h when the popes
retired to Avignon; for the aggrandizement of the Visconti at Milan and
the Medici at Florence; for incipient religious reforms under Wyclif in
England and John Huss in Bohemia; for the foundation of new colleges at
Oxford and Cambridge; for the establishment of guilds in London; for the
exploration of distant countries; for the dreadful pestilence which
swept over Europe, known in England as the Black Death; for the
development of modern languages by the poets; and for the rise of the
English House of Commons as a great constitutional power.

In most of these movements we see especially a simultaneous rising among
the people, in the more civilized countries of Europe, to obtain
charters of freedom and municipal and political privileges, extorted
from monarchs in their necessities. The fourteenth century was marked by
protests and warfare equally against feudal institutions and royal
tyranny. The way was prepared by the wars of kings, which crippled their
resources, as the Crusades had done a century before. The supreme
miseries of the people led them to political revolts and
insurrections,--blind but fierce movements, not inspired by ideas of
liberty, but by a sense of oppression and degradation. Accompanying
these popular insurrections were religious protests against the corrupt
institutions of the Church.

In the midst of these popular agitations, aggressive and needless wars,
public miseries and calamities, baronial aggrandizement, religious
inquiries, parliamentary encroachment, and reviving taste for literature
and art, Chaucer arose.

His remarkable career extended over the last half of the fourteenth
century, when public events were of considerable historical importance.
It was then that parliamentary history became interesting. Until then
the barons, clergy, knights of the shire, and burgesses of the town,
summoned to assist the royal councils, deliberated in separate chambers
or halls; but in the reign of Edward III. the representatives of the
knights of the shires and the burgesses united their interests and
formed a body strong enough to check royal encroachments, and became
known henceforth as the House of Commons. In thirty years this body had
wrested from the Crown the power of arbitrary taxation, had forced upon
it new ministers, and had established the principle that the redress of
grievances preceded grants of supply. Edward III. was compelled to grant
twenty parliamentary confirmat