1350-1477.] ENGLISH LITERATURE against the claim asserted by the Pope to receive " Peter s pence," or an equivalent, from the English nation. These views he was said to have borrowed from Marsilius of Padua and John of Gaudun ; but in truth such Ghibeline sentiments were so common in France and Germany, as well as Italy, that it is needless, in Wickliffe s case, to attempt to trace them to particular authors. Afterwards he broached some singular opinions on several abstruse points of metaphysics, which led to " determinations " or treatises being published against him by John Kyningham, a Carmelite, and John Tyssington, a Franciscan. Lastly, he aroused a theological storm, about 1380, by reviving some thing like the condemned heresy of Berengarius on the mode of the presence of Christ in the sacrament. Picplies were written by Wynterton, Wells, Berton, and others. A synod met in London and condemned Wickliffe s doctrine ; he died at Lutterworth soon afterwards. The whole com plex controversy which he had stirred up was taken in hand, some years later, by a man of vast ability and learning, Thomas Walden the Carmelite, one of the English theologians who took part in the council of Constance. Walden s Doctrinale Fidei has been more than once printed on the Continent. All the writings hitherto described were in Latin. But AYickliffe, on the principle " Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo," resolved to carry the conflict into a more spacious arena, and to appeal to popular sympathy by writing in the language of the people. He preached and circulated many English sermons ; he organized his "pore priestes " as a body of itinerant preachers; assisted by his followers he put into circulation an incredible number of English tracts, directed against abuses in discipline, and what he deemed errors in doctrine. Lastly, he caused to be made a complete English translation of the ^ 7 ulgate Bible, and himself, in all probability, took a con siderable share in the work. His efforts, seconded by those of his principal adherents, such as Herford, Repington, Purvey, ttc., gave rise to the sect of the Lollards, which must have rapidly grown into importance, since it received marked notice in the poetry (written probably between 1380 and 1390), of both Chaucer and Gower. The famous Act " De heretico comburendo" of 1401, and the rigid inquisitorial measures instituted by Archbishop Arundel, and carried on by Chichely, drove Lollardism beneatli the surface of society and from the pages of avowed literature. Yet, though repressed, the spirit of discontent survived. Many Lollards were burnt so late as in the first year of Henry VIIT. ; and the rain of pamphlets and ballads against the church and the clergy, which burst forth as soon as the king was ascertained to be hostile to them, was a sufficient indication of the pent-up hatred which filled the breasts of thousands.
- ock. The career of Pecock, bishop of Chichester, may be
regarded as an incident of Lollardism. Feeling sore and uneasy under the attacks which men, many of whom were undeniably earnest and moral, were making on the clergy and their doings, Pecock wrote in English The Repres- sor of over-much wytinge [blaming] of the Cleryie. He thought that the time for appealing to authority was gone by, and that the Lollards could only be reconciled to the church by proving that her precepts and her ritual were in themselves reasonable. In short, he made the reason of the individual the judge of the goodness, or otherwise, of what the church did and commanded. On this ground his brother bishops could not follow him ; his books were condemned at a synod held in 1457, and he was deposed from his bishopric. English literature in the full and proper sense, of which we saw the beginnings in the cumbrous alex andrines of Robert of Gloucester, and the more pleasing and successful writings of Manning, asserts itself in this period as a growth of time, destined to have thenceforward an independent being and a powerful influence. It is interesting to note that two distinct and rival ten dencies now make their appearance, which may be de scribed as the Teutonic affinity and the Franco-Latin affinity. The sturdiness and self-reliance of the old Saxon blood led many Englishmen to undervalue the culture of the day, which came from the South, and to look lovingly towards the old Teutonic rock from which they were hewn, in the faith that true light and deliverance were to be found there. Of this tendency Langland is the chief representative in the 14th century. He employs the old rhythm of the Teutonic nations, alliteration ; he rejects French models, and studies not French poets: the homely kindly life of the English lower and lower-middle classes is what he loves to depict ; the covetousness and ambition of the foreign ecclesiastics who absorb English prelacies he is never tired of denouncing. The whole body of alliterating poets, and recent investigation has Allitcra- shown that their number was considerable even down to tlve the 16th century, the last known alliterative piece is poe * by Dunbar, represent, with Langland, this Teutonic affinity. Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and the writers who formed themselves upon them, represent the Franco-Latin affinity. Endowed with a more receptive temper and finer perceptions than the men of the opposite school, Chaucer opened his large heart and capacious intelligence to all forms of excellence within his reach ; and a man so minded could not fail to see that what had been written in French and Italian far outweighed what had hitherto been written in English or German. Neither could his more cultivated ear fail to prefer the rhyme of the South to the alliteration of the North. " I am a Southron man," he says under the mask of the Persone " I cannot gestc, rom, ram, ruf, by my letter;" that is, I cannot write alliterative poems like Langland. Wherever good words were to be had, Chaucer appropriated them, whether their origin were Saxon or Romance; wher ever he found a good poem, he imitated it, often bettering the instruction. This veracity of the intellect, this large- mindedness, were the cause that our early literature was laid on broad foundations, and contributed not a little to the many-sided and sympathetic character of our language. The labours of Tyrwhitt and Warton, and in our own day of Sandras and Ten-Brink, have laid bare the sources whence the genius of Chaucer drew its materials and Chauc.-r. derived its kindling suggestions. The old notion that his earliest writings show the influence of the Provencal poetry has been abandoned on more accurate inquiry. The Complaynt of the Dethe of Pite, which is among the earliest, if not the earliest, of the extant compositions, is saturated with the French spirit. The great work of his early youth was the translation of the Roman de la Rose of Lorris and Meung, a poem, be it remembered, not the growth of Normandy, but of France proper, not the work of trouveres, but of French poets. This transformation and sublimation of the romance of the earlier into the dream and allegory of the later Middle Ages, originated by the genius of Lorris, was eagerly adopted by Chaucer, most of whose pieces, prior to the great work of his life, the Canterbury Tales, were cast in the allegorical mould. This is the case with the Assembly of Foules, where the gentle " formel eagle " is believed to represent Isabel, daughter of Edward III., betrothed in 1364 to Engelrain de Couci, as the formel is in the poem to the "royal tercel." Again the Eoke of the Duchesse, on the death of Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, in 1369, is, in form, a vision seen in a dream ; it is also full of actual borrowings
from the French poets Lorris, Meung, and Machault. The