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ployed it in legislation, in poetry, in romance."* They became Christians, and eagerly absorbed the learning which the Church brought with it, encouraging such Italian scholars as Anselm and Lanfranc to settle among them. They built splendid cathedrals and castles; they were foremost in instituting chivalry. Their poets, or trouvères, chanted long knightly songs of battle, love, and heroism,-Chansons de Gestes, as they are called,— that, in style and spirit, were not Scandinavian, but French and Southern. Yet the followers of William the Conqueror were far from being pure Teutons, even in race. In France the invading Northmen had intermarried with the native population, which was largely Celtic, and the two races mixed, as the English and Celt did in parts of England. "The indomitable vigor of the Scandinavian, joined to the buoyant vivacity of the Gaul, produced the conquering and ruling race of Europe."§ With William, too, was a motley following of adventurers from many parts of France, so that, through the Conquest, the Celtic blood, this time mixed with that of other races, mingled a second time,with that of the English. But more important than the strain of Celtic blood that thus came with the Norman, is the fact that the civilization brought in by them was French and Latin, rather than that of the Teutonic North. The great scholars who came into England after the Conquest always wrote in Latin, while the trouvère wandered from castle to castle, singing the chanson of Norman chivalry in the Norman-French of the

* Macaulay's "History of England," vol. i. pp. 21-22.

"Chansons de Gestes, songs of families, as the term literally means, are poems describing the history and achievements of the great men of France in early times. Geste has three senses-(1) The deeds (gesta) of a hero; (2) the poem illustrating those deeds; (3) the family of the hero, and the set of poems celebrating it."-Saintsbury's Primer of French Lit.," p. 3. + P. 15 supra.

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Freeman's "Norman Conquest," vol. i. p. 170.

conquering race. The Song of Roland, the famous Paladin of Charlemagne, was sung by a Norman minstrel on the battlefield of Hastings, and the language of the Norman court became blended with the English of the people. Besides this, many French romances were translated into English, bringing home to the popular imagination a new store of poetic fancies, the flavor of a foreign chivalry. The great results of this establishing of a new literature in England will be better seen when we come to study Chaucer; before this, we must glance at the effect of the Conquest on the making of the language.

Use of French.

THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE,

After the Conquest, French was the language of the court and of the ruling classes in England, and, with a few exceptions, it became that of literature. English was despised by the polished Norman as the barbarous tongue of a conquered people. The mass of English still used it; but as it almost ceased to be a written or literary language, many words not used in ordinary speech were lost from its vocabulary. For a time, Norman-French and English in its various dialects continued in use side by side as distinct languages, but it cannot have been very long before the Normans, who had permanently settled in England, began to learn the native speech. The two races drew closer together, and, by the loss of Normandy in 1204, the connection with a foreign and French speaking power was broken. Parisian French had indeed come with the Plantagenet kings; during the reigns of John (1199–1216) and Henry III. (1216-1272) it was the fashion at court, and for some time later it continued to be the language of state documents, of society, education, and the courts of law. Yet, in spite of this, English began to be more generally employed by the

French speaking people outside of court circles. A writer of the latter part of the thirteenth century declares, "For unless a man knows French people regard him little; but the low men hold to English and to their own speech still."*

By the fourteenth century this stubborn "holding to English" had made the triumph of that language certain. The Hundred Years' War against Triumph of France, begun in Edward III.'s reign (1327 English.

-1377), may have helped to bring French into disfavor, and hastened, but not caused, the more general use of English. By 1339, English instead of French was employed in nearly all the schools as the medium of instruction. In 1362, Parliament passed an act providing that the pleadings in the law courts should henceforth be in English "because the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm be not commonly known in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, showed, and judged in the French tongue."

English.

But while French was being thus given up, there was as yet no one national English established and understood throughout the whole of England. One kind of English was spoken in the North, another in the middle districts, and a third in the South; and even Midland these three forms were split up into further dialects. These three dialects are commonly known. as the Northern, Midland, and Southern English. During the latter part of the fourteenth century the East Midland English, or that spoken in and about London, which was in the Eastern part of the Midland district, asserted itself above the confusion, and gradually became accepted as the national speech. Midland English

an importance as the language of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as that of the capital and the court,

* Robert of Gloucester's "Rhyming Chronicle" (1272).

but its supremacy was rather due to its being made the language of literature. The language of Wyclif's translation of the Bible (1380), a variety of this Midland form, is plainly the parent of the noble Bible-English of our later versions. The poet John Gower (1330-1408) gave up the use of French and Latin to write in the King's or Court English, and, more than all, it was in this same East Midland English of the court that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the poems which became so widely read. These works gave to East Midland English a supremacy which it never lost.

Infusion of

French.

Now this East Midland dialect was not a pure English. When during the early half of the fourteenth century the use of French began to be generally given up in favor of English. those who began to speak English naturally retained and introduced into it a large number of French words. This infusion of French was greatest in the East Midland dialect, because London had a larger foreign population, and had long been the seat of a French speaking court. A mixed tongue was thus formed there, in its foundations of grammar and construction substantially English, in its vocabulary nearly one-half French. By the establishment of this special variety of English, the influence of the Norman Conquest on language was made lasting, and the effect of the French rule in England remains deeply stamped on the English we speak and write to-day. Castle, chivalry, royal, robe, coronation, debonair, courtesy, such stately words, our homelier English owes to the French and Latin. Just as the English race was improved during the preparatory period by its mixture first with the Celt, and then with the partially Celtic followers of the Conqueror, so, by its mixture with French, the English language was made more rich and flexible.

Many elements had thus combined in this composite

England, and the way was made clear for a great poet who could lay the foundations of a truly national literature and language. That poet was Geoffrey Chaucer.

TABLE II.-EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE.

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School of Wes- Anglo-Saxon Chronicle began to be Wessex rises into

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GENERAL NOTES AND REFERENCES.

As the following works may be used with advantage throughout the entire course, they will not be repeated in other tables: 1. History.-Green's "History of the English People" will be found invaluable. Teachers are recommended to use this book freely, and to read, with the class, passages relating to literature or to social conditions. Knight's "Pictorial History of England"; Craik and Macfarlane's "History of England." 2. Literature.-Stopford Brooke's "Primer of English Literature"; Taine's "English Literature" is a classic, and is brilliant and suggestive; it should be used, however, with due

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