Caxton was the midwife of a flourishing English literature. He published the Canterbury Tales and other poems by Chaucer, the poetry of John Gower and John Lydgate, and Sir Thomas Malory’s prose version of the Arthurian legend, along with translations of Cicero and Aesop’s Fables. Before Caxton the outcome had been uncertain, and it was conceivable that the literary language of the island might have been some version of French. The fifth-century Germanic invaders of the British Isles had brought with them the West Germanic Frisian language which became Old English. But after the Norman
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