Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 8

mentioned by Shakspere--and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer
in the Nonne Presto's Tale. The verse was clumsy and the style
monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a
hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan's search for the
earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William
Morris.
About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old
English alliterative verse in romances like William and the Werewolf,
and Sir Gawayne, and in religious pieces such as Clannesse (purity),
Patience and The Perle, the last named a mystical poem of much
beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among
the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as well as alliteration.
They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that
alliteration was most common in the north. "I am a sotherne man," says
the parson in the Canterbury Tales. "I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by
my letter." But the most important of the alliterative poems was the
Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. In the second half of
the 14th century French had ceased to be the mother-tongue of any
considerable part of the population of England. By a statute of Edward

III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386 English had
taken its place in the schools. The {29} Anglo-Norman dialect had
grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the
provincial French spoken by his prioress, "after the scole of
Stratford-atte-Bowe." The native English genius was also beginning to
assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories in the wars
of Edward III. against the French. It was the bows of the English
yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of
the Norman baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes
and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed
upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church was corrupt; the
mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was
eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. The
social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes, which
finally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry, under Wat
Tyler and Jack Straw. This state of things is reflected in the Vision of
Piers Plowman, written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a
tonsured clerk of the west country. It is in form an allegory, and bears
some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the
Pilgrim's Progress. The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in
Worcestershire, and has a vision of a "fair field full of folk,"
representing the world with its various conditions of men. There were
pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who went to
Walsingham--and {30} their wenches after them--great lubbers and
long that were loth to work: friars glossing the Gospel for their own
profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences;
parish priests who forsook their parishes--that had been poor since the
pestilence time--and went to London to sing there for simony; bishops,
archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the
Exchequer, or King's Bench; in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt
ecclesiastics. A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the
dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a
sermon the text of which is, "When all treasure is tried, truth is the
best." A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced,
Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after a series
of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven
deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic

impersonations, and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in
search of St. Truth, finding no guide to direct them save Piers the
Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound
heart of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight
divisions or "passus," to which was added a continuation in three parts,
Vita Do Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best. About 1377 the whole was greatly
enlarged by the author.
Piers Plowman was the first extended literary work after the Conquest
which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but
the {31} allegorical cast which the Roman de la Rose had made
fashionable in both countries. But even here such personified
abstractions as Langland's Fair-speech and Work-when-time-is, remind
us less of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French
courtly allegories than of Bunyan's Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of
such Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land
Busy. The poem is full of English moral seriousness,