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Unit 1: Development of Prose Writing through the Literary Ages

More interesting, however, to the student of Chaucer’s prose than the body of this translation is an Notes
original preface by Chaucer, which is addressed to his little son Louis, and which, short as it is,
constitutes the longest piece of original prose we have from Chaucer’s hand. Chaucer declares it
to be his purpose to set forth his treatise under “ful lighte rewles and naked wordes in English; for
Latin ne canstow yit but smal, my lyte sone.” He continues with a more general address to his
readers in which he asks them to excuse his “rewde endyting” and his “superfluite of wordes,”
the first because “curious endyting and hard sentence is ful hevy atones for swich a child to
lerne,” and the second because it seems to him better “to wryten unto a child twyes a good
sentence than he forgete it ones.” In conclusion Chaucer points out that he makes no claim to the
original authorship of his book, but confesses that he is merely “a lewd compilatour of the labour
of olde Astrologiens,” whose work he has translated : “And with this swerd shal I sleen envye.”
The whole passage is instructive as showing that the quaint simplicity and humor which constitute
the main charm of his verse writings were not impossible to Chaucer in prose. Had he chosen to
do so, Chaucer might have written prose tales for some of his Canterbury pilgrims, the Shipman
or the Miller for example, which would have been more than deserving of a place in that series.
But prose in Chaucer’s mind must have seemed entirely inappropriate for writing of an entertaining
or artistic character, and he therefore uses it only for practical and pious purposes. Chaucer’s
attitude towards prose was generally the attitude of his contemporaries. The first English prose
was written under the hard necessity of instructing and edifying men, not of pleasing them, as
Chaucer was mainly endeavoring to do. The art of prose begins with the effort to adapt language
to useful ends, to find some means of communication whereby men may inform or persuade each
other in the thousand and one complications of everyday life. Chaucer’s perfunctory use of prose
shows on the one hand how little interested he was in the complexities of the life of his day from
the point of view of direct exposition or of persuasion, and it shows on the other hand how little
impressed he was with the possibilities of prose as an art of fine writing. Limited though this
attitude towards prose may seem to the modern student, it was natural in Chaucer’s day and
represents undoubtedly the best literary feeling of his time. For the development of the technic of
English writing in verse, Chaucer is important; for the development of the technic of English
prose, he is almost negligible.

1.4 Langland and Maundevile

By the side of Chaucer stands his greatest literary contemporary, Langland. Thanks to his
connections with the court and with the higher official life of his time, public records have preserved
a considerable body of information with respect to Chaucer. All that is known of Langland, on the
other hand, is derived from the various manuscripts of his writings, and the information thus
obtained is meager and often uncertain. It is fairly sure that the author of Piers Plowman was of
Midland origin, that he lived for some time in London, that he was married and therefore not
eligible to any of the higher offices of the church, that he himself had known the miseries of
poverty which he so feelingly describes, and that his Christian name was William. The exact form
of his surname is doubtful, but tradition has firmly established Langland in general use. The poem
which passes under Langland’s name is not a single, systematically organized work, but rather a
group of closely related poems centering more or less about the figure of the Plowman. It is
recorded in three quite distinct versions, the earliest composed about I 362, the second a revision
and enlargement of this version made some fifteen years later, and the third a second revision
probably made in the last decade of the fourteenth century. Certain interesting questions of technical
scholarship have been raised by the existence of these three versions, the most important being
whether the three versions are to be regarded as the work of a single poet or of two or more poets
who revised and expanded the original theme as it was first developed by Langland. It is quite
certain that Piers Plowman came to be in time a type figure about whom there gathered a

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