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Prose

Notes doctrines of almost incalculable importance for the future growth of the English nation. And not
least in importance among these shadowings of the future, English prose was coming to be applied
to English thought in ways more effective and intimate than had ever before been necessary or
possible.
By the middle of the fourteenth century, the various Scandinavian and Romance additions which
had enriched at the same time that they had disintegrated the old England, built up by the
successive kings of the West Saxons from the time of Egbert, had united with the English base to
form a new nation. During the time of disturbance the English speech had passed through a
period of popular degradation. It had lost literary caste, but now, under the influence of a new
national feeling and a renascence of culture, it had recovered all that had been lost and was
gaining more. By the assimilation of a host of Romance words, it had acquired possibilities of
expression beyond the reach of the language of the Old English period. The English were no
longer an isolated people. Their intellectual life was more vigorous and more varied, and their
social life was more gracious, than either had been in the most flourishing days before the Conquest.
The English writer of the later fourteenth century had a richer body of thought and sentiment to
express than his Anglo-Saxon ancestor, and he had a more effective medium in the language of his
day to serve the purposes of expression. The Anglo-Saxon poets had seldom passed beyond the
simple themes of war and religion; and the prose of Alfred, of Wulfstan, of Ælfric, was limited
almost entirely to the second of these themes. Religion and theology remain, indeed, the principal
concern of prose even into the sixteenth century, but with a very great difference. Scarcely a trace
of popular insurgence is to be found in English writing before the days of Wiclif. The newest, the
most disturbing, and for the history of English prose, the most important element in the life of
England in the fourteenth century was just this awakening of the underworld of the people. Men
now first began to realize that their political and spiritual salvation lay not in the hands of overlords
and ecclesiastics, but in their own. New impulses within demanded new modes of external
expression. Literature could not continue to be merely artistic and courtly, learning could not
expend itself entirely in theological exegesis or the formulation of dogma. The pallid legends and
the summary repetitions of officially approved information and doctrine which constitute so large
a part of medieval writing in the vernacular began now to disappear and their place to be taken by
a fresher literature, addressed not merely to the memory, but directly to the reason and the hearts
of mankind.

1.3 Chaucer’s Prose

It was only gradually, however, that English writers acquired the courage to use prose. Long
custom had established verse as the only accredited form of literary expression. From the point of
view of literary art, the two most significant writers of the latter half of the fourteenth century
were Chaucer, courtly, polished, and reasonable, and Langland, something of a mystic and
enthusiast, a fellow-sufferer with the people, whose hard life he so intimately describes, and
certainly less an artist than his greater contemporary. Chaucer’s prevailing interest being in men
and manners, one might suppose that prose would have been for him a more appropriate form of
expression than verse. And in truth, we may suppose that the use of metrical form by Chaucer was
largely an accident of time. He wrote in verse because the literary conventions of his time imposed
the metrical form upon all writing of artistic pretension. Perhaps it was fortunate for Chaucer that
he accepted these conventions. In his day and hour it was easier to realize the ideals of simplicity,
clarity, and control which his verse exhibits by following the conventional custom of metrical
composition than it would have been if he had chosen to experiment in prose. But Chaucer was
not temperamentally an experimenter or innovator. He followed clearly defined paths of literary
tradition, changing and improving greatly in detail, but seldom departing widely from the practice
of his predecessors and masters. He seems to have felt no impulse, therefore, to invent prose for
English literature, to become an English Boccaccio.

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