Þat outhere in couwee or in baston
Som suld haf ben fordon.
(Chronicle, Prologue, ll. 85 ff.)
Thus far, by way of generalization and without the caveats proper to a literary history, I have indicated some aspects of the preceding period that are important for an understanding of the fourteenth century. But it would be misleading to pass on without a word of reservation. There is reason to suppose that the extant texts from the thirteenth century give a truer reflection of the tastes of the upper classes, who were in closest contact with the French, than of the tastes of the people. But however this may be, they do not authorize us to speak for every part of the country. All the significant texts come from the East or the South—especially the western districts of the South, where an exceptional activity is perhaps to be connected with the old preference of the court for Winchester. In the North and the North-West a silence of five centuries is hardly broken.
II
Judged by what survives, the literary output of the first half of the fourteenth century was small in quantity; though it must be remembered that, unlike the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries which made a fresh start and depended almost entirely on their own production, the fourteenth inherited and enjoyed a good stock of verse, to which the new compositions are a supplement.
Our first impression of this new material is negative and disappointing. The production of rimed romances falls off: their plots become increasingly absurd and mechanical; the action, so swift in the early forms, moves sluggishly through a maze of decorative descriptions; and their style at its best has the pretty inanity of Sir Thopas. The succession of merry tales—such as Dame Siriz, or The Fox and the Wolf[4] where Reynard, Isengrim, and Chauntecleer make their first bow in English—is broken until the appearance of the Canterbury Tales themselves. To find secular lyrics we must turn to the very beginning or the very end of the century, and Chaucer himself does not recover the fresh gaiety of the earlier time.
[4] Both are in Bodleian MS. Digby 86 (about 1280), and are accessible in G. H. McKnight's Middle English Humorous Tales, Boston 1913.
The decline of these characteristic thirteenth-century types becomes less surprising when we notice that literature has changed camps. The South, more especially the South-West, is now almost silent: the North and the North-West reach their literary period. Minot and Rolle are Northerners, Wiclif is a Yorkshireman by birth, the York and Towneley Miracle cycles are both from the North, and with Barbour the literature of the Scots dialect begins; Robert Mannyng belongs to the North-East Midlands; while Sir Gawayne, The Pearl, and The Destruction of Troy represent the North-West. This predominance in the present volume rests on no mere chance of selection, since the Northern (Egerton) version of Mandeville might have been preferred to the Cotton; and if the number of extracts were to be increased, the texts that first come to mind—Cursor Mundi (about 1300),[5] Prick of Conscience (about 1340), Morte Arthure (about 1360), the Chester Plays—are Northern and North-Western.