CHAPTER XVII
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THE reign of Edward III can be divided into two periods, the days of national glory and the days of decline. Most of the incidental achievements, which may now be briefly mentioned, came in the second period, when the gray goose no longer flew high in the sky. They had no bearing on military matters and so provide a welcome change.
It was at this time that English became the accepted language of the nation, ushering in what may reasonably be termed the birth of English literature. Edward III either initiated the movement or at least gave it his sanction. One of the many churchmen who served for brief periods as chancellor during the reign, William de Edington, introduced into Parliament the famous statute which provided that all proceedings before the courts of Westminster, the judgments as well as the pleadings, must be expressed in English. The statute went further and stipulated that schoolmasters must teach their pupils to construe in the English tongue. This was a radical measure, for Norman-French had been the official language since the days of the Conquest. It took a long time for the enactment to be fully accepted.
Edward had been fortunate in his tutor, a learned and witty churchman named Richard de Bury, who later became Bishop of Durham. It was in his last years that he wrote his famous book Philobiblon, which was in a sense an autobiography although it was devoted largely to books and book lovers, a rare class, it must be agreed, in those days. It was written in bad Latin, say scholars, but when translated into English was found to be most beguiling and witty. He was perhaps the first, and most certainly the most active, of book collectors in England, rummaging in the dust heaps of abbey and cathedral archives and rescuing the volumes which made his personal library larger than those of all other bishops combined.
This period produced five rather remarkable writers of widely different gifts. The first, of course, was Geoffrey Chaucer. Born in 1340, he did not achieve any prominence in letters until near the close of the reign. His youth was spent in the Vintry, where his somewhat wealthy citizen father had a house of two cellars, a hall, a parlor, a solar bedroom with a chimney and a privy, a kitchen and larder and chambers in the garret. From this substantial home could be heard very distinctly the deep bass notes of the bells of St. Martin-le-Grand tolling the curfew. Here an observant eye could see enough of life to prepare him for the writing of the wonderful tales he later produced in the native tongue. The productive period of the poet coincided with the closing of the deep shadows about the senile king.
John Gower, called the prince of poets, was born in 1325 but did not produce his serious work until he had reached his mature years. One of his major works, Confessio Amantis, was written in the English tongue and was a monumental effort of thirty thousand rhymed lines.
Little is known about Will Langland except that his long narrative poem, Piers Plowman, was the most noteworthy single effort in the native tongue at this period. In this passionate picture of the life of the common people, he not only displayed intense feeling and power but won himself recognition later as the spokesman of the lower classes.
Jean Froissart came to England bearing letters of commendation to Queen Philippa. He served for a time as secretary to the queen and was given every opportunity to observe and set down the things which transpired. He was born for the life of courts, having a fanatical enthusiasm for knights who lived by the code and who spent their days in the pleasing occupation of snipping, slashing, shearing, mutilating, and disemboweling each other. If he had been content to remain permanently in England on the fat pension that the lavish Edward would have provided for him, he would undoubtedly have produced a great mass of biased but readable and useful history in his Chronicles. Many incidents which are no more than a scratch on a page of history would have come to life in some form or other if Messire Jean had been on hand to track them down and present them in his pleasant but irresponsible prose. What stories he might have told! Of the great John Hawkwood who formed the White Company; of the Lady Joan de Clisson whose bitter grief over the unjust execution of her husband by the French king led her into piracy in the English Channel; of the long and silent conspiracy of the villeins of England which culminated when John Ball had “rungen their bell”; of the real story of Dick Whittington with his cat and tie voices he heard in the bells!
But Froissart went later to France and transferred his enthusiasm to the exploits of French knights.
The most important of this first school of writers from one standpoint was a strange young character who became known as the Hermit of Hampole. His name was Richard Rolle. Feeling the desire to live a detached life, he took two kirtles of his sister’s, one white and one gray, and a rain hood of his father’s, and in this patched-up costume lived in the woods near his home in solitary contemplation. Later he went farther afield and first attracted wide attention when he entered a church at Dalton, put on a surplice, and delivered a sermon of passionate fervor. The rest of his life was spent in a cave at Hampole near the Cistercian nunnery of St. Mary and was devoted to writing messages on spiritual and inspirational questions in the vigorous but little-known dialect of Northumberland. He preached a gospel of hope and joy in a period given over to gloom and despair. The nuns aided him by preserving copies of his work in his own hand in their choir bonds. He was carried off in 1349 by the Black Death, which seemingly could penetrate into dense forests and the deepest caves.
Richard Rolle has been called the father of English prose because he was the first to give written form to what had only been spoken before, an amalgam of Old English, Norman-French, and Latin, the basis of the present tongue. His fame did not penetrate the closed circle known as the court, however, except perhaps as an amusing anecdote about an unhinged recluse.
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The one branch of the arts in which it may reasonably be claimed for Edward that he led the way was architecture and building; and in this field his contribution was largely administrative.
