It also means that literature can be a useful source material for ascertaining political and cultural dynamics of England under the rule of Normans. A prominent theme in Elizabethan theatre is the concept of common identity and brotherhood amongst the English peoples; a concept that is reinforced through the English nation’s perennial battles against France.
“The French armies could not be transported into the theater, but in a sense they were already there. Not the armies that Henry V fought at Agincourt, but the Norman armies of three-and-a-half centuries before, who imposed a French-speaking nobility and repressed English to an unwritten plebian jargon. While the foreign rulers were slowly domesticated in the centuries of Anglo-Saxon twilight, a thick stratum of French vocabulary survived in English. With it survived, too, the native English resentment, in the English-speaker’s unconscious sense that French words are arrogant, mannered, and even rude”. (Steinsaltz, 2002, p.317)
It is no surprise then that the playwright of the day exploited this resentment in the English psyche. As a result the enterprise of literary art of the Elizabethan period is characterized by the sense of identity the people of England associated with their language. A classic exemplification of this theme is Shakespeare’s Henry V, which is marked by its disparaging view of the French language. Ever since the Norman Conquest in the middle of eleventh century, French had been the language of the courts and the ruling classes. Even during the fourteenth century, when the English aristocracy regained the throne, they continued to treat French as their first language. The lingual divide between the classes is illustrated by Edward the Third’s decree in 1362 which stated that “court proceedings be conducted in English rather than French because French is much unknown in the said realm” (Steinsaltz, 2002, p.317). The working class’ view of French language as alien to their own language, as well as carrying other negative connotations springs from this fact.
The Norman Conquest precipitated the emergence of co-operation between the two peoples that was surely unprecedented in their common history. The erstwhile distinct Anglo-Saxon and Norman ethnic groups now became irreversibly assimilated and they strived to collectively defend their nation against extraneous threats as well as helped their nation towards progress. This mixing of blood had also handed the royalty more military and economic power. New opportunities for prosperity also presented itself, which the youth were only eager to avail.
“Capable and eager, the youth of the country strove for distinction; and reward as yielded richly to those who had the wisdom to seek it aright. Success, it was evident, lay not in harking back to a past from which the people was definitely severed, but in seizing the advantages of the present and reaching forward to those seemingly still more abundant in store. As a result of the Battle of Hastings, England was finally removed from isolation, and impelled into the strong currents of international life. The Anglo-Normans, possessed as they were of enthusiasm, energy, and executive skill, vied successfully with their Continental kin, and stirred their fellow-countrymen to like achievement”. (Schofield, et. al., p.25)
Under these new circumstances, literature flourished as did renewed interest in reading and learning among the common people. If one work of literature has to be picked among the entire medieval English canon, which typifies the dynamics of change witnessed in the art, then it would have to be Vie Seinte Osith, which is not very well known then as is now. The Vie Seinte Osith is a classic Anglo-Norman verse life of an early English virgin martyr. The saint venerated in this life is a “pseudo-historical composite made up of three Anglo-Saxon holy women connected to the seventh and tenth centuries” (Jane Dick Zatta, 2005, p.306).