ABSTRACT
In reflecting on a topic which would relate some aspect of English literature to the general theme of class consciousness prescribed for this series of lectures, I became more and more aware of the extent to which English literature, especially in its more flourishing moments, shows the fructifying effects on the literary imagination of social mobility. It is very difficult to find a really great English writer who speaks from the position of a single class. And this is true even in the Middle Ages, which we are accustomed to think of as an age of rigid social stratification. Certainly in the fourteenth century, in the towns at least, there was considerable movement between classes. The so-called feudal system never extended itself fully to all of English life, even in the period immediately after the Norman Conquest, and there can be no doubt that by Chaucer's time feudal social structure and feudal ideals of knightly service bore little relation to social reality and in fact were already nostalgic literary themes. In a sense, knighthood was always a nostalgic literary ideal, in medieval romance as much as in Spenser's Faerie Queene. The ideal of courtly love was an early romanticizing of feudal relationships, and though, of course, that ideal can be correlated with the social reality of the age which produced it, it was certainly not a simple reflection of an actual social system. Medieval society, in England at least, was more fluid than it may appear from the twentieth century, and that fluidity was important for literature.
