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manuscripts also of the ballads of "Robin Hood and the Potter and Robin Hood and the Monk," not older than the last years of the fifteenth century. The ballads and tales that made Robin Hood representative of English popular feeling, not only ascribed to him courage and good-humor, and connected his name with the maintenance of archery for national defence, but also gave him Friar Tuck for chaplain, and blended in him religious feeling with resistance to oppression:

"A good maner then had Robyn

In londe where that he were,
Every daye ere he wolde dine

Three masses wolde he hear."

His religion took especially the form, once dear to the people, of that worship of the Virgin which softened the harsh temper of mediæval doctrine:

"Robyn loved our dere lady;

For doute of dedely synne,
Wolde he never do company harme

That ony woman was ynne."

Maid Marian being added to his company, fidelity to her would express English domestic feeling; while the same battle against corrupt luxury in the church which had been represented for the educated courtier by Walter Map's Golias poetry was rudely expressed to the people in Robin Hood's injunction to his

men:

"These byshoppes and these archebyshoppes,
Ye shall them bete and bynde."

Robin Hood pitied the poor, and gave them part in the wealth stripped from those who lived in sensual excess. The chief representative of rich ecclesiastics in the Robin Hood ballads was the Abbot of St. Mary's at York; and the oppressions of secular authority were especially defied in the person of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood is said to have escaped all perils of his way of life, and to have been more than eighty years old when he went to his aunt, the prioress of Kirklees Nunnery, in Yorkshire, to be bled. She treacherously let him bleed to death. As he was thus dying, Robin bethought him of his bugle-horn, and "blew out weak blasts three." Little

John came to his rescue, and asked leave to burn the nunnery; but Robin said:

"I never hurt fair maid in all my time,

Nor at my end shall it be."

He asked only to shoot an arrow from the window, that he might be buried where the arrow fell; and so, says tradition, he was buried on a height that overlooks the valley of the Calder, at the distance of a mighty bow-shot from Kirklees.

To the end of the fifteenth century belongs the charming dialogue-ballad of "The Nut Brown Maid; " likewise the famous ballads of "The Battle of Otterburn" and "Chevy Chase;" although of the last two there remains no copy written so early as the fifteenth century. The ballad literature to which these poems belong came into strong life in Europe during the thirteenth, and especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the thirteenth century Spain uttered through national ballads the soul of freedom in her struggle against the Moors. Our English ballads are akin to those which also among the Scandinavians became a familiar social amusement of the people. They were recited by one of a company with animation and with varying expression, while the rest kept time, often with joined hands forming a circle, advancing, retiring, balancing, sometimes remaining still, and, by various movements and gestures, followed the changes of emotion in the story. From this manner of enjoying them the ballads took their name. Ballare is a middle Latin word, meaning to incline to this side and that, with which the Italians associate their name for dancing, and we the word "ball" for the name of a dancing-party. There is some reason to think that educated gentlewomen were often the unknown writers of the ballads of England and the North of Europe.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: PROSE-WRITERS.

1. Literary Use of Latin.-2. Reginald Pecock.-3. Sir John Fortescue.-4. William Caxton.-5. Sir Thomas Malory.-6. John Tiptoft; Anthony Woodville.

1. THE literary use of Latin in preference to English, on the part of Englishmen, still continued in the fifteenth century, although the custom was steadily declining.

Among English writers of Latin books may be mentioned Henry Knighton, who wrote a chronicle of events in England from King Edgar to Richard II.; John of Bromyard, who taught theology at Cambridge, and wrote, as his great work, "Summa Predicantium," an earnest, erudite, and interesting mass of mediæval practical theology; William Lindwood, a professor of theology at Oxford, who wrote Constitutiones Provinciales Ecclesiæ Anglicana;" Thomas Netter, who wrote numerous theological books, especially against Wiclif; Sir John Fortescue, who wrote "De Laudibus Legum Angliæ;" and Thomas Walsingham, whose principal work was a chronicle entitled "Historia Anglicana.”

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2. The most important writers in English prose during the fifteenth century were these four, Reginald Pecock, Sir John Fortescue, William Caxton, and Sir Thomas Malory.