The last quarter of the century saw the change from the Curvilinear style to the glories of the Perpendicular. This was, in a sense, a revolt from the great elaboration of the Curvilinear period, when beauty in tracery was eagerly sought and other elements were sometimes neglected. The Perpendicular was manifested in a preference for straight lines rather than flowing, a demand for the sterner and more dignified aspects of simplicity.
Edward was wise enough, and sufficiently discerning in taste, to accept the change and put all his power behind it. A Royal School was founded with headquarters at Westminster in the great administrative building over against the abbey. Here the many ventures in renovation and addition were discussed and planned. It is doubtful that Edward took an active part in the purely technical discussions as his ancestor, Henry III, undoubtedly had done. He was always too busy for that, and his departures from the kingdom were so frequent and so prolonged that he had no time left for such lesser labors. It is certain, however, that he always knew in a general way what the master masons were going to do. The costs were tremendous and so the great Plantagenet king, who was always shivering on the brink of bankruptcy, would have to know what his responsibility would be.
Edward’s activities in building centered at Windsor and Westminster, but his lead was being followed elsewhere. Richard of Farleigh was at work in the west, his chief contribution being the truly beautiful steeple of Salisbury Cathedral. The erection of Salisbury had been a major triumph for England a century before; a rarely fine building, designed, planned, and raised by Englishmen in the record-breaking space of forty years instead of the centuries which more leisurely races allowed. It had always presented one lack, a suitable main tower. Richard of Farleigh proceeded to supply this.
After completing their work at Windsor, William of Wykeham and his right-hand man, William of Wynford, moved on to Winchester and began their memorable contribution there. William Joy transformed Wells Cathedral and John Clyve designed the chastely lovely tower of Worcester. In addition to these major accomplishments, there were native artists, unsung geniuses of the chisel and the mallet, at work on churches throughout the country. It is in the rare artistry of her small churches that England has always excelled.
The spearheading of this change in architectural design in England is said in some quarters to have been the contribution of Robert de Bury, the wise and witty Bishop of Durham. He was above all others the one who might have felt the need for change, but the evidence available is not tangible or convincing. He went, on one of the many continental missions which were entrusted to him because of his suavity and culture, to visit Pope John XXII, who also has had his place in these pages. John was more concerned in the practical and administrative aspects of the papacy but at the same time he was deep in the evolution of the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. This brought many great architect-masons to the spot, and it is conceivable that the urbane Richard would be a welcome visitor in all cultivated circles and that he would come to know in what direction the thought of the great continental leaders was trending.
This much is certain, that the author of Philobiblon met Petrarch at the city where the winds blowing so insistently from the south were no hotter than the controversies raging about the new papal domain. The Italian poet is said to have questioned the English prelate about his island home, which with poetic license he called “the distant north.”
In spite of these interesting speculations, De Bury remains a figure on the outside and far removed from the dust of the building sheds, the screech of winches, and the toil on the ramps. On the inside there was a figure whose contribution can be weighed in more concrete terms, Henry Yvele, and at his shoulder a brother, Robert. Of the birth and early life of Henry Yvele, nothing is known, and the record begins with his work in London in the year 1355. This year belongs in the final stages of the first of the plagues, called the Black Death. The plague had turned this teeming capital from a busy, cheerful, confident city into a center of gloom and fear and new-made graves, where one man was left of two and the dread of the unknown hung over all. Men no longer congregated in noisy crowds for fear of contagion. Their thoughts had turned to the life after death, and those who could afford a chantry were sinking their funds in the building of them; a chantry being a small chapel dedicated to the chanting of masses for the soul of one lowly mortal. This was the kind of thing in which Yvele excelled, and he was kept busy in the planning of royal tombs and, later, the breath-taking naves of Westminster and Canterbury. His success was so quick that in 1356 he was made director of the royal work at Westminster. In 1369 this post was granted him for the duration of his life.
There was also a man who must have been a superb craftsman, although his period antedates the swing to the Perpendicular, William de Ramsaye. He was first heard of in 1326, when he was employed under Thomas of Canterbury on the work being done at Westminster. Ten years later he was engaged in the needed repairs and additions to the Tower of London, where he became the chief mason of the king. In 1344 he was engaged on Edward’s Round Table, the circular hall which was planned for Windsor. The war with France did not stop all architectural activities, but it did lead to the suspension of this major venture. It was never resumed, although in 1365 the king paid the sum of fifty pounds to one John Lindsey for a table to be used in St. George’s Chapel.
How unfortunate it is that little is known of these men. The past yields up so much about the figures of royalty, about the fighting men killing each other with so much zest, even about the dull, rule-ridden, sniveling, and acquisitive creatures in the chancelleries. Although scientists have been known to claim that with one bone the complete body of any long-extinct animal can be re-created, it is impossible to conjure up a flesh-and-blood man of this supreme age of building from a date and an obscure reference in moldy state documents about “our well beloved servant” of such-and-such a name. History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.