were not many beyond the Humber; there were so few that I, indeed, cannot recollect one single instance on the south of the Thames when I assumed the kingdom."* "Before everything," he says, "had been ravaged and burned by the Danes, the churches, through all the English nation, stood full of vessels and books and priests. Of the use of their books, however, they knew very little, as they were not written in the language which they spoke. So that though they might see their treasures, they were unable to explore them."'+ The Saxon language, after having been corrupted by the Danes, who spoke a tongue of distant affinity, began to be infected by the Norman-French before the conquest of England. We are told by Ingulf that "Edward the Confessor, born in England, but brought up and tarrying a very long time in Normandy, had almost become a Frenchman, bringing over and attracting a great many from Normandy, whom, being promoted to various dignities, he raised very high.‡ . . . The whole land, therefore, being introduced under the king and the Normans, began to dismiss the English customs, and in many things to imitate the manners of the French, the Gallic idiom, that is, all the great men in their courts to speak, their charters and deeds to make, and their own custom in these and many other things to be ashamed of." All the charters granted to Croyland by the English kings, according to this learned abbot, were written in the Saxon hand "untill these our times," he says, "which partly were written two ways, as well in the French hand as in the Saxon. For the Saxon, by all the Saxons and Mercians, until the times of King Alfred, who by the French doctors was excellently instructed, used in all chirographs from the time of the said lord the king, had become vile by disuse; and the French hand, because more legible, and very delectable to the sight, excelled more frequently from day to day, pleased among all the English."§ He says further "that a few years before the fire of 1091 he took out of the chartary several chirographs, written in a Saxon hand, of which they had duplicates and triplicates, and delivered them to the chantor dom Fulmar, to be preserved in the cloister, for teaching the younger monks to learn the Saxon hand, forasmuch as such letter, for a long time, because of the Normans, now neglected, had become vile, and was now known but to a few elders, that the younger, instructed to read this letter, might be the

*Preface to the Pastorale, by himself.

† Ibid. There is but one single romance, and that in prose, extant in the Saxon dialect; it is the legend of Apollonius of Tyre, and has been translated from the Latin, in the library of Bennet College.

Gervase of Tilbury says he was educated with the Duke of Neustria (Normandy), for that, among the most noble English, a custom prevailed to bring up their sons with the French, for the use of arms and taking away the barbarism of their native language (Otia Imperialia).

§ Ibid., 85.

more apt in their old age to allege the muniments of their monastery against its adversaries."'*

The Saxon natives, a spiritless and cowardly race, who had been long accustomed to the conquest and ascendency of every neighbouring nation which thought proper to invade them, as the Scots, for instance, the Picts, and the Danes, the last of which had actually taken possession of the crown and kingdom of England, and held it for several reigns, were, after the Norman Conquest, reduced to a state of baseness and servility. They had been deprived of their native landlords, who were forfeited, banished, and put to death, and their estates confiscated, by the rapacious Normans; they had been deprived of their laws, and a final attempt was now made to abolish their language. This, however, though great pains were taken to enforce it, did not entirely succeed, owing chiefly, it may be, to the stupidity of the Saxon peasants.†

From the time of this conquest, the king, and the nobility, and the bishops, and most of the regular clergy, and every man, in short, of landed property, the whole kingdom having been parcelled out in knights' fees, under the feudal law, which was now for the first time introduced into the country, were Normans, and spoke the French, so that, long before his death, and ever afterward, we do not once meet with the name of one single Saxon nobleman; nor is there a single family now flourishing, however high in rank and opulence, that can prove a descent from the Saxon times by authentic documents; all were ruined, exiled, decapitated, or reduced to poverty, wretchedness, and distress, so that, in fact, like the Picts, they seem to have been cut off, all at once, by a single blow, without

*Ibid., 98.

It would, no doubt, have been a glorious matter for a conquered and enslaved people to boast that after they had lost the succession of their native sovereigns their laws, their possessions, their estates and property, and everything, in short that was really valuable, they were permitted to preserve their language, and continue a meagre and barren jargon, which was incapable of discharging its functions; this, in fact, was the only measure of the Norman tyrants which was adapted to the benefit of their conquered subjects, and in this alone they were unsuccessful; neither, on the contrary, did the Saxon commonality retain their primitive tongue; they got, indeed, a barbarous mixture of Saxon, Danish, Norman, and one knows not what, which was no more Saxon than French, and is now known by the name of English, a term formerly synonymous with Saxon.

