For the time, however, the octosyllable was the staple for narrative, varied to no mean extent by the stanzas already described; while these stanzas, often of the most elaborate and complicated descriptions, were adopted from French (and perhaps Provençal) or extemporised by the taste and fancy of the writers. One famous collection[65] indicates the school of which our poets were scholars by alternating French poems with English. But this very collection shows amply that these same writers refused to undergo the syllabic constraints of French, and held to what were to be always the real, if frequently the unrecognised and sometimes the denied, principles of the New English in verse--that is to say, the constitution of the line by feet, _not_ syllables--and the consequent possibility of obtaining equivalent lines by the substitution of feet, varying in syllabic constituence, but interchangeable in metrical value. Some examples of all these things will be found in the Scanned Conspectus; the student should search the books named in the notes for more, which he will find in the fullest abundance. What is important is that by this study he may and should discover the real and too commonly misunderstood relation of Chaucer to precedent English verse.
There is, however, another fact of the fourteenth century which it is not less important for him to recognise, and which also has been too often misunderstood, or at least not put in its proper place. This is the revival of alliterative-accentual verse.
As there are few things, in treating prosody, of greater weight than to keep carefully before the student the difference between controversial and uncontroversial points, it should be said at once that "revival" is not quite one of the latter. There have been some who have taken it for granted that the alliterative-accentual form _never_ ceased out of the land. It may be so; there is even a sort of antecedent plausibility about the notion. But the important historical fact is that no such verse apparently exists of a probable date between about 1250 (the later form of Layamon itself, much further encroached upon by metre and rhyme) and about 1350. Somewhere about this latter time it does reappear; and before very long has its chief pure representative in Langland, at the same time as metre has _its_ chief pure representative in Chaucer.