This fourteenth century was a wonderful time of outbursting life.  Although we cannot claim the Miracles as entirely English products, being in all probability translations from the Norman-French, yet the fact that they were thus translated is one remarkable amongst many in this dawn of the victory of England over her conquerors.  From this time, English prospered and French decayed.  Their own language was now, so far, authorized as the medium of religious instruction to the people, while a similar change had passed upon processes at law; and, most significant of all, the greatest poet of the time, and one of the three greatest poets as yet of all English time, wrote, although a courtier, in the language of the people.  Before selecting some of Chaucer’s religious verses, however, I must speak of two or three poems by other writers.

The first of these is The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman,—­a poem of great influence in the same direction as the writings of Wycliffe.  It is a vision and an allegory, wherein the vices of the time, especially those of the clergy, are unsparingly dealt with.  Towards the close it loses itself in a metaphysical allegory concerning Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest.[17] I do not find much poetry in it.  There is more, to my mind, in another poem, written some thirty or forty years later, the author of which is unknown, perhaps because he was an imitator of William Langland, the author of the Vision.  It is called Pierce the Plough-man’s Crede.  Both are written after the fashion of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and not after the fashion of the Anglo-Norman, of which distinction a little more presently.  Its object is to contrast the life and character of the four orders of friars with those of a simple Christian.  There is considerable humour in the working plan of the poem.

A certain poor man says he has succeeded in learning his A B C, his Paternoster, and his Ave Mary, but he cannot, do what he will, learn his Creed.  He sets out, therefore, to find some one whose life, according with his profession, may give him a hope that he will teach him his creed aright.  He applies to the friars.  One after another, every order abuses the other; nor this only, but for money offers either to teach him his creed, or to absolve him for ignorance of the same.  He finds no helper until he falls in with Pierce the Ploughman, of whose poverty he gives a most touching description.  I shall, however, only quote some lines of The Believe as taught by the Ploughman, and this principally to show the nature of the versification: 

  Leve thou on our Lord God, that all the world wroughte; believe.
  Holy heaven upon high wholly he formed;
  And is almighty himself over all his workes;
  And wrought as his will was, the world and the heaven;
  And on gentle Jesus Christ, engendered of himselven,
  His own only Son, Lord over all y-knowen.