Summary About English Literature in Fifteenth Century (1400-1485)

Henry V an able, shrewd and practical statements died in 1422, leaving the child Henry IV heir the throne. He was a helpless puppet in the hands of his nobles who quarelled among themselves for power. The French took advantages of the weakness of the English monarchy. The English found it difficult to face the rsing tide of nationalism in France. The France army headed by a peasant girl, Joan of Arc, succeeded in turning the English out of France. The defeated English armies returned home. Now thrown out of employment, they let loose a reign of terror in the country side the peasantry was often intimidated, coerced and robbed.

The confusion was worsen by the war of roses (1455-1485), which broke out soon after. It was a civil war for the throne of England, between the two houses of powerful noblemen – the Lancastrians and the Yorkists – who had a red and a white rose respectively as their symbol. The war continued for thirty long years. It was a period of social disorder resulted mainly from a strugle between landholders for more lands.

Literay Works

Poetry

-John Skelton

a. The Book of Colin Cloure

b. Why Come You Not to Court

c. The Book of Sparrow

-John Lydgate

a. The Falls of Prionces

b. The temple Glow

c. Story of thebes

-Thomas Occleve

a. The Regement of Primcess

b. La Male Regle

c. The Complaint of Our Lady

-Stephen haws

a. the Passetyme of Pleasure

b. the Example of Virtue

c. The Conversion of Swerers

d. A Joyfull Medytalyon

Prose Writers

-Reginald Pecock

a. the Repressor of Over-Much Blaming of the Clergy

b. the Book of Faith

-William Caxton

William Caxton was the first printer in England. It would be difficult to overestimate the debt of English Literature to Caxton. He printed almost every English work of real quality known in his day; including Chaucer and Malory. In addition, he made and printed twenty-four translations from French, Dutch and Latin texts, of which the most remarkable were two earliest: The dictes and sayengis of the Philosophers. Recuyell of the History of Troye and Game and Playe of the Chesse.

-Sir Thomas More

a. utopia

b. The Life of John Picus

Other Prose Writers

Hugh Latimer and John Fisher like Thomas more, they were imprisoned due to their opposition to Henry VIII’s Reformation and later they were sentenced to death.