sense of adaptation to the actual wants of the English people, are sufficiently proved by the fact that, of the Romance words found in his writings, not much above one hundred have been suffered to become obsolete, while a much larger number of Anglo-Saxon words employed by him have passed altogether out of use. ... In the three centuries which elapsed between the Conquest and the noon-tide of Chaucer's life, a large proportion of the Anglo-Saxon dialect of religion, of moral and intellectual discourse, and of taste, had become utterly obsolete, and unknown. The place of the lost words had been partly supplied by the importation of Continental terms; but the new words came without the organic power of composition and derivation which belonged to those they had supplanted. Consequently, they were incapable of those modifications of form and extensions of meaning which the Anglo-Saxon roots could so easily assume, and which fitted them for the expression of the new shades of thought and of sentiment born of every hour in a mind and an age like those of Chaucer." _G. P. Marsh, Origin and History of the English Language, lecture 9._ ALSO IN: _T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer._ _A. W. Ward, Chaucer._ _W. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer._ ENGLAND: A. D. 1360-1414. The Lollards. "The Lollards were the earliest 'Protestants' of England. They were the followers of John Wyclif, but before his time the nickname of Lollard had been known on the continent. A little brotherhood of pious people had sprung up in Holland, about the year 1300, who lived in a half-monastic fashion and devoted themselves to helping the poor in the burial of their dead; and, from the low chants they sang at the funerals--lollen being the old word for such singing--they were called Lollards. The priests and friars hated them and accused them of heresy, and a Walter Lollard, probably one of them, was burnt in 1322 at Cologne as a heretic, and gradually the name became a nickname for such people. So when Wyclif's simple priests' were preaching the new doctrines, the name already familiar in Holland and Germany, was given to them, and gradually became the name for that whole movement of religious reformation which grew up from the seed Wyclif sowed." _B. Herford, Story of Religion in England, chapter 16._ {815}