part i

. (Halle, 1896); Paul, "Geschichte der englischen Sprache," in _Grundriss der german. Philologie_ (Strassburg, 1898); Eduard Sievers, _Angelsachsische Grammatik_ (3rd ed., Halle, 1898); Eng. transl. of same (2nd ed.), by A.S. Cook (Boston, 1887); K.D. Bulbring, _Altenglisches Elementarbuch_ (Heidelberg, 1902); Greenough and Kittredge, _Words and their Ways in English Speech_ (London and New York, 1902); Henry Bradley, _The Making of English_ (London, 1904). Numerous contributions to the subject have also been made in _Englische Studien_ (ed. Kolbing, later Hoops; Leipzig, 1877 onward); _Anglia_ (ed. Wulker, Flugel, &c.; Halle, 1878 onward); publications of Mod. Lang. Assoc. of America (J.W. Bright; Baltimore, 1884 onward), and A.M. Elliott, _Modern Language Notes_ (Baltimore, 1886 onward). (J. A. H. M.; H. M. R. M.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A careful examination of several letters of Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon dictionary gives in 2000 words (including derivatives and compounds, but excluding orthographic variants) 535 which still exist as modern English words.

[2] The practical convenience of having one name for what was the same thing in various stages of development is not affected by the probability that (E.A. Freeman notwithstanding) _Engle_ and _Englisc_ were, at an early period, _not_ applied to the whole of the inhabitants of Teutonic Britain, but only to a part of them. The dialects of _Engle_ and _Seaxan_ were alike old forms of what was afterwards English speech, and so, viewed in relation to it, _Old English_, whatever their contemporary names might be.

[3] The works of Gildas in the original Latin were edited by Mr Stevenson for the English Historical Society. There is an English translation in _Six Old English Chronicles_ in Bohn's Antiquarian library.

[4] As to the continued existence of Latin in Britain, see further in Rhys's _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, pp. 226-227; also Dogatschar, _Lautlehre d. gr., lat. u. roman. Lehnworte im Altengl._ (Strassburg, 1888).

[5] Aethelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter "Ongol-Saxna cyning and Brytaenwalda eallaes thyses iglandes"; Eadred in 955 is "Angul-seaxna cyning and casere totius Britanniae," and the name is of frequent occurrence in documents written in Latin. These facts ought to be remembered in the interest of the scholars of the 17th century, who have been blamed for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as if they had invented it. By "Anglo-Saxon" language they meant the language of the people who _sometimes at least_ called themselves "Anglo-Saxons." Even now the name is practically useful, when we are dealing with the subject _per se_, as is _Old English_, on the other hand, when we are treating it historically or in connexion with English as a whole.

[6] _Transactions of the Philological Society_ (_1873-1874_), p. 620; new and much enlarged edition, 1888.

[7] See on this Rhys, _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, v.

[8] During the Old English period both _c_ and [g] appear to have acquired a palatal value in conjunction with front or palatal vowel-sounds, except in the north where _c_, and in some cases [g], tended to remain guttural in such positions. This value was never distinguished in Old English writing, but may be deduced from certain phonetic changes depending upon it, and from the use of _c_, _cc_, as an alternative for _tj_ (as in _ort_[g]_eard_, _orceard_ = orchard, _fetian_, _feccean_ = fetch), as well as from the normal occurrence of _ch_ and _y_ in these positions in later stages of the language, e.g. _cild_ = child, _taecean_ = teach, [g]_iellan_ = yell, _dae_[g] = day, &c.

[9] For a discriminating view of the effects of the Norman Conquest on the English Language, see Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, ch. xxv.

[10] There is no reason to suppose that any attempt was made to proscribe or suppress the native tongue, which was indeed used in some official documents addressed to Englishmen by the Conqueror himself. Its social degradation seemed even on the point of coming to an end, when it was confirmed and prolonged for two centuries more by the accession of the Angevin dynasty, under whom everything French received a fresh impetus.

[11] MS. Cotton Vesp. A. 22.

[12] Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, &c., ed. for Cambridge Press, by W.W. Skeat (1871-1887), second text.

[13] _Old English Homilies of Twelfth Century_, first and second series, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S.), (1868-1873).

[14] The article _the_ becomes _te_ after a preceding _t_ or _d_ by assimilation.

[15] Earle, _Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel_ (1865), p. 265.

[16] Skeat, _Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Gospels_ (1874).

[17] Edited for the Surtees Society, by Rev. J. Stevenson.

[18] Edited for the Early English Text Society, by Rev. Dr Morris.

[19] _The Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman_ exists in three different recensions, all of which have been edited for the Early English Text Society by Rev. W.W. Skeat.

[20] Edited by Rev. Dr Morris for Early English Text Society, in 1866.

[21] Here, and in _tatt_, _tu_, _taer_, for _thatt_, _thu_, _thaet_, after _t_, _d_, there is the same phonetic assimilation as in the last section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle above.

[22] Edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Morris (1865).

[23] Trevisa, _Translation of Higden's Polychronicon_.

[24] Skeat, _Specimens of English Literature_, pp. 49, 54.

[25] _A Shakspearian Grammar_, by Dr E.A. Abbott. To this book we are largely indebted for its admirable summary of the characters of Tudor English.

[26] _Evangelist_, _astronomy_, _dialogue_, are words that have so lived, of which their form is the result. _Photograph_, _geology_, &c., take this form as _if_ they had the same history.

[27] See extended lists of the foreign words in English in Dr Morris's _Historical Outlines of English Accidence_, p. 33.

[28] See description and map in _Trans. of Philol. Soc._, 1875-1876, p. 570.

[29] _The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, its Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations, with an Appendix on the present limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the Dialectal Divisions of the Lowland Tongue; and a Linguistical Map of Scotland_, by James A.H. Murray (London, 1873).

[30] _A Glossary (with some pieces of Verse) of the Old Dialect of the English Colony of Forth and Bargy_, collected by Jacob Poole, edited by W. Barnes, B.D. (London, 1867).

ENGLISH LAW (_History_). In English jurisprudence "legal memory" is said to extend as far as, but no further than the coronation of Richard I. (Sept. 3, 1189). This is a technical doctrine concerning prescriptive rights, but is capable of expressing an important truth. For the last seven centuries, little more or less, the English law, which is now overshadowing a large share of the earth, has had not only an extremely continuous, but a matchlessly well-attested history, and, moreover, has been the subject matter of rational exposition. Already in 1194 the daily doings of a tribunal which was controlling and moulding the whole system were being punctually recorded in letters yet legible, and from that time onwards it is rather the enormous bulk than any dearth of available materials that prevents us from tracing the transformation of every old doctrine and the emergence and expansion of every new idea. If we are content to look no further than the text-books--the books written by lawyers for lawyers--we may read our way backwards to Blackstone (d. 1780), Hale (d. 1676), Coke (d. 1634), Fitzherbert (d. 1538), Littleton (d. 1481), Bracton (d. 1268), Glanvill (d. 1190), until we are in the reign of Henry of Anjou, and yet shall perceive that we are always reading of one and the same body of law, though the little body has become great, and the ideas that were few and indefinite have become many and explicit.

Beyond these seven lucid centuries lies a darker period. Nearly six centuries will still divide us from the dooms of Aethelberht (c. 600), and nearly seven from the _Lex Salica_ (c. 500). We may regard the Norman conquest of England as marking the confluence of two streams of law. The one we may call French or Frankish. If we follow it upwards we pass through the capitularies of Carlovingian emperors and Merovingian kings until we see Chlodwig and his triumphant Franks invading Gaul, submitting their Sicambrian necks to the yoke of the imperial religion, and putting their traditional usages into written Latin. The other rivulet we may call Anglo-Saxon. Pursuing it through the code of Canute (d. 1035) and the ordinances of Alfred (c. 900) and his successors, we see Ine publishing laws in the newly converted Wessex (c. 690), and, almost a century earlier, Aethelberht doing the same in the newly converted Kent (c. 600). This he did, says Beda, in accordance with Roman precedents. Perhaps from the Roman missionaries he had heard tidings of what the Roman emperor had lately been doing far off in New Rome. We may at any rate notice with interest that in order of time Justinian's law-books fall between the _Lex Salica_ and the earliest Kentish dooms; also that the great pope who sent Augustine to England is one of the very few men who between Justinian's day and the 11th century lived in the Occident and yet can be proved to have known the Digest. In the Occident the time for the Germanic "folk-laws" (_Leges Barbarorum_) had come, and a Canon law, ambitious of independence, was being constructed, when in the Orient the lord of church and state was "enucleating" all that was to live of the classical jurisprudence of pagan Rome. It was but a brief interval between Gothic and Lombardic domination that enabled him to give law to Italy: Gaul and Britain were beyond his reach.

The Anglo-Saxon laws that have come down to us (and we have no reason to fear the loss of much beyond some dooms of the Mercian Offa) are best studied as members of a large Teutonic family. Those that proceed from the Kent and Wessex of the 7th century are closely related to the continental folk-laws. Their next of kin seem to be the _Lex Saxonum_ and the laws of the Lombards. Then, though the 8th and 9th centuries are unproductive, we have from Alfred (c. 900) and his successors a series of edicts which strongly resemble the Frankish capitularies--so strongly that we should see a clear case of imitation, were it not that in Frankland the age of legislation had come to its disastrous end long before Alfred was king. This, it may be noted, gives to English legal history a singular continuity from Alfred's day to our own. The king of the English was expected to publish laws at a time when hardly any one else was attempting any such feat, and the English dooms of Canute the Dane are probably the most comprehensive statutes that were issued in the Europe of the 11th century. No genuine laws of the sainted Edward have descended to us, and during his reign England seems but too likely to follow the bad example of Frankland, and become a loose congeries of lordships. From this fate it was saved by the Norman duke, who, like Canute before him, subdued a land in which kings were still expected to publish laws.

In the study of early Germanic law--a study which now for some considerable time has been scientifically prosecuted in Germany--the Anglo-Saxon dooms have received their due share of attention. A high degree of racial purity may be claimed on their behalf. Celtic elements have been sought for in them, but have never been detected. At certain points, notably in the regulation of the blood-feud and the construction of a tariff of atonements, the law of one rude folk will always be somewhat like the law of another; but the existing remains of old Welsh and old Irish law stand far remoter from the dooms of Aethelberht and Ine than stand the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand, kings of the Lombards. Indeed, it is very dubious whether distinctively Celtic customs play any considerable part in the evolution of that system of rules of Anglian, Scandinavian and Frankish origin which becomes the law of Scotland. Within England itself, though for a while there was fighting enough between the various Germanic folks, the tribal differences were not so deep as to prevent the formation of a common language and a common law. Even the strong Scandinavian strain seems to have rapidly blended with the Anglian. It amplified the language and the law, but did not permanently divide the country. If, for example, we can to-day distinguish between _law_ and _right_, we are debtors to the Danes; but very soon _law_ is not distinctive of eastern or _right_ of western England. In the first half of the 12th century a would-be expounder of the law of England had still to say that the country was divided between the Wessex law, the Mercian law, and the Danes' law, but he had also to point out that the law of the king's own court stood apart from and above all partial systems. The local customs were those of shires and hundreds, and shaded off into each other. We may speak of more Danish and less Danish counties; it was a matter of degree; for rivers were narrow and hills were low. England was meant by nature to be the land of one law.

Then as to Roman law. In England and elsewhere Germanic law developed in an atmosphere that was charged with traditions of the old world, and many of these traditions had become implicit in the Christian religion. It might be argued that all that we call progress is due to the influence exercised by Roman civilization; that, were it not for this, Germanic law would never have been set in writing; and that theoretically unchangeable custom would never have been supplemented or superseded by express legislation. All this and much more of the same sort might be said; but the survival in Britain, or the reintroduction into England, of anything that we should dare to call Roman jurisprudence would be a different matter. Eyes, carefully trained, have minutely scrutinized the Anglo-Saxon legal texts without finding the least trace of a Roman rule outside the ecclesiastical sphere. Even within that sphere modern research is showing that the church-property-law of the middle ages, the law of the ecclesiastical "benefice," is permeated by Germanic ideas. This is true of Gaul and Italy, and yet truer of an England in which Christianity was for a while extinguished. Moreover, the laws that were written in England were, from the first, written in the English tongue; and this gives them a unique value in the eyes of students of Germanic folk-law, for even the very ancient and barbarous _Lex Salica_ is a Latin document, though many old Frankish words are enshrined in it. Also we notice--and this is of grave importance--that in England there are no vestiges of any "Romani" who are being suffered to live under their own law by their Teutonic rulers. On the Continent we may see Gundobad, the Burgundian, publishing one law-book for the Burgundians and another for the Romani who own his sway. A book of laws, excerpted chiefly from the Theodosian code, was issued by Alaric the Visigoth for his Roman subjects before the days of Justinian, and this book (the so-called _Breviarium Alarici or Lex Romana Visigothorum_) became for a long while the chief representative of Roman law in Gaul. The Frankish king in his expansive realm ruled over many men whose law was to be found not in the _Lex Salica_ or _Lex Ribuaria_, but in what was called the _Lex Romana_. "A system of personal law" prevailed: the _homo Romanus_ handed on his Roman law to his children, while Frankish or Lombardic, Swabian or Saxon law would run in the blood of the _homo barbarus_. Of all this we hear nothing in England. Then on the mainland of Europe Roman and barbarian law could not remain in juxtaposition without affecting each other. On the one hand we see distinctively Roman rules making their way into the law of the victorious tribes, and on the other hand we see a decay and debasement of jurisprudence which ends in the formation of what modern historians have called a Roman "vulgar-law" (_Vulgarrecht_). For a short age which centres round the year 800 it seemed possible that Frankish kings, who were becoming Roman emperors, would be able to rule by their capitularies nearly the whole of the Christian Occident. The dream vanished before fratricidal wars, heathen invaders, centrifugal feudalism, and a centripetal church which found its law in the newly concocted forgeries of the Pseudo-Isidore (c. 850). The "personal laws" began to transmute themselves into local customs, and the Roman vulgar-law began to look like the local custom of those districts where the Romani were the preponderating element in the population. Meanwhile, the Norse pirates subdued a large tract of what was to be northern France--a land where Romani were few. Their restless and boundless vigour these Normans retained; but they showed a wonderful power of appropriating whatever of alien civilization came in their way. In their language, religion and law, they had become French many years before they subdued England. It is a plausible opinion that among them there lived some sound traditions of the Frankish monarchy's best days, and that Norman dukes, rather than German emperors or kings, of the French, are the truest spiritual heirs of Charles the Great.

