It has been clear for a very long time that the fourteenth-century Alliterative Revival was no revival at all, that the appearance of a substantial number of poems written in the native alliterative measure was not a conscious literary resurrection of a dead or moribund English tradition. Rather, the form and diction of this poetry suggest that there had been a long tradition of composition in the alliterative style without break since the Conquest. The high density of alliterative formulas in many fourteenthand fifteenth-century poems is consistent with a theory that alliterative poems were composed and disseminated orally during those long centuries in which we have no or few texts, though it need not be assumed that all alliterative poetry was composed orally during that period. The existence in classical Old English poetry of highly formulaic poems which were nevertheless composed by literate poets writing "formulaically" suggests that it is not at all impossible that alliterative poems were written throughout the period and the manuscripts simply lost.1 Indeed, the evidence from the fourteenth century itself supports the idea of massive loss, for there must be a strong presumption that the extant alliterative verse represents only a fraction of verse written at the time. There are too many accomplished poems, each apparently by a different author, for it to be otherwise. One doubts, for instance, that the extant works attributed to the Gawain-poet reflect his total oeuvre, and the sophisticated poets who wrote St. Erkenwald, the Morte Arthure, Somer Sunday, Sussanah, or The Wars of Alexander, to name only a few outstanding examples, almost certainly did not write only those poems. Although we cannot begin to characterize the poetry written in the period when we have no texts of substance, one need only look at the fourteenth-century poems and compare them with extant Old English verse to realize that there were large changes in the native tradition, not only in the structure of the line and in the diction and range and choice of subjects but also in the organization of narrative itself. The poems of the Revival display a curious mingling of styles and modes derived from both the native Anglo-Saxon tradition and from Latin and French rhetoric and poetry. In verse composed in the unrhymed alliterative long-line, the native traditions remained dominant, at least in the essential movement of the line. John Lawlor has written brilliantly of the differences between the characteristic movement of the long-lines in Piers Plowman and the foot-counted measure which has dominated English poetry since the sixteenth century, while A. C. Spearing and Larry D. Benson have described the stylistic characteristics of a poetry composed in the native formulaic tradition.2 The impact of Latin and