t
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 me