The Norman age.

In our own day, German historians are wont to speak of English law as a "daughter" of French or Frankish law. This tendency derived its main impulse from H. Brunner's proof that the germ of trial by jury, which cannot be found in the Anglo-Saxon laws, can be found in the prerogative procedure of the Frankish kings. We must here remember that during a long age English lawyers wrote in French and even thought in French, and that to this day most of the technical terms of the law, more especially of the private law, are of French origin. Also it must be allowed that when English law has taken shape in the 13th century it is very like one of the _coutumes_ of northern France. Even when linguistic difficulties have been surmounted, the Saxon Mirror of Eike von Repgow will seem far less familiar to an Englishman than the so-called Establishments of St Louis. This was the outcome of a slow process which fills more than a century (1066-1189), and was in a great measure due to the reforming energy of Henry II., the French prince who, in addition to England, ruled a good half of France. William the Conqueror seems to have intended to govern Englishmen by English law. After the tyranny of Rufus, Henry I. promised a restoration of King Edward's law: that is, the law of the Confessor's time (_Lagam Eadwardi regis vobis reddo_). Various attempts were then made, mostly, so it would seem, by men of French birth, to state in a modern and practicable form the _laga Eadwardi_ which was thus restored. The result of their labours is an intricate group of legal tracts which has been explored of late years by Dr Liebermann. The best of these has long been known as the _Leges Henrici Primi_, and aspires to be a comprehensive law-book. Its author, though he had some foreign sources at his command, such as the _Lex Ribuaria_ and an epitome of the Breviary of Alaric, took the main part of his matter from the code of Canute and the older English dooms. Neither the Conqueror nor either of his sons had issued many ordinances: the invading Normans had little, if any, written law to bring with them, and had invaded a country where kings had been lawgivers. Moreover, there was much in the English system that the Conqueror was keenly interested in retaining--especially an elaborate method of taxing the land and its holders. The greatest product of Norman government, the grandest feat of government that the world had seen for a long time past, the compilation of _Domesday Book_, was a conservative effort, an attempt to fix upon every landholder, French or English, the amount of geld that was due from his predecessor in title. Himself the rebellious vassal of the French king, the duke of the Normans, who had become king of the English, knew much of disruptive feudalism, and had no mind to see England that other France which it had threatened to become in the days of his pious but incompetent cousin. The sheriffs, though called _vice-comites_, were to be the king's officers; the shire-moots might be called county courts, but were not to be the courts of counts. Much that was sound and royal in English public law was to be preserved if William could preserve it.

Royal justice.

The gulf that divides the so-called _Leges Henrici_ (c. 1115) from the text-book ascribed to Ranulf Glanvill (c. 1188) seems at first sight very wide. The one represents a not easily imaginable chaos and clash of old rules and new; it represents also a stage in the development of feudalism which in other countries is represented chiefly by a significant silence. The other is an orderly, rational book, which through all the subsequent centuries will be readily understood by English lawyers. Making no attempt to tell us what goes on in the local courts, its author, who may be Henry II.'s chief justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, or may be Glanvill's nephew, Hubert Walter, fixes our attention on a novel element which is beginning to subdue all else to its powerful operation. He speaks to us of the justice that is done by the king's own court. Henry II. had opened the doors of his French-speaking court to the mass of his subjects. Judges chosen for their ability were to sit there, term after term; judges were to travel in circuits through the land, and in many cases the procedure by way of "an inquest of the country," which the Norman kings had used for the ascertainment of their fiscal rights, was to be at the disposal of ordinary litigants. All this had been done in a piecemeal, experimental fashion by ordinances that were known as "assizes." There had not been, and was not to be, any enunciation of a general principle inviting all who were wronged to bring in their own words their complaints to the king's audience. The general prevalence of feudal justice, and of the world-old methods of supernatural probation (ordeals, battle, oaths sworn with oath-helpers), was to be theoretically respected; but in exceptional cases, which would soon begin to devour the rule, a royal remedy was to be open to any one who could frame his case within the compass of some carefully-worded and prescript formula. With allusion to a remote stage in the history of Roman law, a stage of which Henry's advisers can have known little or nothing, we may say that a "formulary system" is established which will preside over English law until modern times. Certain actions, each with a name of its own, are open to litigants. Each has its own formula set forth in its original (or, as we might say, originating) writ; each has its own procedure and its appropriate mode of trial. The litigant chooses his writ, his action, and must stand or fall by his choice. Thus a book about royal justice tends to become, and Glanvill's book already is, a commentary on original writs.

The precipitation of English law in so coherent a form as that which it has assumed in Glanvill's book is not to be explained without reference to the revival of Roman jurisprudence in Italy. Out of a school of Lombard lawyers at Pavia had come Lanfranc the Conqueror's adviser, and the Lombardists had already been studying Justinian's Institutes. Then at length the Digest came by its rights. About the year 1100 Irnerius was teaching at Bologna, and from all parts of the West men were eagerly flocking to hear the new gospel of civilization. About the year 1149 Vacarius was teaching Roman law in England. The rest of a long life he spent here, and faculties of Roman and Canon law took shape in the nascent university of Oxford. Whatever might be the fate of Roman law in England, there could be no doubt that the Canon law, which was crystallizing in the _Decretum Gratiani_ (c. 1139) and in the decretals of Alexander III., would be the law of the English ecclesiastical tribunals. The great quarrel between Henry II. and Thomas of Canterbury brought this system into collision with the temporal law of England, and the king's ministers must have seen that they had much to learn from the methodic enemy. Some of them were able men who became the justices of Henry's court, and bishops to boot. The luminous _Dialogue of the Exchequer_ (c. 1179), which expounds the English fiscal system, came from the treasurer, Richard Fitz Nigel, who became bishop of London; and the treatise on the laws of England came perhaps from Glanvill, perhaps from Hubert Walter, who was to be both primate and chief justiciar. There was healthy emulation of the work that was being done by Italian jurists, but no meek acceptance of foreign results.

Bracton.

A great constructive era had opened, and its outcome was a large and noble book. The author was Henry of Bratton (his name has been corrupted into Bracton), who died in 1268 after having been for many years one of Henry III.'s justices. The model for its form was the treatise of Azo of Bologna ("master of all the masters of the laws," an Englishman called him), and thence were taken many of the generalities of jurisprudence: maxims that might be regarded as of universal and natural validity. But the true core of the work was the practice of an English court which had yearly been extending its operations in many directions. For half a century past diligent record had been kept on parchment of all that this court had done, and from its rolls Bracton cited numerous decisions. He cited them as precedents, paying special heed to the judgments of two judges who were already dead, Martin Pateshull and William Raleigh. For this purpose he compiled a large Note Book, which was discovered by Prof. Vinogradoff in the British Museum in 1884. Thus at a very early time English "common law" shows a tendency to become what it afterwards definitely became, namely, "case law." The term "common law" was being taken over from the canonists by English lawyers, who used it to distinguish the general law of the land from local customs, royal prerogatives, and in short from all that was exceptional or special. Since statutes and ordinances were still rarities, all expressly enacted laws were also excluded from the English lawyers' notion of "the common law." The Great Charter (1215) had taken the form of a grant of "liberties and privileges," comparable to the grants that the king made to individual men and favoured towns. None the less, it was in that age no small body of enacted law, and, owing to its importance and solemnity, it was in after ages regarded as the first article of a statute book. There it was followed by the "provisions" issued at Merton in 1236 and by those issued at Marlborough after the end of the Barons' War. But during Henry III.'s long reign the swift development of English law was due chiefly to new "original writs" and new "forms of action" devised by the chancery and sanctioned by the court. Bracton knew many writs that were unknown to Glanvill, and men were already perceiving that limits must be set to the inventive power of the chancery unless the king was to be an uncontrollable law-maker. Thus the common law was losing the power of rapid growth when Bracton summed the attained results in a book, the success of which is attested by a crowd of manuscript copies. Bracton had introduced just enough of Roman law and Bolognese method to save the law of England from the fate that awaited German law in Germany. His book was printed in 1569, and Coke owed much to Bracton.

The comparison that is suggested when Edward I. is called the English Justinian cannot be pressed very far. Nevertheless, as is well known, it is in his reign (1272-1307) that English institutions finally take the forms that they are to keep through coming centuries. We already see the parliament of the three estates, the convocations of the clergy, the king's council, the chancery or secretarial department, the exchequer or financial department, the king's bench, the common bench, the commissioners of assize and gaol delivery, the small group of professionally learned judges, and a small group of professionally learned lawyers, whose skill is at the service of those who will employ them. Moreover, the statutes that were passed in the first eighteen years of the reign, though their bulk seems slight to us nowadays, bore so fundamental a character that in subsequent ages they appeared as the substructure of huge masses of superincumbent law. Coke commented upon them sentence by sentence, and even now the merest smatterer in English law must profess some knowledge of _Quia emptores_ and _De donis conditionalibus_. If some American states have, while others have not, accepted these statutes, that is a difference which is not unimportant to citizens of the United States in the 20th century. Then from the early years of Edward's reign come the first "law reports" that have descended to us: the oldest of them have not yet been printed; the oldest that has been printed belongs to 1292. These are the precursors of the long series of Year Books (Edw. II.-Hen. VIII.) which runs through the residue of the middle ages. Lawyers, we perceive, are already making and preserving notes of the discussions that take place in court; French notes that will be more useful to them than the formal Latin records inscribed upon the plea rolls. From these reports we learn that there are already, as we should say, a few "leading counsel," some of whom will be retained in almost every important cause. Papal decretals had been endeavouring to withdraw the clergy from secular employment. The clerical element had been strong among the judges of Henry III.'s reign: Bracton was an archdeacon, Pateshull a dean, Raleigh died a bishop. Their places begin to be filled by men who are not in orders, but who have pleaded the king's causes for him--his serjeants or servants at law--and beside them there are young men who are "apprentices at law," and are learning to plead. Also we begin to see men who, as "attorneys at law," are making it their business to appear on behalf of litigants. The history of the legal profession and its monopoly of legal aid is intricate, and at some points still obscure; but the influence of the canonical system is evident: the English attorney corresponds to the canonical proctor, and the English barrister to the canonical advocate. The main outlines were being drawn in Edward I.'s day; the legal profession became organic, and professional opinion became one of the main forces that moulded the law.

The study of English law fell apart from all other studies, and the impulse that had flowed from Italian jurisprudence was ebbing. We have two comprehensive text-books from Edward's reign: the one known to us as _Fleta_, the other as _Britton_; both of them, however, quarry their materials from Bracton's treatise. Also we have two little books on procedure which are attributed to Chief-Justice Hengham, and a few other small tracts of an intensely practical kind. Under the cover of fables about King Alfred, the author of the _Mirror of Justices_ made a bitter attack upon King Edward's judges, some of whom had fallen into deep disgrace. English legal history has hardly yet been purged of the leaven of falsehood that was introduced by this fantastic and unscrupulous pamphleteer. His enigmatical book ends that literate age which begins with Glanvill's treatise and the treasurer's dialogue. Between Edward I.'s day and Edward IV.'s hardly anything that deserves the name of book was written by an English lawyer.

14th and 15th centuries.

