Conclusion

In this century we have had several generations of impressive, even inspired, contributions to our understanding of fourteenth-century English literature and its literary context. Somewhat less successful have been the attempts, until quite recently, to place literary history back into its non-literary environment, that daily life of both audience and poets in which warfare, political wrangling, religious piety, plague and illness, legal proceedings and economic complaint constituted the immediate experience of English men and women. But from this daily experience emerged a literature of instruction, complaint and entertainment that provided food for thought after the long day’s dealings with the exigencies of living in an age of transition. The poets and patrons of this literature, which was written to be read, aloud or silently, were more numerous than they had ever previously been. And it was the acquisition of literate skills, particularly in English but also in Latin, that helped to create what we have come to recognize as that great literature of the later fourteenth century: alliterative, Ricardian and Chaucerian.