Langland and Chaucer both died about the beginning of the fifteenth century.  But from that date until 1576—­when Gascoigne’s Steel Glass, the first verse satire of the Elizabethan age, was published—­we must look mainly to Scotland and the poems of William Dunbar, Sir David Lyndsay, and others, to preserve the apostolic succession of satire.  William Dunbar is one of the greatest of British satirists.  His Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, in which the popular poetic form of the age—­allegory—­is utilized with remarkable skill as the vehicle for a scathing satire on the headlong sensuality of his time, produces by its startling realism and terrible intensity an effect not unlike that exercised by the overpowering creations of Salvator Rosa.  The poem is a bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all classes in the society of his period.  Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens nothing, tones down nothing.  The evil is presented in all its native hideousness.  Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly.  His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and tediousness.  Brevity is the soul of satire as well as of wit.

The most vigorous English satire of this entire period was that which we owe to the scurrilous pen of Skelton and the provocative personality of Wolsey.  With his work may be mentioned the rude and unpolished, yet vigorous, piece bearing the rhyming title,

     “Rede me and be nott wrothe,
      For I saye no thing but trothe”,

written by two English Observantine Franciscan friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlowe;[6] a satire which stung the great cardinal so sharply that he commissioned Hermann Rynck to buy up every available copy.  Alexander Barclay’s imitation, in his Ship of Fools, of Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff, was only remarkable for the novel satirical device of the plan.

Bishop Latimer in his sermons is a vigorous satirist, particularly in that discourse upon “The Ploughers” (1547).  His fearlessness is very conspicuous, and his attacks on the bishops who proved untrue to their trust and allowed their dioceses to go to wreck and ruin, are outspoken and trenchant: 

“They that be lords will ill go to plough.  It is no meet office for them.  It is not seeming for their state.  Thus came up lording loiterers; Thus crept in unprechinge prelates, and so have they long continued.  For how many unlearned prelates have we now at this day?  And no marvel; For if the ploughmen that now be, were made lordes, they would clean give over ploughing, they would leave of theyr labour and fall to lording outright and let the plough stand.  For ever since the Prelates were made lords and nobles, the plough standeth, there is no work done, the people starve.  They hawke, they hunte, they carde, they dyce, they pastime in their prelacies with