But the picturesque language of our emotions, the creative diction of poetry, appeared in the courtly style of Chaucer, who nobly designed to render the national language refined and varied, while his great contemporaries, the author of Piers Ploughman lingered in a rude dialect, and Gower was still composing alternately in Latin and in French. The emancipation of the national language was subsequently confirmed by another monarch. A curious anecdote in our literary history has recently been disclosed of Henry V. To encourage the use of the vernacular tongue, this monarch, in a letter missive to one of the city companies, declared that "_the English tongue hath in modern days begun to be honourably enlarged and adorned, and for the better understanding of the people_ the common idiom should be exercised in writing:" this was at once setting aside the Norman-French and the Latin for the daily business of civil life. By this record it appears that many of the craft of brewers, to whose company this letter was addressed, had "knowledge of writing and reading in the English idiom, but Latin and French they by no means understood." We further learn that now "the LORDS and the COMMONS BEGAN _to have their proceedings noted down in the mother tongue_;" and this example was therefore to be followed by the city companies.[16] At this advanced age of transition, so unsettled was the language of ordinary affairs, that the same document bears evidence of three different idioms. We find the petition of an Irish chieftain, a prisoner in the Tower, written in the French language, while the endorsed royal answer is in English, and the order of the council in Latin.[17] The bulletins of Henry V. to the mayor and aldermen of London are written in English, but endorsed in French. As if they designed to hold out a model to their subjects and to sanction the use of their native English, both this prince, and his father, Henry IV., left their wills in the national language,[18] at a time when the nobles employed Latin or French for such purposes.