during the boyhood and youth of Chaucer, when two North of England men, Laurence Minot, and Richard Rolle, of Hampole, have been included in the sketch. One wrote of war, the other of religion.

Laurence Minot was a poet who in Northern English celebrated victories of Edward III. over the Scots and the French, from the battle of Halidon Hill, in July, 1333, to the capture of Guines Castle, in January, 1352.* His war-songs were linked together by connecting verses. When he had celebrated the defeat of the Scots at Halidon Hill, which caused the surrender of Berwick, he exulted in his second song over the avenging of Bannockburn; then celebrated the king's expedition to Brabant, in 1338; proceeded to the first invasion of France; the sea-fight of Sluys or of the Swyne; the siege of Tournai; a song of triumph for the great battle of Crécy, in 1346; songs of the siege of Calais, and of the battle of Neville's Cross (October, 1346), in which David King of the Scots was taken prisoner. Then followed his celebrations of victory at sea over the Spaniards in 1350, and lastly, of the taking of Guines Castle, in 1352, when Chaucer was twenty-four years old. Probably Minot died soon afterwards, as he did not sing of the memorable events of the next following years. He was our first national song writer, and used with ease a variety of rhyming measures, while he retained something of the old habit of alliteration.

7. Richard Rolle, known also as the Hermit of Hampole, was born, about the year 1290, at Thornton in Yorkshire. He was sent to school, and from school to Oxford, by Thomas Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made great progress in theological studies. At the age of nineteen, mindful of the un

New Style.-An Act of Parliament of the year 1752 introduced "New Style" by bringing the English reckoning of dates into conformity with that of countries which had adopted Pope Gregory XIII.'s reform of the calendar, a reform first instituted in 1582, and then at once adopted in France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Flanders, and Portugal. Protestant Germany did not accept this reformation by a pope till 1699; Protestant England held aloof till 1752. Besides the rectification of the day of the month, which then was eleven days behind the reckoning in foreign countries, the Act of 1752 abolished the custom, begun in the twelfth century, and until then in use in England, not in Scotland, of reckoning the 25th of March as the first day of the legal year, while the 1st of January was, according to the popular reckoning by the Julian Calendar, accounted New Year's Day. Before 1752, therefore, any date in a public record or official document, falling in January or February, or in March, to the 24th inclusive, would be ascribed to the year preceding that in which we should now reckon it. Thus the capture of Guines Castle was dated January, 1351. I give all such dates according to the present way of reckoning.

TO A.D. 1352)

THE HERMIT OF HAMPOLE

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certainty of life, and fearing the temptation to sin, he returned home, and one day told a beloved sister that he had a mighty desire towards two of her gowns, one white the other grey. Would she bring them to him the next day in a neighbouring wood, and bring with them a hood her father used in rainy weather? When she did so, he took off his own clothes, put on his sister's white dress next his skin, drew over it the grey dress with its sleeves cut off, thrusting his arms through the armholes, hooded himself with his father's rain-hood, and having thus made himself look as much like a hermit as he could, ran away, while his sister cried, "My brother is mad!" He went then, so dressed, on the vigil of the Assumption, into a church, and placed himself where the wife of a Sir John de Dalton used to pray. When Lady de Dalton came with her servants, she would not allow them to disturb the pious young man at his prayers. Her sons, who had studied at Oxford, told her who he was. Next day he assumed, unbidden, the dress of an assistant, and joined in the singing of the service; after which, having obtained the benediction of the priest, he mounted the pulpit, and preached such a sermon that many wept over it and said they had never heard the like before. After mass, Sir John de Dalton invited him to dinner; but he went, because of humility, into a poor old house at the gate of the manor, till he was urged by the knight's own sons to the dinner table. During dinner he maintained a profound silence; but after dinner, Sir John, having talked with him privately, was satisfied of his sanity; he therefore furnished the enthusiast with such hermit's dress as he wished for, gave him a cell to live in, and provided for his daily sustenance. The Hermit of Hampole, thus set up in his chosen vocation, became, while Minot was singing the victories of Edward III., the busiest religious writer of his day, and continued so till 1349, when he died, and was buried in the Cistercian nunnery of Hampole, about four miles from Doncaster, near which he had set up his hermit's cell, and which after his death derived great profit from his reputation as a saint. He wrote many religious treatises in Latin and in English, and he turned the Psalms of David into English prose. A version of the Psalter into English had been made about nine years before, in 1327, by William of Shoreham. Richard Rolle also ver sified part of the book of Job, and produced a Northern English poem in seven books, and almost ten thousand lines, called The Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus Conscientiæ). Its seven books

treat-1. Of the Beginning of Man's Life. 2. Of the Unstableness of this World. 3. Of Death, and why Death is to be Dreaded. 4 Of Purgatory. 5. Of Doomsday. 6. Of the Pains of Hell. 7. Of the Joys of Heaven. The poem represents in the mind of an honest and religious monk that body of mediæval doctrine against which, in some of its parts-and especially its claim for the pope or his delegates of power to trade in release from the pains of purgatory--the most vigorous protest of the English mind was already arising.

8. To the year 1340, which is about the date of Hampole's "Pricke of Conscience," belongs a prose translation by Dan Michel of Northgate, into Kentish dialect, of a French treatise, "Le Somme des Vices et des Vertues," written in 1279 by Frère Lorens (Laurentius Gallus) for Philip II. of France. The English translation is entitled The Ayenbite (Again-bite, Remorse) of Inwit (Conscience). It discusses the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the seven deadly sins, how to learn to die, knowledge of good and evil, wit and clergy, the five senses, the seven petitions of the Paternoster, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, and other such subjects, with more doctrine and less anecdote than in the "Manuel des Péchés" or "Handlynge Synne," which was a work of like intention.

