The decline of these characteristic thirteenth-century types becomes less surprising when we notice that literature has changed camps. The South, more especially the South-West, is now almost silent: the North and the North-West reach their literary period. Minot and Rolle are Northerners, Wiclif is a Yorkshireman by birth, the York and Towneley Miracle cycles are both from the North, and with Barbour the literature of the Scots dialect begins; Robert Mannyng belongs to the North-East Midlands; while _Sir Gawayne_, _The Pearl_, and _The Destruction of Troy_ represent the North-West. This predominance in the present volume rests on no mere chance of selection, since the Northern (Egerton) version of _Mandeville_ might have been preferred to the Cotton; and if the number of extracts were to be increased, the texts that first come to mind—_Cursor Mundi_ (about 1300),[5] _Prick of Conscience_ (about 1340), _Morte Arthure_ (about 1360), the Chester Plays—are Northern and North-Western. [Foot-note 5: Early English Text Society, ed. R. Morris. Unless other editions are mentioned, the longer works which are not represented by specimens may be read among the Early English Texts.] It is impossible to give more than a partial explanation of the change in the area of production. But as the kinds of poetry that declined early in the fourteenth century are those that owed most to French influence, it is reasonable to assume that in the South the impulse that produced them had spent its force. The same pause is observable at the same time in France, where it coincides with the transition from oral poetry to more reflective compositions written for the eye of a reader. It is the pause between the passing of the minstrels and the coming of men of letters. Such changes were felt first in the centres of government, learning, and commerce, whence ideas and fashions spread very slowly to the country districts. At this time the North, and above all the North-West, was the backward quarter of England, thinly populated and in great part uncultivated. An industrial age had not yet dotted it with inland cities; and while America was still unknown the western havens were neglected.[6] In these old-fashioned parts the age of minstrel poetry was prolonged, and the wave of inspiration from France, though it came late, stirred the North and North-West after the South had relapsed into mediocrity or silence. [Foot-note 6: See p. 150.]