During that time the body of statute law was growing, but not very rapidly. Acts of parliament intervened at a sufficient number of important points to generate and maintain a persuasion that no limit, or no ascertainable limit, can be set to the legislative power of king and parliament. Very few are the signs that the judges ever permitted the validity of a statute to be drawn into debate. Thus the way was being prepared for the definite assertion of parliamentary "omnicompetence" which we obtain from the Elizabethan statesman Sir Thomas Smith, and for those theories of sovereignty which we couple with the names of Hobbes and Austin. Nevertheless, English law was being developed rather by debates in court than by open legislation. The most distinctively English of English institutions in the later middle ages are the Year-Books and the Inns of Court. Year by year, term by term, lawyers were reporting cases in order that they and their fellows might know how cases had been decided. The allegation of specific precedents was indeed much rarer than it afterwards became, and no calculus of authority so definite as that which now obtains had been established in Coke's day, far less in Littleton's. Still it was by a perusal of reported cases that a man would learn the law of England. A skeleton for the law was provided, not by the Roman rubrics (such as public and private, real and personal, possessory and proprietary, contract and delict), but by the cycle of original writs that were inscribed in the chancery's _Registrum Brevium_. A new form of action could not be introduced without the authority of Parliament, and the growth of the law took the shape of an explication of the true intent of ancient formulas. Times of inventive liberality alternated with times of cautious and captious conservatism. Coke could look back to Edward III.'s day as to a golden age of good pleading. The otherwise miserable time which saw the Wars of the Roses produced some famous lawyers, and some bold doctrines which broke new ground. It produced also Sir Thomas Littleton's (d. 1481) treatise on Tenures, which (though it be not, as Coke thought it, the most perfect work that ever was written in any human science) is an excellent statement of law in exquisitely simple language.

Legal education.

Meanwhile English law was being scholastically taught. This, if we look at the fate of native and national law in Germany, or France, or Scotland, appears as a fact of primary importance. From beginnings, so small and formless that they still elude research, the Inns of Court had grown. The lawyers, like other men, had grouped themselves in gilds, or gild-like "fellowships." The fellowship acquired property; it was not technically incorporate, but made use of the thoroughly English machinery of a trust. Behind a hedge of trustees it lived an autonomous life, unhampered by charters or statutes. There was a hall in which its members dined in common; there was the nucleus of a library; there were also dormitories or chambers in which during term-time lawyers lived celibately, leaving their wives in the country. Something of the college thus enters the constitution of these fellowships; and then something academical. The craft gild regulated apprenticeship; it would protect the public against incompetent artificers, and its own members against unfair competition. So the fellowship of lawyers. In course of time a lengthy and laborious course of education of the medieval sort had been devised. He who had pursued it to its end received a call to the bar of his inn. This call was in effect a degree. Like the doctor or master of a university, the full-blown barrister was competent to teach others, and was expected to read lectures to students. But further, in a manner that is still very dark, these societies had succeeded in making their degrees the only steps that led to practice in the king's courts. At the end of the middle ages (c. 1470) Sir John Fortescue rehearsed the praises of the laws of England in a book which is one of the earliest efforts of comparative politics. Contrasting England with France, he rightly connects limited monarchy, public and oral debate in the law courts, trial by jury, and the teaching of national law in schools that are thronged by wealthy and well-born youths. But nearly a century earlier, the assertion that English law affords as subtle and civilizing a discipline as any that is to be had from Roman law was made by a man no less famous than John Wycliffe. The heresiarch naturally loathed the Canon law; but he also spoke with reprobation of the "paynims' law," the "heathen men's law," the study of which in the two universities was being fostered by some of the bishops. That study, after inspiring Bracton, had come to little in England, though the canonist was compelled to learn something of Justinian, and there was a small demand for learned civilians in the court of admiralty, and in what we might call the king's diplomatic service. No medieval Englishman did anything considerable for Roman law. Even the canonists were content to read the books of French and Italian masters, though John Acton (c. 1340) and William Lyndwood (1430) wrote meritorious glosses. The Angevin kings, by appropriating to the temporal forum the whole province of ecclesiastical patronage, had robbed the decretists of an inexhaustible source of learning and of lucre. The work that was done by the legal faculties at Oxford and Cambridge is slight when compared with the inestimable services rendered to the cause of national continuity by the schools of English law which grew within the Inns of Court.

Chancery.

A danger threatened: the danger that a prematurely osseous system of common law would be overwhelmed by summary justice and royal equity. Even when courts for all ordinary causes had been established, a reserve of residuary justice remained with the king. Whatever lawyers and even parliaments might say, it was seen to be desirable that the king in council should with little regard for form punish offenders who could break through the meshes of a tardy procedure and should redress wrongs which corrupt and timid juries would leave unrighted. Papal edicts against heretics had made familiar to all men the notion that a judge should at times proceed _summarie et de plano et sine strepitu et figura justitiae_. And so extraordinary justice of a penal kind was done by the king's council upon misdemeanants, and extraordinary justice of a civil kind was ministered by the king's chancellor (who was the specially learned member of the council) to those who "for the love of God and in the way of charity," craved his powerful assistance. It is now well established that the chancellors started upon this course, not with any desire to introduce rules of "equity" which should supplement, or perhaps supplant, the rules of law, but for the purpose of driving the law through those accidental impediments which sometimes unfortunately beset its due course. The wrongs that the chancellor redressed were often wrongs of the simplest and most brutal kind: assaults, batteries and forcible dispossessions. However, he was warned off this field of

## activity by parliament; the danger to law, to lawyers, to trial by jury,

was evident. But just when this was happening, a new field was being opened for him by the growing practice of conveying land to trustees. The English trust of land had ancient Germanic roots, and of late we have been learning how in far-off centuries our Lombard cousins were in effect giving themselves a power of testation by putting their lands in trust. In England, when the forms of action were crystallizing, this practice had not been common enough to obtain the protection of a writ; but many causes conspired to make it common in the 14th century; and so, with the general approval of lawyers and laity, the chancellors began to enforce by summary process against the trustee the duty that lay upon his conscience. In the next century it was clear that England had come by a new civil tribunal. Negatively, its competence was defined by the rule that when the common law offered a remedy, the chancellor was not to intervene. Positively, his power was conceived as that of doing what "good conscience" required, more especially in cases of "fraud, accident or breach of confidence." His procedure was the summary, the heresy-suppressing (not the ordinary and solemn) procedure of an ecclesiastical court; but there are few signs that he borrowed any substantive rules from legist or decretist, and many proofs that within the new field of trust he pursued the ideas of the common law. It was long, however, before lawyers made a habit of reporting his decisions. He was not supposed to be tightly bound by precedent. Adaptability was of the essence of the justice that he did.

The Tudor Age.

A time of strain and trial came with the Tudor kings. It was questionable whether the strong "governance" for which the weary nation yearned could work within the limits of a parliamentary system, or would be compatible with the preservation of the common law. We see new courts appropriating large fields of justice and proceeding _summarie et de plano_; the star chamber, the chancery, the courts of requests, of wards, of augmentations, the councils of the North and Wales; a little later we see the high commission. We see also that judicial torture which Fortescue had called the road to hell. The stream of law reports became intermittent under Henry VIII.; few judges of his or his son's reign left names that are to be remembered. In an age of humanism, alphabetically arranged "abridgments" of medieval cases were the best work of English lawyers: one comes to us from Anthony Fitzherbert (d. 1538), and another from Robert Broke (d. 1558). This was the time when Roman law swept like a flood over Germany. The modern historian of Germany will speak of "the Reception" (that is, the reception of Roman law), as no less important than the Renaissance and Reformation with which it is intimately connected. Very probably he will bestow hard words on a movement which disintegrated the nation and consolidated the tyranny of the princelings. Now a project that Roman law should be "received" in England occurred to Reginald Pole (d. 1558), a humanist, and at one time a reformer, who with good fortune might have been either king of England or pope of Rome. English law, said the future cardinal and archbishop, was barbarous; Roman law was the very voice of nature pleading for "civility" and good princely governance. Pole's words were brought to the ears of his majestic cousin, and, had the course of events been somewhat other than it was, King Henry might well have decreed a reception. The role of English Justinian would have perfectly suited him, and there are distinct traces of the civilian's Byzantinism in the doings of the Church of England's supreme head. The academic study of the Canon law was prohibited; regius professorships of the civil law were founded; civilians were to sit as judges in the ecclesiastical courts. A little later, the Protector Somerset was deeply interested in the establishment of a great school for civilians at Cambridge. Scottish law was the own sister of English law, and yet in Scotland we may see a reception of Roman jurisprudence which might have been more whole-hearted than it was, but for the drift of two British and Protestant kingdoms towards union. As it fell out, however, Henry could get what he wanted in church and state without any decisive supersession of English by foreign law. The omnicompetence of an act of parliament stands out the more clearly if it settles the succession to the throne, annuls royal marriages, forgives royal debts, defines religious creeds, attaints guilty or innocent nobles, or prospectively lends the force of statute to the king's proclamations. The courts of common law were suffered to work in obscurity, for jurors feared fines, and matter of state was reserved for council or star chamber. The Inns of Court were spared; their moots and readings did no perceptible harm, if little perceptible good.

Coke.

Yet it is no reception of alien jurisprudence that must be chronicled, but a marvellous resuscitation of English medieval law. We may see it already in the Commentaries of Edward Plowden (d. 1585) who reported cases at length and lovingly. Bracton's great book was put in print, and was a key to much that had been forgotten or misunderstood. Under Parker's patronage, even the Anglo-Saxon dooms were brought to light; they seemed to tell of a Church of England that had not yet been enslaved by Rome. The new national pride that animated Elizabethan England issued in boasts touching the antiquity, humanity, enlightenment of English law. Resuming the strain of Fortescue, Sir Thomas Smith, himself a civilian, wrote concerning the Commonwealth of England a book that claimed the attention of foreigners for her law and her polity. There was dignified rebuke for the French jurist who had dared to speak lightly of Littleton. And then the common law took flesh in the person of Edward Coke (1552-1634). With an enthusiastic love of English tradition, for the sake of which many offences may be forgiven him, he ranged over nearly the whole field of law, commenting, reporting, arguing, deciding,--disorderly, pedantic, masterful, an incarnate national dogmatism tenacious of continuous life. Imbued with this new spirit, the lawyers fought the battle of the constitution against James and Charles, and historical research appeared as the guardian of national liberties. That the Stuarts united against themselves three such men as Edward Coke, John Selden and William Prynne, is the measure of their folly and their failure. Words that, rightly or wrongly, were ascribed to Bracton rang in Charles's ears when he was sent to the scaffold. For the modern student of medieval law many of the reported cases of the Stuart time are storehouses of valuable material, since the lawyers of the 17th century were mighty hunters after records. Prynne (d. 1669), the fanatical Puritan, published ancient documents with fervid zeal, and made possible a history of parliament. Selden (d. 1654) was in all Europe among the very first to write legal history as it should be written. His book about tithes is to this day a model and a masterpiece. When this accomplished scholar had declared that he had laboured to make himself worthy to be called a common lawyer, it could no longer be said that the common lawyers were _indoctissimum genus doctissimorum hominum_. Even pliant judges, whose tenure of office depended on the king's will, were compelled to cite and discuss old precedents before they could give judgment for their master; and even at their worst moments they would not openly break with medieval tradition, or declare in favour of that "modern police-state" which has too often become the ideal of foreign publicists trained in Byzantine law.

Hale.

The current of legal doctrine was by this time so strong and voluminous that such events as the Civil War, the Restoration and the Revolution hardly deflected the course of the stream. In retrospect, Charles II. reigns so soon as life has left his father's body, and James II. ends a lawless career by a considerate and convenient abdication. The statute book of the restored king was enriched by leaves excerpted from the acts of a lord protector; and Matthew Hale (d. 1676), who was, perhaps, the last of the great record-searching judges, sketched a map of English law which Blackstone was to colour. Then a time of self-complacency came for the law, which knew itself to be the perfection of wisdom, and any proposal for drastic legislation would have worn the garb discredited by the tyranny of the Puritan Caesar. The need for the yearly renewal of the Mutiny Act secured an annual session of parliament. The mass of the statute law made in the 18th century is enormous; but, even when we have excluded from view such acts as are technically called "private," the residuary matter bears a wonderfully empirical, partial and minutely

## particularizing character. In this "age of reason," as we are wont to

think it, the British parliament seems rarely to rise to the dignity of a general proposition, and in our own day the legal practitioner is likely to know less about the statutes of the 18th century than he knows about the statutes of Edward I., Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Parliament, it should be remembered, was endeavouring directly to govern the nation. There was little that resembled the permanent civil service of to-day. The choice lay between direct parliamentary government and royal "prerogative"; and lengthy statutes did much of that work of detail which would now be done by virtue of the powers that are delegated to ministers and governmental boards. Moreover, extreme and verbose

## particularity was required in statutes, for judges were loath to admit

that the common law was capable of amendment. A vague doctrine, inherited from Coke, taught that statutes might be so unreasonable as to be null, and any political theory that seemed to derive from Hobbes would have been regarded with not unjust suspicion. But the doctrine in question never took tangible shape, and enough could be done to protect the common law by a niggardly exposition of every legislating word. It is to be remembered that some main features of English public law were attracting the admiration of enlightened Europe. When Voltaire and Montesquieu applauded, the English lawyer had cause for complacency.

