He took part in more than one of Edward’s French campaigns, and served in diplomatic missions to Italy, Flanders, and elsewhere.  His early poems reflect the modes and metres of the current French tradition in an English dress, and only reach sustained importance in his lament on the death of the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, written about 1370.  It is significant that the favourite poet of the king’s declining years was no clerk but a layman, and that the Tuscan mission of 1373, which perhaps first introduced him to the treasures of Italian poetry, was undertaken in the king’s service.  Thorough Englishman as Chaucer was, he had his eyes open to every movement of European culture.  His higher and later style begins with his study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.  Though he wrote for Englishmen in their own tongue, his fame was celebrated by the French poet, Eustace Deschamps, as the “great translator” who had sown the flowers of French poesy in the realm of Aeneas and Brut the Trojan.  His broad geniality stood in strong contrast to the savage patriotism of Minot.  In becoming national, English vernacular art did not become insular.  Chaucer wrote in the tongue of the southern midlands, the region wherein were situated his native London, the two universities, the habitual residences of the court, the chief seats of parliaments and councils, and the most frequented marts of commerce.  For the first time a standard English language came into being, largely displacing for literary purposes the local dialects which had hitherto been the natural vehicles of writing in their respective districts.  The Yorkshireman, Wycliffe, the westcountryman, Langland, adopted before the end of the reign the tongue of the capital for their literary language in preference to the speech of their native shires.  The language of the extreme south, the descendant of the tongue of the West Saxon court, became the dialect of peasants and artisans.  That a continuous life was reserved for the idiom of the north country, was due to its becoming the speech of a free Scotland, the language in which Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, commemorated for the court of the first Stewart king the exploits of Robert Bruce and the Scottish war of independence.  The unity of England thus found another notable expression in the oneness of the popular speech.  And the evolution of the northern dialect into the “Scottish” of a separate kingdom showed that, if England were united, English-speaking Britain remained divided.

Other arts indicate the same tendency.  Even in the thirteenth century English Gothic architecture differentiated itself pretty completely from its models in the Isle de France.  The early fourteenth century, the age of the so-called “decorated style,” suggests in some ways a falling back to the French types, though the prosperity of England and the desolation of France make the English examples of fourteenth century building the more numerous and splendid.  The