George Macaulay Trevelyan
Published: 2015-07-04
Total Pages: 436
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Excerpt from England in the Age of Wycliffe The book, which is here presented to the public, was originally composed as a dissertation sent in to compete for a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Its object is to give a general picture of English society, politics, and religion at a certain stage in their progress, and to recount the leading and characteristic events of a brief period in our country's history. That period, which represents, as far as England is concerned, the meeting point of the mediaeval and the modern, is of peculiar interest and importance. As the book is now addressed to the general reader, and not to students alone, I have felt obliged to omit here and there the discussion of historical problems which, though of interest to students, throw little or no light on the period as a whole. For a similar reason I have given my quotations from 'Piers Plowman' and Wycliffe in modern English; though I have not ventured to take the same liberty with Chaucer, whose very spelling is sacred to literature. The Notes and Appendices are not intended to contain information of importance to the general reader, but are adduced as proofs of statements in the text, and are intended for the historical critic. For, notwithstanding its wider and more popular aim, I venture to hope that the book may claim to be a serious contribution to history. It is based on original authorities, and many of these authorities have been now for the first time unearthed in the Public Record Office and British Museum. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."