The common law was by no means stagnant. Many rules which come to the front in the 18th century are hardly to be traced farther. Especially is this the case in the province of mercantile law, where the earl of Mansfield's (d. 1793) long presidency over the king's bench marked an epoch. It is too often forgotten that, until Elizabeth's reign, England was a thoroughly rustic kingdom, and that trade with England was mainly in the hands of foreigners. Also in medieval fairs, the assembled merchants declared their own "law merchant," which was considered to have a supernational validity. In the reports of the common law courts it is late in the day before we read of some mercantile usages which can be traced far back in the statutes of Italian cities. Even on the basis of the excessively elaborated land law--a basis which Coke's Commentary on Littleton seemed to have settled for ever--a lofty and ingenious superstructure could be reared. One after another delicate devices were invented for the accommodation of new wants within the law; but only by the assurance that the old law could not be frankly abolished can we be induced to admire the subtlety that was thus displayed. As to procedure, it had become a maze of evasive fictions, to which only a few learned men held the historical clue. By fiction the courts had stolen business from each other, and by fiction a few comparatively speedy forms of

## action were set to tasks for which they were not originally framed. Two

fictitious persons, John Doe and Richard Roe, reigned supreme. On the other hand, that healthy and vigorous institution, the Commission of the Peace, with a long history behind it, was giving an important share in the administration of justice to numerous country gentlemen who were thus compelled to learn some law. A like beneficial work was being done among jurors, who, having ceased to be regarded as witnesses, had become "judges of fact." No one doubted that trial by jury was the "palladium" of English liberties, and popularity awaited those who would exalt the office of the jurors and narrowly limit the powers of the judge.

Equity.

But during this age the chief addition to English jurisprudence was made by the crystallization of the chancellor's equity. In the 17th century the chancery had a narrow escape of sharing the fate that befell its twin sister the star chamber. Its younger sister the court of requests perished under the persistent attacks of the common lawyers. Having outlived troubles, the chancery took to orderly habits, and administered under the name of "equity" a growing group of rules, which in fact were supplemental law. Stages in this process are marked by the chancellorships of Nottingham (1673-1675) and Hardwicke (1737-1756). Slowly a continuous series of Equity Reports began to flow, and still more slowly an "equity bar" began to form itself. The principal outlines of equity were drawn by men who were steeped in the common law. By way of ornament a Roman maxim might be borrowed from a French or Dutch expositor, or a phrase which smacked of that "nature-rightly" school which was dominating continental Europe; but the influence exercised by Roman law upon English equity has been the subject of gross exaggeration. Parliament and the old courts being what they were, perhaps it was only in a new court that the requisite new law could be evolved. The result was not altogether satisfactory. Freed from contact with the plain man in the jury-box, the chancellors were tempted to forget how plain and rough good law should be, and to screw up the legal standard of reasonable conduct to a height hardly attainable except by those whose purses could command the constant advice of a family solicitor. A court which started with the idea of doing summary justice for the poor became a court which did a highly refined, but tardy justice, suitable only to the rich.

Blackstone.

About the middle of the century William Blackstone, then a disappointed barrister, began to give lectures on English law at Oxford (1758), and soon afterwards he began to publish (1765) his _Commentaries_. Accurate enough in its history and doctrine to be an invaluable guide to professional students and a useful aid to practitioners, his book set before the unprofessional public an artistic picture of the laws of England such as had never been drawn of any similar system. No nation but the English had so eminently readable a law-book, and it must be doubtful whether any other lawyer ever did more important work than was done by the first professor of English law. Over and over again the _Commentaries_ were edited, sometimes by distinguished men, and it is hardly too much to say that for nearly a century the English lawyer's main ideas of the organization and articulation of the body of English law were controlled by Blackstone. This was far from all. The Tory lawyer little thought that he was giving law to colonies that were on the eve of a great and successful rebellion. Yet so it was. Out in America, where books were few and lawyers had a mighty task to perform, Blackstone's facile presentment of the law of the mother country was of inestimable value. It has been said that among American lawyers the _Commentaries_ "stood for the law of England," and this at a time when the American daughter of English law was rapidly growing in stature, and was preparing herself for her destined march from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Excising only what seemed to savour of oligarchy, those who had defied King George retained with marvellous tenacity the law of their forefathers. Profound discussions of English medieval law have been heard in American courts; admirable researches into the recesses of the Year-Books have been made in American law schools; the names of the great American judges are familiar in an England which knows little indeed of foreign jurists; and the debt due for the loan of Blackstone's _Commentaries_ is being fast repaid. Lectures on the common law delivered by Mr Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States may even have begun to turn the scale against the old country. No

## chapter in Blackstone's book nowadays seems more antiquated than that

which describes the modest territorial limits of that English law which was soon to spread throughout Australia and New Zealand and to follow the dominant race in India.

Bentham.

Long wars, vast economic changes and the conservatism generated by the French Revolution piled up a monstrous arrear of work for the English legislature. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) had laboured for the overthrow of much that Blackstone had lauded. Bentham's largest projects of destruction and reconstruction took but little effect. Profoundly convinced of the fungibility and pliability of mankind, he was but too ready to draw a code for England or Spain or Russia at the shortest notice; and, scornful as he was of the past and its historic deposit, a code drawn by Bentham would have been a sorry failure. On the other hand, as a critic and derider of the system which Blackstone had complacently expounded he did excellent service. Reform, and radical reform, was indeed sadly needed throughout a system which was encumbered by noxious rubbish, the useless leavings of the middle ages: trial by battle and compurgation, deodands and benefit of clergy, John Doe and Richard Roe. It is perhaps the main fault of "judge-made law" (to use Bentham's phrase) that its destructive work can never be cleanly done. Of all vitality, and therefore of all patent harmfulness, the old rule can be deprived, but the moribund husk must remain in the system doing latent mischief. English law was full of decaying husks when Bentham attacked it, and his persistent demand for reasons could not be answered. At length a general interest in "law reform" was excited; Romilly and Brougham were inspired by Bentham, and the great changes in constitutional law which cluster round the Reform Act of 1832 were accompanied by many measures which purged the private, procedural and criminal law of much, though hardly enough, of the medieval dross. Some credit for rousing an interest in law, in definitions of legal terms, and in schemes of codification, is due to John Austin (d. 1859) who was regarded as the jurist of the reforming and utilitarian group. But, though he was at times an acute dissector of confused thought, he was too ignorant of the English, the Roman and every other system of law to make any considerable addition to the sum of knowledge; and when Savigny, the herald of evolution, was already in the field, the day for a "Nature-Right"--and Austin's projected "general jurisprudence" would have been a Nature-Right--was past beyond recall. The obsolescence of the map of law which Blackstone had inherited from Hale, and in which many outlines were drawn by medieval formulas, left intelligent English lawyers without a guide, and they were willing to listen for a while to what in their insularity they thought to be the voice of cosmopolitan science. Little came of it all. The revived study of Germanic law in Germany, which was just beginning in Austin's day, seems to be showing that the scheme of Roman jurisprudence is not the scheme into which English law will run without distortion.

Recent changes.

In the latter half of the 19th century some great and wise changes were made by the legislature. Notably in 1875 the old courts were merged in a new Supreme Court of Judicature, and a concurrent administration of law and equity was introduced. Successful endeavours have been made also to reduce the bulk of old statute law, and to improve the form of acts of parliament; but the emergence of new forces whose nature may be suggested by some such names as "socialism" and "imperialism" has distracted the attention of the British parliament from the commonplace law of the land, and the development of obstructive tactics has caused the issue of too many statutes whose brevity was purchased by disgraceful obscurity. By way of "partial codification" some branches of the common law (bills of exchange, sale of goods, partnership) have been skilfully stated in statutes, but a draft criminal code, upon which much expert labour was expended, lies pigeon-holed and almost forgotten. British India has been the scene of some large legislative exploits, and in America a few big experiments have been made in the way of code-making, but have given little satisfaction to the bulk of those who are competent to appreciate their results. In England there are large portions of the law which, in their present condition, no one would think of codifying: notably the law of real property, in which may still be found numerous hurtful relics of bygone centuries. So omnipresent are statutes throughout the whole field of jurisprudence that the opportunity of doing any great feat in the development of law can come but seldom to a modern court. More and more, therefore, the fate of English law depends on the will of parliament, or rather of the ministry. The quality of legal text-books has steadily improved; some of them are models of clear statement and good arrangement; but no one has with any success aspired to be the Blackstone of a new age.

Law reporting.

The Council of Law Reporting was formed in the year 1863. The council now consists of three _ex-officio_ members--the attorney-general, the solicitor-general and the president of the Incorporated Law Society, and ten members appointed by the three Inns of Court, the Incorporated Law Society and the council itself on the nomination of the general council of the bar. The practitioner and the student now get for a subscription of four guineas a year the reports in all the superior courts and the House of Lords, and the judicial committee of the privy council issued in monthly parts a king's printer's copy of the statutes, and weekly notes, containing short notes of current decisions and announcements of all new rules made under the Judicature Acts and other acts of parliament, and other legal information. In addition the subscriber receives the chronological index of the statutes published from time to time by the Stationery Office, and last, but not least, the Digests of decided cases published by the council from time to time. In 1892 a Digest was published containing the cases and statutes for twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, and this was supplemented by one for the succeeding ten years, from 1891 to 1900. The digesting is now carried on continuously by means of "Current Indexes," which are published monthly and annually, and consolidated into a digest at stated intervals (say) of five years. The Indian appeals series, which is not required by the general practitioner, is supplied separately at one guinea a year.

Legal education.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the corporate life of the Inns of Court in London became less and less active. The general decay of the organization of crafts and gilds showed itself among lawyers as among other craftsmen. Successful barristers, sharing in the general prosperity of the country, became less and less able and willing to devote their time to the welfare of their profession as a whole. The Inns of Chancery, though some of their buildings still remain--picturesque survivals in their "suburbs"--ceased to be used as places for the education of students. The benchers of the Inns of Court, until the revival towards the middle of the 19th century, had wholly ceased to concern themselves with the systematic teaching of law. The modern system of legal education may be said to date from the establishment, in 1852, of the council of legal education, a body of twenty judges and barristers appointed by the four Inns of Court to control the legal education of students preparing to be called to the bar. The most important feature is the examination which a student must pass before he can be called. The examination (which by degrees has been made "stiffer") serves the double purpose of fixing the compulsory standard which all must reach, and of guiding the reading of students who may desire, sooner or later, to carry their studies beyond this standard. The subjects in which the examination is held are divided into Roman law; Constitutional law and legal history; Evidence, Procedure and Criminal law; Real and Personal Property; Equity; and Common law. The council of legal education also appoint a body of readers and assistant readers, practising barristers, who deliver lectures and hold classes.

Meanwhile the custom remains by which a student reads for a year or more as a pupil in the chambers of some practising barrister. In the 18th century it first became usual for students to read with a solicitor or attorney, and after a short time the modern practice grew up of reading in the chambers of a conveyancer, equity draftsman or special pleader, or, in more recent times, in the chambers of a junior barrister. Before the modern examination system, a student required to have a certificate from the barrister in whose chambers he had been a pupil before he could be "called," but the only relic of the old system now is the necessity of "eating dinners," six (three for university men) in each of the four terms for three years, at one of the Inns of Court.

The education of solicitors suffered from the absence of any professional organization until the Incorporated Law Society was established in 1825 and the following years. So far as any professional education is provided for solicitors or required from them, this is due to the efforts of the Law Society. As early as 1729 it was required by statute that any person applying for admission as attorney or solicitor should submit to examination by one of the judges, who was to test his fitness and capacity in consideration of a fee of one shilling. At the same time regular preliminary service under articles was required, that is to say, under a contract by which the clerk was bound to serve for five years. The examination soon became, perhaps always was, an empty form. The Law Society, however, soon showed zeal for the education of future solicitors. In 1833 lectures were instituted. In 1836 the first regular examinations were established, and in 1860 the present system of examinations--preliminary, intermediate and final--came into effect. Of these only the last two are devoted to law, and both are of a strictly professional character. The final examination is a fairly severe test of practical acquaintance with all branches of modern English law. The Law Society makes some provision for the teaching of students, but this teaching is designed solely to assist in preparation for the examinations.

At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge there has, since 1850, been an attempt to promote the study of law. The curriculum of legal subjects in which lectures are given and examinations held is calculated to give a student a sound fundamental knowledge of general principles, as well as an elementary acquaintance with the rules of modern English law. Jurisprudence, Roman law, Constitutional law and International law are taught, as well as the law of Real and Personal Property, the Law of Contract and Tort, Criminal law, Procedure and Evidence. But the law tripos and the law schools suffer from remoteness from the law courts, and from the exclusively academical character of the teaching. Law is also taught, though not on a very large scale, at Manchester and at Liverpool. London University has encouraged the study of law by its examinations for law degrees, at which a comparatively high standard of knowledge is required; and at University College, London, and King's College, London, teaching is given in law and jurisprudence.

