It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than
fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and
moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded declares
itself in what we know concerning the social life of the nobility, as, for
instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of Froissart, whose
counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves,
nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals. The "Vows of the
Heron," a poem of the earlier part of King Edward III's reign, contains a
choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths; and in a humbler way the
rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance of their
rulers, and in the words of the "Parson's Tale," "dismembered Christ by
soul, heart, bones, and body."

But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the
social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have largely
replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted. The
relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history as well
as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and incontestably
its conceptions of this relation still retained much of the pure sentiment
belonging to the best and most fervent times of Christian chivalry. The
highest religious expression which has ever been given to man's sense of
woman's mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally
dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin, King Edward III dedicated his
principal religious foundation; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his
opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of
ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost
Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the "Praise of Women," in which
she is enthusiastically recognized as the representative of the whole of
her sex, is generally rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison
to the Holy Virgin," beginning