to accuse another of
thoughtlessness or heartlessness; and though the classes for which
Chaucer mainly wrote and with which he mainly felt, were in all
probability as little inclined to improve the occasions of the Black
Death as the middle classes of the present day would be to fall on
their knees after a season of commercial ruin, yet signs are not
wanting that in the later years of the fourteenth century words of
admonition came to be not unfrequently spoken. The portents of the
eventful year 1382 called forth moralisings in English verse, and the
pestilence of 1391 a rhymed lamentation in Latin; and at different
dates in King Richard's reign the poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary
and friend, inveighed both in Latin and in English, from his
conservative point of view, against the corruption and sinfulness of
society at large. But by this time the great peasant insurrection had
added its warning, to which it was impossible to remain deaf.

A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth
and ashes. On the whole it is clear, that though the last years of
Edward III were a season of failure and disappointment,--though from
the period of the First Pestilence onwards the signs increase of the
king's unpopularity and of the people's discontent,--yet the
overburdened and enfeebled nation was brought almost as slowly as the
King himself to renounce the proud position of a conquering power. In
1363 he had celebrated the completion of his fiftieth year; and three
suppliant kings had at that time been gathered as satellites round the
sun of his success. By 1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all
the conquests gained by himself and the valiant Prince of Wales; and
during the years remaining to him his subjects hated his rule and
angrily assailed his favourites. From being a conquering power the
English monarchy was fast sinking into an island which found it
difficult to defend its own shores. There were times towards the close
of Edward's and early in his successor's reign when matters would have
gone hard with English traders, naturally desirous of having their
money's worth for their subsidy of tonnage and poundage, and anxious,
like their type the "Merchant" in Chaucer, that "the sea were kept for
anything" between Middelburgh and Harwich, had not some of them, such
as the Londoner John Philpot, occasionally armed and manned a squadron
of ships on their own account, in defiance of red tape