Which cruddles the blood and pricks the harte:
Then is your carelesse corage accoied,
Your careful heards with cold bene annoied:
Then paye you the price of your surquedrie,
With weeping, and wailing, and misery.[100]

The syllabic value of the final _e_, already weakening in the London of
Chaucer's later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most
immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness,
and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous
one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers
possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered
conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were,
without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the
beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as:

Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence
For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry;
For al my minde, wyth percyng influence,
Was sette upon the most fayre lady
La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly,
That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene,
Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.[101]

It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to
differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some
of Wyatt's verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of
Barclay. It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser
to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer
produced a somewhat strange result. The one point which the late