AUTHORITIES.--F. Liebermann, _Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen_ (1898); K.E. Digby, _History of the Law of Real Property_; Sir W. Dugdale, _Origines juridicales_ (1671); O.W. Holmes, _The Common Law_ (Boston, 1881); H. Hallam, _Constitutional History_; W.S. Holdsworth, _History of English Law_, 3 vols. (1903-9); J. Reeves, _History of English Law_, ed. W.F. Finlason (1869); T. Madox, _History and Antiquities of the Exchequer_ (1769); C. de Franqueville, _Le Systeme judiciaire de la Grande-Bretagne_ (Paris, 1893); Sir F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, _History of English Law_ (2 vols., 1898); H. Brunner, _The Sources of the Law of England_, trans. by W. Hastie (1888); Sir R.K. Wilson, _History of Modern English Law_ (1875); A.V. Dicey, _Law and Public Opinion in England_ (1905); Sir J.F. Stephen, _History of the Criminal Law of England_ (3 vols., 1883); W. Stubbs, _Select Charters, Constitutional History_; the Publications of the Selden Society and the Year Books in the Rolls Series. (F. W. M.)

ENGLISH LITERATURE. The following discussion of the evolution of English literature, i.e. of the contribution to literature made in the course of ages by the writers of England, is planned so as to give a comprehensive view, the details as to particular authors and their work, and special consideration of the greater writers, being given in the separate articles devoted to them. It is divided into the following sections: (1) Earliest times to Chaucer; (2) Chaucer to the end of the middle ages; (3) Elizabethan times; (4) the Restoration period; (5) the Eighteenth century; (6) the Nineteenth century. The object of these sections is to form connecting links among the successive literary ages, leaving the separate articles on individual great writers to deal with their special interest; attention being paid in the main to the gradually developing characteristics of the product, qua literary. The precise delimitation of what may narrowly be called "English" literature, i.e. in the English language, is perhaps impossible, and separate articles are devoted to American literature (q.v.), and to the vernacular literatures of Scotland (see SCOTLAND; and CELT: _Literature_), Ireland (see CELT: _Literature_), and Wales (see CELT: _Literature_); see also CANADA: _Literature_. Reference may also be made to such general articles on

## particular forms as NOVEL; ROMANCE; VERSE, &c.

I. EARLIEST TIMES TO CHAUCER

English literature, in the etymological sense of the word, had, so far as we know, no existence until Christian times. There is no evidence either that the heathen English had adopted the Roman alphabet, or that they had learned to employ their native monumental script (the runes) on materials suitable for the writing of continuous compositions of considerable length.

It is, however, certain that in the pre-literary period at least one species of poetic art had attained a high degree of development, and that an extensive body of poetry was handed down--not, indeed, with absolute fixity of form or substance--from generation to generation. This unwritten poetry was the work of minstrels who found their audiences in the halls of kings and nobles. Its themes were the exploits of heroes belonging to the royal houses of Germanic Europe, with which its listeners claimed kinship. Its metre was the alliterative long line, the lax rhythm of which shows that it was intended, not to be sung to regular melodies, but to be recited--probably with some kind of instrumental accompaniment. Of its beauty and power we may judge from the best passages in _Beowulf_ (q.v.); for there can be little doubt that this poem gained nothing and lost much in the process of literary redaction.

The conversion of the people to Christianity necessarily involved the decline of the minstrelsy that celebrated the glories of heathen times. Yet the descendants of Woden, even when they were devout Christians, would not easily lose all interest in the achievements of their kindred of former days. Chaucer's knowledge of "the song of Wade" is one proof among others that even so late as the 14th century the deeds of Germanic heroes had not ceased to be recited in minstrel verse. The paucity of the extant remains of Old English heroic poetry is no argument to the contrary. The wonder is that any of it has survived at all. We may well believe that the professional reciter would, as a rule, be jealous of any attempt to commit to writing the poems which he had received by tradition or had himself composed. The clergy, to whom we owe the writing and the preservation of the Old English MSS., would only in rare instances be keenly interested in secular poetry. We possess, in fact, portions of four narrative poems, treating of heroic legend--_Beowulf_, _Widsith_, _Finnesburh_ and _Waldere_. The second of these has no poetical merit, but great archaeological interest. It is an enumeration of the famous kings known to German tradition, put into the mouth of a minstrel (named Widsith, "far-travelled"), who claims to have been at many of their courts and to have been rewarded by them for his song. The list includes historical persons such as Ermanaric and Alboin, who really lived centuries apart, but (with the usual chronological vagueness of tradition) are treated as contemporaries. The extant fragment of _Finnesburh_ (50 lines) is a brilliant battle piece, belonging to a story of which another part is introduced episodically in _Beowulf_. _Waldere_, of which we have two fragments (together 68 lines) is concerned with Frankish and Burgundian traditions based on events of the 5th century; the hero is the "Waltharius" of Ekkehart's famous Latin epic. The English poem may possibly be rather a literary composition than a genuine example of minstrel poetry, but the portions that have survived are hardly inferior to the best passages of _Beowulf_.

It may reasonably be assumed that the same minstrels who entertained the English kings and nobles with the recital of ancient heroic traditions would also celebrate in verse the martial deeds of their own patrons and their immediate ancestors. Probably there may have existed an abundance of poetry commemorative of events in the conquest of Britain and the struggle with the Danes. Two examples only have survived, both belonging to the 10th century: The _Battle of Brunanburh_, which has been greatly over-praised by critics who were unaware that its striking phrases and compounds are mere traditional echoes; and the _Battle of Maldon_, the work of a truly great poet, of which unhappily only a fragment has been preserved.

One of the marvels of history is the rapidity and thoroughness with which Christian civilization was adopted by the English. Augustine landed in 597; forty years later was born an Englishman, Aldhelm, who in the judgment of his contemporaries throughout the Christian world was the most accomplished scholar and the finest Latin writer of his time. In the next generation England produced in Bede (Baeda) a man who in solidity and variety of knowledge, and in literary power, had for centuries no rival in Europe. Aldhelm and Bede are known to us only from their Latin writings, though the former is recorded to have written vernacular poetry of great merit. The extant Old English literature is almost entirely Christian, for the poems that belong to an earlier period have been expurgated and interpolated in a Christian sense. From the writings that have survived, it would seem as if men strove to forget that England had ever been heathen. The four deities whose names are attached to the days of the week are hardly mentioned at all. The names Thunor and Tiw are sometimes used to translate the Latin Jupiter and Mars; Woden has his place (but not as a god) in the genealogies of the kings, and his name occurs once in a magical poem, but that is all. Bede, as a historian, is obliged to tell the story of the conversion; but the only native divinities he mentions are the goddesses Hreth and Eostre, and all we learn about them is that they gave their names to Hrethemonath (March) and Easter. That superstitious practices of heathen origin long survived among the people is shown by the acts of church councils and by a few poems of a magical nature that have been preserved; but, so far as can be discovered, the definite worship of the ancient gods quickly died out. English heathenism perished without leaving a record.

The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful _Dream of the Rood_, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only, and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of _Judith_, however, is certainly much later; and the _Exodus_, though early, seems to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on CAeDMON and CYNEWULF, to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.

The Riddles (q.v.) of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter

## Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying

proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very curious _Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn_ may be regarded as belonging to the same class.

The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary poetry is the group of dramatic monologues--_The Banished Wife's Complaint_, _The Husband's Message_, _The Wanderer_, _The Seafarer_, _Deor_ and _Wulf and Eadwacer_. The date of these compositions is uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This, however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short pieces--_Deor_ and _Wulf and Eadwacer_--which have something of a lyric character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure and the use of the refrain. _Wulf and Eadwacer_, indeed, exhibits a still further development in the same direction, the monotony of the long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its extent and variety.

While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was written much earlier. The English laws of Aethelberht of Kent, though it is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died A.D. 604), or even in that of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the 12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (q.v.) is probably founded partly on prose annals of pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual guides.

Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, _St Gregory's Pastoral Care_ and his _Dialogues_ (the latter rendered by Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all (not excepting the secular _History of Orosius_) essentially religious in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the _Pastoral Care_, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted in the _Orosius_, and in the free rendering and amplification of the _Consolation_ of Boethius and of the _Soliloquies_ of Augustine, Alfred appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws (preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from Latin and of homilies and saints' lives, the substance of which is derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it has therefore for us little importance except from the philological point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the writings of Aelfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels, though executed in Aelfric's time (about 1000), is by other hands. The sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical value.

From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic manual of the science of the time--chronology, astronomy, arithmetic, metre, rhetoric and ethics--by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or two formulas of incantations in Irish.

Two famous works of fiction, the romance of _Apollonius of Tyre_ and the _Letter of Alexander_, which in their Latin form had much influence on the later literature of Europe, were Englished in the 11th century with considerable skill. To the same period belongs the curious tract on _The Wonders of the East_. In these works, and some minor productions of the time, we see that the minds of Englishmen were beginning to find interest in other than religious subjects.

The crowding of the English monasteries by foreigners, which was one of the results of the Norman Conquest, brought about a rapid arrest of the development of the vernacular literature. It was not long before the boys trained in the monastic schools ceased to learn to read and write their native tongue, and learned instead to read and write French. The effects of this change are visible in the rapid alteration of the literary language. The artificial tradition of grammatical correctness lost its hold; the archaic literary vocabulary fell into disuse; and those who wrote English at all wrote as they spoke, using more and more an extemporized phonetic spelling based largely on French analogies. The 12th century is a brilliant period in the history of Anglo-Latin literature, and many works of merit were written in French (see ANGLO-NORMAN). But vernacular literature is scanty and of little originality. The _Peterborough Chronicle_, it is true, was continued till 1154, and its later portions, while markedly exemplifying the changes in the language, contain some really admirable writing. But it is substantially correct to say that from this point until the age of Chaucer vernacular prose served no other purpose than that of popular religious edification. For light on the intellectual life of the nation during this period we must look mainly to the works written in Latin. The homilies of the 12th century are partly modernized transcripts from Aelfric and other older writers, partly translations from French and Latin; the remainder is mostly commonplace in substance and clumsy in expression. At the beginning of the 13th century the _Ancren Riwle_ (q.v.), a book of counsel for nuns, shows true literary genius, and is singularly interesting in its substance and spirit; but notwithstanding the author's remarkable mastery of English expression, his culture was evidently French rather than English. Some minor religious prose works of the same period are not without merit. But these examples had no literary following. In the early 14th century the writings of Richard Rolle and his school attained great popularity. The profound influence which they exercised on later religious thought, and on the development of prose style, has seldom been adequately recognized. The _Ayenbite of Inwyt_ (see MICHEL, DAN), a wretchedly unintelligent translation (finished in 1340) from Frere Lorens's _Somme des vices et des vertus_, is valuable to the student of language, but otherwise worthless.

The break in the continuity of literary tradition, induced by the Conquest, was no less complete with regard to poetry than with regard to prose. The poetry of the 13th and the latter part of the 12th century was uninfluenced by the written works of Old English poets, whose archaic diction had to a great extent become unintelligible. But there is no ground to suppose that the succession of popular singers and reciters was ever interrupted. In the north-west, indeed, the old recitative metre seems to have survived in oral tradition, with little more alteration than was rendered necessary by the changes in the language, until the middle of the 14th century, when it was again adopted by literary versifiers. In the south this metre had greatly degenerated in strictness before the Conquest, but, with gradually increasing laxity in the laws of alliteration and rhythm, it continued long in use. It is commonly believed, with great intrinsic probability but with scanty actual evidence, that in the Old English period there existed, beside the alliterative long line, other forms of verse adapted not for recitation but for singing, used in popular lyrics and ballads that were deemed too trivial for written record. The influence of native popular poetic tradition, whether in the form of recited or of sung verse, is clearly discernible in the earliest Middle English poems that have been preserved. But the authors of these poems were familiar with Latin, and probably spoke French as easily as their mother tongue; and there was no longer any literary convention to restrain them from adopting foreign metrical forms. The artless verses of the hermit Godric, who died in 1170, exhibit in their metre the combined influence of native rhythm and of that of Latin hymnology. The _Proverbs of Alfred_, written about 1200, is (like the later _Proverbs of Hendyng_) in style and substance a gnomic poem of the ancient Germanic type, containing maxims some of which may be of immemorial antiquity; and its rhythm is mainly of native origin. On the other hand, the solemn and touching meditation known as the _Moral Ode_, which is somewhat earlier in date, is in a metre derived from contemporary Latin verse--a line of seven accents, broken by a caesura, and with feminine end-rhymes. In the _Ormulum_ (see ORM) this metre (known as the septenarius) appears without rhyme, and with a syllabic regularity previously without example in English verse, the line (or distich, as it may be called with almost equal propriety) having invariably fifteen syllables. In various modified forms, the septenarius was a favourite measure throughout the Middle English period. In the poetry of the 13th century the influence of French models is conspicuous. The many devotional lyrics, some of which, as the _Luve Ron_ of Thomas of Hales, have great beauty, show this influence not only in their varied metrical form, but also in their peculiar mystical tenderness and fervour. The _Story of Genesis and Exodus_, the substance of which is taken from the Bible and Latin commentators, derives its metre chiefly from French. Its poetical merit is very small. The secular poetry also received a new impulse from France. The brilliant and sprightly dialogue of the _Owl and Nightingale_, which can hardly be dated later than about 1230, is a "contention" of the type familiar in French and Provencal literature. The "Gallic" type of humour may be seen in various other writings of this period, notably in the _Land of Cockaigne_, a vivacious satire on monastic self-indulgence, and in the fabliau of _Dame Siviz_, a story of Eastern origin, told with almost Chaucerian skill. Predominantly, though not exclusively French in metrical structure, are the charming love poems collected in a MS. (Harl. 2253) written about 1320 in Herefordshire, some of which (edited in T. Wright's _Specimens of Lyric Poetry_) find a place in modern popular anthologies. It is noteworthy that they are accompanied by some French lyrics very similar in style. The same MS. contains, besides some religious poetry, a number of political songs of the time of Edward II. They are not quite the earliest examples of their kind; in the time of the Barons' War the popular cause had had its singers in English as well as in French. Later, the victories of Edward III. down to the taking of Guisnes in 1352, were celebrated by the Yorkshireman Laurence Minot in alliterative verse with strophic arrangement and rhyme.

