older man than Chaucer, Gower, Wiclif, and Langland, he was born at St. Albans in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and it was in the reign of Edward II., on Michaelmas Day, 1322, that he set out upon his Travels. Five years later, when Edward III. became king, Sir John Mandeville was still abroad. He tells us that he visited Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, Chaldea, and a great part of Ethiopia, Amazonia, India the Less and the Greater, and isles that are about India. For more than thirty years he had been absent, when he came home, as he said, in spite of himself, to rest; "for rheumatic gouts that distress me fix the end of my labour against my will (God knoweth)." On his way home he showed to the pope what he had written in Latin about the marvels and customs he had seen or heard of. The pope showed the book to his council, and it was approved. After his return Sir John Mandeville employed his forced leisure in turning his Latin book into French, and then again into English. This he did in 1356, thirty-four years after he had sailed from England; and at a time when Chaucer, at court, had perhaps done little more than translate the Roman de la Rose," and write his "Court of Love;" when Gower might have written a balade or two; and Wiclif and Langland, one at Oxford, and the other possibly at Malvern, were two young and earnest men, with the chief labours of their lives before them.

แ

Mandeville's book was planned with distinct reference to the wants of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and contrived to subordinate accounts of the remotest travel to the form of what we might call a Travellers' Guide to Jerusalem by four routes, with a Handbook to the Holy Places. The wonderful things told do not in themselves convict Mandeville of any wilful untruth. He tells of what was seen by him as matter of knowledge; in the miracles narrated to him he put faith; and all other marvels of which he heard he tells only as matter of hearsay. He says that he and his men served the Sultan of Babylon in war against the Bedouins, and had from him letters which gave admission to the least accessible of the Holy Places at Jerusalem. He says also that for fifteen months he and his men served the Great Chan of the Tartars of Cathay (China).

But if Sir John Mandeville visited Cathay and India, and wrote from his own knowledge of what he saw there, he must then have had for a travelling companion a Lombard Franciscan friar, Odoric of Pordenone, in Friuli. Odoric was about fourteen

TO A.D. 1384] WICLIF'S TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE

137

years older than Mandeville, and he started on his travels about five years earlier, remaining absent until 1330. He was in Western India soon after 1321, and spent three of the years between 1322 and 1328 in Northern China. In much of his travel he had an Irish friar for companion. On his return to Italy, in 1330, Odoric told the story of his travels, and it was set down in Latin by a brother of his order. He died in the following year. The resemblance between the narratives of Odoric and Mandeville concerning travel in the far East is so very close that the two men have been spoken of as travelling companions. Mandeville, in describing the Perilous Valley, says that he had with him "two worthy men, friars of Lombardy, who said if any man would enter they would go in with us." Sir John Mandeville's "Travels" were written more than twenty years later than Odoric's, and it is in the resemblances between these two books that we find most reason to doubt Sir John's veracity. It is not unreasonable to ask whether he saw more of Cathay or India than he found upon the pages of the Lombard friar.

30. We may now pass into the reign of Richard II. (13771399). The first event in its literary history is the completion by John Wiclif (§ 26) of his Translation of the Bible. In the year 1360 the English people had in their own current language no part of the Bible but the Psalter. Twenty years afterwards, in 1380, the devoted labour of Wiclif and his fellow-workers had produced a complete English Bible, including the Apocrypha. Wiclif-who was appointed to the living of Ludgershall in 1368, resigned that for Lutterworth in 1374, and in 1376 was on a commission with John of Gaunt at Bruges-began with work upon the Gospels. The translator of the Old Testament was Nicholas of Hereford, one of the leaders of Wiclif's party at Oxford; excommunicated in 1382, he went to Rome, was imprisoned there, returned, and in 1386 was committed to prison for life. Next year he was free. In 1394 he was made Chancellor, and in 1397 Treasurer of the Cathedral at Hereford. In 1417 he joined the Carthusians at Coventry. A chief helper in the New Testament work was John Purvey, Wiclif's curate at Lutterworth, who revised the whole Bible Translation. Wiclif left also many sermons in Latin and English. He wrote also a series of Latin treatises forming a Summa in Theologia, and many works of which the MSS. are at Vienna and Prague. Action was taken against his followers, but Wiclif himself was not touched, nor had he been cited before the Pope when he F*

suffered, after two years' interval, a second stroke of palsy, while attending service in his church. Three days afterwards, on the

31st of December, 1384, he died.

31. John Gower (§ 25) in the earlier days of Richard II. was still a wealthy country gentleman at home in Kent. He was acquiring two new manors in Norfolk and Suffolk, and he had still an interest in land near Wigborough, in Essex, when the men of Kent, under Wat Tyler, and the men of Essex, with Jack Straw for their priest, the excommunicated priest John Ball being also one of the company, rose in rebellion. Gower's home was in the midst of the district out of which, in May, 1381, the tumult sprang.

