A History of England, Period I. Mediæval Monarchy - J. Franck Bright

These satirical poems are directed against nearly every class of society, the monks, the judges, the taxers, the nobility, the ladies, the logicians of the university, and even the doctors meet with their share of abuse. The democratic spirit which is visible in them found a more complete and worthy expression in the poem known by the name of the Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman. It is supposed to be the work of a poet of the name of Langland. The form is allegorical, a form which the great celebrity of the French “Romance of the Rose” made permanent both in France and England for many years. A pilgrim of quite the lowest rank sees in a vision virtues and vices pass before him, and also representatives of all the various classes of society. Each in turn is criticised; none can lead him in the path of virtue, till Peter the Ploughman appears, who, in a religious conversation, shows him the right way. His character is one of typical perfection, and becomes confused towards the end of the poem with that of Christ. The poem is written in alliterative verse, and in English by no means so much like our present English as some of the songs that preceded it. But at length the time was come for the complete nationalization of the language. French was in decay, the popular songs were in rude English, and when the union of all classes in Parliament had completed the real nationality, any further division of the languages was impossible. The junction was effected by Chaucer. He set himself intentionally to work to make a compound and national tongue. He took for its basis the English; and on it he grafted, sometimes in their own form, sometimes in an altered form, vast numbers of French words. It is a curious instance of an intentional formation of a language. Many words he admitted apparently upon trial, and they have been rejected. Others have been somewhat changed in form, but in his works we have a language which a very little trouble will enable any Englishman to read, and the grammar and structure of which, with few exceptions, is like our own English. The great work for which he employed this language, the “Canterbury Tales,” was well fitted to establish it. While the prologue describes every class of English society, each drawn with an incomparable delicacy and humour, the tales which form the bulk of the work are of every description. Love romances for the knights; coarse or farcical incidents for the commonalty; sober religious prose for the serious. Compared with this poem, there is nothing for more than a century worthy of mention. Gower, who wrote at the same time with Chaucer, and in the three languages, is wholly deficient in humour, and heavy and prosaic to the last degree. His followers in the next century, Lydgate and Occleve, were poets by profession and not by inspiration, always ready to turn out a poem upon demand. Chaucer was not only the founder of the English language, but, before the appearance of Spenser, the only great poet whom England produced.

[HENRY IV.]
1399–1413.

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Henry’s position in English history. 1399.

The reign of Richard II., with its strange and rapid revolutions, had been the beginning of that great faction fight which was concluded a century afterwards by the accession of Henry VII. After pursuing during that reign a policy of inconsistent, and even treacherous, self-seeking, the Duke of Lancaster now came forward as the champion of order. The coup d’état by which he put himself on the throne is another of those instances which history has so abundantly furnished, of the willing acceptance by a nation, after a period of long discomfort, of any one who would bring it rest. There are thus two points of view from which to regard his reign. It is the reign of a usurper bent upon establishing a dynasty, the reign of a conservative who bases his position on the maintenance of the existing state of society, and therefore for a time checks the natural progress of the nation. The necessity which a usurper feels for popularity will explain the improved constitutional position of the Commons during the earlier years of his reign; his position as a reactionary that attachment to the Church which produced the famous statute, “De Hæretico comburendo.”

Reversal of the acts of the late King.

[HENRY IV.]1399–1413.

[HENRY IV.]
1399–1413.