CHAPTER II.

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066–1400.

Layamon's Brut, 1205.- Ormin's Ormulum, 1215.— Sir John Mandeville's Travels, 1356.-William Langland's Vision concerning Piers the Plowman, 1362-1378.-John Wyclif's Translation of the Bible, 1380.-John Gower's Confessio Amantis, 1393-4.

Geoffrey Chaucer, born 1340, died 1400.-Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, 1369.-Troylus and Creseide.-Parlament of Foules.-Compleynt of Mars.-Anelida and Arcite.Hous of Fame. 1374-1384.-Legende of Good Women, 1385.-Prose Treatise on Astrolabe, 1391. - Canterbury Tales, 1373 to 1400.

19. General Outline. The invasion of Britain by the English made the island, its speech and its literature, English. The invasion of England by the Danes left our speech and literature still English. The Danes were of our stock and tongue, and we absorbed them. The invasion of England by the Normans seemed likely to crush the English people, to root out their literature, and even to threaten their speech. But that which happened to the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the same reason. They were originally of like blood to the English, and of like speech; and though during their settlement in Normandy they had become French in manner and language, and their literature French, yet the old blood prevailed in the end. The Norman felt his kindred with the English tongue and spirit, became an Englishman, and left the French. tongue to speak and write in English. We absorbed. the Normans, and we took into our literature and speech some French elements they had brought with them. It was a process slower in literature than it

was in the political history, but it began from the political struggle. Up to the time of Henry II. the Norman troubled himself but little about the English tongue. But when French foreigners came pouring into the land in the train of Henry and his sons, the Norman allied himself with the Englishman against these foreigners, and the English tongue began to rise into importance. Its literature grew slowly, but as quickly as most of the literatures of Europe, and it never ceased to grow. "The last memoranda of the Peterborough Chronicle are of year 1154. the last extant English Charter can scarcely be earlier than 1155." There are English sermons of the same century, and now, early in the next century, at the central time of this struggle, after the death of Richard the First, the Brut of Layamon and the Ormulum come forth within ten years of each other to prove the continuity, the survival, and the victory of the English tongue. When the patriotic struggle closed in the reign of Edward I., English literature had risen again through the song, the sermon, and the poem, into importance, and was written by a people made up of Norman and Englishman welded into one by the fight against the foreigner. But though the foreigner was driven out, his literature influenced and continued to influence, the new English poetry. The poetry, we say, for in this revival our literature was only poetical. All prose, with the exception of a few sermons and some religious works from the French, was written in Latin.

20. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the two main streams into which this poetical literature divides itself. The religious poetry is entirely English in spirit and a poetry of the people, from the Ormulum of Ormin, 1215, to the Vision of Piers the Plowman, in which poem the distinctly English poetry reached its truest expression in 1362.. The story-telling poetry is English at its beginning but becomes more and

more influenced by the romantic poetry of France, and in the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry of the court and of high society, a literary in contrast with a popular poetry. But even in this the spirit of the poetry is English, though the manner is French. Chaucer becomes less French and even less Italian, till at last we find him entirely national in the Canterbury Tales, the best English example of storytelling we possess. The struggle then of England against the foreigner to become and remain England finds its parallel in the struggle of English poetry against the influence of foreign poetry to become and remain English. Both struggles were long and wearisome, but in both England was triumphant. She became a nation, and she won a national literature. It is the steps of this struggle we have now to trace along the two lines already laid down-the poetry of religion and the poetry of story-telling; but to do so we must begin in both instances with the Norman Conquest.

21. The Religious Poetry. The religious revival of the 11th century was strongly felt in Normandy, and both the knights and Churchmen who came to England with William the Conqueror and during his son's reign were founders of abbeys whence the country was civilized. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of England was further quickened by missionary monks sent by Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to rebuild St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well-watered valleys of the North. The English citizens of London, and the English peasants in the country received a new religious life from the foreign noble and the foreign monk, and both were drawn together through a common worship. When this took place a desire arose for religious handbooks in the English tongue. Ormin's Ormulum is a type of these. We may date it, though not precisely, at 1215, the date of the Great Charter. It is entirely English, not five French words

are to be found in it. It is a metrical version of the service of each day with the addition of a sermon in verse. The book was called Ormulum, "for this that Orm it wrought," Orm being a contraction for Ormin. It marks the rise of English religious literature, and its religion is simple and rustic. Orm's ideal monk is to be "a very pure man, and altogether without property, except that he shall be found in simple meat and clothes." He will have " a hard and stiff and rough and heavy life to lead. All his heart and desire ought to be aye toward heaven, and his Master well to serve." This was English religion in

the country at this date.

22. Literature and the Friars.-There was little religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. In 1221 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and they chose the towns for their work. Their influence was great, and they drew Norman and English more closely together on the ground of religion. The first Friars were foreigners, and they necessarily used many French words in their English teaching, and Normans as well as English now began to write religious works in English. In 1303 Robert of Brunne translated a French poem, the Manual of Sins (written thirty years earlier by William of Waddington), under the title of Handlyng Sinne. William of Shoreham translated the whole of the Psalter into English prose about 1327, and wrote religious poems. The Cursor Mundi, written about 1320, and thought "the best book of all" by men of that time, was a metrical version of the Old and New Testament, interspersed, as was the Handlyng Sinne, with legends of saints. Some scattered. Sermons, and in 1340 the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience), translated from the French, mark how English prose was rising through religion. About the same year Richard Rolle of Hampole wrote in Latin and in Northumbrian English for the " unlearned," a poem called the Pricke of Conscience, and some

prose treatises. The poem marks the close of the religious influence of the Friars. They had been attacked before in a poem of 1320; but in this It is poem there is not a word said against them.

true the author, living far in the country, may not have been thrown much with them. Twenty years later however all is changed; and in the Vision of Piers the Plowman, the protest its writer makes for purity of life is also a protest against the foul life and the hypocrisy of the Friars. In that poem, as we shall see, the whole of the popular English religion of the time of Chaucer is represented. In it also the natural, unliterary, country English is best represented. It brings us up in the death of its author to the year 1400, the same year in which Chaucer died.

23. History and the Story-telling Poetry.— The Normans brought an historical taste with them to England, and created a most valuable historical literature. It was written in Latin, and we have nothing to do with it till story-telling grew out of it in the time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself of such importance that a few things must be said about it.

(1) The men who wrote it were called CHRONICLERS. At first they were mere annalists-that is, they jotted down the events of year after year without any attempt to bind them together into a connected whole. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scattered monasteries, but in the Court. Living at the centre of political life, their histories were written in a philosophic spirit, and wove into a whole the growth of law and national life and the story of affairs abroad. They are our great authorities for the history of these times. They begin with William of Malmesbury, whose book ends in 1142, and die out after Matthew Paris, 1235-73. Historical literature in England is only represented after the death of Henry III. by a