universities, the habitual residences of the court, the chief seats of
parliaments and councils, and the most frequented marts of commerce.
For the first time a standard English language came into being, largely
displacing for literary purposes the local dialects which had hitherto
been the natural vehicles of writing in their respective districts. The
Yorkshireman, Wycliffe, the westcountryman, Langland, adopted before
the end of the reign the tongue of the capital for their literary
language in preference to the speech of their native shires. The
language of the extreme south, the descendant of the tongue of the West
Saxon court, became the dialect of peasants and artisans. That a
continuous life was reserved for the idiom of the north country, was
due to its becoming the speech of a free Scotland, the language in
which Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, commemorated for the court of
the first Stewart king the exploits of Robert Bruce and the Scottish
war of independence. The unity of England thus found another notable
expression in the oneness of the popular speech. And the evolution of
the northern dialect into the "Scottish" of a separate kingdom showed
that, if England were united, English-speaking Britain remained
divided.

Other arts indicate the same tendency. Even in the thirteenth century
English Gothic architecture differentiated itself pretty completely from
its models in the Isle de France. The early fourteenth century, the age
of the so-called "decorated style," suggests in some ways a falling back
to the French types, though the prosperity of England and the desolation
of France make the English examples of fourteenth century building the
more numerous and splendid. The occasional tendency of the later
"flowing" decorated towards "flamboyant" forms, to be seen in some of
the churches of Northamptonshire, marks the culminating point of this
fresh approximation of French and English architecture. But the division
between the two countries brought about by war was illustrated before
the end of the reign in the growth of the most local of our medieval
architectural types, that "perpendicular" style which is so strikingly
different from the "flamboyant" art of the neighbouring kingdom. This
specially English style begins early in the reign of Edward III, when
the cult of the murdered Edward of Carnarvon gave to the monks of St.
Peter's, Gloucester, the means to recast the massive columns and gloomy
arcades of