Hearne, indeed, contends that " the introduction of the French tongue was of very great disadvantage. It brought a disuse," he says, "of the Scriptures, which having been translated into Saxon, were commonly read among the vulgar till after the Normans came among us, who did all they could possibly to destroy everything that looked like Saxon; and yet they were not able to bring their ill designs to perfection" (Preface to Langtoft, p. xxix.). The loss sustained by the vulgar of their Saxon version would have been effectually remedied by the Latin Vulgate, which the priests continued to explain to them in their vernacular idiom (for, in fact, there was no French translation of the Bible); and the reading of it might have contributed to the knowledge of the Latin tongue.

any progeny being left to represent them. "At length,” says Ingulph, the Normans "so abominated the English, that whensoever they excelled in merit, they were driven from their dignities, and much less able foreigners, of whatsoever other nation which is under heaven they were, would be taken willingly. The very idiom even they so much abhorred, that the laws of the land and the statutes of the English kings were treated in the French language.* And to boys also, in schools, the grammatical principles of letters were delivered in French, and not in English; the English mode also of writing was omitted, and the French mode adopted, in all charters and books."†

Henry of Huntingdon, relating the death of William the Conqueror, says that "now the Normans had accomplished the just

*The only laws promulgated by the Conqueror in Norman-French are those that were found in a single MS. of Ingulph, now destroyed (a blank space being left in other copies for their insertion), and have been printed by Selden in Fulman's edition, and by Wilkins in L. L. Saxonicæ. If these laws be genuine, a fact which is not intended to be disturbed, they must have been proclaimed, one would think, in the Saxon language, being the old laws of the king's cousin Edward, as he says, and intended for the benefit of his newly acquired Saxon subjects; and this Norman version must be a work of later times, by some monk, who preferred to get them translated for him by another who understood the Saxon tongue, supposing him not to have done it for himself. But it seems evident that the copyist of the MS. used by Sir Henry Saville had been unable to write the Saxon character, and therefore obliged to leave a blank; and a Norman monk, after Ingulph's death, would naturally prefer his native tongue. These laws, no doubt, afford a very ancient specimen of the Norman-French; but it is the height of absurdity to imagine that he would have restored them to his Saxon subjects in a language they did not understand, particularly as we find in Wilkins (p. 230) that, on other occasions, he had no objection to make use of their own idiom. The laws in Latin, which immediately follow the above, are, like many others, a manifest forgery. There are, in fact, several charters of the Conqueror, in the Saxon language, still extant, though the vulgar English, at that period, seems to have been essentially different. William of Malmesbury, relating the death of Aldred, Archbishop of York, who succeeded in 1060, and died in 1069, says that the frankness of his mind shone very clear in one expression, which, he adds, "I will give in English, because Latin words do not answer like the English to the rhyme." One Urfus, who had been appointed by the king sheriff of Worcester, having, in erection of his castle, committed a nuisance to the monks, and their complaint being brought before the archbishop, as patron of that see, he, as soon as he saw the sheriff, attacked him with these words:

"Hatest thou Urse?

Have thou God's curse!"

which is, certainly, the most ancient and authentic vestige of the English tongue, not being pure Saxon, that we are able to recover (De Gestis Pontificum, 1. 3, p. 271).

† Robert Holcot, as quoted by Selden, in his notes to Eadmer, says that the Conqueror "deliberated how he might destroy the Saxon language, and accord England and Normandy in idiom."

1 I.e., dost thou call thyself.

will of the Lord over the nation of the Engles; nor was there scarce any chief of the progeny of the Engles in England, but all were reduced to slavery and sorrow, so that it was a disgrace to be called an Englishman.'

