and its
censures. But in the days when Chaucer and the generation with which
he grew up were young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died
out in the land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing
the burdens which military glory has at all times brought with it for a
civilised people. The high spirit of the English nation, at a time
when the decline in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), is
evident from the answer given to the application from Rome for the
arrears of thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King John, or
rather from what must unmistakeably have been the drift of that answer.
Its terms are unknown, but the demand was never afterwards repeated.

The power of England in the period of an ascendancy to which she so
tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon the valour of
her arms. Our country was already a rich one in comparison with most
others in Europe. Other purposes besides that of providing good cheer
for a robust generation were served by the wealth of her great landed
proprietors, and of the "worthy vavasours" (smaller landowners) who,
like Chaucer's "Franklin"--a very Saint Julian or pattern of
hospitality--knew not what it was to be "without baked meat in the
house," where their

tables dormant in the hall alway
Stood ready covered all the longe day.

From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders came
the laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which did so
much to consolidate national feeling in England. The foreign companies
of merchants long contrived to retain the chief share of the banking
business and export trade assigned to them by the short-sighted
commercial policy of Edward III, and the weaving and fishing industries
of Hanseatic and Flemish immigrants had established an almost
unbearable competition in our own ports and towns. But the active
import trade, which already connected England with both nearer and
remoter parts of Christendom, must have been largely in native hands;
and English chivalry, diplomacy, and literature followed in the lines
of the trade-routes to the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Our mariners,
like their type the "Shipman" in Chaucer (an anticipation of the
"Venturer" of later days, with the pirate as yet, perhaps, more
strongly marked in him than the patriot),--

knew well all the havens, as they were
From Gothland, to the Cape of Finisterre,
And every