CHARACTERISTICS OF FOURTEENTH CENTURY 95 of splendour, but this involved costly ostentation and continual war, bringing along with them poverty and famine, and the systematic employment of hired mercenaries. It was equally inevitable that the enthusiasm which had created the religious orders of the preceding age should decay, and that the apostles of the thirteenth century should become the impostors of the fourteenth. The " Babylonish captivity" of the Church at Avignon augmented its corruptions and dimmed its halo of sanctity; while the unforeseen, and in the then state of medical and sanitary knowledge, irresistible calamity of the Black Death, four times a visitor to England, by the havoc which it made among the labouring population, profoundly modified the existing social relations, and begot a spirit of discontent and revolt. Here were materials for a great satiric poet, and England found one in William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman. Yet as this Janus age had another and far different face; its gay and gallant aspects, its good-humour and genial enjoyment of life, the sumptuousness of its apparel, and the picturesqueness of its manners, were to be represented by another and a greater poet, the English Langland's man" Boccaccio; as the seer of Piers Plowman, notwithstanding the enormous disparity of genius, may be styled the English Dante. Chaucer will need a chapter to himself. Langland may be fitly introduced here as the consummation of that strictly national style of poetry to which our attention has hitherto been mainly confined, and which, having been carried by him to the utmost height of which it was capable, is about to yield to a more perfect form of art, as Ennius and Lucilius of old gave place to Virgil and Horace. The poem of Piers Plowman was widely popular from the first, but the "Piers Plow- author is named by no contemporary, and few circumstances of his life are positively known. It is, nevertheless, not difficult to form a fair picture of the man from the internal evidence of his work. He represents himself as beholding his vision on Malvern Hill, and there is no reason to distrust Bishop Bale's statement that he was born at Cleobury Mortimer, on the border of the adjacent county of Shropshire, though this is nearly three times as far from Malvern as the eight miles stated by Bale. It is within a few miles of Areley, where, more than a century before, Layamon had dwelt and sung. Langland's Shropshire or Worcestershire birth is also confirmed by the evidence of his West Midland dialect. From his own statement respecting the age he had attained about 1377, he would seem to have been born in 1332. He represents himself as having received a good education, but as having in some measure neglected his opportunities. His works, nevertheless, evince acquaintance with many Latin and French authors. He had taken minor orders, which did not disable him from marrying. The reason why he advanced no farther in the ecclesiastical hierarchy may well be that he was already married when ordained he certainly had a legitimate wife and daughter by 1362. He was consequently unable to hold a benefice, and his principal vocation would be to participate in occasional services, especially masses for the dead. He speaks of himself as supported by Paternoster, Primer, and Psalter; and as dropping in from time to time "now at some gentleman's house, now at some lady's," "begging without bag or bottle," "roaming about, robed in russet." His life seems to have been chiefly spent in London, with many of whose streets and quarters he exhibits a close acquaintance. He had ample means of becoming intimate with all orders of society, and his mysticism is tempered by a wide knowledge of the world. Character of The character assumed by Langland is that of the prophet, denouncing the sins of society and encouraging men to aspire to a higher life. He is perhaps the first English writer to appear formally in this capacity, and it might be difficult to find another by whom it has been supported with less of occasional unreason and fanaticism. He could never have rivalled the eloquence of a Carlyle or a Ruskin, even had the language in which he wrote been at as advanced a stage as theirs. But he is more constructive than the former, and more consistent than the latter. On the other hand, he has few deep or surprising gleams of insight. He is a conservative reformer, who would rather preserve by amendment than destroy to rebuild. He takes a keen interest in the politics of his day, and usually "PIERS PLOWMAN' 97 sides with the Commons in their disputes with the Crown. He is always patriotic, and, as M. Jusserand says, insular; he would maintain the old distinctions of classes and fix wages by the authority of the State; he detests Lombards as Queen Anne's country gentlemen detested the moneyed interest. Stringent and fiery in reproof as he is, he is yet tender to penitent transgressors. His liberality of nature is shown by his kindly mention of the Jew. Honest, healthy, homely, he is an Englishman of the best type, a precursor and practically an ally of Wycliffe, dealing with the ethical side of current beliefs and customs as Wycliffe dealt with the theological. His Protestantism is undeveloped, he preserves considerable respect for the Chair of Peter, but his tendencies are entirely anti-sacerdotal. He bitterly denounces the worldliness of the Papacy, the greed of the legates the luxury of the clergy, and the traffic in relics and indulgences, and plainly foretells the downfall of the religious houses: "And now [he says] is religion a rider, a roamer by streets, A leader of lovedayes and a land-buyer, A priker on a palfrey from manor to manor, A hep of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were, And but his knave knele, that shall his cuppe bring, He lowreth on hym, and asketh hym who taught hym curtesie." Langland represents the dissatisfaction of the lower and the more thinking classes of English society as Chaucer represents the content of the aristocracy and the prosperous middle class. Each is in a manner the comple VOL. I. G |