all who could read, and taken as a model by all who
could write. It was only a man of genius that could lift up one of
these dialects into a preeminence over the rest, or could ever give to
the scattered forces existing in any one of them the unity and vigor
of life. This was the work that Chaucer did." For this reason he
deserves to be called our first modern English poet. At first sight,
his works look far harder to read than they really are, because the
spelling has changed so much since Chaucer's day.

SUMMARY

The period from the Norman Conquest to 1400 is remarkable (1) for
bringing into England French influence and closer contact with the
continent; (2) for the development of (_a_) a more centralized
government, (_b_) the feudal system and chivalry, (_c_) better civil
courts of justice and a more representative government, _Magna Charta_
being one of the steps in this direction; (3) for the influence of
religion, the coming of the friars, the erection of unsurpassed Gothic
cathedrals; (4) for the struggles of the peasants to escape their
bondage, for a striking decline in the relative importance of the
armored knight, and for Wycliffe's movement for a religious
reformation.

This period is also specially important because it gave to England a
new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections,
genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining
compounds were for the most part lost. To supply the places of lost
words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader
experiences of an emancipated, progressive nation, many new words were
adopted from the French and the Latin. When the time for literature
came, Chaucer found ready for his pen the strongest, sincerest, and
most flexible language that ever expressed a poet's thought.

In tracing the development of the literature of this period, we have
noted (1) the metrical romances; (2) Geoffrey of Monmouth's (Latin)
_History of the Kings of Britain_, and Layamon's _Brut_, with their
stories of Lear, Cymbeline and King Arthur; (3) the _Ormulum_, a
metrical paraphrase of those parts of the _Gospels_ used in church
service; (4) the _Ancren Riwle_, remarkable for its natural eloquent
prose and its noble ethics, as well as for showing the development of
the language; (5) the lyrical poetry, beginning to be redolent of the
odor of the blossom and resonant with the song of the bird; (6) the
_Handlyng Synne_, in which we stan