Some of these employed rhyme as well as alliteration.
They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that
alliteration was most common in the north. "I am a sotherne man," says
the parson in the _Canterbury Tales_. "I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by
my letter." But the most important of the alliterative poems was the
_Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman_.
In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the
mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of England. By
a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts.
By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools. The Anglo-Norman
dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris
with the provincial French spoken by his prioress, "after the scole of
Stratford-atte-Bowe." The native English genius was also beginning to
assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories in the
wars of Edward III. against the French. It was the bows of the English
yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of
the Norman baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes and the
repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the
poor and wasted the land.
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