tinued till 1154, then gave way to chronicles and histories in Latin and French. About the year 1200, appeared what is known as Layamon's Brut or history. Layamon was a priest living near the border of Wales, who conceived the idea of writing a long poem telling the history of England. Borrowing freely from works in Latin and French, and adding many tales and legends of the Britons, tales which doubtless he had heard over and over again in his boyhood days, he produced a poem of over 30,000 lines. He has been called the first minstrel to celebrate King Arthur in English song, the same Arthur of whom we read in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Layamon's Aside from Layamon's Brut, there is not much to delay us in our survey of the English writings of this period. There is, to be sure, quite a supply of religious works, but with one or two exceptions they are of no great interest; and we find, as time goes on, many romantic poems paraphrasing the French hero-romances, showing how French romance is being absorbed just as in the Brut we find old Briton tales absorbed. Guy of Warwick and Havelok the Dane, English romances with English heroes, though wrought in the French manner, were great favorites, and were long cherished. Finally we can mention with pleasure a few genuinely English songs, which appear among others of less value imitated from the French. As we read these simple, heartfelt lyrics, we easily yield to a belief that, in all probability, even in darkest days of oppression, the English, as in earlier times, were singers and song-makers, and that they loved their own songs better than the more polished products of foreign minstrels. The period may be summarized as follows: For a century and a half following the Conquest, little was written in the native tongue; from then on, much was written by Eng lishmen in Latin and French, but comparatively little in English and that little was largely imitative of French models. No great writers appeared. The Summary period is an important one, however, for during it the language changed greatly through absorbing many French and Latin words. The long French romances brought into our literature a vast treasure of stories for future writers to retell with greater art, the choicest of these tales centering about the half-mythical Briton hero, King Arthur. Finally, through fusing with the Normans, the English became a stronger people, happily without the loss of the original sterling qualities of the Anglo-Saxons. CHAPTER XXII CHAUCER'S PERIOD: 1340-1400 John Wyclif 1324 (?)–1384 (?) First complete translation of the Bible William Langland 1332 (?)-1400 (?) †Vision concerning Piers Geoffrey Chaucer 1340-1400 Plowman The Canterbury Tales †Songs and ballads of the common people An oasis amid long reaches Sixty years, a single lifetime, measures the extent of this period. It is therefore in marked contrast to the preceding periods, which, taken together, cover 690 years, over one-half of the span of all English literature. It may be thought of as an oasis amid the long reaches between the days when Saxon warriors were thrilled by the story of Beowulf and the days when men crowded the Globe theatre to see Shakespeare's plays. Wyclif Wyclif was not a minstrel nor a monk but an Oxford teacher and preacher whose life was one long attack against the Church. He has been called "the first champion of the Reformation," that great movement which, in later years, wrought a mighty change in England and led to the establishment of a national church independent of Rome. To his belief that the scriptures should no longer remain locked up in Latin we owe the first complete translation of the Bible into English, a translation which, in a revised version made soon after his death, found its way among all classes. Better translations, as we shall see, were made in later periods, for Wyclif was not a great literary artist, yet in his Bible we find the best prose thus far produced in Englandprose which aided greatly in establishing a national language; nor can we easily estimate the great service Wyclif rendered to literature when he made it possible, for the first time, for men and women of all classes to read or hear all of the Bible in their native tongue. Side by side with this great reformer whose sermons and pamphlets stirred all England, posterity has placed a poverty-stricken dreamer-poet, William Langland Langland, so obscure an individual that little is known about him except that his boyhood days were passed near the Welsh borders where probably he received some monastery training, and that after roaming the country for a time after the manner of a begging friar he drifted to London and there for many years earned a miserable living by chanting for the release from purgatory of the souls of dead men. His days, therefore, were spent among the poor, and from among them he looked out upon a world which seemed to him sadly out of joint: church and state corrupt; the rich tyrannizing over the poor; purity, justice, and industry rarely met with. His way of righting the world was to picture the world as he saw it, in all its corruption, and to cry out fearlessly for much needed reforms. His picture-sermon we find in a long poem, frequently added to and reshaped during thirty years, known as the Vision Concerning Piers Plowman. It is an allegory in the form of a dream, and to the modern reader it is in some respects as confusing and inconsistent as dreams are apt to be. But the poor people of his day understood it, recognized the truthfulness of the thinly veiled pictures of society and the sincere earnestness of the gifted poet. It moved them as the fiery pamphlets of Wyclif stirred the better educated classes. Chaucer We may think of Wyclif and Langland as the greatest of all that long, unbroken line of writers on religious themes, the earliest of whom are Caedmon, Bede, and Cynewulf. Chaucer, who towers high above them in literary skill, belongs to an entirely different class. This son of a prosperous London merchant began life as a page in the royal household, a bright, good natured lad with a sense of humor which made him, we may believe, a general favorite. All his days were spent close to that brilliant aristocracy for which Langland had little sympathy. He became an exceedingly able man, was sent abroad on embassies, held positions of trust at home, and climbed high for one not of noble birth. He was always a busy man, a tireless worker. His great passion was for books and the green fields, though it should be quickly added that he was a lover of mankind as well and looked out upon the world with keen yet friendly eyes. He seemed to know all classes from the nobility down to the poor parish priests. Much of the greed and misery that came before Langland's eyes must have been known to him, but it reached him softened somewhat by the glamor of that courtly aristocracy with which he was associated. To him, England was merry England. Chaucer's Nearly all of Chaucer was a life-long poet. In his younger days he was under the spell of Norman minstrelsy, which is not strange; for French minstrels were still to be found at the royal court and in the homes of the nobility. The old French romances formed the popular literature of the day. them, during the thirteenth and fourteenth century, were turned into English verse; but Chaucer doubtless preferred them in their original form. Later he was more deeply influenced by Italian literature, which about this time reached its highest level in three world-great writers. |