Chaucer wrote them when English was beginning to take a form recognisable today.
"The telecommunication businesses of 1978, meanwhile, are not recognisable today, nor are the names of many of the players and the service they once provided".
But it was by no means an unhappy time, and there is much that is familiar and recognisable today in her vivid novel about the era.
Capitalism is arriving, and its practices, all too recognisable today, are sweeping aside a privileged class that no longer knows how to maintain its way of life.
But the production that did most to change our perspective was the 1985 production by Bill Alexander, which set the action in a recognisable 1950s world, with Lindsay Duncan and Janet Dale as the witty wives seen plotting under the hairdryer.
Cybulski manages, through Wajda, to express a uniquely Polish sensibility - reflecting his nation's troubled history - as well as the kind of youthful frustrations that are still recognisable today.
Whether despised or admired, its posters and slogans have been adopted as a stylish global shorthand for working-class revolt, more widely recognisable today than Marianne, the fictional French revolutionary mascot, or even Soviet images of Lenin.
As one of the main rooms in the Pallant House exhibition reveals, Burra delighted in travel and it is his blazingly coloured studies of streetlife in Paris, Marseilles and Harlem of the interwar period that are most instantly recognisable today.
Clare poems such as Winter Evening and Wood Pictures in Summer depict a rural Northamptonshire still recognisable today, and he remains the county's unofficial laureate, audible behind the writing of Moore and the music of Sir Malcolm Arnold, the Northampton-born composer born in 1921 who, like Clare, suffered mental breakdown and came home for treatment at St Andrews.
