Under the grene-wode tre.

HISTORICAL OUTLINE. The history of England during this period is
largely a record of strife and confusion. The struggle of the House
of Commons against the despotism of kings; the Hundred Years War
with France, in which those whose fathers had been Celts, Danes,
Saxons, Normans, were now fighting shoulder to shoulder as
Englishmen all; the suffering of the common people, resulting in
the Peasant Rebellion; the barbarity of the nobles, who were
destroying one another in the Wars of the Roses; the beginning of
commerce and manufacturing, following the lead of Holland, and the
rise of a powerful middle class; the belated appearance of the
Renaissance, welcomed by a few scholars but unnoticed by the masses
of people, who remained in dense ignorance,--even such a brief
catalogue suggests that many books must be read before we can enter
into the spirit of fourteenth-century England. We shall note here
only two circumstances, which may help us to understand Chaucer and
the age in which he lived.

[Sidenote: MODERN PROBLEMS]

The first is that the age of Chaucer, if examined carefully, shows
many striking resemblances to our own. It was, for example, an age
of warfare; and, as in our own age of hideous inventions, military
methods were all upset by the discovery that the foot soldier with
his blunderbuss was more potent than the panoplied knight on
horseback. While war raged abroad, there was no end of labor
troubles at home, strikes, "lockouts," assaults on imported workmen
(the Flemish weavers brought in by Edward III), and no end of
experimental laws to remedy the evil. The Turk came into Europe,