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 medieval 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.”

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 Lollards— Puritans 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, as a hunter 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

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.

4. William Caxton, born about 1422, in the Weald of Kent, was apprenticed to a wealthy London mercer. After his master's death, in 1441, he lived chiefly in Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zealand, for thirty years and more. In 1464 he was employed by Edward IV. as one of two commissioners for the settlement of a treaty of commerce with Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Afterward, Caxton was in the service of Edward IV.'s sister Margaret, who married Charles the Bold. In 1469, he began to translate from French into English the "Histories of Troy," and finished it in 1471. Having done this, he says that he "practised and learnt at great charge and expense the art of printing, to enable him to strike off in one day many copies. He seems to have learnt the art at Cologne, of Conrad Winters, who had set up his press there in 1470.

The first book printed by him was his translation, also from the French, of a moral treatise, "The Game and Play of the Chess." Of this there are two editions, the first said to have been finished on the last day of March, 1474. It is assumed to be the first book printed in England. Perhaps it was; but there is no evidence that Caxton did not print it at Cologne. It is to the printed copy of the translation of "Les Dictes Moraux des Philosophes," as The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers," by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, that Caxton first added, "imprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westmynstre;" and the date of it is 1477. A book of 1480 specifies the Abbey as the place where Caxton had his press. Resort to the Abbey scriptorium for copies of books had led to a settlement of copyists within the Abbey precints. The new-born giant was in its mother's lap when Caxton, who had learnt the new art as a business speculation, worked his press at Westminster Abbey among the professional transcribers whom he found there busy with their pens. From the beginning until his death in 1492, Caxton worked with astonishing industry, both as a printer and as a writer. Though already stricken in years, he published, in all, sixty-four volumes, and himself translated into English not fewer than five thousand closely printed folio pages. His is one of the worthiest names in English literature. 5. The most delightful example of English prose produced in

this century is "The Byrth, Lif, and Actes of Kyng Arthur,” printed by Caxton in 1485, and frequently reprinted since then. The book is often entitled "Morte d'Arthur." Of its author, Sir Thomas Malory, almost nothing is now known. Some suppose him to have been a Welsh priest; also, that he died a little before his book passed through Caxton's press. At any rate, the book itself is a storehouse of racy English words, and for delight of reading is still one of the most exquisite books in our literature. It is a felicitous selection, chiefly from French romances, of the best legends concerning King Arthur, and the knights and ladies of his court. Few books equal it in simplicity and sweetness of phrase, in poetic and dramatic vividness, in the grace of chivalric feeling. Sir Walter Scott pronounced it "indisputably the best prose romance the language can boast;" and Robert Southey said of it, that "there was no book, except 'The Faery Queen, which, in his boyhood, he "perused so often or with such deep contentment."

999

6. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1470, translated into English Cicero's "De Amicitiâ." Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, translated, from the French, "Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers," the first book upon which Caxton put his imprint.