The second movement is social; it falls largely within the reign of Edward’s successor, Richard II, and marks the growing discontent with the contrast between luxury and poverty, between the idle wealthy classes and the overtaxed peasants.  Sometimes this movement is quiet and strong, as when Wyclif arouses the conscience of England; again it has the portentous rumble of an approaching tempest, as when John Ball harangues a multitude of discontented peasants on Black Heath commons, using the famous text: 

    When Adam delved and Eve span
    Who was then the gentleman?

and again it breaks out into the violent rebellion of Wat Tyler.  All these things show the same Saxon spirit that had won its freedom in a thousand years’ struggle against foreign enemies, and that now felt itself oppressed by a social and industrial tyranny in its own midst.

Aside from these two movements, the age was one of unusual stir and progress.  Chivalry, that mediaeval institution of mixed good and evil, was in its Indian summer,—­a sentiment rather than a practical system.  Trade, and its resultant wealth and luxury, were increasing enormously.  Following trade, as the Vikings had followed glory, the English began to be a conquering and colonizing people, like the Anglo-Saxons.  The native shed something of his insularity and became a traveler, going first to view the places where trade had opened the way, and returning with wider interests and a larger horizon.  Above all, the first dawn of the Renaissance is heralded in England, as in Spain and Italy, by the appearance of a national literature.

FIVE WRITERS OF THE AGE.  The literary movement of the age clearly reflects the stirring life of the times.  There is Langland, voicing the social discontent, preaching the equality of men and the dignity of labor; Wyclif, greatest of English religious reformers, giving the Gospel to the people in their own tongue, and the freedom of the Gospel in unnumbered tracts and addresses; Gower, the scholar and literary man, criticising this vigorous life and plainly afraid of its consequences; and Mandeville, the traveler, romancing about the wonders to be seen abroad.  Above all there is Chaucer,—­scholar, traveler, business man, courtier, sharing in all the stirring life of his times, and reflecting it in literature as no other but Shakespeare has ever done.  Outside of England the greatest literary influence of the age was that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, whose works, then at the summit of their influence in Italy, profoundly affected the literature of all Europe.

CHAUCER (1340?-1400)

‘What man artow?’ quod he;
’Thou lokest as thou woldest finde an hare,
For ever upon the ground I see thee stare. 
Approche neer, and loke up merily.... 
He semeth elvish by his contenaunce.’ 
(The Host’s description of Chaucer,
Prologue, Sir Thopas)