vivors, once little better than serfs, asserted themselves in a manner that alarmed the landed proprietors and prompted some futile legislation. There was the Jacquerie or Peasants' Insurrection in France. In England there were the uprisings of Wat Tyler, John Ball, and Jack Straw, partly a revolt against unjust taxation and oppressive landlords, and partly, especially in London, an assault upon the Flemings, who had been imported by Edward III to establish the manufacture of cloth, and of whom native workmen were intensely jealous. The Eastern Question, too, was assuming a strangely modern appearance. In 1343 the Turk first got a foothold in Europe, and twenty years later began the meteoric career of Tamerlane, infinitely prophetic of barbarous possibilities from the Orient. The revolt against the Pope, which resulted in the complicated movement known as the Reformation, began in the fourteenth century with Wyclif in England and with John Huss in Bohemia. The Revival of Learning also falls in this century; Petrarch and Boccaccio were Chaucer's contemporaries. The interest in education was widespread. A whole chain of universities, from Cracow to Saint Andrews, were established between 1340 and 1410. The extension of the British empire was never a more vital question than at this time. The armed assertion of Edward's claims to the crown of France, the war of Richard II in Ireland, and the attempt of John of Gaunt to seize the kingdom of Castile, show how farreaching this movement was. One can even see a forecast of the gold and silver question in the time of Edward III. The king's gold nobles became immediately famous. They were readily accepted by foreign merchants everywhere, as sovereigns pass current to-day. Many similar details might be enumerated, but enough has been said to indicate

that Chaucer was born in a time of great religious and political and literary activity.

By station, and by the incidents of his career, Chaucer was peculiarly fitted to express the complicated life of this intensely 'modern' age. He belonged to the wellto-do burgher class, and his family stood in some kind of relation to the court. He was neither too high nor too low to be well acquainted with all varieties of English life. In his youth he became page to the Countess of Ulster, and from this time he always enjoyed some kind of official emolument within the royal gift. He was a Collector of the Customs, a Superintendent of Buildings, and an officer in charge of what we should now call the Thames Conservation. He was also a Member of Parliament for a short time. But his experiences were not merely insular. He visited France and Italy several times on business of state, and thus came into close relations with foreign life and letters as well as with diplomacy. As courtier, officeholder, legislator, soldier, diplomatist, burgher of London, he came into contact with every sort of person worth knowing, from king to apprentice. Probably no man had a broader and more intimate knowledge of the social life of the fourteenth century. Add to all this the splendid accident of genius, and you have a writer astonishingly well equipped to depict all sorts and conditions of men as they thought and acted in this interesting time.

Chaucer found his native East Midland dialect already a cultivated language. There had been much narrative poetry written in this dialect. It was, in the main, the English of commerce, of the court, and of the universities. Before he had written a line, the East Midland dialect seemed likely to become standard or literary English, and it doubtless would have achieved that position, even if he

had never been born. Still, the process would have been more gradual and much less certain. What was needed at this juncture was a literary man, a poet of commanding genius, whose native dialect was that which stood ready to be stamped as literary English forever. Chaucer was such a poet; and after his death nobody doubted that the language as he had written it was the best English.

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It must not be thought that Chaucer actually imported many new words into our language. Almost every word that he used can be found somewhere at any earlier date. Most of his French and Latin borrowings' had been made before. What he did for the Midland dialect was rather to write it with an ease, a polish, and a regularity which had not been hitherto attained, and to use it as the vehicle for first-rate poetry. This stamped the language of Chaucer at once as the literary standard. The excellence of his English is celebrated by his contemporaries and successors. By his side stood Gower, who wrote in the same dialect. Gower, though no genius, was a skilful versifier and the master of an extremely neat style. Fortunately, his influence on the language coincided with Chaucer's in almost every particular. Gower without Chaucer would not have sufficed. Chaucer without Gower would have been abundantly able to accomplish what was necessary. The coincidence of their efforts was fortunate for the English language. Chaucer died in 1400. His successors and feeble pupils, Hoccleve and Lydgate, though they contributed nothing of value to English poetry, did much to popularize the language of Chaucer, which they directly imitated in every possible way. There was no longer any doubt what was the English literary language: it was the East Midland dialect, and whoever wrote in any other dialect was not

writing standard English, but a local or provincial patois. Since 1400 there has been a very slight shift, so that Modern English is a trifle more northerly than Chaucer's dialect, but this is of no importance in the present discussion.1

It is to be noticed that the dialect which finally became literary English, and which, therefore, all educated speakers of English use, however they may differ among themselves in details, is not the descendant of King Alfred's West Saxon, but of quite a different dialect, the Mercian. The West Saxon is now represented by the rustic dialects of Wilts and Dorset in the South of England.

The triumph of the Midland Dialect was complete by 1450, and soon caused most of the other dialects to fall into disuse as literary media. In the north, however, a variety of the Northumbrian was developed into the Scottish language, which was subjected to many special influences, and received much literary cultivation. The Scottish language could not maintain itself, however. It has been constrained to consort with the dialects once more, though it still maintains an exceptionally dignified position among them.

Thus every one of the three dialects of the Anglo-Saxons has had its chance. The Northumbrian became the first literary English. The West Saxon succeeded to that position, and held it until the Norman Conquest. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Mercian made good its claims and won a recognition which was final.

1 The most striking evidence of this shift is seen in the use of s instead of th in the third person singular of verbs. Chaucer said hath, doth, waileth, for example, but we say has, does, wails.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LATIN IN ENGLISH

IN sketching the development of the English language we have confined our attention to the native (AngloSaxon) element and to the influence exerted by Norman and Parisian French. We have yet to consider the indebtedness of our language to the Latin.

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English began to borrow words from the Latin before there was any English. Street (L. strata [via], 'a paved road'), wall (L. vallum), chalk (L. calx, calcis, lime'), and a few other terms entered the West Germanic dialects before the Anglo-Saxon Conquest of Britain. A few others were learned by the invaders from the Britons, who had been Roman colonists for three or four hundred years. Among these were port (L. portus) and -chester, -caster (L. castra, 'camp'), as seen in the name of the County of Chester, and in Silchester, Lancaster, etc. The conversion of the invaders to Christianity immediately brought in a number of religious and ecclesiastical words, like pope, bishop, monk, nun, which we have already studied (p. 44). From this time to the present, the borrowing of Latin words has gone on incessantly. We have seen that this is true of the technical dialects of divinity, philosophy, law, and natural science. But the influence of Latin is not confined to the technical vocabulary. It is felt in almost every sentence that we utter. It pervades the whole system of English speech.