Reginald Pecock, probably a Welshman, was born towards the end of the fourteenth century, studied at Oxford, and was admitted to priest's orders in 1421. Being a man of great learning, piety, and eloquence, he soon became distinguished, especially for the defence of orthodoxy in arguments addressed to the reason. In 1444, he was made Bishop of St. Asaph; and in 1449, Bishop of Chichester. About this time, he was engaged upon his principal work, the most important English prosework produced in the first half of the fifteenth century,- "The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy." In this book, he attempted to justify six of the practices for which the clergy

incurred blame among the people: these were, the use of images; the going on pilgrimages; the holding of landed possessions by the clergy; the various ranks of the hierarchy; the framing of church laws by papal and episcopal authority; and the institution of the religious orders. Upon the topics it discussed, the book was a repertory of fifteenth-century argument. Although sincerely meant as a defence of the clergy against the Biblemen, this book greatly increased the hostility of his own order against him, an hostility that had been growing for many years. His offence was that the whole subject was argued out in homely English for discussion by the English people; for while Pecock exalted the Pope's supremacy, he conceded to his opponents that in Scripture was the only rule of faith, and urged that doctrine should be proved therefrom by reason. This, however, he did while opposing the demand of the LollardsPuritans of the fifteenth century - for authority of Scripture in less important matters of usage, lay or clerical. There could be no real conflict between reason and Scripture, Pecock taught; and the clergy, he said, shall be condemned at the last day "if by clear wit they draw not men into consent of true faith otherwise than by fire, sword, and hangment; although I will not deny these second means to be lawful, provided the former be first used." A bishop who thought for himself after this fashion -denying to the Lollards that deductions from their reading of the Bible were infallible, denying also to his brethren of the hierarchy the right to claim an uninquiring faith in dogmas of the church-opposed himself to the passions of the combatants on either side, and had no partisans. In 1457 a council was held at Westminster, in which all temporal lords refused to speak till Pecock had been expelled from it. The divines at this council appointed four and twenty doctors to examine Pecock's books. The books were reported against, Pecock was declared a sickly sheep, and called upon to abjure or be burnt. He had admitted the right of the church thus to compel opinion, and he submitted. The executioner burnt, instead of the bishop, his works in three folios and eleven quartos, including a copy of that "Repressor" of his, a piece of natural fifteenthcentury English, which yet survives as one of the best and most

considerable specimens of early prose among the treasures of our literature. After some months Bishop Pecock was deprived of his see, and secluded in the Abbey of Thorney in Cambridgeshire, where he was confined to a private room within sight of an altar, was forbidden ever again to put pen to paper, and was to have access to no books but a breviary, a mass-book, a psalter, a legend, and a Bible. The doors of Thorney Abbey closed on him, and he was heard of no more.

3. Even when distracted by contending factions, England was advancing towards freedom. The laws of the country were not based like those of France upon the will of the monarch, but upon the will of the people through their representatives. An English lawyer, Sir John Fortescue, who was born in Devonshire, was chief justice of the King's Bench from 1442 to 1460, and lived, it is said, to the age of ninety, wrote in the latter part of his life a strong and noble book on the "Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy," his chief object being to show the superiority of a constitutional over a despotic government. The strength of constitutional feeling in this chief English lawyer of the fifteenth century may be inferred from his manner of dating the absolute regal dominion from Nimrod, who "first acquired to himself a kingdom, though he is not called a king in the Scripture, but a mighty hunter before the Lord. For," says Fortescue, behaves towards beasts, which are naturally wild and free; so did he oblige mankind to be in servitude and to obey him." He went back even to the mythical time for the free spirit of the English body politic. "The kingdom of England," he says, "had its original from Brut and the Trojans who attended him from Italy and Greece, and became a mixed kind of government, compounded of the regal and political." Going as far back as he could, he was unable to find or conceive an English people passively obedient to any one irresponsible master. The nation was advancing slowly in his days; there was social confusion, and intellectual life seemed to be numbed, while events But if there was no

66 as a hunter

of great moment were happening abroad. guiding light of genius, there was the sense of God and duty in the people which enabled them to find their own way till the next guides came.

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