9. In the year of the death of Richard Rolle of Hampole, 1349, John Wiclif was five-and-twenty years old, William Langland little younger, Geoffrey Chaucer about one-and-twenty, John Gower little older, and a famous Scottish poet of their day, John Barbour, was thirty-three years old, according to the earliest date assigned to his birth, nineteen according to the latest. It was then also seven-and-twenty years since Sir John Mandeville set out upon his adventures in the world. Young Chaucer had begun to sing when Mandeville, by nearly thirty years his senior, wrote the story of his travels. In the same year, 1349, Dante had been dead twenty-eight years, but the vigour of Italian literature was being maintained by Petrarch and Boccaccio, Petrarch then forty-five years old and Boccaccio six-and-thirty.

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably the son of a John who was the son of a Robert Chaucer, of Ipswich and London. A London vintner, Richard Chaucer, who died in 1349, was the third husband of his wife Mary, whose son by her first husband was Thomas Heyroun, whose second husband was Robert Chaucer, and who brought to her third husband, Richard Chaucer, as a stepson, John, son of Robert, who inherited from

TO A.D. 1350]

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

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Robert his father some property at Ipswich, which his mother and stepfather held in trust for him. Records remain of proceedings in the Ipswich case of an abduction of John Chaucer, while a boy, to marry him to a Joan Westhale, from which it appears that John Chaucer was yet unmarried in the year 1328. He married Agnes, kinswoman of the moneyer Hamo de Compton, and they had a son Geoffrey, of whom there is record that he executed the assignment of a lease in 1380, of a house in Thames Street that had belonged to John Chaucer, his father. If this was the poet, and not some kinsman bearing the same Christian name, as we have no known reason for assuming, Geoffrey Chaucer must have been born later than 1328. His birth-date is not known, but it can hardly have been later than the year 1332. The later date of 1342 has been suggested upon misapprehension of evidence from an incident in his life presently to be told. The London Chaucers seem to have had kindred in Suffolk and Norfolk, and there is a local tradition that the poet himself was born at Lynn.

Chaucer's arms did not connect his family with any noble house. A perpendicular line divided the shield into halves, and it was crossed by a transverse bar. On one side of the middle line the bar was red on a white ground, on the other side white on a red ground. Thomas Fuller says that some wits had made Chaucer's arms to mean "the dashing of white and red wine (the parents of our ordinary claret), as nicking his father's profession." Probably they were right. Arms were not granted to merchants until the reign of Henry VI. ; but long before that time wealthy merchants of the Middle Ages bore their trademarks upon shields. The vintners, or wine-tunners, to whose body Richard Chaucer belonged, were in the days of Edward III. a prosperous body, merchant vintners of Gascoyne yielding to London several mayors, one of whom, in 1359, feasted together at his house in the Vintry the four kings of England, France, Scotland, and Cyprus.

If Chaucer wrote the "Court of Love," he makes his Philogenet describe himself as "of Cambridge, clerk ;" and in the opening of his Reve's tale he alludes familiarly to the brook, mill, and bridge, which were "at Trompington, not far fro Cantebrigge." But there are no such familiar references to Oxford in his verse, though it must not be forgotten that the poor scholar sketched with sympathetic touches in the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" was a clerk of Oxenfordle.

Nothing trustworthy is known of Chaucer's occupation in the world during the first years of his manhood. He was a poet, we know, and perhaps while he was translating the famous “Roman de la Rose” (ch. iii. § 36)—he tells us himself that he was its translator-he may have been earning money in the Vintry ward. Chaucer read in the earlier part of his life the French literature then most in request, and by his translations earned a balade of compliment from Eustache Deschamps with the refrain “Grant translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucier." It is very likely that Chaucer worked at his translation of the Romaunt of the Rose when he was training himself in his vocation as a poet, and that he laid it aside as he felt more and more strongly the impulse towards independent song. Although Chaucer translated the Roman de la Rose, and there is reason to think the whole of it, we must deny his authorship of the large fragment that has come down from his time, until it can be proved that he was born and bred in Norfolk. Professor Skeat has clearly shown that the North Midland dialect of this translation differs from that of all Chaucer's undoubted writings. It would support any clear evidence, which has yet to be found, of Chaucer's supposed birth, say, at Lynn, if he began to write verse while living in Norfolk, and outgrew afterwards in London, in his study at court, the dialect that had been about him in his youth. But there is so little evidence in this direction, that we are bound to regard the linguistic evidence against Chaucer's authorship of the extant fourteenth-century translation of a large part of the Roman de la Rose, as far outweighing any reasons we have for regarding it as work of his. But it is with the higher strain of the Italian literature that his genius feels its affinity as he attains full strength. Every young poet must acquire the mechanism of his art by imitation, and the fashion among poets in his younger days caused Chaucer to learn his art, in the first instance, as an imitator of the trouvères. Before the age of forty he had perhaps not fully outgrown the influences of his early training. But when he approached the age of forty, Chaucer's writing shows, with the best qualities of his own independent genius, that where he looked abroad at all for a quickening influence it was not to France, but to the great Italian writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. By what he heard of the new birth of Literature in Italy, the book-reading poet must have been drawn early to the study of Italian.

Besides the "Romaunt of the Rose." we may probably place