The Middle English Bestiary: Missing Link in the Evolution of the Alliterative Long Line?

T. Turville-Petre is correct in noting that the alliterative style of the fourteenth century is so dissimilar to that found in the Brut as to rule out a direct link between the two traditions. But the prosodic similarity of the ME Bestiary to OE poems like Maldon and Durham and to later ME poems like the Destruction of Troy, in half-lines of two stresses each, with double alliteration in the first half-line, single in the second, suggests an unbroken metrical tradition.