of either fiction or history were at liberty to use any matter that came to their hands.

Furthermore, in many cases the writers probably drew more largely from folk-tales current in all lands than from any written story. A possible example of this sort of procedure is the account of a hero's boyhood, of which the most famous

ars h

dy, a On New od Ta e an mands a

se to s Tot rest most co the b

ad rides o

ment n

as word

et fads his yafeint

Dance

that

RUINS OF MONASTERY AT GLASTONBURY.

Where King Arthur was said to have been buried.

is the story of Perceval, one of Arthur's knights. This is told in romances extant in English, French, German, and Welsh; and in the opinion of most scholars it is impossible to determine whether any one of the four is the "original." The same sort of story, moreover, is told in folk-tales of almost every country, and of numerous heroes, one of Finn, in an Irish manuscript dating probably from the tenth century.

One of the finest

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." of the romances in English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a story belonging to the Arthurian cycle and dating in its extant form from the latter part of the fourteenth century. In this romance, as in many, two stories originally separate are brought together. The second deals with the testing of Gawain's purity. The first, regarding the origin and development of which a vigorous controversy between scholars has raged for years, deals with the testing of his bravery, and runs as follows:

On New Year's Day, when Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are just beginning a feast, a huge knight clad all in green and riding a horse of that color rides into the hall and demands a boon. In his hand he carries a huge axe; and he desires that some knight give him a blow with the axe, and promise to seek the Green Knight a year from that time and take without resistance a similar blow. Gawain, Arthur's nephew and the most courteous of the Round Table, accepts the challenge. After the blow is given, the Green Knight takes up his head and rides out, the head calling upon Gawain to keep his appointment next New Year's Day at the Green Chapel. Faithful to his word, Gawain reaches the chapel on the appointed day, and finds his antagonist awaiting him. The Green Knight makes only a feint of slaying Gawain, and then explains that the whole performance was planned merely to try "the most faultless knight that ever walked the earth."

Religious Works. Side by side with the romances appeared from about the year 1200 numerous religious works, most of which can be called literature only by exercise of great courtesy. Of these the most famous are the Poema Morale, or Moral Ode; Ormulum, a series of sermons in verse; Ancren Riwle (pronounce Riwle as if written "Rula "), or Rule for Nuns, written for the guidance of three noble women who belonged to no order; Cursor Mundi, relating in rhyme the whole " course of the world from creation to

doomsday, and adding many legends to the Bible narrative.
With the exception of Ormulum, which was so named "be-
cause Orm composed it," we can attach no author's name to
these works.

From the great mass of religious writing, however, the
names of two writers stand out prominently; one by reason
of his great influence, the other as producer of perhaps the
most famous piece of "vision" literature in English. These
writers are John Wiclif and William Langland.

Wiclif. Although satisfactory evidence regarding many events in Wiclif's life is lacking, we are reasonably sure that

JOHN WICLIF.

he was born from fifteen to
twenty years before Chau-
cer; and we know that he
died in 1384 about the
time that Chaucer was ma-
turing the plan for The
Canterbury Tales. He was
educated at Oxford, and in
1360 was master (that is,
president) of one of the
colleges there, Balliol (Bāl-
yol). On becoming rector
of a neighboring church not
long after, he gave up his
college position; and to the
end of his life he was a zeal-
ous preacher and laborer for
the good of the common
people. Eight years before

his death he had been summoned before an ecclesiastical
court to give account of his preaching; and only the force of

22

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Piers Plowman." In the "Prologue" the author represents himself as falling asleep, one May morning, on a hill, and having a marvelous dream. In this dream he saw 66 a fair field of folk," - folk of all social classes, all occupations, all shades of character. There were farm-laborers, merchants, representatives of various religious orders, jesters and jugglers (“Judas children "), lawyers and beggars, butchers and barons. "All this I saw sleeping, and seven times more." The people, almost without exception, are engaged in occupations which are either positively harmful or else useless. Besides the persons named from their employments there are numerous personified abstractions — Truth, Falsehood, Guile, Duplicity, Meed, Theology, Conscience; and in the very complicated allegory of the poem the abuses of the day are attacked and the people are exhorted to better living.

On the formal side Piers Plowman is important because it was written in the alliterative, unrhymed metre of AngloSaxon verse. No English poem was written subsequently in this form — modern English poetry has followed Chaucer, who adopted and modified the French form, characterized by end-rhyme and a regularly recurring accent or stress.

Mandeville's "Travels." Another work of the fourteenth century of interest to modern as well as mediæval readers is a curious one known as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. This book "had been a household work in eleven languages and for five centuries before it was ascertained that Sir John never lived, that his travels never took place, and that his personal experiences, long the test of others' veracity, were compiled out of every possible authority, going back to Pliny, if not further." 1

1 Cambridge History, II, 90.