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FROM THE DEATH OF CHAUCER TO THE ACCESSION

OF ELIZABETH (1400-1558)

1. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Fifteenth-century Literature. Fifteenth-century literature was strikingly inferior to that of the fourteenth. No poet appeared who showed more than occasional traces of power. Chaucer's professed disciples, Lydgate and Occleve, failed utterly to give evidence of profit by study of their master. Some Scotch poets, notably William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, showed talent of a somewhat higher order; but they would scarcely deserve mention except in a rather barren period. With a single exception, Malory, no prose writer appeared who would be read with pleasure to-day; and in the case of Malory our interest is rather in his subject-matter and the use of his work by poets of later ages than in any great literary merit of his own.

A Period of Unrest. The century was marked by much unrest, yet was without any great movement or accomplishment. The insurrection of the Percies and the religious persecutions under Henry IV; the war with France, begun by Henry V, and brought to an inglorious close under Henry VI; Jack Cade's rebellion, under the last-named sovereign; the Wars of the Roses, the civil conflict which distracted the country from 1455 to 1485: these events occupied the people with other things than literature.

War does, it is true, often bring out the best there is in a people, including fit record in prose and verse of their deeds; but England's wars and fightings in the fifteenth century were not of that sort. The Percies fought because the King did not live up to his pre-coronation promises to them; Henry V fought as a means of gaining wealth, and at the same time quieting his own dominions; the Wars of the Roses were the outcome of the disregard by Henry IV of the direct order of succession to the throne; Cade's rebellion, the result of restrictions of the franchise, was utterly lacking in heroic elements.

Importance of the Period. - It must not, however, be assumed that this period is unimportant in English literature. A great number of those poems known as " popular ballads (i.e., poems originating with the people, the folk), seem to have been committed to writing at this time, though many may have been composed earlier. An event of the greatest significance to literature took place about the middle of the century-the invention of printing from movable types. The invention reached England about a quarter of a century later; and before the year 1500 nearly 400 books had been printed. The use that subsequent writers made of Malory's great work on the legends of Arthur has been mentioned. Through the century also the drama was making slow but sure progress.

The "Popular" Ballad: (1) Definition. In taking up the ballads the first thing necessary is a definition. We are here not concerned with such poems as Tennyson's The Revenge (sub-title, "A Ballad of the Fleet "); or Kipling's Ballad of East and West; or Oliver Wendell Holmes's Ballad of the Oysterman; or any of the poems in the volume of Wordsworth and Coleridge called Lyrical Ballads. By "ballad "

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of Lord Randal, for example, the four lines are partly alike; the first line ends, "Lord Randal, my son "; the second, "my handsome young man "; the third, "mother, make my bed soon"; the fourth, fain would lie down." The three stanzas of Bonnie George Campbell end with the line

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"But never cam he!"

(4) Communal Origin. - Even so brief a treatment of ballads as this should not end without an addition to the definition given above. Not only is the typical ballad of unknown authorship: the theory finding almost universal acceptance to-day is that it is of "communal origin." By this is meant that the ballad has its beginning in the communal dance," the meeting of the tribe; and that the form of it we possess is due to a singer, "a skilful recording secretary, one might say, who stands between us and the community." 1

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Some modern writers - Coleridge, for example- have to some extent caught the trick of ballad writing; but The Ancient Mariner is clearly the work of one individual writing in a more or less literary language for distinctly educated readers. The gap, therefore, is wide between it and the genuine ballad, with its anonymous, collective authorship, and its uncultured audience.

The introduction of printing may on first thought sound like a contradiction of the statement above that the fifteenth century was marked by no great accomplishment in Eng

1 F. B. Gummere, Old English Ballads, page lxviii. Other writings of Professor Gummere necessary to any extended study of ballads are: The Beginnings of Poetry, The Popular Ballad, and volume II, chapter XVII, of the Cambridge History of English Literature. Professor Kittredge's introduction to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Cambridge Edition, should also be read.

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