CHAPTER II.

We now approach a period when a change took place in the language, as well as in the government of England. "The Norman Conquest," says a learned modern writer, "forms a dark, determined boundary line, where the accession of William becomes an era upon which we are accustomed to found chronologies and calculations; a term of beginning and of ending. It has been maintained by some, that the Conqueror entertained the project of abolishing the English language: he ordered that in all schools throughout the kingdom, the youth should be instructed in the French tongue. The pleadings in the supreme court of judicature were in French, the deeds were often drawn in the same language, and the laws were composed in that idiom. This theory, which, until very recently, has received the assent of almost every writer on English history, has been controverted by the learned author of the Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth. He tells us that "before the reign of Henry III. we cannot discover either a deed or law drawn or composed in French; and that, instead of the language being proscribed by the Conqueror and his successors, it was employed by them in their charters, till the reign of Henry II., when it was superseded by the Latin, which, however, was no new custom, but had been the language employed in these compositions anterior to the accession of Alfred, from whose time they were as often written in Anglo-Saxon as in the Latin."†

*

Palgrave's Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth, vol. i. p. 52. ↑ Ibid. vol. i. p. 56.

B

There is, however, one thing which is undoubted, that the language of the court was that which the Conqueror brought over with him. It was by no means unknown before his time. Many of the youth of England, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, were sent to the schools of France; a continual intercourse was carried on between the two countries, long before this period, and if we could accurately trace the AngloSaxon language from the commencement of the Confessor's reign, in any chronological series of works, we should doubtless find that changes had already begun, and that it had become adulterated with words from the French, before the period at which its total extinction is said to have been contemplated.

There is scarcely a subject of literary history that is less known than the process by which the English language was evolved, or produced from the Anglo-Saxon, by the amalgamation of words from the French. The language up to the Conquest is called Anglo-Saxon. From that period to the middle of the thirteenth century it has acquired (though with very doubtful propriety) the name of Semi-Saxon; and from that period to the Reformation, that of Middle-English. But on a slight consideration of the subject, it will be evident that dialectic varieties must have existed after the Conquest to a much greater extent than before that event. There is no doubt respecting the adoption of words from the Danish, and the alteration of many names of places in the northern counties. At the present time, the dialects of the North and West vary so much, that it is with considerable difficulty the natives of each understand one another in conversation; and nearly the same may be said to exist in those of the mid-land counties understanding the other two. Even in the metropolis, where the constant circulation of society brings the east and west together, and from which it might be supposed that something like a uniformity of speech would be maintained, we are at no loss to distinguish the races or the language which they use.

We are indebted, perhaps, to many causes, and those not easy of elucidation, for the changes which our language un

derwent during the period from the Conquest to the Refor mation. But it is amongst the agricultural population of the remoter counties that we must expect to meet with, and if we seek amongst them, shall find, the remains of our old speech. The retention of customs by them, once general, now local; of the implements of husbandry which their forefathers used; of their mode of cultivation; and non-intercourse with large cities and towns; have caused them to retain the terms of a language, which in other parts of the kingdom have become extinct. Amongst other causes, the hereditary hatred of the races must have kept the language of the Conqueror at bay, and preserved to the Anglo-Saxon his native tongue, long after the Norman had settled on the fairest portion of his lands. And thus it is, that the same names of agricultural implements; their uses; the occupations of agriculture; the names of fields; their boundaries; the streams which divide one possession from another; the names of villages, hamlets, towns, (marking out with an accuracy truly astonishing the local circumstances which distinguish them, and from which their names were formed,) are still preserved in many of the remote counties of England. Such as they were before the Conquest, such have they continued since, and now remain.

