IV. THIRTEENTH CENTURY REVIVAL OF ENGLISH FOURTEENTH CENTURY-AGE OF CHAUCER INTRODUCTION The position occupied by the English people among the great nations of the modern world is a position which has been won by more than fifteen centuries of slow progress and varied conflict. The record of the outward events of these centuries is the fascinating story of English history. The more spontaneous record of the inner lives of the men and women who made this history, of their reaction upon events and their reflections upon them, of their social needs and intellectual aspirations, is the equally fascinating story of English literature. The two records run side by side, and of the latter in particular it is not possible to give a detailed and lucid account without some preliminary sketch of the former. Two thousand years ago the British Isles were not inhabited by the English race. When Cæsar landed there, fifty-five years before the Christian era, he found a Celtic people the ancestors of the present Welsh, Irish, and Highland Scotch. Several centuries of Roman rule followed, in the course of which the southern portion of these people were partially civilized and Romanized. But early in the fifth century the Roman legions, needed for the defence of Rome against the great wave of barbarian invasion from the North, were withdrawn. Immediately the more barbarous tribes to the west and north began to press southward, and the southern Celts, or Britons as they were now called, had to ask certain of the Teutonic (Germanic) tribes dwelling by the coast of the North Sea to come to their assistance. These wild sea-rovers, who had long harassed the British shores, kept at bay only by the Roman power, were ready enough to come. But once they had secured a foothold, it was not long before they turned against their British allies and permanently established themselves in power. This, in short, was the English Conquest, which made Britain England. It dates from the landing of Hengist and Horsa about 449. Through the years that follow we may trace the records with varying distinctness. On the one hand, we get glimpses of the struggling British chieftains as they were slowly pressed westward by their new enemies. On the other hand, we see that among the conquerors themselves there was by no means political unity. Three different tribes had come from the shores of the German ocean:-the Jutes, who settled in the extreme southeast; the Saxons, who occupied the banks of the Thames and most of the region to the south and west; and the Angles, who seized all the northward portion, "North Humber Land." The Angles were the first to erect a powerful kingdom, and it was in Northumbria that a literature was first cultivated.* But in the eighth and ninth centuries the Northumbrian ascendency was lost. The kingdom was torn with a civil strife that reduced it to anarchy, and the Danes, who came with a fresh barbarian irruption from the continent, found it an easy prey. The leadership among the English passed to the West Saxon kingdom in the south under Ecgberht (802), whose grandson, Ælfred, succeeded a little later in checking the Danes. Altogether the Saxon supremacy lasted for about a century and a half; then the Dane conquered Wessex, too, and was for a short while master. period was put to this era in 1066 by the Norman Conquest, which brought new elements into the race and ultimately into the language, unified the diverse interests, and founded the later line of kings. A Such, in bare outline, is England's early history. The story of her language we must also glance at. The various dialects of the tribes who came from the continent constituted a Teutonic language of the Low German group—a tongue, that is, spoken by the dwellers in the lowland and coast region extending from *Hence the name England (Engla land, Angle-land). The late Greeks had called the island Albion, and the Romans Britannia. The name Britain was revived about the time of Henry VIII. in connection with the efforts made to unite England and Scotland. In 1601 James I. was proclaimed "King of Great Britain. the mouth of the Rhine northeastward. Its most direct descendants outside of England to-day are Frisian and Dutch. Modern German, descended from the High German group, stands at a slightly further remove. The language as it was first used in England, we now call by the name of Old English. There were three or four dialects, corresponding to the different tribes:—the Anglian, which was spoken in the north; the West Saxon (later called the Southern), used by the Saxons in the south; and the Kentish, used by the Jutes. The Anglian may be further subdivided into the Northumbrian, of the extreme north, and the Mercian (later known as the Midland). Only the Anglian, in its two divisions, and the West Saxon were prominent, whence the name Anglo-Saxon has sometimes been used for Old English. But as the name English was early used even by the Saxons themselves, owing to the prior ascendency of the Anglian people and the Northumbrian dialect, it has the stronger claim. It was not the Northumbrian dialect, however, that was destined to grow into modern English. It was first supplanted in literary supremacy by the West Saxon, when the latter kingdom rose to power. Then the supremacy was finally transferred to the Mercian, or Midland, the dialect spoken in and about London, the capital city. This took place about the fourteenth century, which makes it evident that the whole question of dialects is one that concerns philology rather than literature. For in the early centuries the amount of writing having a literary value was comparatively small; and since the invention of printing, literature has naturally sought a common dialect-the language of the learned. Exceptions in the later literature are to be found only here and there, as in the native Scotch poetry of Burns, the imitative dialect poems of Tennyson, or the character sketches of modern fiction. Looking at the English language as a whole, however, we find other considerations of importance. We observe that the framework of it remains to this day Teutonic; its affinity with the German language may be easily traced in the words of the old native stock-the numerals, for instance, the pronouns, preposi |