by the considerable remains that have outlived hostility and neglect? Now that the Saxon landowners were dispossessed, who should patronise the Saxon minstrel and welcome the man of song in the halls of mirth ?

The shock of the Conquest gave a deathblow to Saxon literature. There is but one of the Chroniclers that goes on to any length after the Conquest; and one of them stops short exactly at A.D. 1066, as if that sad year had bereft his task of all further interest. We have Saxon poetry up to that date or very near to it, but we have none for some generations after it. The English language continued to be spoken by the masses who could speak no other; and here and there a secluded student continued to write in it. But its honours and emoluments were gone, and a gloomy period of depression lay before the Saxon language as before the Saxon people. It is not too much to say that the Norman Conquest entailed the dissolution of the old cultivated language of the Saxons, the literary Englisc. The inflectionsystem could not live through this trying period. Just as we accumulate superfluities about us in prosperity but in adversity we get rid of them as encumbrances, and we like to travel light when we have only our own legs to carry us -just so it happened to the Englisc language. For now all these sounding terminations that made so handsome a figure in Saxon courts-the -AN, the -UM, the -ERA and the -ENA, the IGENNE and -IGENDUM,- -all these, superfluous as bells on idle horses, were laid aside when the nation had lost its old political life and its pride of nationality, and had received leaders and teachers who spoke a foreign tongue.

41. Nor was this the only effect of the introduction of a new language into the country. A vast change was made in the vocabulary. The Normans had learnt by their sojourn in France to speak French, and this foreign

language they brought with them to England. Sometimes this language is spoken of as the Norman or Norman-French. In a well-known volume of lectures on the Study of Words (the author of which is now Archbishop of Dublin) the relations between this intrusive 'Norman' and the native speech are given with much felicity of illustration. I have the pleasure of inserting the following passage with the permission of the author:

We might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them-sovereign, sceptre, throne, realm, royalty, homage, prince, duke, count, (earl indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his countess from the Norman,) chancellor, treasurer, palace, castle, hall, dome, and a multitude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of KING would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to assert itself anew.

And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, is Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire, all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, -these are Saxon. Palace and castle may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe far dearer

names, the house, the roof, the home, the hearth. His 'board' too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound than the 'table' of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the soil; he is the boor, the hind, the churl; or if his Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain.' The instruments used in cultivating the earth, the flail, the plough, the sickle, the spade, are expressed in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere; and no less the names of domestic animals. Concerning these last it is curious to observe that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are thus Saxon, but when dressed and prepared for food become Norman—a fact indeed which we might have expected beforehand; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his Norman lord. Thus ox, steer, cow, are Saxon, but beef Norman; calf is Saxon, but veal Norman; sheep is Saxon, but mutton Norman ; so it is severally with swine and pork, deer and venison, fowl and pullet.

Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of AngloSaxon life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present social condition of England, consent in bearing witness.-Study of Words, 12th ed., 1867, pp. 98-100.

42. This duplicate system of words in English was the result of a long period during which the country was in a bilingual condition. The language of the consumer was one, and that of the producer another. In the market the seller and the buyer must have spoken different languages, both languages being familiar in sound to either party: just as on

the frontier of the English and Welsh in the present day large numbers of people have a practical acquaintance with both languages, while they can talk in one only. This it is which has brought down upon the rustic Welsh the unjust imputation of saying Dim Saesoneg out of churlishness. They may understand the enquiry, and yet they may not possess English enough to make answer with. A frontier between English and French must have existed in the Norman period in every town and district of England. It was a bilingual condition which lasted down to the middle of the fourteenth century, when a mixed English language broke forth and took the lead. During three centuries, the native language was cast into the shade by the foreign speech of the conquerors. All that time French was getting more and more widely known and spoken; and it never covered so wide an area in this island as it did at the moment when the native speech upreared her head again to assert a permanent supremacy. As the waters of a river are often shallowest there where they cover the widest area, so the French language had then the feeblest hold in this country, when it was most widely cultivated and most generally affected.

§ 6. The Literature of the Transition. First Period.

43. Saxon had never ceased to be the speech of the body of the people. The Conquest could not alter this fact. What the Conquest did was to destroy the cultivated Englisc, which depended for its propagation upon literature and literary men. This once extinct, there was no central or standard language. The French language in some respects supplied the place of a standard language, as the medium of intercourse between persons in the best ranks of society. The native speech, bereft of its central standard, fell abroad

again. It fell back into that divided condition, in which each speaker and each writer is guided by the dialect of his own locality, undisciplined by any central standard of propriety. Our language became dialectic. And hence it comes to pass that of the authors whose books are preserved from the year A.D. 1100 to 1350, no two of them are uniform in dialect; each speaks a tongue of its own. We can divide this large tract of time into two parts, corresponding vaguely to the culmination and decline of the French fashion. It must be understood here, and wherever figures are given to distinguish periods in the history of language, that it is intended for the convenience of writer and reader, for distinctness of arrangement, and as an aid to the memory, rather than as a rigid limit. For in such things the two bordering forms so shade off and blend into one another, that they are not to be rigidly outlined any more than the primary colours in the rainbow.

44. For convenience sake, we may divide the 'Transition' into two parts, and add a third era for the infancy of the national language :—

TRANSITION.

Broken Saxon (Latin documentary period) from 1100 to 1215 Early English (French documentary period). 1215 to 1350 First national English

1350 to 1550

Of the first division of this period, the grand landmarks are two poems, namely Layamon's Brut, and the Ormulum; Layamon representing the dialect of the south and west, and Orm that of the east and north.

The Brut of Layamon, a work which embodies in a poetic form the legends of British history, and which exceeds 30,000 lines, was edited, with an English translation, by Sir Frederic