evil days when the literary labours of Englishmen had been little better
than bond-service to the tastes of their foreign masters had passed away,
since the Norman barons had, from whatever motive, invited the commons of
England to take a share with them in the national councils. After this,
the question of the relations between the two languages, and the wider one
of the relations between the two nationalities, could only be decided by
the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the one side upon
the other. The Norman noble, his ideas, and the expression they found in
forms of life and literature, had henceforth, so to speak, to stand on
their merits; the days of their dominion as a matter of course had passed
away.

Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman nobles of
Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order.
Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusades; but it was a
difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in these
degenerate days. No laurels were any longer to be gained in the Holy
Land; and though the campaigns of the great German Order against the
pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an English
knight--in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, fought
there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV, did forty years later--
yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind. Of the great mediaeval
companies of Knights, the most famous had, early in the century, perished
under charges which were undoubtedly in the main foul fictions, but at the
same time were only too much in accord with facts betokening an
unmistakable decay of the true spirit of chivalry; before the century
closed, lawyers were rolling parchments in the halls of the Templars by
the Thames. Thus, though the age of chivalry had not yet ended, its
supremacy was already on the wane, and its ideal was growing dim. In the
history of English chivalry the reign of Edward III is memorable, not only