Thus far, by way of generalization and without the _caveats_ proper to a literary history, I have indicated some aspects of the preceding period that are important for an understanding of the fourteenth century. But it would be misleading to pass on without a word of reservation. There is reason to suppose that the extant texts from the thirteenth century give a truer reflection of the tastes of the upper classes, who were in closest contact with the French, than of the tastes of the people. But however this may be, they do not authorize us to speak for every part of the country. All the significant texts come from the East or the South—especially the western districts of the South, where an exceptional activity is perhaps to be connected with the old preference of the court for Winchester. In the North and the North-West a silence of five centuries is hardly broken. II Judged by what survives, the literary output of the first half of the fourteenth century was small in quantity; though it must be remembered that, unlike the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries which made a fresh start and depended almost entirely on their own production, the fourteenth inherited and enjoyed a good stock of verse, to which the new compositions are a supplement. Our first impression of this new material is negative and disappointing. The production of rimed romances falls off: their plots become increasingly absurd and mechanical; the action, so swift in the early forms, moves sluggishly through a maze of decorative descriptions; and their style at its best has the pretty inanity of _Sir Thopas_. The succession of merry tales—such as _Dame Siriz_, or _The Fox and the Wolf_[4] where Reynard, Isengrim, and Chauntecleer make their first bow in English—is broken until the appearance of the _Canterbury Tales_ themselves. To find secular lyrics we must turn to the very beginning or the very end of the century, and Chaucer himself does not recover the fresh gaiety of the earlier time. [Foot-note 4: Both are in Bodleian MS. Digby 86 (about 1280), and are accessible in G. H. McKnight's _Middle English Humorous Tales_, Boston 1913.]