social and political degradation was added their keen sense of the scorn with which the Norman regarded their lack of culture and their "barbarous tongue."

But the influences operative through all these years were not wholly those of repulsion. These two peoples living together had to meet each other in the field and in the town. They were forced to buy of each other and to sell to each other. Time could not but temper the arrogance of the one, and qualify the sullen moroseness of the other. The subject race gradually acquired definite rights. The service which the serf rendered became limited, and could be commuted for payments of money. The possession of his hut and of the plat of ground around it, and his privilege of turning a few cattle out on the waste land of the manor, changed from indulgences into rights that could be pleaded at law. The serf was struggling to become a copyholder, and the copyholder to be a freeholder. The military power of the nobles waned. The courts of the feudal baronage were shorn of their power. The feudal system was giving way. The Anglo-Saxons were improving in education as well as in material things. They and the Normans intermarried.

A strong national feeling was springing up before which their mutual antagonism was yielding. This feeling was aided by the fact that the English kings had vast possessions in France, partly hereditary and partly acquired by marriage. To hold these against the French kings required a united people, a people made one by the strong sentiment of nationality. And to make head against the encroachments of their own kings the nobility were forced to make common cause with the people. To what extent the barons identified the cause of the commons with their own may be seen from

the celebrated provisions of the Great Charter extorted from King John in 1215.

XI. The Two Languages Side by Side.-For a long while after the Conquest there existed in England the strange spectacle of two languages declining to coalesce and yet spoken by two peoples living together. Neither language would yield to the other, neither people would learn that of the other. How little these two tongues had blended in the vocabulary of writers, at least, may be seen when we say that Layamon's Brut, a poem of thirty-two thousand lines, written in 1205, does not contain a hundred and fifty French words; and that in the Ormulum, a poem of twenty thousand lines, appearing in the year of Magna Charta, scarcely fifty French words are found.

But during this period the difficulties in the way of a coalescence were gradually lessening. Such of these as might be called political we have spoken of in the preceding section. Of those difficulties more properly linguistic we will here say a word.

This period was for the subject race one of great and general depression. Very little literature was produced by them, and that little of an indifferent quality. Their speech was no longer cultivated. The standards in it were all forgotten. Anglo-Saxon was no longer taught in schools, spoken at the palace and in the castles of the nobles, or used in courts of law. Few were writing in it. It was left in the care, if care it can be called, of those ignorant of the literature in it and of its grammar, and familiar only with the vocabulary employed in colloquial speech upon the commonplace topics of the household, the farm, the street.

The effect of all this upon the language can easily be inferred. A large fraction of the vocabulary, the more digni

fied and scholarly portion, fell into neglect and then into oblivion. Of the words kept in circulation, so much of each as we call its grammatical inflections, denoting case, person, number, tense, almost entirely perished. These inflections would be retained only by those aware of their importance; they sloughed off as the words dropped from the tongues of those ignorant of it. When, then, this Anglo-Saxon speech had forced itself upon the Normans, as it fairly succeeded in doing by the second half of the fourteenth century, it was far easier to master than it would have been immediately after 1066. It is estimated that nearly one-half of the words in the vocabulary before the Conquest dropped out of it in the three hundred years immediately following, and we certainly know that the grammar had been vastly simplified. With one-half of its words lost, and the remaining half nearly flectionless, the work of learning the language was made easy for the Norman.

We said that by 1350 the conquered had forced their tongue upon their conquerors. Let us dwell upon this fact, for it was a signal achievement and of far-reaching consequences. We have it upon the authority of John of Trevisa, that, after the great pestilence of 1349, the instruction of youth was revolutionized. John Cornwall changed the instruction in the grammar-school from French into English, and Richard Pencrich and others followed his lead, so that in 1385 in all the grammar-schools of England the children had abandoned French and were taught in English. In 1362 French was exchanged for English in the courts of law. An act of Parliament was passed in this year, ordering that in all the courts "all pleas . . shall be pleaded, shewed, defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English tongue." Great writers had now arisen-Wyclif,

1324-1384, in prose; Chaucer, 1340-1400, in poetry. They wrote in English, and their influence upon the plastic language of their time, and upon all English writers succeeding, is simply incalculable.

We may add that the adoption of Anglo-Saxon by the Norman was greatly facilitated by the fact that the French he was using had become sadly corrupt. That which he brought over from the Continent was not the French of Paris, but the degenerate tongue of Normandy, and so at best was provincial, a mere patois. But during the centuries of its use in England it had been kept from free contact with the dialect of Normandy, and so had deteriorated even from this imperfect standard-had become, as Lounsbury aptly puts it, a mere patois of a patois. The Norman himself had grown ashamed of it, and was not unwilling to part with it.

XII. The New Tongue-its Composition.-When now we say that by 1400, and even earlier, English was generally used, what are we really saying? What do we mean by English? Just what in Section IX. we said we should mean when we applied the term to a language. We mean a speech not in existence by itself till long after the Norman Conquest; a speech neither Anglo-Saxon nor French, but Anglo-Saxon and French; a speech to which both of these contributed, to form which both of these were combined. For the adoption of words was not all done by the Norman. While he borrowed many from the Saxon, the Saxon borrowed some from the Norman. What by mutual giving and taking the two jointly formed is the English, a compromise, a compound; one speech after the union, but not univocal, not all of a piece, every speaker of which is bilingual.

We have hitherto called the Conqueror Norman-French.

tongue brought over by the

But it is time now to say

that in reality it was Latin. Just before the Christian era Julius Cæsar subdued the people then in possession of what is now France, and imposed upon them his language, which was that of Rome. This language, used for a thousand years by a people to whom it was not the mother-tongue, the Normans, of still another alien stock, acquired, and brought into England. Spoken a whole millennium by those whose vernacular it displaced, and from them learned by strangers, the words had lost much of their original form and meaning. Outwardly they were almost invariably shortened. By a dropping of vowels or consonants, or of both, two or three syllables had been squeezed into one; as, French sûr, our sure, from original Latin securus; French règle, our rule, from Latin regula; French ile, English isle, from insula. And sometimes the final and unaccented syllable or syllables seem not to have been caught by the subject Gaul; or, if caught by his ear, were not retained on his tongue. The Latin domina, for instance, appears in French as the truncated dame; medius dies, as midi; malum, as mal. Still, though changed, the French words are Latin; their essential identity with the words used by the countrymen of Horace and Virgil is easily seen.

We spoke in Section VII. of the Celtic and of the Scandinavian of the First Period, and of the Latin of the First and Second Periods-words from these languages taken up by the Anglo-Saxon and carried on into English. Here we add that these Norman words, introduced in the centuries succeeding the Conquest, and entering into union with the Anglo-Saxon to form the English, constitute the Latin of the Third Period.

But as the original Celtic of Britain had Latin words in it, so this Latin of the Normans had Celtic words in it. The