The boy Richard, but eleven years old, had come, in 1377, to a troubled throne. The people were suffering. The French and Spaniards harassed the English coasts, destroying towns and interrupting trade. John of Gaunt urged to Parliament the needs of the country; and the Parliament, forgetting all old grudges, voted liberal supplies, only appointing two merchants as treasurers to protect the public money from misuse. John of Gaunt then achieved in Brittany a costly failure. The Scots broke truce. The Government had spent all, and was heavily in debt. Parliament now resolved to meet two-thirds of the debt with a poll-tax of three groats upon each person above fifteen years of age. It was the second poll-tax within five years, and the sufferings of the people had then brought them to the verge of the next of the three great plague years of the fourteenth century. Each is associated with a piece of literature. The Great Plague of 1348-9, which killed Holcot and Bradwardine (§ 2), and Petrach's Laura, suggested the groundwork of Boccaccio's "Decameron." The plague of 1360-1 was one of the miseries which caused William Langland to write the "Vision of Piers Plowman." The state of England immediately before the plague of 1382 is the subject of the poem written by John Gower on the occasion of the Jack Straw rebellion. There were other bad years, notably one in 1373, and there was no year in which the plague was altogether absent. But in 1381 the people had suffered patiently, until the farming of the heavy poll-tax gave them to be ground under it by men who looked, of course, to their own want of mercy for the profits of their speculation. But when, stung to rebellion, this English mob swarmed out of Kent and Essex to Blackheath, and threatened London, its demands were simply: that all should be free; that they should

TO A.D. 1382]

GOWER'S VOX CLAMANTIS

139 Dot be restrained from buying and selling wherever they could find a profitable market; that there should be a fixed rental of land; and a general pardon. Later experience condemns but one of their four points. These unhappy men, of whom many were seeking honestly to find the right, and some sought no more than a mischievous revenge on those whom they believed to be oppressors, poured into Southwark on the 12th of June, destroyed the Marshalsea, sacked the archbishop's palace, crossed London Bridge next morning, destroyed Newgate, laid waste John of Gaunt's rich palace of the Savoy, and threw into its flames one whom they found taking to himself some of its gold and silver. At the worst they were not thieves, but wild and ignorant avengers. On the 14th the young king met the

rebels at Mile End, and conceded their demands. The great body of them at once retired. But he men stung to a fierce despair by private suffering, with all the baser portion of the crowd, remained. These, breaking into the Tower, where the men of mark in the state had taken refuge, murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and other lords. This was the rabble met by the king at Smithfield on the 17th of June, when Wat Tyler was stabbed by Walworth the mayor, and the young king, only fifteen years old, won the generous trust even of this worst remnant of the rioters. When they bent their bows, crying "They have killed our captain, slay them all," young Richard galloped up to them and said, "What are you about, my friends? Tyler was a traitor; I am your king. Follow me." They fol lowed, and he led them into the clutch of a troop of soldiers, whom he would have set upon them if Sir Robert Knolles had had not been more merciful and wise than his young master. But submission was made, the concessions were revoked; the insurrection was avenged with cruelty upon the people. Then came on them the terrible plague year, 1382.

32. These were the events which drew from John Gower his best poem, the Vox Clamantis (Voice of One Crying), in seven books of Latin elegiacs. In its first book Gower told of the revolt allegorically, in the form of a dream of beasts who have changed their nature. But if, he says, he is in an island of discord, let there be strife without and peace within his doors, and let him seek the less for worldly occupation. A voice admonished him quickly to write what he had seen and heard; for dreams often contain warnings of the future.

In his second book, being awake, he did begin to write, in

voking no muse but the Holy Spirit. If he seem unpolished to the reader, let the reader spare the faults, and look to the inner meaning of his work. And again and again he asks that the soul of his book, not its mere form, be looked to. The eye is blind, he says, and the ear deaf that convey nothing down to the heart's depths; and the heart that does not utter what it knows is as a live coal hid under ashes. The Voice of One Crying shall be the name of his volume, because there are written in it the words that come of a fresh grief. Then he went on to utter what was in his heart. There is no blind fortune ruling the affairs of men; they go ill or well according to the manner in which men fulfil their duties before God. As we do, so we rejoice or suffer. There is no misfortune, no good luck. Whatever happens among us, for good or ill, comes with our own doing-"nos sumus in causa." The object of Gower's "Vox Clamantis was, therefore, to set the educated men, readers of Latin, to the task of finding that disease within our social body of which the Jack Straw rebellion was but a symptom; his plan was to go through all orders of society, and ask himself wherein each fell short of its duty.

"

This he began to do in the third book, which has, like the second, a most earnest prelude. “I do not,” Gower says, "affect to touch the stars, or write the wonders of the poles; but rather, with the common human voice that is lamenting in this land, I write the ills I see. In the voice of my crying there will be nothing doubtful, for every man's knowledge will be its best interpreter." Then follows a passage which ought to be quoted by all teachers who would train young Englishmen to write. Gower prays that his verse may not be turgid; that there may be in it no word of untruth; that each word may answer to the thing it speaks of pleasantly and fitly; that he may flatter in it no one, and seek in it no praise above the praise of God. "Give me that there shall be less vice, and more virtue for my speaking."

Then he divided society into three classes, represented by clerk, soldier, and ploughman, and began with an unsparing review of the vices of the higher clergy of his time. Christ was poor; they heap together wealth. Christ gave on earth peace ; they only stir up wars. Christ gave freely; they are as locked boxes. He lived to labour, but they take their ease; Christ was gentle, they are impetuous. He walked in humility; they walk in pride. Christ was full of pity; they wreak vengeance. Christ