So, about the middle of the century, imaginative poetry found a new home in the West-Midlands. As before, poets turned to French for their subjects, and often contented themselves with free adaptation of French romances. They accepted such literary conventions as the Vision, which was borrowed from the _Roman de la Rose_ to be the frame of _Wynnere and Wastoure_ (1352)[7] and _The Parlement of the Thre Ages_,[8] before it was used in _Piers Plowman_ and _The Pearl_ and by Chaucer. But time and distance had weakened the French influence, and the new school of poets did not catch, as the Southern poets did, the form and spirit of their models. [Foot-note 7: Ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, Oxford 1920.] [Foot-note 8: Ed. Gollancz, Oxford 1915.] They preferred the unrimed alliterative verse, which from pre-Conquest days must have lived on in the remote Western counties without a written record; and for a generation rime is overshadowed. The suddenness and importance of this revival in a time otherwise barren of poetry will appear from a list of the principal alliterative poems that are commonly assigned to the third quarter of the century:—_Wynnere and Wastoure_, _The Parlement of the Thre Ages_, _Joseph of Arimathie_ (the first English Graal romance), _William of Palerne_, _Piers Plowman_ (A-text), _Patience_, _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_, _The Destruction of Troy_, _Morte Arthure_. At the time alliterative verse was fitted to become the medium of popular literature. Prose would not serve, because its literary life depends on books and readers. Up to the end of the century (if we exclude sermons and religious or technical treatises, where practical considerations reinforced a Latin tradition) the function of prose in English literature is to translate Latin or French prose;[9] and even this narrow province is sometimes invaded by verse. Yet it was not easy to write verse that depended on number of syllables, quantity, or rime. The fall of inflexions brought confusion on syllabic metres; there were great changes in the quantity and quality of vowels; and these disturbances affected the dialects unevenly.[10] It must have been hard enough for a poet to make rules for himself: but popularity involved the recital of his work by all kinds of men in all kinds of English, when the rimes would be broken and the rhythm lost. It is perhaps unfair to call Michael of Northgate's doggerel (p. 33) to witness the misfortunes of rimed metres. But the text of _Sir Orfeo_ from the Auchinleck manuscript shows how often Englishmen who were nearly contemporary with the composer had lost the tune of his verses. The more fortunate makers of alliterative poems, whose work depended on the stable yet elastic frame of stress and initial consonants, possessed a master-key to the dialects. [Foot-note 9: Chaucer's prose rendering of the _Metra_ of Boethius is an apparent exception, but Jean de Meung's French prose version lay before him.]