Period of Inevitable Conflict Wars of the Roses To busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels. Arc. The brilliant campaign that culminated in the victory of Agincourt followed; all France was at the King's feet, and for a moment the old thrill of the days of Crécy swept over England. But it was only for a moment. The great King died in the midst of his triumph, and his son, only nine months old, was crowned in his cradle. The strong wills of the two Henrys had stayed the tide of civil discord, but now there was no hand to check it, for even when the young King became of age he was but a child. During his whole life he was a shuttlecock tossed between powerful factions. Little by little the French territory won by his father was wrested away, for a great power, the peasant maiden, Joan 1415. Agincourt. of Arc, had arisen in France. Soon there 1429. Siege of Orleans, was but the little town of Calais to show raised by Joan of for the brilliant and costly wars of the 1455. Battle of St. former reign, and now the house of, York, led by the powerful baron War- ton. wick, who boasted that on festal days he fed thirty thousand at his table, boldly 1485. Battle of demanded its rights, wrested from it by the usurper Henry IV. The Wars of the Roses followed, and for thirty years the island was a battlefield. The conflict so long inevitable had burst upon England with fury, seldom in history does one find so savage and so bloody a struggle. No quarter was asked or given. After every battle there was a wholesale beheading, until almost all the nobility of the kingdom were destroyed. Whole houses like that of Warwick and of Somerset were exterminated to a man. When the Wars of the Roses Albans. 1461. Battle of Tow 1471. Battle of Tewkesbury. worth Field. Religious Repression Persecution of the Lollards were over, the great wreck of the feudal system that had cumbered and threatened the land since the days of Henry II. was swept entirely from English soil. This struggle, so fearfully cruel and bloody, was the last lesson in that harsh school whose first master had been William the Norman. It was a lesson that England had sooner or later to learn if she was ever to become a united, self-centered nation. Another and perhaps more important cause for the literary barrenness of the period was the policy of religious repression adopted by Henry IV. and continued with fierceness until the middle of the century. Protected by John of Gaunt, Wyclif had sown broadcast the seeds of religious and intellectual emancipation. For half a century England had thrilled with a new life; literature had flourished, originality of thought and opinion had been tolerated. But no sooner was the great Duke dead than the tide turned. In 1400 a fierce decree against the Lollards was enacted, and during the following half-century no efforts were spared to root out the effects of Wyclif's sowing. The colleges were prominent in the persecution, and as a result learning sank lower and lower. Since all free inquiry, all originality, was heresy, scholarship must continue to beat at the old straw, and literature must be content to echo masters who had sung in more fortunate days. SUGGESTED READING. Drayton, Ballad of Agincourt (Ward, English Poets); Scott, The Fair Maid of Perth; Bulwer, The Last of the Barons; Southey, Joan of Arc. 1. William Caxton (c. 1421-1491) (Life, by William Blades,-scholarly and exhaustive; Morley, vi., Ch. xiv.) Life of Caxton His Publications While the darkness of the period was most dense there entered England, silently and unobserved, a force that was destined to revolutionize the nation's intellectual life. The advent of Caxton with his printing press divides sharply the history of English literature. All before him is the old; all after him the new. Caxton was of English parentage, a native of Kent; but being apprenticed to a mercer he was early taken abroad, and in 1450 we find him a prosperous merchant of Bruges. He remained in the Flemish city during the next twenty-five years, an active and important business man, kept in constant trouble by the trade relations between England and the Low Countries. In 1468 a change in the treaty relieved him of much of his labor, and he immediately began to improve his leisure hours by making a translation from the French. Three years later he had completed an English version of Le Recueil des Histoires de Troye. It became exceedingly popular, but the old difficulty that had confronted every successful writer since the earliest times now arose before Caxton. The reduplication of manuscripts was a long and tedious process. He copied until his eyes were "dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper," and then he bethought himself of the newly discovered art of printing which had just been introduced into Bruges. As a result his translation of the Recueil was printed in 1474, perhaps at Bruges, probably at Cologne, thereby winning the distinction of being the first English book reproduced by movable types. Caxton was evidently charmed with his new accomplishment. In 1476 he took a complete printing outfit to London, and the next year he produced The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the first book ever His Service to the English Tongue printed in England. His Love of Romance He produced editions of From this date until 1491 Caxton's press was in constant activity. He threw into his new work all the marvelous energy that had characterized him as a business man. He translated from the French twenty-one books, mainly romances, and issued them sometimes in several editions. Chaucer, Gower, Malory, and Lydgate, besides translations from the Latin and the Dutch. He printed in fourteen years," says his biographer, “more than eighteen thousand pages, nearly all of folio size, and nearly eighty separate books.' 66 The service that Caxton rendered the English language and literature cannot be overestimated. He selected with a careful hand the best that English literature had produced, and he made it possible for it to be distributed widely; the author was no longer at the mercy of the copyist; large numbers of a work, absolutely uniform, could be produced, a fact that in itself did much to settle English speech. But Caxton did more: he was the first English editor; he supplied introductory matter and insisted upon uniformity of orthography and diction. His own prose style, although not especially notable, is nevertheless vigorous and idiomatic. "He stood," says Green, "between two schools of translation, that of French affectation and English pedantry "'; and his sturdy good sense bade him use the strong, homely English that he heard all about him. The publications of the first printer, with their simple, honest introductions, throw a flood of light upon his character and his time. He loved romance and the old tales of chivalry. O blessed Lord [he cried] when I remembre the grete and many volumes Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur of Seynt Graal, Ghalehot & Launcelotte de Lake, Gawayn, Perceval, Lyonel, and Tristram, and many other, of whom were over longe to reherce, and also to me unknowen! But thy storye of the said Arthur is so gloryous and shyning that he is stalled in the fyrst place of the moost noble, beste and worthyest of the Cristen men. Romance But Caxton was not alone in his enthusiasm. was still the chief literary diet of those who could read, as it had been ever since the Normans had brought it into the island four centuries before. Authorities. 2. Sir Thomas Malory The Globe Edition; Sommer's Edition, 3 vols., is the leading authority; Mead's Selections from Le Morte d'Arthur, with its excellent introduction, is the most helpful for the general student; see also Rhys', Studies in the Arthur Legend. 66 In July, 1485, there issued from Caxton's press the most important work produced in England during the century, Le Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. The book comes suddenly before us like one of Merlin's creations. Of its origin and its author we know almost nothing. It was ended the ix yere of the reygne of King Edward the fourth [1470] by Syr Thomas Maleore Knight"; a copy was delivered to Caxton, “whyche copye Syr Thomas Malorye dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe"; and it was edited, furnished with preface and table of contents, divided into books and chapters, and printed by Caxton. So much we gather from the work itself. All attempts to supply more details and to connect the author with any historical personage must rest upon conjecture. But the personality of the old knight breathes from |