EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD.

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portion of the fifteenth centuries, was edited by Mr. Riley for the Rolls Series in 1864. Scarcely any thing is known of Walsingham, except that he was a monk of St. Albans; that he compiled, besides the " Historia,' an account of Normandy, called " Ypodigma Neustriæ ; and that he was still alive in 1419. The "Historia," as it stands, extends from 1272 to 1422; but Mr. Riley shows some ground for supposing that the portion compiled by Walsingham himself may reach no further than to 1392; the only really original and valuable part even of this being the fifteen years between 1377 and 1392, while the concluding thirty years were added by some unknown hand.

John Fordun, a secular priest of Kincardineshire, is the author of the "Scotichronicon," a history of Scotland in Latin prose, written toward the close of the fourteenth century. The entire work contains sixteen books; but of these only five and part of the sixth were composed by Fordun, the remainder being the work of Abbot Bower, who brings down the story to the death of James I. in 1437.1

In theology and philosophy occurs the name of John Wyclif, the ablest schoolman of his day in England, admired by his contemporaries as an expert logician and prolific system-monger, long before he wrote those attacks on the hierarchy, the mendicant friars, and the received doctrine concerning the eucharist, which gained for him with posterity the name of the first English reformer. His numerous Latin works, very few of which have ever been printed, are classed by Dr. Shirley in his excellent "Catalogue of the Original Works of John Wyclif," 2 under six heads: 1. Philosophy and Systematic Theology; 2. Sermons, Expositions,

1 Irving's History of Scottish Poetry, edited by Dr. Carlyle, p. 116. 2 Clarendon Press, 1865.

;

and Practical Theology; 3. Protests, Disputations, and Epistles; 4. On Church Government and Endowments 5. On the Monastic Orders; 6. On the Secular Clergy. Under the first head is included the "Summa Theologiæ," a body of divinity of stupendous magnitude, the substance of which he afterwards reproduced in the "Trialogus, sive Summa Summæ," the best known of all his works, printed at Basle by the Swiss reformers in 1525.1 Two or three of his shorter Latin tracts are contained in the "Fasciculi Zizaniorum," which, in spite of its enigmatical title, is a volume of remarkable interest, in respect of the light which it throws on the ecclesiastical history of the last half of the fourteenth century. Here are described in detail the first bickerings between Wyclif and the friars his opponents, the synodical proceedings taken by the bishops against the rising heresy, the turbulent sympathy of the masters at Oxford with the accused, and the steps taken by the Government, on a scale of ever-increasing severity, to enforce submission to the hierarchy. Dr. Shirley's introduction to the volume, which was edited by him for the Rolls Series in 1858, explains the acts and tendencies of Wyclif, in a spirit characterized alike by penetration and fairness.

The obvious cause of the decline of French and Latin composition in England was the growing prevalence, social and literary, of the native speech. To this many circumstances contributed. The gradual consolidation of nationalities, which had long been making steady progress throughout Europe, had been constantly drawing the Norman barons and the English commonalty closer together, and separating both from the rival nationality of France. Nor had the nation at any time

1 And lately carefully edited by Dr. Lechler of Leipsic, for the Clarendon Press, 1869.

lost, so to speak, its personal identity: it was England for which the Norman Richard fought at Acre; and even William of Malmesbury, writing not a hundred years after the Conquest, speaks of that event rather as a change of dynasty occurring in English history, than as of a complete social revolution. The influence of the Church must have pressed powerfully in the same direction. Though the Conqueror filled nearly all the sees with Normans, it was not long before native Englishmen, through that noble respect for and recognition of human equality which were theoretically always, and sometimes practically maintained in the midst of feudalism by the Church of the Middle Ages, obtained a fair proportion of them. The political and official power of bishops in those days was great; and the native tongue of an English Archbishop of Canterbury could not even by the proud Norman barons, his compeers in Parliament, be treated with disrespect. Again: since 1340, England and France had been constantly at war; in this war the English-speaking archers, not the French-speaking barons, had won the chief laurels; and the tongue of a humbled beaten enemy was likely to be less attractive to the mass of Englishmen than ever. The well-known law of Edward III., passed in 1362, directing the English language to be used thenceforward in judicial pleadings, was merely an effect of the slow but resistless operation of these and other cognate causes. Again: it must not be lost sight of, that a sort of tacit compromise passed between the English and French speaking portions of the population: the former were to retain the entire grammar (so much, at least as was left of it) of the native speech; all the conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns the osseous structure, so to speak, of the language-were to be English; while, in return, the Normans were to be at liberty

to import French nouns, adjectives, and verbs at discretion, without troubling themselves to hunt for the corresponding terms in the old literary Anglo-Saxon. Finally this English language, so re-cast, became in the fourteenth century the chosen instrument of thought and expression for a great poet; and, after Chaucer, no Englishman could feel ashamed of his native tongue, nor doubt of its boundless capabilities.

Of the parentage of Geoffrey Chaucer nothing is known; but we have his own word for it1 that London was the place of his birth. The year seems to have been 1328,2 that in which Edward III. married Philippa of Hainault. Leland, writing in the time of Henry VIII., says that he was "nobili loco natus;" but he gives no authority for the statement. Godwin's supposition, founded upon a number of minute allusions scattered through his works, that his father was a merchant, or burgess of London, seems to be much more probable.

That he was educated at a university, may be held as certain; but, whether at Oxford or Cambridge, is not so clear. There is a passage in "The Court of Love,” line 912,

"Philogenet I called am ferre and nere,
Of Cambridge clerk;

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which seems to tell in favor of Cambridge. On the other hand, it is known that his most intimate friends and disciples, Gower, Strode, and Occleve, were Oxford men; and the earnest scholar who makes one of the group of Canterbury pilgrims is a "clerk of Oxenford.” In 1359 he served in the great army of invasion which Edward III. led over into France. In the course of

1 In "The Testament of Love."

2 This, however, is merely a conjecture of Speght (writing in 1597), coupling the date (1400) on the tombstone with Leland's assertion that he lived to the "period of gray hairs.”

this bootless expedition Chaucer was taken prisoner, but seems to have been released at the peace of Bretigny, in 1360. His marriage with Philippa Rouet is thought to have taken place in the same year. This lady was a native of Hainault, and maid of honor to Queen Philippa. Her sister Catherine was the third wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. These circumstances readily explain Chaucer's long and close connection with the court, commencing with the year 1367, when the king granted him a pension of twenty marks for life, under the designation of "dilectus valettus noster." His prudence and practical wisdom seem to have been as conspicuous as his more brilliant gifts, since he was at various times employed by the king on important diplomatic missions. One of these took him to Italy in 1373, in which year he is thought with the highest probability to have become acquainted with Petrarch, who was then living at Arqua, near Padua. What other sense can be attached to the famous passage in the prologue to "The Clerk's Tale"? —

"I wil you telle a tale, which that I
Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his wordes and his werk;
He is now dead, and nayled in his chest,
Now God give his soule wel good rest!

Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whose rhetorike swete
Enlumynd all Ytail of poetrie,

As Linian did of philosophie.”

Petrarch died in 1374, so that the acquaintance could not have been formed at the time of Chaucer's second visit to Italy, in 1378.

In 1374 Chaucer was appointed to the lucrative office of comptroller of the customs in the port of London. About the time of the king's death, in 1377, he was employed on more than one secret and delicate mission,