Bolingbroke, immediately following his coronation as Henry…

Bolingbroke, immediately following his coronation as Henry IV, had granted an additional annuity from the crown to the author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat courtier, and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer, who meanwhile is attempting to complete the last of his humorous “Canterbury Tales.“

Had the sixty-year old poet not died on October 25, 1400, he would have presented the thirty planned tellers and tales within a cohesive dramatic and philosophical structure.

As it is, he is able to write only twenty-four tales, some incomplete. (Chaucer's tomb in Westminster Abbey is the first in what is now known as Poets' Corner.)

Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin.

Henry is the first king since Harold II whose mother tongue is English rather than French.

Middle English (the name given to the English language in use during the four hundred-year period extending from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the introduction of printing in England in 1476) is characterized both by its greater French vocabulary and, more importantly, by the loss of inflections.

Only two of these inflections remain in use by 1400, however:: “-es” for plural nouns (descended from “-as”) and the past tense marker “-ed” (from “-od”).

Chaucer, for example, was no longer able to indicate by means of the inflection “-ne” that the phrase “urne...hlaf” was a direct object even though it preceded its verb sele ("give"). (Chaucer's equivalent phrase, “our loof”—like present English "our loaf,” or "our bread"—could function either as a subject or as an object. To indicate that the phrase was the object in a sentence, Chaucer had to place it after the verb, as we do.)

A great change in English manuscript painting occurs about 1400 and is associated with an artist named Herman Scheere, who seems to have come from the region of Cologne.

His figures feature a plump softness that aligns them with stylistic developments elsewhere; he also has a command of perspective and compositional structure lacking in the work of most previous artists in England.

The style of Dominican friar John Siferwas, another painter active during this period, is similar, but his page decoration is usually more lavish; his realistic series of beautiful bird studies recalls earlier Lombard work.