At the very beginning of the 13th century a new species of composition, the metrical chronicle, was introduced into English literature. The huge work of Layamon, a history (mainly legendary) of Britain from the time of the mythical Brutus till after the mission of Augustine, is a free rendering of the Norman-French _Brut_ of Wace, with extensive additions from traditional sources. Its metre seems to be a degenerate survival of the Old English alliterative line, gradually modified in the course of the work by assimilation to the regular syllabic measure of the French original. Unquestionable evidence of the knowledge of the poem on the part of later writers is scarce, but distinct echoes of its diction appear in the chronicle ascribed to Robert of Gloucester, written in rhymed septenary measures about 1300. This work, founded in its earlier part on the Latin historians of the 12th century, is an independent historical source of some value for the events of the writer's own times. The succession of versified histories of England was continued by Thomas Bek of Castleford in Yorkshire (whose work still awaits an editor), and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (Bourne, Lincolnshire). Mannyng's chronicle, finished in 1338, is a translation, in its earlier part from Wace's _Brut_, and in its later part from an Anglo-French chronicle (still extant) written by Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington.

Not far from the year 1300 (for the most part probably earlier rather than later) a vast mass of hagiological and homiletic verse was produced in divers parts of England. To Gloucester belongs an extensive series of Lives of Saints, metrically and linguistically closely resembling Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, and perhaps wholly or in part of the same authorship. A similar collection was written in the north of England, as well as a large body of homilies showing considerable poetic skill, and abounding in exempla or illustrative stories. Of _exempla_ several prose collections had already been made in Anglo-French, and William of Wadington's poem _Manuel des peches_, which contains a great number of them, was translated in 1303 by Robert Mannyng already mentioned, with some enlargement of the anecdotic element, and frequent omissions of didactic passages. The great rhyming chronicle of Scripture history entitled _Cursor Mundi_ (q.v.) was written in the north about this time. It was extensively read and transcribed, and exercised a powerful influence on later writers down to the end of the 14th century. The remaining homiletic verse of this period is too abundant to be referred to in detail; it will be enough to mention the sermons of William of Shoreham, written in strophic form, but showing little either of metrical skill or poetic feeling. To the next generation belongs the _Pricke of Conscience_ by Richard Rolle, the influence of which was not less powerful than that of the author's prose writings.

Romantic poetry, which in French had been extensively cultivated, both on the continent and in England from the early years of the 12th century, did not assume a vernacular form till about 1250. In the next hundred years its development was marvellously rapid. Of the vast mass of metrical romances produced during this period no detailed account need here be attempted (see ROMANCE, and articles, &c. referred to; ARTHURIAN ROMANCE). Native English traditions form the basis of _King Horn_, _Guy of Warwick_, _Bevis of Hamtoun_ and _Havelok_, though the stories were first put into literary form by Anglo-Norman poets. The popularity of these home-grown tales (with which may be classed the wildly fictitious _Coer de Lion_) was soon rivalled by that of importations from France. The English rendering of _Floris and Blancheflur_ (a love-romance of Greek origin) is found in the same MS. that contains the earliest copy of _King Horn_. Before the end of the century, the French "matter of Britain" was represented in English by the Southern _Arthur and Merlin_ and the Northern _Tristram_ and _Yvaine and Gawin_, the "matter of France" by _Roland and Vernagu_ and _Otuel_; the _Alexander_ was also translated, but in this instance the immediate original was an Anglo-French and not a continental poem. The tale of Troy did not come into English till long afterwards. The Auchinleck MS., written about 1330, contains no fewer than 14 poetical romances; there were many others in circulation, and the number continued to grow. About the middle of the 14th century, the Old English alliterative long line, which for centuries had been used only in unwritten minstrel poetry, emerges again in literature. One of the earliest poems in this revived measure, _Wynnere and Wastour_, written in 1352, is by a professional reciter-poet, who complains bitterly that original minstrel poetry no longer finds a welcome in the halls of great nobles, who prefer to listen to those who recite verses not of their own making. About the same date the metre began to be employed by men of letters for the translation of romance--_William of Palerne_ and _Joseph of Arimathea_ from the French, _Alexander_ from Latin prose. The later development of alliterative poetry belongs mainly to the age of Chaucer.

The extent and character of the literature produced during the first half of the 14th century indicate that the literary use of the native tongue was no longer, as in the preceding age, a mere condescension to the needs of the common people. The rapid disuse of French as the ordinary medium of intercourse among the middle and higher ranks of society, and the consequent substitution of English for French as the vehicle of school instruction, created a widespread demand for vernacular reading. The literature which arose in answer to this demand, though it consisted mainly of translations or adaptations of foreign works, yet served to develop the appreciation of poetic beauty, and to prepare an audience in the near future for a poetry in which the genuine thought and feeling of the nation were to find expression.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Only general works need be mentioned here. Those cited contain lists of books for more detailed information. (1) For the literature from the beginnings to Chaucer:--B. ten Brink, _Geschichte der englischen Litteratur_, vol. i. 2nd ed., by A. Brandl (Strassburg, 1899) (English translation from the 1st ed. of 1877, by H.M. Kennedy, London, 1883); _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. i. (1907). (2) For the Old English period:--R. Wulker, _Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsachsischen Litteratur_ (Leipzig, 1885); Stopford A. Brooke, _English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest_ (London, 1898); A. Brandl, "Altenglische Litteratur," in H. Paul's _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_, vol. ii. (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1908). (3) For the early Middle English Period:--H. Morley, _English Writers_, vol. iii. (London, 1888; vols. i. and ii., dealing with the Old English period, cannot be recommended); A. Brandl, "Mittelenglische Litteratur," in H. Paul's _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_, vol. ii. (1st ed., Strassburg, 1893); W.H. Schofield, _English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer_ (London, 1906). (H. Br.)

II. CHAUCER TO THE RENAISSANCE

The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature, not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects, Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers, sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers, that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun and the other "courtly makers" of France. But while he was still striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France, among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion,--in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. The new prose--which Chaucer knew in several of the writings of Boccaccio--was vastly different from any that he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes like those _exempla_ which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid, well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of stories like Griselda and the Franklin's Tale to coarse mirth and malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer's Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio's tales and novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer's literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in the transformation of his methods of narration.

This transformation was effected not so much through the mere superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus which the differences between the two gave to his reflections upon the processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless, happy-go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character, the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere,--as may be seen, for example, in the transformations he wrought in the _Pardoner's Tale_. It is therefore in the latest and most original of the _Canterbury Tales_ that his art is most admirable, most distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity, and of perfect adaptation to his theme; his versification is not only correct but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer and more complex melodies; his best tales are not mere repetitions of the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the dimensions and the vivacity of real life, acting on adequate motives, and moving in an atmosphere and against a background appropriate to their characters and their actions. In the tales of the Pardoner, the Franklin, the Summoner, the Squire, he is no less notable as a consummate artist than as a poet.

Chaucer, however, was not the only writer of his day remarkable for mastery of technique. Gower, indeed, though a man of much learning and intelligence, was neither a poet of the first rank nor an artist. Despite the admirable qualities of clearness, order and occasional picturesqueness which distinguish his work, he lacked the ability which great poets have of making their words mean more than they say, and of stirring the emotions even beyond the bounds of this enhanced meaning; and there is not, perhaps, in all his voluminous work in English, French and Latin, any indication that he regarded composition as an art requiring consideration or any care beyond that of conforming to the chosen rhythm and finding suitable rhymes.

There were others more richly endowed as poets and more finely developed as artists. There was the beginner of the _Piers Plowman_ cycle[1], the author of the Prologue and first eight passus of the A-text, a man of clear and profound observation, a poet whose imagination brought before him with distinctness and reality visual images of the motley individuals and masses of men of whom he wrote, an artist who knew how to organize and direct the figures of his dream-world, the movement of his ever-unfolding vision. There was the remarkable successor of this man, the author of the B-text, an almost prophetic figure, a great poetic idealist, and, helpless though he often was in the direction of his thought, an absolute master of images and words that seize upon the heart and haunt the memory. Besides these, an unknown writer far in the north-west had, in _Gawayne and the Grene Knight_, transformed the medieval romance into a thing of speed and colour, of vitality and mystery, no less remarkable for its fluent definiteness of form than for the delights of hall-feast and hunt, the graceful comedy of temptation, and the lonely ride of the doomed Gawayne through the silence of the forest and the deep snow. In the same region, by its author's power of visual imagination, the Biblical paraphrase, so often a mere humdrum narrative, had been transformed, in _Patience_, into a narrative so detailed and vivid that the reader is almost ready to believe that the author himself, rather than Jonah, went down into the sea in the belly of the great fish, and sat humbled and rebuked beside the withered gourd-vine. And there also, by some strange chance, blossomed, with perhaps only a local and temporary fragrance until its rediscovery in the 19th century, that delicate flower of loneliness and aspiration, _Pearl_, a wonder of elaborate art as well as of touching sentiment.

All these writings are great, not only relatively, but absolutely. There is not one of them which would not, if written in our own time, immediately mark its author as a man of very unusual ability. But the point of special concern to us at the present moment is not so much that they show remarkable poetic power, as that they possess technical merits of a very high order. And we are accustomed to believe that, although genius is a purely personal and incommunicable element, technical gains are a common possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique of blank verse, this technique was available for all; that after Pope had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of technical correctness; that, as Tennyson puts it,

"All can grow the flower now, For all have got the seed."

But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer and his great contemporaries. _Pearl_ and _Patience_ were apparently unknown to the 15th century, but _Gawayne_ and _Piers Plowman_ and Chaucer's works were known and were influential in one way or another throughout the century. _Gawayne_ called into existence a large number of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is only superficial. _Piers Plowman_ gave rise to satirical allegories written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence of the first _Piers Plowman_ poem was soon buried for centuries under the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made, but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.

Wide and lasting Chaucer's influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all the court-poetry, all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability than England had (see SCOTLAND: _Literature_). In England the three chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve (see OCCLEVE) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost inseparable in modern discussions, but 15th century readers and writers appear not to have associated them very closely. Indeed, Hoccleve is rarely mentioned, while Lydgate is not only mentioned continually, but continually praised as Chaucer's equal or even superior. Hoccleve was not, to be sure, as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to understand why his work, which compares favourably in quality with Lydgate's, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest poem, _De regimine principum_, may have repelled readers who were not princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer's death and his care to transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full of Chaucer's phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master's use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer's decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those early allegorical works of the Master which produced in the 15th century so dreary a flock of imitations.

Lydgate's productivity was enormous,--how great no man can say, for, as was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic (140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic, legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving for facts--true or fictitious--the same craving that made possible the poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and old machinery, they are full of what had once been imagination but had become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read or heard, and not a faithful transcript of the author's own peculiar sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. The fault is not that the old is repeated, that a twice-told tale is retold, but that it is retold without being re-imagined by the teller of the tale, without taking on from his personality something that was not in it before. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows tried to supply, and some of them supplied it abundantly according to their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of words, and that famous "ornate diction," those "aureate terms," with which they strove to surpass the melody, picturesqueness and dignity which, for all its simplicity, they somehow dimly discerned in the diction of Chaucer.

Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet, exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to trace through Hawes the line of Spenser's spiritual ancestry seem not well advised. The resemblances that have been pointed out are such as arise inevitably from the allegories and from the traditional material with which both worked. There is no reason to believe that Spenser owed his general conception to Hawes, or that the _Faery Queene_ would have differed in even the slightest detail from its present form if the _Pastime of Pleasure_ had never been written. The machinery of chivalric romance had already been applied to spiritual and moral themes in Spain without the aid of Hawes.

