ABSTRACT
Roughly between the years 1350 and 1400 there appeared a score of poems, ranging from a few hundred lines to several thousand, in a metre which had clearly evolved in an unbroken development from the old four-beat alliterative measure of Beowulf and Cynewulf. It is not an antiquarian revival, but the reappearance of a metrical pattern which has undergone considerable change. The line has become in most cases the unit of thought, and the alliteration is therefore not so much structural as decorative. With some poets hunting the letter becomes a passion, and the alliteration falls on three syllables in a halfline or is carried through several consecutive lines. Verse of this sort was obviously associated in Chaucer’s mind with the north, as is indicated by the well-known words of the Parson:
But trusteth wel, I am a Southern man, I can not geste-rum, ram, ruf-by lettre.
