wider one of the relations between the two nationalities, could only be
decided by the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the
one side upon the other. The Norman noble, his ideas, and the
expression they found in forms of life and literature, had henceforth,
so to speak, to stand on their merits; the days of their dominion as a
matter of course had passed away.

Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman nobles
of Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order.
Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusades; but it was a
difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in
these degenerate days. No laurels were any longer to be gained in the
Holy Land; and though the campaigns of the great German Order against
the pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an
English knight--in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster,
fought there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV, did forty
years later--yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind. Of the
great mediaeval companies of Knights, the most famous had, early in the
century, perished under charges which were undoubtedly in the main foul
fictions, but at the same time were only too much in accord with facts
betokening an unmistakable decay of the true spirit of chivalry; before
the century closed, lawyers were rolling parchments in the halls of the
Templars by the Thames. Thus, though the age of chivalry had not yet
ended, its supremacy was already on the wane, and its ideal was growing
dim. In the history of English chivalry the reign of Edward III is
memorable, not only for the foundation of our most illustrious order of
knighthood, but likewise for many typical acts of knightly valour and
courtesy, as well on the part of the King when in his better days, as
on that of his heroic son. Yet it cannot be by accident that an
undefinable air of the old-fashioned clings to that most delightful of
all Chaucer's character-sketches, the "Knight" of the "Canterbury
Tales." His warlike deeds at Alexandria, in Prussia, and elsewhere,
may be illustrated from those of more than one actual knight of the
times; and the whole description of him seems founded on one by a
French poet of King John of Bohemia, who had at least the external
features of a knight of the old school. The chivalry, however, which
was in fashion as the century advanced, was one outwardly far