It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative power, poetic ability. This is a sufficient reason for failure to write good poetry. But why did not men of better ability devote themselves to literature in this age? Was it because of the perturbed conditions arising from the prevalence of foreign and civil wars? Perhaps not, though it is clear that if Sir Thomas Malory had perished in one of the many fights through which he lived, the chivalric and literary impulses which he perhaps received from the "Fadre of Curteisy," Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, would have gone for nothing and we should lack the _Morte Darthur_. But it may very well be that the wars and the tremendous industrial growth of England fixed the attention of the strongest and most original spirits among the younger men and so withdrew them from the possible attractions of literature. But, after all, whatever general truth may lie in such speculations, the way of a young man with his own life is as incalculable as any of the four things which Agur son of Jakeh declared to be past finding out; local and special accidents rather than general communal influences are apt to shape the choice of boys of exceptional character, and we have many instances of great talents turning to literature or art when war or commerce or science was the dominant attraction of social life.

But even recognizing that the followers of Chaucer were not men of genius, it seems strange that their imitation of Chaucer was what it was. They not only entirely failed to see what his merits as an artist were and how greatly superior his mature work is to his earlier in point of technique; they even preferred the earlier and imitated it almost exclusively. Furthermore, his mastery of verse seemed to them to consist solely in writing verses of approximately four or five stresses and arranging them in couplets or in stanzas of seven or eight lines. Their preference for the early allegorical work can be explained by their lack of taste and critical discernment and by the great vogue of allegorical writing in England and France. Men who are just beginning to think about the distinction between literature and ordinary writing usually feel that it consists in making literary expression differ as widely as possible from simple direct speech. For this reason some sort of artificial diction is developed and some artificial word order devised. Allegory is used as an elegant method of avoiding unpoetical plainness, and is an easy means of substituting logic for imagination. The failure to reproduce in some degree at least the melody and smoothness of Chaucer's decasyllabic verse, and the particular form which that failure took in Lydgate, are to be explained by the fact that Lydgate and his fellows never knew how Chaucer's verse sounded when properly read. It is a mistake to suppose that the disappearance of final unaccented _e_ from many words or its instability in many others made it difficult for Lydgate and his fellows to write melodious verse. Melodious verse has been written since the disappearance of all these sounds, and the possibility of a choice between a form with final _e_ and one without it is not a hindrance but an advantage to a poet, as Goethe, Schiller, Heine and innumerable German poets have shown by their practice. The real difficulty with these men was that they pronounced Chaucer's verse as if it were written in the English of their own day. As a matter of fact all the types of verse discovered by scholars in Lydgate's poems can be discovered in Chaucer's also if they be read with Lydgate's pronunciation. Chaucer did not write archaic English, as some have supposed,--that is, English of an earlier age than his own,--it would have been impossible for him to do so with the unfailing accuracy he shows; he did, however, write a conservative, perhaps an old-fashioned, English, such as was spoken by the conservative members of the class of society to which he was attached and for which he wrote. An English with fewer final _e_'s was already in existence among the less conservative classes, and this rapidly became standard English in consequence of the social changes which occurred during his own life. We know that a misunderstanding of Chaucer's verse existed from the 16th century to the time of Thomas Tyrwhitt; it seems clear that it began even earlier, in Chaucer's own lifetime.

There are several poems of the 15th century which were long ascribed to Chaucer. Among them are:--the _Complaint of the Black Knight_, or _Complaint of a Lover's Life_, now known to be Lydgate's; the _Mother of God_, now ascribed to Hoccleve; the _Cuckoo and the Nightingale_, by Clanvowe; _La Belle Dame sans merci_, a translation from the French of Alain Chartier by Richard Ros; _Chaucer's Dream, or the Isle of Ladies_; the _Assembly of Ladies_; the _Flower and the Leaf_; and the _Court of Love_. The two poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve are as good as Chaucer's poorest work. The _Assembly of Ladies_ and the _Flower and the Leaf_ are perhaps better than the _Book of the Duchess_, but not so good as the _Parliament of Fowls_. The _Flower and the Leaf_, it will be remembered, was very dear to John Keats, who, like all his contemporaries, regarded it as Chaucer's. An additional interest attaches to both it and the _Assembly of Ladies_, from the fact that the author may have been a woman; Professor Skeat is, indeed, confident that he knows who the woman was and when she wrote. These poems, like the _Court of Love_, are thoroughly conventional in material, all the figures and poetical machinery may be found in dozens of other poems in England and France, as Professor Neilson has shown for the _Court of Love_ and Mr Marsh for the _Flower and the Leaf_; but there are a freshness of spirit and a love of beauty in them that are not common; the conventional birds and flowers are there, but they seem, like those of Chaucer's _Legend_, to have some touch of life, and the conventional companies of ladies and gentlemen ride and talk and walk with natural grace and ease. The _Court of Love_ is usually ascribed to a very late date, as late even as the middle of the 16th century. If this is correct, it is a notable instance of the persistence of a Chaucerian influence. An effort has been made, to be sure, to show that it was written by Scogan and that the writing of it constituted the offence mentioned by Chaucer in his _Envoy to Scogan_, but it has been clearly shown that this is impossible, both because the language is later than Scogan's time and because nothing in the poem resembles the offence clearly described by Chaucer.

Whatever may be true of the authorship of the _Assembly of Ladies_ and the _Flower and the Leaf_, there were women writers in England in the middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her _Revelations of Divine Love_ before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed compiler of the treatise on hunting in the _Book of St Albans_, may be mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the sunlight is the supposed authoress of the _Nut Brown Maid_, for if language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman, and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for 1463-1464, "Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our Lord's Passion, 6s. 8d.," which is apparently the earliest mention of a woman dramatist in England. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers, but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St Thomas a Kempis's _Imitatio Christi_. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy, it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his translation and printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his _Garland of Laurel_, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern literary club; Erasmus's Suffragette Convention may correspond to no reality, but the Learned Lady arguing against the Monk for the usefulness and pleasure derived from books was not an unknown type. Women were capable of many things in the middle ages. English records show them to have been physicians, churchwardens, justices of the peace and sheriffs, and, according to a satirist, they were also priests.

The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently written without conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions deserve special attention,--songs and carols, popular ballads and certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which certainly was greatly modified by the musical and lyric forms of France. The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they sometimes do, the description of a person, a situation, or an event, they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as mere expressions of joy in the Yule-tide eating and drinking and merriment catch at moments hints of higher joys, of finer emotions, and lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth. Hundreds of songs written and sung in the 15th century must have perished; many, no doubt, lived only a single season and were never even written down; but chance has preserved enough of them to make us wonder at the age which could produce such masterpieces of tantalizing simplicity.

The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most famous of the latter, the _Nut Brown Maid_, has often been called a ballad, and "lyrical ballad" it is in the sense established by Coleridge and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol than with the folk-ballad, and, like Henryson's charming _Robin and Malkin_, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single sonnet of Blanco White. It can hardly be doubted that the author learned his technique from the songs and carols.

The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to immemorial antiquity. It is doubtless a mistake to suppose that any ballad has been preserved to us that is a purely communal product, a confection of the common knowledge, traditions and emotions of the community wrought by subconscious processes into a song that finds chance but inevitable utterance through one or more individuals as the whole commune moves in its molecular dance. But it is equally a mistake to argue that ballads are essentially metrical romances in a state of decay. Both the matter and the manner of most of the best ballads forbid such a supposition, and it can hardly be doubted that in some of the folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century, however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they were, conventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. They furnished, one may say, a vibrant framework of emotional expression, each tone of which moved the hearers all the more powerfully because it had sung to them so many old, unhappy, far-off things, so many battles and treacheries and sudden griefs; a framework which the individual singer needed only to fill out with the simplest statement of the event which had stirred his own imagination and passions to produce, not a work of art, but a song of universal appeal. Not a work of art, because there are scarcely half a dozen ballads that are really works of art, and the greatest ballads are not among these. There is scarcely one that is free from excrescences, from dulness, from trivialities, from additions that would spoil their greatest situations and their greatest lines, were it not that we resolutely shut our ears and our eyes, as we should, to all but their greatest moments. But at their best moments the best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been so commonly discussed in connexion with their rediscovery in the 18th century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were demonstrably composed in the 15th and that many others of uncertain date probably belong to the same time.

Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into regarding the genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.

Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the 15th century produced ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know, but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further independent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the 15th century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas Hardy has so charmingly described in _The Return of the Native_.

The additions which the 15th century made to the ancient cycles of Scripture plays, the so-called Mysteries, are another instance of a literary effort which spent itself in vain (see DRAMA). The most notable of these are, of course, the world renowned comic scenes in the _Towneley_ (or _Wakefield_) _Plays_, in the pageants of Cain, of Noah and of the Shepherds. In none of these is the 15th century writer responsible for the original comic intention; in the pageants of Cain and of the Shepherds fragments of the work of a 14th century writer still remain to prove the earlier existence of the comic conception, and that it was traditional in the Noah pageant we know from the testimony of Chaucer's Miller; but none the less the 15th century writer was a comic dramatist of original power and of a skill in the development of both character and situation previously unexampled in England. The inability of Lydgate to develop a comic conception is strikingly displayed if one compares his _Pageant for Presentation before the King at Hereford_ with the work of this unknown artist. But in our admiration for this man and his famous episode of Mak and the fictitious infant, we are apt to forget the equally fine, though very different qualities shown in some of the later pageants of the _York Plays_. Such, for example, is the final pageant, that of the _Last Judgment_, a drama of slow and majestic movement, to be sure, but with a large and fine conception of the great situation, and a noble and dignified elocution not inadequate to the theme.

The _Abraham and Isaac_ play of the Brome MS., extant as a separate play and perhaps so performed, which has been so greatly admired for its cumulative pathos, also belongs demonstrably to this century. It is not, as has been supposed, an intermediate stage between French plays and the Chester _Abraham and Isaac_, but is derived directly from the latter by processes which comparison of the two easily reveals. Scripture plays of a type entirely different from the well-known cyclic mysteries, apparently confined to the Passion and Resurrection and the related events, become known to us for the first time in the records of this century. Such plays seem to have been confined to the towns of the south, and, as both their location and their structure suggest, may have been borrowed from France. In any event, the records show that they flourished greatly and that new versions were made from time to time.

Another form of the medieval drama, the Morality Play, had its origin in the 15th century,--or else very late in the 14th. The earliest known examples of it in England date from about 1420. These are the _Castle of Perseverance_ and the _Pride of Life_. Others belonging to the century are _Mind, Will and Understanding_, _Mankind_ and Medwall's _Nature_. There are also parts of two pageants in the _Ludus Coventriae_ (c. 1460) that are commonly classed as Moralities, and these, together with the existence of a few personified abstractions in other plays, have led some critics to suppose that the Morality was derived from the Mystery by the gradual introduction of personified abstractions in the place of real persons. But the two kinds of plays are fundamentally different, different in subject and in technique; and no replacement of real persons by personifications can change a Mystery into a Morality. Moreover, the Morality features in Mysteries are later than the origin of the Morality itself and are due to the influence of the latter. The Morality Play is merely a dramatized allegory, and derives its characters and its peculiar technique from the application of the dramatic method to the allegory, the favourite literary form of the middle ages. None of the 15th century Moralities is literature of the first rank, though both the _Castle of Perseverance_ and _Pride of Life_ contain passages ringing with a passionate sincerity that communicates itself to the hearer or reader. But it was not until the beginning of the 16th century that a Morality of permanent human interest appeared in _Everyman_, which, after all, is a translation from the Dutch, as is clearly proved by the fact that in the two prayers near the end of the play the Dutch has complicated but regular stanzas, whereas the English has only irregularly rhymed passages.

Besides the Mysteries and Moralities, the 15th century had also Miracle Plays, properly so called, dealing with the lives, martyrdoms and miracles of saints. As we know these only from records of their performance or their mere existence--no texts have been preserved to us, except the very curious _Play of the Sacrament_--it is impossible to speak of their literary or dramatic qualities. The Miracle Play as a form was, of course, not confined to the 15th century. Notwithstanding the assertions of historians of literature that it died out in England soon after its introduction at the beginning of the 12th century, its existence can be demonstrated from c. 1110 to the time of Shakespeare. But records seem to indicate that it flourished especially during this period of supposed barrenness.

What was the nature of the "Komedy of Troylous and Pandor" performed before Henry VIII. on the 6th of January 1516 we have no means of knowing. It is very early indeed to assume the influence of either classical or Italian drama, and although we have no records of similar plays from the 15th century, it must be remembered that our records are scanty, that the middle ages applied the dramatic method to all sorts of material, and that it is therefore not impossible that secular plays like this were performed at court at a much earlier date. The record at any rate does not indicate that it was a new type of play, and the Griselda story had been dramatized in France, Italy and the Netherlands before 1500.

