Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 3

a purely Germanic speech, with a
complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred
years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven
from the king's court and the courts of law, from parliament, school,
and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken in
England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and
English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in the
struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national
speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred. It
was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly {12}
stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words, and had
filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had
introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and
courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the
chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals
contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason.
The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living animals, ox,
swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of
them, while the dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received
their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman master. The four orders
of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars,
introduced into England in 1224, became intermediaries between the
high and the low. They went about preaching to the poor, and in their
sermons they intermingled French with English. In their hands, too,

was almost all the science of the day; their medicine, botany, and
astronomy displaced the old nomenclature of leechdom, wort-cunning,
and star-craft. And, finally, the translators of French poems often
found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a
native synonym, particularly when the former supplied them with a
rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in
every-day use, so that voice drove out steven, poor drove out earm, and
color, use, and place made good their footing beside hue, {13} wont,
and stead. A great part of the English words that were left were so
changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer
stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but
his English differs vastly more from the former's than from the latter's.
To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us.
The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect,
spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French
had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a
"king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern
standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in
Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the
old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly
threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a
written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more
tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect;
while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge,
became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.
The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new
forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they
connected England with the continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first
two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid
prelates of a {14} type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They
introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris,
and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the
English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans.
English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French
abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle

of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in
Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time
altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the
period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant.
After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in
translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native
genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its
master.
The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and
alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four
rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating.
Reste hine thâ rúm-heort; réced hlifade Geáp and góld-fâh, gäst inne
swäf.
Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered Roomy and
gold-bright, the guest slept within.
This rude energetic verse the Saxon scôp