Englands Antiphon | Page 9

the _making war upon_ or despoiling of hell_,[16] for which the authority is a passage in the Gospel of Nicodemus, full of a certain florid Eastern grandeur. I need hardly remind my readers that the Apostles' Creed, as it now stands, contains the same legend in the form of an article of faith. The allusions to it are frequent in the early literature of Christendom.
The soul of Christ comes to the gates of hell, and says:
Undo your gates of sorwatorie; place of sorrow. On man's soul I have memorie;?There cometh now the king of glory,?These gates for to breke!?Ye devils that are here within,?Hell gates ye shall unpin;?I shall deliver man's kin--?From woe I will them wreke. avenge.

Against me it were but waste?To holdyn or to standyn fast;?Hell-lodge may not last?Against the king of glory.?Thy dark door down I throw;?My fair friends now well I know;?I shall them bring, reckoned by row,?Out of their purgatory!
_The Burial; The Resurrection; The Three Maries; Christ appearing to Mary; The Pilgrim of Emmaus; The Ascension; The Descent of the Holy Ghost; The Assumption of the Virgin_; and Doomsday, close the series. I have quoted enough to show that these plays must, in the condition of the people to whom they were presented, have had much to do with their religious education.
This fourteenth century was a wonderful time of outbursting life. Although we cannot claim the Miracles as entirely English products, being in all probability translations from the Norman-French, yet the fact that they were thus translated is one remarkable amongst many in this dawn of the victory of England over her conquerors. From this time, English prospered and French decayed. Their own language was now, so far, authorized as the medium of religious instruction to the people, while a similar change had passed upon processes at law; and, most significant of all, the greatest poet of the time, and one of the three greatest poets as yet of all English time, wrote, although a courtier, in the language of the people. Before selecting some of Chaucer's religious verses, however, I must speak of two or three poems by other writers.
The first of these is _The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman_,--a poem of great influence in the same direction as the writings of Wycliffe. It is a vision and an allegory, wherein the vices of the time, especially those of the clergy, are unsparingly dealt with. Towards the close it loses itself in a metaphysical allegory concerning Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest.[17] I do not find much poetry in it. There is more, to my mind, in another poem, written some thirty or forty years later, the author of which is unknown, perhaps because he was an imitator of William Langland, the author of the Vision_. It is called Pierce the Plough-man's Crede_. Both are written after the fashion of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and not after the fashion of the Anglo-Norman, of which distinction a little more presently. Its object is to contrast the life and character of the four orders of friars with those of a simple Christian. There is considerable humour in the working plan of the poem.
A certain poor man says he has succeeded in learning his A B C, his Paternoster, and his Ave Mary, but he cannot, do what he will, learn his Creed. He sets out, therefore, to find some one whose life, according with his profession, may give him a hope that he will teach him his creed aright. He applies to the friars. One after another, every order abuses the other; nor this only, but for money offers either to teach him his creed, or to absolve him for ignorance of the same. He finds no helper until he falls in with Pierce the Ploughman, of whose poverty he gives a most touching description. I shall, however, only quote some lines of The Believe as taught by the Ploughman, and this principally to show the nature of the versification:
Leve thou on our Lord God, that all the world wrought��; believe. Holy heaven upon high wholly he formed;?And is almighty himself over all his work��s;?And wrought as his will was, the world and the heaven;?And on gentle Jesus Christ, engendered of himselven,?His own only Son, Lord over all y-knowen.

With thorn y-crowned, crucified, and on the cross di��d;?And sythen his blessed body was in a stone buried; after that. And descended adown to the dark hell��,?And fetched out our forefathers; and they full fain weren. glad. The third day readily, himself rose from death,?And on a stone there he stood, he stey up to heaven. where: ascended.
Here there is no rhyme. There is measure--a dance-movement in the verse; and likewise, in most of the lines, what was essential to Anglo-Saxon verse--three or more words beginning with the same sound.