That not much good prose was written in the 15th century is less surprising than that so little good verse was written. The technique of verse composition had been studied and mastered in the preceding age, as we have seen, but the technique of prose had apparently received no serious consideration. Indeed, it is doubtful if any one thought of prose as a possible medium of artistic expression. Chaucer apparently did not, in spite of the comparative excellence of his Preface to the _Astrolabe_ and his occasional noteworthy successes with the difficulties of the philosophy of Boethius; Wycliffe is usually clumsy; and the translators of Mandeville, though they often give us passages of great charm, obviously were plain men who merely translated as best they could. There was, however, a comparatively large amount of prose written in the 15th century, mainly for religious or educational purposes, dealing with the same sorts of subjects that were dealt with in verse, and in some cases not distinguishable from the verse by any feature but the absence of rhyme. The vast body of this we must neglect; only five writers need be named: John Capgrave, Reginald Pecock, Sir John Fortescue, Caxton and Malory. Capgrave, the compiler of the first chronicle in English prose since the Conquest, wrote by preference in Latin; his English is a condescension to those who could not read Latin and has the qualities which belong to the talk of an earnest and sincere man of commonplace ability. Pecock and Fortescue are more important. Pecock (c. 1395-c. 1460) was a man of singularly acute and logical mind. He prided himself upon his dialectic skill and his faculty for discovering arguments that had been overlooked by others. His writings, therefore--or at least the _Repressor_--are excellent in general structure and arrangement, his ideas are presented clearly and simply, with few digressions or excrescences, and his sentences, though sometimes too long, are more like modern prose than any others before the age of Elizabeth. His style is lightened by frequent figures of speech, mostly illustrative, and really illustrative, of his ideas, while his intellectual ingenuity cannot fail to interest even those whom his prejudices and preconceptions repel. Fortescue, like Capgrave, wrote by preference in Latin, and, like Pecock, was philosophical and controversial. But his principal English work, the _Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy_, differs from Pecock's in being rather a pleading than a logical argument, and the geniality and glowing patriotism of its author give it a far greater human interest.

No new era in literary composition was marked by the activity of William Caxton as translator and publisher, though the printing-press has, of course, changed fundamentally the problem of the dissemination and preservation of culture, and thereby ultimately affected literary production profoundly. But neither Caxton nor the writers whose works he printed produced anything new in form or spirit. His publications range over the whole field of 15th century literature, and no doubt he tried, as his quaint prefaces indicate, to direct the public taste to what was best among the works of the past, as when he printed and reprinted the _Canterbury Tales_, but among all his numerous publications not one is the herald of a new era. The only book of permanent interest as literature which he introduced to the world was the _Morte Darthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory, and this is a compilation from older romances (see ARTHURIAN LEGEND). It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the warmth and beauty of the old knight's conception of chivalry and his love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naive charm; "thystorye (i.e. the history) of the sayd Arthur," as Caxton long ago declared, "is so gloryous and shynyng, that he is stalled in the first place of the moost noble, beste and worthyest of the Crysten men"; it is not, however, as the first of a new species, but as the final flower of an old that this glorious and shining book retains its place in English literature.

Whatever may have been the effect of the wars and the growth of industrial life in England in withdrawing men of the best abilities from the pursuit of literature, neither these causes nor any other interfered with the activity of writers of lesser powers. The amount of writing is really astonishing, as is also its range. More than three hundred separate works (exclusive of the large number still ascribed to Lydgate and of the seventy printed by Caxton) have been made accessible by the Early English Text Society and other public or private presses, and it seems probable that an equal number remains as yet unpublished. No list of these writings can be given here, but it may not be unprofitable to indicate the range of interests by noting the classes of writing represented. The classification is necessarily rough, as some writings belong to more than one type. We may note, first, love poems, allegorical and unallegorical, narrative, didactic, lyrical and quasi-lyrical; poems autobiographical and exculpatory; poems of eulogy and appeal for aid; tales of entertainment or instruction, in prose and in verse; histories ancient and modern, and brief accounts of recent historical events, in prose and in verse; prose romances and metrical romances; legends and lives of saints, in prose and in verse; poems and prose works of religious meditation, devotion and controversy; treatises of religious instruction, in prose and in verse; ethical and philosophical treatises, and ethical and prudential treatises; treatises of government, of political economy, of foreign travel, of hygiene, of surgery, of alchemy, of heraldry, of hunting and hawking and fishing, of farming, of good manners, and of cooking and carving. Prosaic and intended merely to serve practical uses as many of these were, verse is the medium of expression as often as prose. Besides this large amount and variety of English compositions, it must be remembered that much was also written in Latin, and that Latin and French works of this and other centuries were read by the educated classes.

Although the intellectual and spiritual movement which we call the Italian Renaissance was not unknown in England in the 14th and 15th centuries, it is not strange that it exercised no perceptible influence upon English literature, except in the case of Chaucer. Chaucer was the only English man of letters before the 16th century who knew Italian literature. The Italians who visited England and the Englishmen who visited Italy were interested, not in literature, but in scholarship. Such studies as were pursued by Free, Grey, Flemming, Tilly, Gunthorpe and others who went to Italy, made them better grammarians and rhetoricians, and no doubt gave them a freer, wider outlook, but upon their return to England they were immediately absorbed in administrative cares, which left them little leisure for literary composition, even if they had had any inclination to write. They prepared the way, however, for the leaders of the great intellectual awakening which began in England with Linacre, Colet, More and their fellows, and which finally culminated in the age of Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Gilbert, Harvey and Harriott.

When the middle ages ceased in England it is impossible to say definitely. Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. John Skelton, although according to Erasmus "unum Britannicarum literarum lumen ac decus," and although possessing great originality and vigour both in diction and in versification when attacking his enemies or indulging in playful rhyming, was not only a great admirer of Lydgate, but equalled even the worst of his predecessors in aureate pedantries of diction, in complicated impossibilities of syntax, and in meaningless inversions of word-order whenever he wished to write elegant and dignified literature. And not a little of the absurd diction of the middle of the 16th century is merely a continuation of the bad ideals and practices of the refined writers of the 15th.

In fine, the 15th century has, aside from its vigorous, though sometimes coarse, popular productions, little that can interest the lover of literature. It offers, however, in richest profusion problems for the literary antiquarian and the student of the relations between social conditions and literary productivity,--problems which have usually been attacked only with the light weapons of irresponsible speculation, but which may perhaps be solved by a careful comparative study of many literatures and many periods. Moreover, although in the quality of its literary output it is decidedly inferior to the 14th century, the amount and the wide range of its productions indicate the gradual extension of the habit of reading to classes of society that were previously unlettered; and this was of great importance for the future of English literature, just as the innumerable dramatic performances throughout England were important in developing audiences for Marlowe and Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.

For bibliography see vol. ii. of the _Cambridge History of Literature_ (1909); and Brandl's _Geschichte der mittelenglischen Literatur_ (reprinted from Paul's _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_). Interesting general discussions may be found in the larger histories of English Literature, such as Ten Brink's, Jusserand's, and (a little more antiquated) Courthope's and Morley's. (J. M. Ma.)

III. ELIZABETHAN TIMES

_General Influences, and Prologue to 1579._--The history of letters in England from More's _Utopia_ (1516), the first Platonic vision, to Milton's _Samson Agonistes_ (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called "Elizabethan." With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age preceding, and also from the classical or "Augustan" age that followed. The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase; but it was still a phase of the Renaissance; and the break that declared itself about 1660 counts as nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the whole change in art, thought and temper, which re-created the European mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages, not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the _Falls of Princes_, lived on; and so did the characteristic medieval form, allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare's use of the histories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser's of the allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages are not transformed, as in the _Mirror for Magistrates_, they strike us as survivals from a lost world.

So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of letters only came into full flower during the last twenty years of the 16th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives, or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the end fertilize these workings of genius.

General forces.

What, then, in England, were these forces? Two of them lie outside letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican Church grew out of the English Reformation. A third force lay within the sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the narrower meaning of the term. It was culture--the prefatory work of culture and education, which at once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. "Elizabethan" literature took its complexion from the circumstance that all these three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ and Shakespeare's _Henry V._ came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces, political, religious and educational, were of very different duration and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the years 1600-1610, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels; and literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than religious. But Renaissance culture, in its ramifications and consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from 1500 to 1660. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied chronicle. Before passing to narrative, a short review of each of these elements is required.

Politics.

Down to 1579 the Tudor rule was hardly a direct inspiration to authors. The reign of Henry VII. was first duly told by Bacon, and that of Henry VIII. staged by Shakespeare and Fletcher, in the time of James I. Sir Thomas More found in Roper, and Wolsey in Cavendish, sound biographers, who are nearly the earliest in the language. The later years of Henry VIII. were full of episodes too tragically picturesque for safe handling in the lifetime of his children. The next two reigns were engrossed with the religious war; and the first twenty years of Elizabeth, if they laid the bases of an age of peace, well-being, and national self-confidence that was to prove a teeming soil for letters, were themselves poor in themes for patriotic art. The abortive treason of the northern earls was echoed only in a ringing ballad. But the voyagers, freebooters, and explorers reported their experiences, as a duty, not for fame; and these, though not till the golden age, were edited by Hakluyt, and fledged the poetic fancies that took wing from the "Indian Peru" to the "still-vext Bermoothes." Yet, in default of any true historian, the queen's wise delays and diplomacies that upheld the English power, and her refusal to launch on a Protestant or a national war until occasion compelled and the country was ready, were subjects as uninspiring to poets as the burning questions of the royal marriage or the royal title. But by 1580 the nation was filled with the sense of Elizabeth's success and greatness and of its own prosperity. No shorter struggle and no less achievement could have nursed the insolent, jubilant patriotism of the years that followed; a feeling that for good reasons was peculiar to England among the nations, and created the peculiar forms of the chronicle play and poem. These were borrowed neither from antiquity nor from abroad, and were never afterwards revived. The same exultation found its way into the current forms of ode and pastoral, of masque and allegory, and into many a dedication and interlude of prose. It was so strong as to outlive the age that gave it warrant. The passion for England, the passion of England for herself, animates the bulk of Drayton's _Poly-Olbion_, which was finished so late as 1622. But the public issues were then changing, the temper was darker; and the civil struggle was to speak less in poetry than in the prose of political theory and ecclesiastical argument, until its after-explosion came in the verse of Milton.

Religious change.

The English Reformation, so long political rather than doctrinal or imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin's _Institution_ is its trophy, at once defining the religious change for millions of later men and marking a term of departure in the national prose. Still, the debating weapons, the axes and billhooks, of vernacular English were sharpened--somewhat jaggedly--in the pamphlet battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were proved for descriptive economy by Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and forthright jests in the sermons of Latimer (died 1555). Foxe's reports of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563); but the reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ as in Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_; and the English Reformation lived partly on its pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and trained it more than any single influence,--trained it so well, for the purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy and Hooker's treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines was unbroken for a hundred years.

Classical culture.

Renaissance culture had many stages and was fed from many streams. At the outset of the century, in the wake of Erasmus, under the teaching of Colet and his friends, there spread a sounder knowledge of the Greek and Latin tongues, of the classic texts, and so of the ancient life and mind. This period of humanism in the stricter sense was far less brilliant than in Italy and France. No very great scholar or savant arose in Britain for a long time; but neo-Latin literature, the satellite of scholarship, shone brightly in George Buchanan. But scholarship was created and secured; and in at least one, rather solitary, work of power, the _Utopia_ (which remained in Latin till 1551), the fundamental process was begun which appropriates the Greek mind, not only for purposes of schooling, but as a source of new and independent thinking. In and after the middle of the century the classics were again put forward by Cheke, by Wilson in his _Art of Rhetoric_ (1553), and by Ascham in his letters and in his _Schoolmaster_ (1570), as the true staple of humane education, and the pattern for a simple yet lettered English. The literature of translations from the classics, in prose and verse, increased; and these works, at first plain, business-like, and uninspired, slowly rose in style and power, and at last, like the translations from modern tongues, were written by a series of masters of English, who thus introduced Plutarch and Tacitus to poets and historians. This labour of mediation was encouraged by the rapid expansion and reform of the two universities, of which almost every great master except Shakespeare was a member; and even Shakespeare had ample Latin for his purpose.

Italy and France.

The direct impact of the classics on "Elizabethan" literature, whether through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe. But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are hard to discern. This is another point that distinguishes the English Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex. The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiasms of Rome and Athens constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early playwrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Montaigne's reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distinguished the original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit was immediate as well as constant; and so was that of the conciser Roman masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English literary history,--the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy. The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It inspired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, allegory, song, pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the master-thoughts upon government and conduct formed both by the old and the new Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time--and letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life and culture--if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journeymen like Boisteau and Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of Spanish mannerists, above all of Guevara upon sententious prose, and of the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German legend is found not only in Marlowe's _Faustus_, but in the by-ways of play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science. The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in unexpected spots.

Philosophy.

As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or the French of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence in the _Faerie Queene_ (