Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.

  Winter wakeneth all my care
  Now these leaves waxeth bare,
  Oft I sigh and mourne sare
  When it cometh in my thought
  Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought.

Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in the warm language of earthly passion.  The sentiment of chivalry united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry, and the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had made this feeling of divine love familiar.  Toward the end of the 13th century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English Golden Legend, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on saints’ days.  The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael; partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the lives of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin—­who is mentioned by Shakspere—­and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in the Nonne Preste’s Tale.  The verse was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets.  Thus the legend of St. Brandan’s search for the earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris.

[Footnote 5:  Pain.] [Footnote 6:  Branch.]

About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old English alliterative verse in romances like William and the Werewolf, and Sir Gawayne, and in religious pieces such as Clannesse (purity), Patience, and The Perle, the last named a mystical poem of much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among the glorified.  Some of these employed rhyme as well as alliteration.  They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that alliteration was most common in the north.  “I am a sotherne man,” says the parson in the Canterbury Tales.  “I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by my letter.”  But the most important of the alliterative poems was the Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.

In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of England.  By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts.  By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools.  The Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress, “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.”  The native English genius was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories in the wars of Edward III. against the French.  It was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage.  But at home the times were bad.  Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land.  The Church was corrupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors.  That social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes which finally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw.