On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the passage, at
once powerful and touching, in the so-called "Parson's Tale" (the sermon
which closes the "Canterbury Tales" as Chaucer left them), in which
certain lords are reproached for taking of their bondmen amercements,
"which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements," while
lords in general are commanded to be good to their thralls (serfs),
because "those that they clept thralls, be God's people; for humble folks
be Christ's friends; they be contubernially with the Lord." The solitary
type, however, of the labouring man proper which Chaucer, in manifest
remembrance of Langland's allegory, produces, is one which, beautiful and
affecting as it is, has in it a flavour of the comfortable sentiment, that
things are as they should be. This is--not of course the "Parson"
himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but--the
"Parson's" brother, the "Ploughman". He is a true labourer and a good,
religious and charitable in his life,--and always ready to pay his tithes.
In short, he is a true Christian, but at the same time the ideal rather
than the prototype, if one may so say, of the conservative working man.

Such were some, though of course some only, of the general currents of
English public life in the latter half--Chaucer's half--of the fourteenth
century. Its social features were naturally in accordance with the course
of the national history. In the first place, the slow and painful process
of amalgamation between the Normans and the English was still unfinished,
though the reign of Edward III went far towards completing what had
rapidly advanced since the reigns of John and Henry III. By the middle of
the fourteenth century English had become, or was just becoming, the
common tongue of the whole nation. Among the political poems and songs
preserved from the days of Edward III and Richard II, not a single one
composed on English soil is written in French. Parliament was opened by
an English speech in the year 1363, and in the previous year the