The paramount influence of French learning in England after the Conquest is well known. Under Edward the Confessor many of the most important church positions in England had been filled by foreigners. Although most of the foreign prelates were expelled by Earl Godwin, after the accession of William there was an immediate and general occupation by the invaders of all high offices of church and state. Freeman (Norman Conquest, vol. III.) remarks that when, near the end of his reign, “William gathered his Witan to his great Gemot at Salisbury, there was not a single English earl and only one English bishop to answer his summons.” That under these circumstances French culture and French learning must have dominated in England, is obvious.

Among the English poets of the fourteenth century the one who deserves the seat next to Chaucer is the anonymous author of the four poems: Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. The singular beauty of these poems has long stimulated scholars to the most diligent efforts to discover their author.

The first attempt to identify the unknown poet was made in 1838 by Dr. Edwin Guest, who confidently assigned these poems to Huchown, the mysterious Scotch poet mentioned by the chronicler Wyntoun. At one time or another, almost every piece of fourteenth century verse which shows a northerly dialect has been ascribed to Huchown; this identification of our author was therefore natural, if not inevitable. In the following year Sir Frederic Madden, in his edition of Sir Gawayne, accepted Dr. Guest's opinion that Huchown was its author. At the same time he recognized the fact that the poem in its present form is not in the Scotch dialect, and suggested as an explanation that it had been rewritten “by a scribe of the Midland counties.” With this recognition that Sir Gawayne as we have it is in the Midland rather than the Scottish dialect, there was manifestly slender reason for continuing to suppose that Huchown was the author.

At the request of my friend Dr. Brown, who in the preceding article has cast so much light on the character of the author of The Pearl, I have undertaken to state in print certain heterodox opinions, which I have long held, concerning the nature and fabric of that beautiful poem.

Briefly, to indicate my main thesis at the outset, I would maintain that The Pearl is not in the least elegiac or autobiographical, as hitherto regularly regarded by scholars and critics, and that the conclusions as to the author's life and domestic sorrows frequently drawn from it are wholly without foundation.