saints' days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the
Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael;
partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the lives of St.
Thomas of Canterbury, and of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin--who is
mentioned by Shakspere--and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in
the _Nonne Preste's Tale_. The verse was clumsy and the style
monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint
to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan's search for the earthly
paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris.

[Footnote 5: Pain.]
[Footnote 6: Branch.]

About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old
English alliterative verse in romances like _William and the Werewolf_,
and _Sir Gawayne_, and in religious pieces such as _Clannesse_ (purity),
_Patience_, and _The Perle_, the last named a mystical poem of much
beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among
the glorified. 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