PERIOD III. THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES. ABOUT 1350 TO ABOUT 1500


THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS. Of the century and
a half, from 1350 to 1500, which forms our third period, the most important
part for literature was the first fifty years, which constitutes the age of
Chaucer.

The middle of the fourteenth century was also the middle of the externally
brilliant fifty years' reign of Edward III. In 1337 Edward had begun the
terrible though often-interrupted series of campaigns in France which
historians group together as the Hundred Tears' War, and having won the
battle of Crecy against amazing odds, he had inaugurated at his court a
period of splendor and luxury. The country as a whole was really increasing
in prosperity; Edward was fostering trade, and the towns and some of the
town-merchants were becoming wealthy; but the oppressiveness of the feudal
system, now becoming outgrown, was apparent, abuses in society and state
and church were almost intolerable, and the spirit which was to create our
modern age, beginning already in Italy to move toward the Renaissance, was
felt in faint stirrings even so far to the North as England.

The towns, indeed, were achieving their freedom. Thanks to compact
organization, they were loosening the bonds of their dependence on the
lords or bishops to whom most of them paid taxes; and the alliance of their
representatives with the knights of the shire (country gentlemen) in the
House of Commons, now a separate division of Parliament, was laying the
foundation of the political power of the whole middle class. But the feudal
system continued to rest cruelly on the peasants. Still bound, most of
them, to the soil, as serfs of the land or tenants with definite and heavy
obligations of service, living in dark and filthy hovels under