Word: ploughman
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...caught from the Indians. Compared with the great mass of our language, the number of words of Norman introduction is also very small. Chaucer shows the tendency of the two dialects of court and country to coalesce and form a new language. The almost contemporary poem of Piers Ploughman, written for popular effect, is Anglo-Saxon in the form of its metre, and shows but slight traces of French in its diction. The vision opens thus...
...take the beginning of the Romance of the Rose, which, being a translation from the French, would be as likely as anything he wrote to be colored by that language, we shall find that the proportion of French words in it, though much greater than in Piers Ploughman, is relatively very small. But if we take a piece of Chaucer's prose-from the Parson's Tale, for example,- we are astonished to find how modern...
Langley was educated for the church, and lived his whole life as an inferior ecclesiastic. He was extremely poor, extremely proud, and exceedingly wroth at the wickedness of the world. His one work, "Piers the Ploughman" is a keen and daring satire on the state of society and religion in England, full of merciless sarcasm and incisive irony in the dissoluteness of the clergy and the vanity...