In a somer seson, when soft was the sunne,

I shope me in shroudes, as I a shepherd were,

In habite as an hermite, unholy of werkes,

Went wide in this worlde, wonders to here.

The greatest figure of the English literature of the fourteenth century is Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 - 1400). He was born when the Hundred Years' War with France had already begun (1337 - 1453). Three times in his life the plague known as the Black Death smote the country. When he was in his twenties the English language was established, for the first time, as the language of law-courts. When he was in his late thirties the young and unfortunate Richard II ascended the throne, to be deposed and murdered a year before Chaucer's death by Bolingbroke, the rebel who became Henry IV. In 1381 there came the Peasants' Revolt, and with it a recognition that the labourers and diggers had human rights quite as much as the middle class and the nobility. Chaucer died in 1400, about forty years before a really important event in British literary history - the invention of printing.

Chaucer belonged to that growing class of merchants from which, in the centuries to follow, many great writers sprang. He was the son of a man engaged in trade: his father was a wine merchant. But young Chaucer was to learn a lot about the aristocracy through becoming a page to the Countess of Ulster. Promotion and foreign service as a young soldier, marriage into the family of the great John of Gaunt, the opportunity to observe polite manners, to study the sciences and the arts, the literatures of France and Italy - all these had their part to play in making Chaucer one of the best-equipped of the English poets. Granted intelligence, a strong sense of humour, a fine musical ear, and the ability to tell a story are also his finest assets.

Chaucer created a masterpiece of the Middle English verse - The Canterbury Tales. In the poem he stood on his own feet and gave literature something it had never seen before - observation of life as it is really lived, pictures of people who are real (not just abstractions from books) and a view of life which, in its tolerance, humour, scepticism, passion, and love of humanity, we can only call 'modern'. Chaucer is a living poet: he speaks to us today with a clear a voice as was heard in his own age. It is this living quality that makes him great.

Chaucer is also modern in that the language he uses is, for the first time in the history of English literature, recognisably the language of our time. The following lines pronounced in the Pardoner's Tale, where the teller is attacking the sin of gluttony:

Adam our fader, and his wyf also,

Fro Paradys to labour and to wo

Were driven for that vyce, it is no drede;

For whyl that Adam fasted, as I rede,

He was in Paradys; and what that he

Eet of the fruyt defended on the tree,

Anon he was out-cast to wo and peyne...

In any case, when we are really immersed in a tale by Chaucer, his brilliant descriptive gifts and his humour carry us along and make us forget that we are reading a poet who lived six hundred years ago. The vigour and swiftness of his style is something new in English poetry. The Canterbury Tales - a long work, but still unfinished at Chaucer's death - is partly a new idea, partly an old one. Collections of short stories had been popular for a long time on the Continent (and also in Islam, as the Arabian Nights reminds us). Chaucer's masterpiece is no more than a collection of stories, and very few of them are original. That is one way of looking at The Canterbury Tales. But what had never been done before was to take a collection of human beings - of all temperaments and social positions - and mingle them together, make them tell stories, and make these stories illustrate their own characters.Chaucer's work sparkles with drama and life: temperaments clash, each person has his own way of speaking and his own philosophy, and the result is not only a picture of the late Middle Ages - in all its colour and variety - but of the world itself.

Pilgrimages were as much a part of Christian life in Chaucer's time as they are today of Muslim and Hindu life. When spring came, when the snow and frost and, later, the floods had left the roads of England and made them safe for traffic again, then people from all classes of society would make trips to holy places. One of the holy towns of England was Canterbury, where Thomas a Becket, the 'blissful holy martyr' murdered in the reign of Henry II, had his resting-place. It was convenient for those pilgrims to travel in companies, having usually met each other at some starting point, as, for example, the Tabard Inn at Southwark, London. On the occasion of the immortal pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales, Harry Bailey, the landlord of the Tabard, making the pilgrimage himself, offers a free supper to whichever of the pilgrims shall tell the best story on the long road to Canterbury. We never find out who it is that wins the landlord's prize; we can only be sure of one thing - that it is not Chaucer himself. He, a shy pilgrim, tells a verse story so terribly dull that Harry Bailey stops him in the middle of it. Then Chaucer - the great poet - tells a prose story hardly less dull. The other tales are delightful and varied - the rich humour of the Carpenter's Tale and the Miller's Tale, the pathetic tale of the Prioress, the romantic tale of the Knight, and all the rest of them. The Prologue to the Tales is a marvellous portrait-gallery of typical people of the age - the corrupt Monk, the dainty Prioress, the gay young Squire - people whose offices for the most part no longer exist, for the society that produced them no longer exists. We do not have Summoners and Maunciples and Pardoners nowadays, though we do have Physicians and Parsons and Cooks. But beneath the costumes and the strange occupations we have timeless human beings. The new spirit was best reflected in the poem wrtten by Chaucer - the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet who paved the road for English realistic literature. In his Canterbury Tales he achieves realism (in the Prologue), which brings almost the whole of the medieval English world before us, drawn sometimes with irony, sometimes with open and robust satire, but always with complete mastery.

The next greatest work of Chaucer is Troilus and Criseyde, a love-story taken from the annals of the Trojan War, a war which has provided European writers with innumerable myths. Shakespeare also told the bitter tale of these two wartime lovers. Chaucer's version, with its moral of the faithlessness of women, is not only tragic but also full of humour, and its psychology is so startlingly modern that it reads in some ways like a modern novel. Indeed, it can be called the first full-length piece of English fiction.

The only considerable poet in England in the fifteenth century is John Skelton (1460? - 1529) who, after a long period of neglect, came into his own again in the twentieth century. It was Robert Graves, the modern poet, who pointed out his virtues and allowed these virtues to influence his own work. A modern British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, set five of his poems to music, and introduced to mere music-lovers the humour, pathos, and fantastic spirit of that strange writer. 'Strange' because it is hard to classify him: he seems to owe nothing to Chaucer nor to anybody else. He is fond of a short line, a loose rhyme-pattern, and the simplest of words:

Merry Margaret,

As midsummer flower,

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower:

With solace and gladness,

Much mirth and no madness,

All good and no badness;

So joyously,

So maidenly,

So womanly

Her demeaning