By the fourteenth century, however, Normans and Saxons had long since begun to amalgamate, and the Hundred Years' War did much to foster the spirit of patriotism, and thus weld together the conflicting elements of which the nation was composed. Different dialects prevailed in different parts of the country, but they were at least varieties of English, and English was the language of the people as a whole. French, whether of Paris or of Stratford atte Bowe, was learned as a foreign tongue, although as late as the end of the fourteenth century we still find Gower writing indifferently in Latin, French, and English. It needed only that there should arise an author great enough to establish some one dialect--or combination of dialects--as standard English, and this creation of language from dialect, we owe--among other things--in large measure to Chaucer.
London was already the centre of English trade and industry, and the circumstances of its position, which brought its inhabitants into contact with both Northerners and Southerners, made its dialect particularly suitable for the standard language of the country. Chaucer, as we have seen, was London born and bred, and wrote naturally in the "cokeneye" dialect, thus helping to establish it as the common speech. The modern reader who turns over the pages of the _Ayenbite of Inwit_ or the _Ancren Riwle_ finds himself confronted by what is practically a foreign tongue; it is excusable if he finds even _Piers Plowman_ baffling in places, and has difficulty in construing such passages as:--
He was pale as a pelet, in the palsye he semed, And clothed in a caurimaury, I couthe it noughte discreue; In kirtel and kourteley, and a knyf bi his syde; Of a freres frokke were þe forsleues,[36]
but Chaucer's English, full as it may be of old and decayed terms, presents few serious difficulties to any ordinary intelligence. We may have to look up a word here and there in the glossary, or find ourselves puzzled by some astronomical or chemical terms, but these are merely by the way, and Chaucer fairly lays claim to the title of Father, not only of English poetry, but of modern English.
In metre his work is no less remarkable. Professor Skeat, in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Chaucer's works, gives a list of no less than thirteen metres which he introduced into English poetry, consisting for the most part of modifications and alterations of French and Italian models.