Harold, and set sail with thirty thousand followers for the coast of England. On October 14, 1066, he met and defeated Harold on the slope of Senlac, near Hastings, and soon after was crowned king at Westminster. This was the only conquest-and British soil has throbbed to the "drums and tramplings" of four-that reached down to the people of the island and in time thoroughly leavened them. But the admixture of new blood and another spirit with theirs proved the most signal blessing that ever befell them. We can call it no less than their regeneration. It made the English nation of to-day, the English language, and the English literature.

To his Teutonic ancestry the modern Englishman owes his love of justice and fair play, his honesty, his religious nature, his physical robustness and intellectual sturdiness, his doggedness of purpose, his strong good sense, his love of liberty, his fondness for facts, and his firm grip upon the real. To his French lineage—and we must remember that, though originally Teutonic, the Normans had been metamorphosed by their life in France; and that, though many of French extraction accompanied William the Conqueror, they were to those who followed after but as the prologue to the play-the modern Englishman owes his manner, his tact, his sense of proportion, his genius for administration, his poetic skill, and his artistic. nature. In him the two races have blended most happily, forming a composite better than either component, greater even than both elements while separated.

The changes which Anglo-Saxon underwent because of this conquest are vital, we will say fundamental; they amount to a revolution. A change of name is needed to mark this. We have purposely refrained from calling the

dominant people of the island, or their speech, before 1066, by any other term than Anglo-Saxon. But after the union of the peoples and of the languages, a new word is needed to denote new things; and this term we have in the word English. As we use it, English denotes always the race resulting from the marriage of the two peoples, or the speech resulting from the union of the two tongues.

X. The Two Peoples Side by Side. But we must guard against supposing that either the two peoples or the two tongues were welded into one instantaneously. They grew together, and this growth was slow.

Any yoke of conquest would be galling to the libertyloving Anglo-Saxons, but there are special reasons why this was so. The conqueror was of alien blood; and national animosity existed between him and the conquered. William's conquest was ruthless, especially in the north. He ravaged the country, destroyed harvests, cattle, the very implements of husbandry, burned town and village, and slew the inhabitants or drove them across the border. He con

fiscated the entire soil. He parceled out the land, upon condition of military service, among a score or more of great vassals, among some hundreds of inferior crown-vassals, and among the higher clergy. "The meanest Norman rose to wealth and power in the new dominion of the Duke." By this establishment of a modified feudal system, the mass of the population were reduced to a species of serfdom, became mere tillers of the soil. Shoals of Norman ecclesiastics came across the Channel, and the people were forced to receive even religious consolation from foreigners. Another language than their own prevailed in all places of authority-in the palace and among the nobility, in law courts, in the schools. To their painful consciousness of

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,