66

‘England,” in the words of William of Malmesbury, contemporary with Henry the Archdeacon, "is made the habitation of strangers, and the dominion of aliens. No Englishman," he says, "at this day, is either duke,† or bishop, or abbot. The new-comers everywhere eat up the riches and bowels of England.” ‡

Robert of Gloucester, in his rude provincial rhymes, says of this king William :

"He yef londes in Engelond that lyghtlyche cam therto,
That yut her eyrs holdest a londe mony on;

And deseryted mony kundemen, that he hulde his son ;

So that the meste del of hey men that in Englond beth

Beth ycome of the Normans, as ye nou yn feth ;

And men of relygion of Normandye also ;

So that vewe contreyes beth in Engelond,

That monckes nabbeth of Normandye somthyng in her honde." §

John Rous, who, though not an ancient author, may have been acquainted with the work of one, remarks that “from the Conquest the English were everywhere trod under foot, and for a trivial offence, or none at all, most cruelly afflicted; and, in the beginning of Henry I., the English were held in the greatest detestation."||

William, the only son of this Henry, who was drowned in the Channel, had boasted that if ever he should receive dominion over the Engles, he would make them draw the plough like oxen. ¶

After this how strange and weak a thing it was that so great a man as Sir Henry Spelman should, for the sake of a pitiful, forensic quibble, maintain that the name of conquestor, assumed by, or bestowed upon, William, Duke of Normandy, who routed the Saxon army in a pitched battle, and slew their native kings, signifies not conquerour in historical language, but acquisitor, or purchaser, in the feudal jargon, forgetting or contemning not only the old historians, but even the old Leonine: "Gulielmus rex Anglorum bello conquestor eorum."

It was still more weak and puerile in Sir William Blackstone, in a more enlightened age, to adopt such a groundless idea, though naturally enough to be expected from an ignorant reviewer.

† In the original dux, but there was no duke in this kingdom before the eleventh year of King Edward III., when he created his eldest son duke of Cornwall. Ancient writers use dux and comes indifferently. Geoffrey Plantagenet, duke of Britany, is as frequently called earl.

$459.

§ 368.

|| 138.

¶ T. Walsingham, 444; H. de Knyghton, 23, 82; the latter cites Willian of Malmesbury.

"At more than a century after the Conquest," it is supposed, "both the Norman and English languages would be heard in the houses of the great, so that probably about this æra, or soon after, we are to date that remarkable intercommunity and exchange of each other's compositions, which we discover to have taken place at some early period between the French and English minstrels ; the same set of phrases, the same species of characters, incidents, and adventures, and often the same identical stories being found in the old metrical romances of both nations."* This, though it could not possibly take place at so early a period, nor more than a century after, is by no means to be wondered at, as the English minstrels, being far inferior, in genius and invention, to the Norman or French trouveres, were obliged to content themselves with translating what had already become celebrated, and they were unable to emulate. It is, at the same time, a gross misrepresentation and imposition, however confidently or plausibly asserted or insinuated, that any one English minstrel romance was ever translated into French.

That William the bastard, his son Rufus, his daughter Maud, or his nephew Stephen, did, or could, speak the Anglo-Saxon, or English language, we have no information. The Saxon chronicle ended in the last of these reigns; but, being imperfect towards the conclusion, it is not certainly known how low it was actually brought, and still less at what age it commenced. King Henry II., in his progress to Wales, was addressed by a singular character “in Teutonica lingua," very good English, it would seem, and it may be also very good German, at least for the time; the three first words of the speech delivered (all that is given in that language) being “Gode olde kinge!” The king himself speaks French.†

In this reign, it is most probable, Layamon, the priest, made his translation, in the style of Saxon poetry, without rhyme, from the Brut of Maistre Wace, which affords a strange and singular mixture of the Saxon and Norman idioms, both apparently much corrupted. This curious work exhibits the progress of the English language, properly so called, as we now have it, in its dawn or infancy, if one may use such an expression.

The change of Saxon into English, however, was probably still more rapid, as the Saxon chronicle terminated in the reign of King Stephen, who died in 1154, and in FIFTEEN years after we have English rhymes by St. Godric, a hermit at Finchal, who died in 1170, though it must be confessed there are specimens of a later period in prose.

According to William of Malmesbury, in the time of King Henry I., the whole language of the Northumbrians, and most of all in York,

Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, xxxii.

† J. Brompton, 1079.