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Threshold to a New Age

'Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view

Who stands upon the threshold of the new'

    Edmund Waller

Discussing the disasters which befell England in the latter fourteenth century -- the Black Death, the loss of her French conquests and of her kings' former hereditary dominions, the Peasants' Revolt and the dethronement of Richard II -- there lived, surviving them all, a court official named Geoffrey Chaucer.