and vice.  It was not the doctrine, but the practice which they condemned.  With the accession of the house of Plantagenet, the people were made to feel that the Norman monarchy was a curse, without alloy.  Richard I. was a knight-errant and a crusader, who cared little for the realm; John was an adulterer, traitor, and coward, who roused the people’s anger by first quarrelling with the Pope, and then basely giving him the kingdom to receive it again as a papal fief.  The nation, headed by the warlike barons, had forced the great charter of popular rights from John, and had caused it to be confirmed and supplemented during the long reign of his son, the weak Henry III.

Edward I. was engaged in cruel wars, both in Wales and Scotland, which wasted the people’s money without any corresponding advantage.

Edward II. was deposed and murdered by his queen and her paramour Mortimer; and, however great their crime, he was certainly unworthy and unable to control a fierce and turbulent people, already clamorous for their rights.  These well-known facts are here stated to show the unsettled condition of things during the period when the English were being formed into a nation, the language established, and the earliest literary efforts made.  Materials for a better organization were at hand in great abundance; only proper master-builders were needed.  We have seen that everything now betokened the coming of a new era, in State, Church, and literature.

The monarch who came to the throne in 1327, one year before the birth of Chaucer, was worthy to be the usher of this new era to England:  a man of might, of judgment, and of forecast; the first truly English monarch in sympathy and purpose who had occupied the throne since the Conquest:  liberal beyond all former precedent in religion, he sheltered Wiclif in his bold invectives, and paved the way for the later encroachments upon the papal supremacy.  With the aid of his accomplished son, Edward the Black Prince, he rendered England illustrious by his foreign wars, and removed what remained of the animosity between Saxon and Norman.

REFORM IN RELIGION.—­We are so accustomed to refer the Reformation to the time of Luther in Germany, as the grand religious turning-point in modern history, that we are apt to underrate, if not to forget, the religious movement in this most important era of English history.  Chaucer and Wiclif wrote nearly half a century before John Huss was burned by Sigismond:  it was a century after that that Luther burned the Pope’s decretals at Wittenberg, and still later that Henry VIII. threw off the papal dominion in England.  But great crises in a nation’s history never arrive without premonition;—­there are no moral earthquakes without premonitory throes, and sometimes these are more decisive and destructive than that which gives electric publicity.  Such distinct signs appeared in the age of Chaucer, and the later history of the Church in England cannot be distinctly understood without a careful study of this period.