church endowments. He was supported by his patron, John of Gaunt, whose personal unpopularity, however, caused a riot, and the proceedings came to naught. Both king and Parliament, nevertheless, supported his resistance to the papal demands; and, when his enemies procured bulls from Rome formulating charges against him, the university refused to condemn Wyclif. Another riot took place, this time in his favour, when he was brought before the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, who ordered him to desist from preaching his doctrines (1378), a command he did not obey. After the papal schism his opposition to the claims of the Roman see grew more determined; he described the Pope as Antichrist, and denounced the practices of the Church as in conflict with the original purity of the faith.

Wyclif was at length driven from Oxford, and retired to his parish work at Lutterworth; but he calmly defied the papal citation to Rome, and never relaxed either his crusade against papal demands and for Church reform, or his denial of transubstantiation and his preaching of a purer religion based on the Bible. His "Poor Priests" carried his teachings far and wide through the dioceses of Lincoln, Norwich, and Worcester, where there were afterwards many centres of Lollardy. They were accused of fomenting the Socialist tendencies that underlay the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The social upheaval was stifled, but the seeds of religious reform brought forth fruit a century later, though the suppression of Wyclifism at Oxford extinguished not only religious freedom, but also all intellectual life in the university, until the coming of the New Learning. In the nation at large, moreover, the march of civilization was now interrupted by the long struggle of the Houses of Lancaster and York. The literary outburst had produced two great poets, one of them among our greatest, and several lesser poets, and was succeeded by the dullest period in our intellectual history. Its one permanent result was to have fixed the language. Chaucer's are the first works that we can still read with a sense that, however antique the form of his words, the vocabulary and the style are Modern English.

CHAPTER 2. GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Translations: Roman de la Rose; Boethius.-Minor Poems: Death of Blanche the
Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, Legend of Good
Women-Canterbury Tales

Chaucer may be called the true founder of the line of English poets, as we give the title of founder of the family to that ancestor who first established it upon a firm basis of prosperity, and gave it a lasting influence and reputation. The full justification of this claim will be found by comparing Chaucer's poetry with the work of his predecessors, with the English of his contemporaries John Wyclif and the author of Piers Plowman, with the poetry of his immediate successors, and with the work and opinions of later poets-notably of Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Keats, and William Morris.

His greatness and national importance have never been in doubt from the first. Within twelve years of his death his follower, Thomas Hoccleve, wrote of him as "This londes verray tresour and richesse," and lamented his death in well-known stanzas: But wele away, so is myn herte wo,

That the honoùr of English tounge is dead,
Of which I was wonte have counseil and rede.

O maister dere and fadir reverent,

My maister Chaucer, floure of eloquence,
Mirrour of fructuous entendement,

O universal fadir in science,

Allas! that thou thyne excellent prudence

In thy bedde mortel myghtest not bequethe;

What eyled Dethe? allas, why wold he sle the ?

O Dethe, that didest not harme singulere

In slaughtre of hym, but alle this lond it smerteth,

But natheles yit hast thou no powere

His name to slee; his hye vertu asterteth
Unsleyne fro the, which ay us lyfly herteth
With bookes of his ornat endityng

That is to alle this lond enlumynyng.

A hundred and eighty years afterwards, when Spenser is retelling and completing Chaucer's Squire's Tale, he sets forth on the adventures of Cambalo and Canace :

As that renowned poet them compiled
With warlike numbers and heroicke sound,

Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled

On Fame's eternall bead-roll worthie to be fyled.

And fifty years later the same story of the same poet haunts the "divinest melancholy" of Il Penseroso.

Another fifty years, and Dryden utters his famous judgment to the same purpose, though in the tones of a different age:

In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer or the Romans Virgil. . . . He has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. . . . 'Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that Here is God's plenty. We have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days: their general characters are still remaining in mankind and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons and Lady Abbesses and Nuns; for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of Nature, though everything is altered.

Until we come to Shakespeare there is no other poet of whom anything like this could be said; and it follows that when we speak of English poetry to-day, as a whole tradition and a whole achievement, capable of being understood and enjoyed by educated Englishmen of any generation, we have no choice but to begin our account of it with Chaucer. As Professor Saintsbury has said, "Chaucer is not the earliest (of that generation of accomplished poets and prose-writers in whom culminates the long process of incubation and experiment); and he is not the only one worthy of attention. But he is by so much the greatest figure that

he deserves to give, as he has always given, name to the period, and to have precedence of

those who, like Gower possibly, Langland, if Langland it was, and Wyclif pretty certainly, had the start of him in literary performance."

Life.-Geoffrey Chaucer, the grandson of Robert Chaucer, Collector of Customs, and son of John Chaucer, a London vintner, was born about 1340, and is first heard of in 1357 in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. In 1359 he was taken prisoner during the war with France, and ransomed the next year by the aid of Edward III., in whose household he was (or became) a yeoman of the chamber, being granted in 1367 a pension of twenty marks for his services, and raised in or before 1369 to the rank of one of the king's esquires of less degree. During the next ten years he was employed on several diplomatic

Geoffrey Chaucer.

missions, one of which in 1372 took him to Genoa, another in 1378 to Milan, and others to France and Flanders. In 1374 he was granted by the king a pitcher of wine daily (commuted for twenty marks a year), leased a house over the gate at Aldgate, was appointed Controller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wool and Hides in the Port of London, and received a pension of £10 from John of Gaunt for the services of himself and his wife Philippa, identified beyond serious doubt as a daughter of Sir Payne Roet. He received other grants in 1375 and 1376, the Controllership of the Petty Customs of the Port of London in 1382, and became a justice of the peace for Kent in 1385 and knight of the shire in 1386. At the end of that year he lost both his controllerships, and was henceforth less prosperous, save for two years (1389-91) during which he was clerk of the king's works at the palace of Westminster and Tower of London. In 1394 Richard II. granted him a new pension of £20, and in 1398 a yearly tun of wine; and in 1399 Henry IV. promised him an additional pension of forty marks. He died on October 25, 1400, in a house he had recently rented in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and was buried in St. Benet's Chapel (now known as Poets' Corner) in Westminster Abbey.

Works.—While in the king's household Chaucer translated the famous Roman de la Rose, or part of it, and wrote numerous love-poems. Some 1,700 lines of the existing version of the Roman may be his, but we have nothing that is both certainly his and certainly early work before the Death of Blanche the Duchess, commemorating the wife of his patron John of Gaunt, who died in November 1369. A Complaint of the Death of Pity, an A B C or hymn to the Blessed Virgin, a Complaint to his Lady (written in the metre of Dante's Divina Commedia), the Legend of St. Cecilia, Tale of Constance, Tale of Grisilde, and some of the short "Tragedies" afterwards assigned to the Monk in the Canterbury Tales, were all probably written in the next decade. To the years 1381-5 belong Queen Anelida and False Arcite (a fragment), the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde (based on Boccaccio's Filostrato), House of Fame (unfinished), story of Palamon and Arcite (based on Boccaccio's Teseide and revised as the Knight's Tale), and an uncompleted series of lives of Cupid's saints, with two versions of a delightful prologue, entitled the Legend of Good Women; also a prose translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius. The idea of a great series of tales to be assigned to pilgrims travelling to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury now took shape, and save for a few Balades and a prose treatise on the Astrolabe (unfinished), all the rest of Chaucer's work went into this.

Chaucer primarily a Story-teller. In the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, when Chaucer is accused by Cupid of heresy against love, it is pleaded on his behalf that he had made many a hymn for love's holiday," that highten Balades, Roundels, Virelayes." A charming roundel has come down to us embedded in the Parliament of Fowls, with the refrain

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