Meanwhile the English tongue was undergoing those serious grammatical and pho netic changes to which reference has already been made. During this half-chaotic stage it was scarcely fit to be a vehicle of literary expression, even if the ignorance and help lessness of the conquered people had not of themselves been sufficient to prevent the growth of a vernacular literature. The first indication of reviving life is the appear ance of Layamon's Brut (see LAyAmoN) about the close of the 12th century. The next century is comparatively rich in writers who use the English tongue, and whose works, if not masterpieces of artistic skill, are at least invaluable for linguistic purposes. The most important of these writers are Orm, Guildford, and Robert of Gloucester.
The period of what is called Early English, embracing the 14th and 15th centuries, is one of great importance, both in the progress of English history and of English litera ture. The translation (the first ever executed) of the Bible into English, which was completed by Wickliffe about 1380, is a work of great value, not only as a monument in the religious history of our nation, but in a philological point of view, being, as it is, all but first among the prose-writings in that form of the English tongue which is now in use. The principal book which precedes it, and the very oldest written in "early English," is sir John Mandeville's account of his eastern travels (1356). Somewhat later (between 1390 and 1400), Geoffrey Chaucer, the genuine father of English poetry, pub lished his Canterbury Tales. A shrewd and sagacious observer, he has left behind him in these Tales a series of sportive and pathetic narratives, told with such a wonderful power of tenderness and humor, in such a simple, healthy style (although his vocabu lary is largely modified by French, and is by no means a " well of English undefiled"), that they have been the wonder and delight of all succeeding times. Laurence Minot, Richard Rolle, Langland, author of Piers the Plowman, and Gower, fitly close round Chaucer as contemporaries who wrote more or less vigorous verse. About the same period flourished in Saotland John Barbour. whose epic narrative, The Brus, written about 1376, is incomparably the greatest of all the metrical chronicles. In the follow ing century (the 15th), and in the early part of the 16th, occur in England the names of John Lydgate (1430), whose London Lyckpeny is still agreeable reading; Alexander Bar clay, whose Ship of Fools was printed in 1509; John Skelton, author of the scurrilous satires of Co/in Clout and Why Come ye not to Court? (died 1529); Howard, earl of Surrey (beheaded 1546-47), who wrote the first sonnets and the first blank verse in the English tongue; and sir Thomas Wyatt (died 1541). The prose writers of this period are sir John
Fortescue, chief-justice of the king's bench under Henry VI., who flourished 1430-70, and who wrote, among other things, a tract on the Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, as it more particularly regards the English Constitution; William Caxton, who introduced printing iuto Britain in 1477—the first book ever printed in this country being translation of the French work Le Reeueil des HAtoires de Troye; sir Thomas Malory, whose Norte Darthur (1469-70) is the final form of the Arthurian romance; Hall, an English lawyer (died 1547), who wrote a chronicle of the Wars of the Roses; and Tyndale, burned (1586) for heresy. In Scotland, during the same period, we encounter in poetry the names of James I., king of Scotland (murdered 1437), author of the King's Quhair, etc.; Andrew Wyntoun, prior of Lochleven, whose Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland was completed about 1420; Blind Harry, author of The Adventures of William Wallace, a work written about 1460, and long exceedingly popular with the Scottish peasantry; Robert Henryson (died circa 1500), author of The Testament of Cresseid, etc.; William Dunbar (died about 1590), whose Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins shows him to have possessed great boldness and vigor in his delineations of character; and Gavin Douglas (died 1522), whose best work is a translation of Virgil's A'neid into English verse—at least into what both Scotchmen and Englishmen then reckoned English verse.
3. The Period extending from the English Reformation to the brilliant works of the Elizabethan age, there is probably none of which we may not detect germs in some of the efforts which were made in the century that preceded. In theology, the names of Latimer (burned 1555), of Cranmer (burned 1556), and of Ridley (burned 1555), shine forth conspicuously; and it is sufficient to mention sir Thomas More (beheaded 1535), author of Utopia, a curious philosophical work, and Roger Ascham (died 1568), as excellent miscellaneous writers of that time. The last-mentioned, indeed, exercised no inconsiderable influence on the development of the English tongue, and his Scholemaster is a work that is even yet influential. We may here mention the Scotchmen, or Major, sir David Lyndsay, Boece, Melville, and, above all, George Buchanan, who is uhiversally admitted to have been one of the finest classical scholars that ever appeared in Christendom.