The Alliterative Revival is a term adopted by literary historians to refer to the resurgence of poetry using the alliterative verse form in Middle English between c. 1350 and 1500. Alliterative verse was the traditional verse form of Old English poetry; the last known alliterative poem prior to the Revival was Layamon's Brut, which dates from around 1190. Scholarly opinion has been divided on whether the Alliterative Revival represented a conscious revival of an old artistic tradition, or merely signified that despite the tradition continuing in some form between 1200 and 1350, no poems survived in written form. Major works of the Revival include William Langland's Piers Plowman, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the works of the Gawain Poet: Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cleanness, and Patience. History of academic recognition of the Revival It was not until the later 19th century that editors began to consider the problems caused by the chronology of surviving medieval alliterative verse. Although he offered no comment himself, the work of Walter William Skeat made it apparent to students for the first time that there was a gap during the 13th and 14th centuries when no verse was written using an alliterative stave. By 1889 the philologist ten Brink spoke of a "revival of alliterative poetry" in the later 14th century, and the term was in routine use by the early 20th century. The concept was further developed by scholars such as Israel Gollancz, James R. Hulbert, and J. P. Oakden. Their work developed a regionally based, nativist formulation of alliterative poetry which argued it expressed selfconsciously 'English' and archaic modes, revived from previous centuries, in opposition to the modern French-influenced court poetry of the south and east of England. While the arguments of Gollancz and early 20th century academics strongly supposed continuity between Old English verse forms and those of the Revival, academics of the 1960s and 70s increasingly began to stress the discontinuities in the forms, suggesting that 14th century alliterative verse was a purely new invention. Writers such as Elizabeth Salter, David Lawton and Thorlac Turville-Petre notably refused to hypothesise the existence of poetry that had not survived in the written record, preferring instead to seek possible inspiration for the Revival's poetry within rhythmic prose traditions of the 13th and 14th century. Verse Alliterative "long line" The rules by which alliterative verse was composed in Middle English are unclear