Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/346

Rh 326 old grammatical forms, which had adopted a crowd of foreign words, and which had even displaced many English words to make way for them. Still the unbroken continuity, the personal being as it were, of the native tongue remained untouched. We may say that in one age French displaced English, that iu another age English displaced French. But the English tongue always remained the English tongue. The tongue of Chaucer did not displace the tongue of Beowulf; the elder form of the language changed into the younger by gradual and imperceptible shades. The fourteenth century was one of the great periods of English literature. The devotional vein which had never ceased, the satirical vein which Ladbegun : most likely begun again in the thirteenth century, -flowed together in the fourteenth to form the great work, religious, moral, and social, of William Langland, the Vision of Piers the Ploughman. And after the English poet of the people soon came the English poet of more courtly life and more courtly speech in the person of Geoffrey Chaucer. And alongside of these more famous names we have a considerable mass of verse, political and satirical, on the events of the times. But while a hundred years earlier compositions of this kind were written indif ferently in three languages, we have them now in two only; they are written in Latin and in English, but never in French. We have indeed one French chronicle of this time, that which records the deposition and death of Richard ; but it is the work of a Frenchman. But it is now that English prose comes to the front in the hands of Wickliffe, in the form of his translation of the Bible and of his countless popular tracts. From his time a series of prose writers has never failed us. The English version of the travels of Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century, the theological writings of Bishop Reginald Peacock in the fifteenth, carry on the series from the days of the great master. Prose history in English does not appear in the fourteenth century, and it is of small importance in the fifteenth. But that is the case with our history generally. The old series of the Latin historians of England is but feebly represented in the fourteenth century, and it can hardly be said to be represented at all in the fifteenth. The great school of St Albans comes down to Thomas of Wals- ingham and Abbot Whethamstead. But we now look in vain at St Albans for successors of Matthew Paris, as we look in vain elsewhere for successors of William of Malmes- bury or William of Newburgh. Sum- It is therefore not too much to say that, in the course Diai&amp;gt;5r&amp;gt; of this period, the period of the Hundred Years War, England finally took its modern shape. The essence of the constitution, the main points of the law, the dominant language, all took a shape which has since been changed only in detail. In all these things the formation of the England that was to be was brought to perfection in this age. And if the remaining distinctive characteristic of England was not brought to perfection in this age, the first steps to it were already taken. The papal claims were narrowly limited by law; ecclesiastical revenues were alienated by authority of parliament; if strictly religious reformation obtained no legal sanction, yet its seeds were now for the first time sown in the heart of the people. And if this was the age when the main features of English political life put on their present form, it was no less so with the main features of English social life. The dis tinguishing elements of English society, the peer as distin guished from the continental noble, the country gentleman, the farmer, the free labourer all of them elements so specially English all take nearly their present shape dur ing this time. Villainage, if not actually abolished, received its death-blow. The mingling of classes is shown even by the olitrarchic statutes which tried in some measure to [HISTORY. hinder it. Esquires had long represented shires as well as actual knights. The rich citizen could buy a landed estate, and in a generation or two his children counted as esquires. The towns were growing in wealth and political importance, but their internal constitutions were getting narrower. The law was administered by nearly the same courts as it is now, and the abundance of lawsuits kept all courts, great and small, fully supplied with business. This growth of the law, the specially English law, statute and common, led to the rapid growth and increasing importance of the class of professional lawyers, men who practised the statute and common law of England, as distinguished from the professors of the law of Rome, civil and canon. Their importance is shown in the fourteenth century, by a peti tion of the Commons that the practitioners of the law might not be returned as knights of the shire ; it was more terribly shown towards the end of that century in the bitter hatred towards the whole lawyer class which was shown in the peasant revolt. But notwithstanding both laws and lawyers, we find that powerful men, to say nothing of the king himself, were often able to interfere with the due administration of the law. But this fault is common to all lands. What is specially English is that, though the law was often broken, yet the law remained to rebuke those who broke it, and to triumph over them in the end. Thus, on the whole, practical peace and order, as well as constitutional freedom, steadily advanced during this age. Not the smallest sign of its advance is the marked im provement in domestic architecture. The style which Advan came in with the latter half of the fourteenth century and f tlon went on in use during the fifteenth, is commonly looked on as a decline from the style of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Yet, even as applied to churches, this style is not without its own merits, and it is the charac teristic domestic style of England. Up to the end of the thirteenth century, we have but small remains of houses, houses as distinguished from castles and not built within the walls of a town. But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries England was covered with houses of all classes, manor-houses, parsonages, houses of substantial yeomen, of wood or stone according to their district, often excellent examples of the architecture of the time, and witnessing to the general state of security in the greater part of the country. We at once contrast them with the houses of the same and of a much later date on the Scottish border and in Ireland, where the esquire and the priest still had to live for safety s sake in the pele-tower. This last is in truth nothing but a continuation of the square Xorman keep m a smaller and ruder form. In short, in England security, liberty, and political rights were spread over the whole country. They were not, as in most other lands, confined to the inhabitants either of fortified towns or of private strongholds. Three hundred and fifty years of struggle had thus made England once more fully herself after the great overthrow of the Norman Conquest. In a formal narrative of English history, our tale would now, as it draws nearer and nearer to our own time, be fittingly told in greater detail at eacli stage. In a sketch like the present the opposite process would seem to be no less fitting. We now know what England is. She has made herself; she has won her rights; she has now to defend, to secure, when needful to reform ; she lias no longer any need to create. The only exception is with regard to her religious history. In other respects all that has henceforth to be done is to keep what has already been gained. In the religious department alone, there is still something to be gained, something, if not to be created, at least to be put into a wholly new shape.