s_. Under Edward III,
however, French remained the living speech of many Englishmen. John
Gower wrote in French the earliest of his long poems. But he is a
thorough Englishman for all that. He writes in French, but, as he says,
he writes for England.[1]

[1] "O gentile Engleterre, a toi j'escrits," _Mirour de
l'Omme,_ in John Gower's _Works,_ i., 378, ed. G.C. MaCaulay,
to whom belongs the credit of recovering this long lost work.

It was characteristic of the patriotic movement of the reign of Edward
III, that a new courtly literature in the English language rivalled the
French vernacular literature which as yet had by no means ceased to
produce fruit. The new type begins with the anonymous poems, "Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight," and the "Pearl". While Froissart was the
chief literary figure at the English court during the ten years after
the treaty of Calais, his place was occupied in the concluding decade
of the reign by Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great poet of the English
literary revival. The son of a substantial London vintner, Chaucer
spent his youth as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, from
which he was transferred to the service of Edward himself. He took part
in more than one of Edward's French campaigns, and served in diplomatic
missions to Italy, Flanders, and elsewhere. His early poems reflect the
modes and metres of the current French tradition in an English dress,
and only reach sustained importance in his lament on the death of the
Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, written about 1370. It is significant
that the favourite poet of the king's declining years was no clerk but
a layman, and that the Tuscan mission of 1373, which perhaps first
introduced him to the treasures of Italian poetry, was undertaken in
the king's service. Thorough Englishman as Chaucer was, he had his eyes
open to every movement of European culture. His higher and later style
begins with his study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Though he
wrote for Englishmen in their own tongue, his fame was celebrated by
the French poet, Eustace Deschamps, as the "great translator" who had
sown the flowers of French poesy in the realm of Aeneas and Brut the
Trojan. His broad geniality stood in strong contrast to the savage
patriotism of Minot. In becoming national, English vernacular art did
not become insular. Chaucer wrote in the tongue of the southern
midlands, the region wherein were situated his native London, the two