Until a classification of the Anglo-Saxon MSS. has been made by some competent scholar, we shall be wanting in the requisite knowledge, by means of which to detail the history of the language. Although the Saxon Chronicle, after the Conquest, displays considerable changes in its language, and which appear much greater towards the latter years, the uncertainty respecting its authors, and the periods when it was written up, must render it at present a very doubtful authority on the contemporary character of the language of the people whose history it records. Some Anglo-Saxon charters recently published,* from the Chartulary of Cirencester Abbey, establish the fact, that the orthography of the language was in the

* By Sir Thomas Phillipps in the Archæologia, vol. xxvi. part 1, 1835.

course of change, between the reign of Edward the Confessor and the Norman Conquest. Any attempt to classify the writings after the Conquest, according to the order of time only, must fail; from the fact, which a slight examination of Middle-age literature will illustrate, that they do not synchronize. The language of MSS. written in one part of the kingdom, will not be found to agree with that of MSS. written in other places. For proof of this we may compare some of the writings of the twelfth century with others of the thirteenth, and even of a later period. We might also illustrate this from various sources, were it necessary, but one or two will be sufficient. The language of a MS. in the Kentish dialect of the date of 1340,* presents a character at least a century older, and even may be termed Semi-Saxon. The Vision of Piers Plowman by no means appears to belong to the period in which it is supposed to have been written: and its recent editor seems to have thought there was a strong relationship between its language and that of the people among whom he himself lived.

In the west of England, a language is still spoken in many places which bears no strict definite relation to any written composition that we find in books. Many of the words which they use are now obsolete in written compositions. On referring to the Anglo-Saxon writings we meet with them. We find them in the Semi-Saxon pages of Layamon, in the pages of Robert of Gloucester, and in writings nearer to the Reformation, as well as after that event, preserving the same orthography, as their vulgar pronunciation now must compel us to employ if we put them into writing. Although we have made some little progress in Middle-age literature since the time of Thomas Hearne, and therefore are not likely to be led to the conclusion, "that Simon Fish was the author of Piers Plowman," we have much still to learn; and the industry of some scholar, who shall give us a good "Dictionary of Middle

With much pleasure we observe proposals recently issued for the publication of this MS. (the Ayenbite of Inwit) by a gentleman well qualified to do it justice.

English," will richly merit, if he do not receive, the thanks of his own age and of posterity.*

If the Danes, during their ravages, merit our reprobation for the devastation which they committed, (and in which the loss of our libraries is to be much regretted,) we cannot pass over the destruction of our literary treasures after the Conquest from different causes, without passing a deserved reprobation on the motives which dictated it. We owe the preservation of many MSS., containing Anglo-Saxon compositions, during this period, solely to the circumstance of their being written partly in Latin,—the Saxon having been preserved for the sake of the Latin. Many of the Latin MSS. are found to be interlined with an Anglo-Saxon translation. We are, however, by the preservation of this mixed class of MSS. enabled to trace with greater accuracy the doctrines of the Anglo-Saxon church, as it merged, which it did soon after the Conquest, into that of Rome. In a Latin epistle of Ælfric, formerly in the Library of Worcester, but now in Benet College Library, on the then doctrines of the church, that portion of it written against

* It may not be altogether out of place here, to notice an opinion which a distinguished writer of the present day has promulgated in the following words : "A colloquial language, approaching nearly to modern English, seems to have existed concurrently with the more cultivated language which we call AngloSaxon, at a period before the Conquest; and one of the versions of the New Testament [Codex Hattonianus in the Bodleian Library] is in this language.” (Palgrave's Hist. of Anglo-Saxons, vol. i. p. 174.-Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth, i. p. 26, 27, 28, 462, 464.) And he supposes this language to have been derived from the Belgæ, who were settled in Britain anterior to the invasion of Hengist and Horsa. But is it within the range of possibility, that a train of circumstances, like that which followed the Norman Conquest, (and which, without doubt, laid the foundation of our modern English, in the changes which then commenced in our ancient speech,) could have been paralleled in the reign of the Anglo-Saxons in England? There seem to have been few events in common that could lead to any such results as are here supposed,—the descent of the Belgic into the " colloquial language, approaching nearly to mo dern English" before the Conquest, and the actual descent of the AngloSaxon into modern English; for the latter of which we have materials existing that will guide us by an unbroken chain of evidence from the Conquest to the present hour. I am not aware whether the contents of the Hatton Codex have been sufficiently examined to enable us fully to give a judgment on the matter. The learned Wanley speaks of it as Anglo-Saxon, or rather NormanSaxon; and its composition he refers to about the time of Henry II. [Wanley's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon MSS., 76.] May we not attribute some portion of this opinion to the author's theory respecting the "British Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorls?"