rhythmical lines which is more conventionally understood as poetry.