of queens.  For nine years he enjoyed the queen’s bounty, and described with loyal partiality the exploits of English knights.  With the death of his patroness and the beginning of England’s misfortunes, the light-minded adventurer sought another master in the French-loving Wenceslaus of Brabant.  The first edition of his chronicle, compiled when under the spell of the English court, contrasts strongly with the second version written at Brussels at the instigation of the Luxemburg duke of Brabant.

Even Froissart saw that all was not well in England.  The common people seemed to him proud, cruel, disloyal, and suspicious.  Their delight was in battle and slaughter, and they hated the foreigner with a fierce hatred which had no counterpart in the cosmopolitan knightly class.  They were the terror of their lords and delighted in keeping their kings under restraint.  The Londoners were the most mighty of the English and could do more than all the rest of England.  Other writers tell the same tale.  The same fierce patriotism that Froissart notes glows through the rude battle songs in which Lawrence Minot sang the early victories of Edward from Halidon Hill to the taking of Guines, and inspired Geoffrey le Baker to repeat with absolute confidence every malicious story which gossip told to the discredit of the French king and his people.  It was under the influence of this spirit that the steps were taken, which we have already recorded, to extend the use of English, notably in the law courts.  Yet the old bilingual habit clave long to the English.  Despite the statute of 1362, the lawyers continued to employ the French tongue, until it crystallised into the jargon of the later Year Books or of Littleton’s Tenures.  Under Edward III, however, French remained the living speech of many Englishmen.  John Gower wrote in French the earliest of his long poems.  But he is a thorough Englishman for all that.  He writes in French, but, as he says, he writes for England.[1]

    [1] “O gentile Engleterre, a toi j’escrits,” Mirour de
    l’Omme, in John Gower’s Works, i., 378, ed.  G.C.  MaCaulay,
    to whom belongs the credit of recovering this long lost work.

It was characteristic of the patriotic movement of the reign of Edward III, that a new courtly literature in the English language rivalled the French vernacular literature which as yet had by no means ceased to produce fruit.  The new type begins with the anonymous poems, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and the “Pearl”.  While Froissart was the chief literary figure at the English court during the ten years after the treaty of Calais, his place was occupied in the concluding decade of the reign by Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great poet of the English literary revival.  The son of a substantial London vintner, Chaucer spent his youth as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, from which he was transferred to the service of Edward himself.