ABSTRACT
Alliterative verse is quite widely used in the friars’ miscellanies of the later thirteenth century, in the early fourteenth-century Harley 2253, in the poems of Minot and of Richard Rolle’s followers, but it is almost invariably associated with rhyme, whether in monorhymed quatrains, longer monorhymed stanzas or laisses, or more complex composite stanzas. Everything argues for the continued strength, throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of alliterative tradition, in its various forms, and the continued process of adaptation to and fusion with other forms that it undergoes. The only apparent casualty in this development, and one very much to be expected, is the traditional unrhymed alliterative line itself. Technically, the development of the alliterative line in Middle English, in relation to its ancestor in Old English, is towards a strengthening of the pause at the end of the line and a weakening of the strong medial caesura.
