Englands Antiphon | Page 9

much.
Scribe_. Alas the time that this betyd! _happened. Right bitter care doth
me embrace.
All my sins be now unhid,
Yon man before me them
all doth trace.
If I were once out of this place,
To suffer death great
and vengeance able,[15]
I will never come before his face,
Though
I should die in a stable.
Upon this follows The Raising of Lazarus_; next The Council of the
Jews_, to which the devil appears as a Prologue, dressed in the extreme
of the fashion of the day, which he sets forth minutely enough in his

speech also. _The Entry into Jerusalem; The Last Supper; The Betrayal;
King Herod; The Trial of Christ; Pilate's Wife's Dream_ come next; to
the subject of the last of which the curious but generally accepted
origin is given, that it was inspired by Satan, anxious that Jesus should
not be slain, because he dreaded the mischief he would work when he
entered Hades or Hell, for there is no distinction between them either
here or in the Apocryphal Gospel whence the Descent into Hell is taken.
Then follow The Crucifixion_ and _The Descent into Hell--often called
the Harrowing of Hell_--that is, the _making war upon_ or despoiling
of hell_,[16] for which the authority is a passage in the Gospel of
Nicodemus, full of a certain florid Eastern grandeur. I need hardly
remind my readers that the Apostles' Creed, as it now stands, contains
the same legend in the form of an article of faith. The allusions to it are
frequent in the early literature of Christendom.
The soul of Christ comes to the gates of hell, and says:
Undo your gates of sorwatorie; place of sorrow. On man's soul I have
memorie;
There cometh now the king of glory,
These gates for to
breke!
Ye devils that are here within,
Hell gates ye shall unpin;
I
shall deliver man's kin--
From woe I will them wreke. avenge.

Against me it were but waste
To holdyn or to standyn fast;

Hell-lodge may not last
Against the king of glory.
Thy dark door
down I throw;
My fair friends now well I know;
I shall them bring,
reckoned by row,
Out of their purgatory!
_The Burial; The Resurrection; The Three Maries; Christ appearing to
Mary; The Pilgrim of Emmaus; The Ascension; The Descent of the
Holy Ghost; The Assumption of the Virgin_; and Doomsday, close the
series. I have quoted enough to show that these plays must, in the
condition of the people to whom they were presented, have had much
to do with their religious education.
This fourteenth century was a wonderful time of outbursting life.

Although we cannot claim the Miracles as entirely English products,
being in all probability translations from the Norman-French, yet the
fact that they were thus translated is one remarkable amongst many in
this dawn of the victory of England over her conquerors. From this
time, English prospered and French decayed. Their own language was
now, so far, authorized as the medium of religious instruction to the
people, while a similar change had passed upon processes at law; and,
most significant of all, the greatest poet of the time, and one of the
three greatest poets as yet of all English time, wrote, although a courtier,
in the language of the people. Before selecting some of Chaucer's
religious verses, however, I must speak of two or three poems by other
writers.
The first of these is _The Vision of William concerning Piers
Plowman_,--a poem of great influence in the same direction as the
writings of Wycliffe. It is a vision and an allegory, wherein the vices of
the time, especially those of the clergy, are unsparingly dealt with.
Towards the close it loses itself in a metaphysical allegory concerning
Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest.[17] I do not find much poetry in it. There is
more, to my mind, in another poem, written some thirty or forty years
later, the author of which is unknown, perhaps because he was an
imitator of William Langland, the author of the Vision_. It is called
Pierce the Plough-man's Crede_. Both are written after the fashion of
the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and not after the fashion of the Anglo-Norman,
of which distinction a little more presently. Its object is to contrast the
life and character of the four orders of friars with those of a simple
Christian. There is considerable humour in the working plan of the
poem.
A certain poor man says he has succeeded in learning his A B C, his
Paternoster, and his Ave Mary, but he cannot, do what he will, learn his
Creed. He sets out, therefore, to find some one whose life, according
with his profession, may give him a hope that he will teach him his
creed aright. He applies to the friars. One after another, every order