were generally felt. Already in 1354 an order appeared that no ecclesiastical preferment should be given in England to any person not conversant with the English language, excepting only a Cardinal. It was from this class of patriotic men that the great á Becket arose, and, a few years later, William the Bearded, a native Saxon, who has earned the rare renown of being a profound jurist, and the first pleader in English courts of justice, who spoke both Saxon and Norman with equal eloquence and success. Devoted to the cause of his race, he rose to eminence, and was for a time entirely successful, but perished in 1196, the victim of his devotion to a cause which words alone were too weak to defend, revered by his brethren as a martyr, and long known as "the last of the AngloSaxons."

Another humble and lowly class of patriots was found among the burgesses of English towns. The Saxons, deprived of all hope to distinguish themselves at court or in arms, oppressed and ill-treated on their estates, peopled the fortified towns, and carried to them all the perseverance and industry of their race. Here they were allowed to enjoy comparative freedom and their ancient municipal institutions. The toleration of some sovereigns, the wise foresight of others, protected them here; Richard and John gave them the privileges of "free burghs," and soon trade and commerce, wealth and political influence attached themselves to the rising cities. Here, also, the tongue of their fathers found an asylum; a mercantile jargon at first, it soon became the medium of all communication; new topics were discussed and produced new forms of speech, and such intercourse naturally tended strongly to favor its amalga

THE ANGLO-SAXON AND BURGESSES OF ENGLAND. 135

mation with the Norman-French. Political circumstances hastened the desired result. From the time that Normandy had fallen into the hands of the French, it became the policy of English sovereigns to discourage the use of French, the language of their enemies. The reign of Edward III. was, in this respect, probably the most important for the language which owed already so much to the spirit of this monarch, the splendor of his reign, and the liberal encouragement it received at his hands. Desirous to break off all friendly connections between his subjects and the Continent, he proscribed the exclusive use of the French tongue, admitted the Saxon or English in pleadings before civil courts, aided the vigorous growth of its native literature, and thus prepared the first revival of genius and taste in English since the days of the Conquest.

By such assistance and through such agencies, the apparently fatal consequences of a Conquest, followed by total subjugation, had been avoided. The Anglo-Saxon was not only not destroyed, but had survived in spite of all that seemed to conspire against its existence, and gradually recovered what it had lost in a few days, by the slow but unceasing labor of ages and the inherent power and vitality of a national tongue.

CHAPTER XXIV.

RESTORATION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON.

In Poetry-Gower-Mixture of the two Idioms-Charter of ConfirmationStatute of Edward III.

Ir recovered its place, as ever is the case with languages, first in poetry. Already, a hundred years after the Conquest, Norman nobles sang English rhymes; in fact, the earliest we know fell from the lips of Normans, as, for example, those of Robert, Earl of Leicester, and his Flemings of the year 1173:

"Hoppe Wyliken, Hoppe Wyliken,

England is thyne and myne," &c.

and the well known boast of Hugh Bigot, Earl of Norfolk, under Henry II.

"Were I in my castle of Bungay,

Upon the river of Waveney,

I would no care for the king of Cockeney, &c.

Most of these songs, moreover, begin with the words: "Listen, Lordlings," and thus show that they were by no means confined to the oppressed race, but listened to in castle and palace. By the side of French minstrelsy there appear, gradually, more and more versions of such romances into English, containing of course many French idioms, together with before unknown po

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137

etical phrases, but enriching the language by the coinage of new words, and the addition of new expressions. The very fact that the English was thus overloaded—not enriched—with French terms, however objectionable in itself, made it all the more easy to minstrels and acceptable at Court, where pure Saxon would, probably, have been neither understood nor admitted. The translators, or "diseurs," retained mostly but such "strange" (French) words as they knew not how to translate or as suited their rhymes, and thus introduced a number of French words, for which even Chaucer finds an excuse, when he says:

"And eke to me it is a great penance,

Sith rhyme in Englisc heth such scarcity,

To follow word by word the curiosity

Of Graunson, flower of hem that make in France."

On the other hand, we find that such a change had come over England as to induce Gower, whose fame had been established upon his fifty French ballads, to obey, in his old age, the commands of his sovereign, Richard II., who ordered him to write his later works in English.

The first strains of this new English muse were, of course, very inharmonious, and their harsh and rugged measures are but little softened by the frequent mixture of the two contending languages, either in the same line or in alternate couplets, as, e. g., in the original of Goethe's famous prayer in Faust:

"Mayden moder mild, oyez cet oreysoun,

From shame thou me scilde, et de ly mal feloun,
For love of thyne childe, me menez de tresoun,
Ich wes wod and wilde, ore su en prisoun."

which dates from the end of the thirteenth century, and a similar one of the time of Henry IV.:

"Continuance

Of Remembrance
With-oute endyng,

Doth me penaunce
And grete grievaunce

For your partynge."

The same effect was next perceived in the language of public documents and of institutions of learning. The conservative tendency of the English government, its most characteristic and fortunate quality, admitted the new tongue but slowly, and has, in fact, never allowed the Norman-French to be entirely abandoned. The Saxon Charter, or Instrument of Confirmation, given by Henry I. to William, Archbishop of Westminster, is probably one of the earliest instances of the use of Saxon for official documents, and was, no doubt, mainly due to the influence of an Anglo-Saxon queen. Soon after followed the famous Letters Patent of king Henry III. in support of the Oxford Provisions, which were sent to each county in Latin, French and English, although the parties as well as the proceedings had been French, and although the first statute, de scaccario, of the year 1266, given by the same king, is found only in Norman-French. A curious pause occurred during the fourteenth century when it became apparently the fashion to put law matters into French verse; there exist, at least, still metrical copies of the Statutes of Gloucester and Merton, and a compiler of the reign of Edward I. says, that he preferred executing his task in "common romance,”—in plain French prose, to translating it into rhyme.