Since in the 1990s ideas of ‘Englishness’ are such a prominent subject in academic writing, and since Chaucer and his work might at first sight seem highly likely to be requisitioned by a nationalist ideology, I shall conclude this book with a brief investigation of the currency of the above ‘title’, first bestowed on Chaucer in Dryden's 1700 Preface to his Fables. When in 1866 F. D. Maurice defended Chaucer from the charge of being a Wycliffite – ‘he is not that. He is simply an Englishman. He hates Friars, because they are not English and not manly’ – he presented a Chaucer frequently found in Victorian writing, and one often designated by the interchangeable adjectives ‘English’, ‘manly’, and ‘ healthy’. A veritable paean to this Chaucer can be found in Matthew Browne's Chaucer's England (1869): ‘his Canterbury Tales contain …more Englishness than any other poem in the language’, an attitude that, for example, leads Browne to dismiss any influence the Decameron might have had on the Tales, on the grounds that the former work is ‘evidently mediaeval-Italian, – cowardly, romantic, and thin’; had not its tellers actually run away from the plague rather than facing it four-square, as we can be sure Chaucer and his tellers would? It is fair to say that this jingoism characterizes nineteenth-century views on Chaucer rather than popular writing on him of the twentieth. The English Chaucer very much survives into the later period, of course, but now transmuted from a loather of friars and foreigners into a less aggressive founder of the nation's literature and shaper of the nation's character: the voice of merry, rather than militant, England.

Alfred Noyes's two articles on Chaucer in the Bookman magazine (1929–30) are a classic example of nationalist appro- priation, concerned to minimize his debt to foreign authors, concentrating primarily on the Canterbury Tales to the exclusion of the rest of the œuvre, and seeing Chaucer as founding the poetic line of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Keats, on the one hand, and, through his talents of characterization, the novelistic line (commencing at Smollett), on the other.