mischief had they done to the scholars had not Henry Spencer, the warlike Bishop of Norwich, casually come to Cambridge with some forces and seasonably suppressed their madness."[49] And so the story of the seven earliest of the Cambridge colleges closes in a time of social misery and of national peril. The collapse of the French war after Crecy, and the ruinous taxation of the country which was consequent upon it, the terrible plague of the Black Death sweeping away half the population of England, and the iniquitous labour laws, which in face of that depopulation strove to keep down the rate of wages in the interests of the landlords, had brought the country to the verge of a wide, universal, social, political revolution. It was no time, perhaps, in which to look for any great national advance in scholarship or learning, much less for new theories of education or of academic progress. It is not certainly in the subtle realist philosophy and the dry syllogistic Latin of the _De Dominio Divino_ of John Wycliffe, the greatest Oxford schoolman of his age, but in the virile, homely English tracts, terse and vehement, which John Wycliffe, the Reformer, wrote for the guidance of his "poore priestes" (and in which, incidentally, he made once more the English tongue a weapon of literature), that we find the new forces of thought and feeling which were destined to tell on every age of our later history. It is not in the good-humoured, gracious worldliness of the poet Chaucer--most true to the English life of his own day as is the varied picture of his "Canterbury Tales"--but in the rustic shrewdness and surly honesty of "Peterkin the Plowman" in William Langland's great satire, that we find the true "note" of English religion, that godliness, grim, earnest, and Puritan, which was from henceforth to exercise so deep an influence on the national character.