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The most important measure was the statute of Edward III. (36 Edw. III. st. I. c. 15), who, when he entered upon his fiftieth year, as an act of grace, abolished pleading in French, "unde in suo Jubileo populo suo se exhibeat gratiosum." It seems, however, that the gift thus granted was too gracious and liberal to be strictly carried out. It states that "reasonably the said law and customs the rather shall be perceived and known, and better understood in the tongue used in the said realm, and by so much every man may the better govern himself without offending the law, and better defend his heritage; and in divers countries where the king and nobles have been, good governance and just right is done to every person because that the laws and customs are used in the tongue of the country;" and upon this ground directs that pleadings and judgments in the Court of Westminster shall no longer be had in French but in English. The same plea might very advantageously have been applied to the language of the laws themselves and the speeches of the practitioners; but this would have been too great a boon, and both continued in French, thus showing that the English began to preponderate in the scale, although so slowly as to indicate the great weight it had to overcome. As if anxious still farther to limit the extent of the gracious gift, the same statute, after granting the request, contained in the petition on the parliament roll, "that all pleas shall be pleaded in English," adds, "and that they be entered and enrolled in Latin," which words were not in the parliament roll.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE ENGLISH RESULTING FROM THE AMALGAMATION.

Use of French now-English taught first in schools in 1395-Caxton and Printing.

AN instance occurs, also, about the same time already of English being used by one of the high functionaries of the crown, the Chief Justice, Sir Henry Greene, declaring the cause why parliament was summoned "en Engleis." From that time the Saxon, or as it began to be generally called, the English, and the French were used indifferently. Whilst as late as 1271 the laws of the realm still contain a French translation of such Anglo-Saxon terms as had to be used, and the latter spelt in a manner indicative of profound ignorance, we find in the subsidy of Wolle, &c., 1 Henry II., that the monarch granted his royal assent in English: "be it ordeined as it is axed!" The proceedings in parliament and the statutes themselves continued for some time yet in French; the first bill of the lower house in English dates from the year 1425; and the first statute, drawn up in English, was probably one that appeared during the reign of Richard III., when John Russell was Lord Chancellor. It is remarkable that this was also the first statute printed. Gradual but final abolition of French in matters of law or record might have been expected from these promising measures; this was,

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however, never done; so far from it, that even at the present day parliamentary formulas still preserve the old idiom of the Conqueror. The royal assent of the British sovereign to ordinary public bills, is given in the words, "La Reine le veut;" to private bills, "Soit fait comme il est désiré;" to bills embodying petitions or declarations of right, as in the time of Charles I., "Soit droit fait comme il est désiré ;" and to the particular bills, called the supply and appropriation bills, presented at the time of prorogation in open parliament, "La Reine remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur bénévolence et ainsi le veut." A bill of either house, when passed, is indorsed with the magic words, "Soit bailé aux Seigneurs," "aux Communes;" and at the beginning of each session the lords cause an entry to be made, in French, of the appointed receivers and triers of petitions, "For England and for Gascony"! It was in vain that Oliver Cromwell tried to abolish these last vestiges of Norman dominion and gave his assent in plain English; the old forms came back with the Restoration, and have remained unchanged ever since in all official acts of the crown. In legal records, however, an act of parliament of the time of the Commonwealth, prescribes the use of the English language, "because," as Whitelock, the advocate of that act, said, to reconcile his pious brethren of the robe, "Moses also drew up the laws of the Jews in Hebrew, and not in Chinese or Egyptian"! The argument might easily have been strengthened by the dissatisfaction with which, as Cranmer tells us, suitors of the time of Henry VIII. listened to the pleadings of their attorneys in French, which the poor clients did not understand.

In 1483, under Edward IV., the French still furnished most

terms for games and mercantile transactions; but long before, Trevisa tells us, in his naïve simplicity, that former "manirs hath some dele changed in the year 1383 in all the grammer scoles of England," when children were taught English, and even mentions for our admiration the names of the two worthy schoolmasters who introduced this most commendable reform. John Cornewaile, he says, "a maistre of grammer changide the lore in great scoles and construction of Frensch into Englisc," and Richard Pencriche "learned that manner of teaching of him."

When finally Caxton used the magical power of the newlyinvented instrument in his skilful hands, multiplied English books and English readers, and encouraged by his press many to turn authors who could only write in their native tongue, the English language may be said to have assumed its independence and its rank among the national idioms of Europe. Nor ought it to be overlooked, that the merits of Caxton are by no means limited to the skill of his press and the admirable use he made of it. His own intelligence, tact and judgment. were no small aids to an idiom but just emerging from a state of inorganic amalgamation and unsettled grammar. Before he printed Higden's Polychronicon, he tells us in his own words, he "wrote over all the said book, somewhat changed the rude and olde English, that is to wit, certain words which in these days we neither used ne understood," because "certainly our language varyeth far from that which was spoken when I was born." Of his enlightened liberality, also, he gave a memorable instance in his first enterprise, the printing of the Canterbury Tales. When they were published, he found he had

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chosen the very worst MS. existing, and at once undertook a second edition, "for to satisfy the author, whereas tofore by ignorance he had erred in hurting and diffaming his book;" a noble confession, and a noble reparation. Almost all the books he printed were English; they were the best of their kind; and of his labors in the good cause he says modestly and touch ingly at the end of his work, "Thus end I this book, and for as moche as in wryting of the same my penne is worn, myn hande wery, and myn eyen dimmed with overmoche lookyng on the whit paper, and that age crepeth on me dayly," &c.

Conquest, then, had not succeeded in destroying the ancient tongue. It never can do so entirely; but it does not follow that it may not alter and often radically change the language of the conquered. Of such an effect the English of our day bears but too striking marks in its tendencies and general character, its orthography and grammar. In spelling it knows no law, not even that of analogy; grammatical inflections have been lost almost without exception; it prefers, in sound at least, monosyllabic words more decidedly than any other language, and labors under the disadvantage of a constantly varying, uncertain accent. Norman conquest and Norman rulers, it is true, have not deprived it of its Teutonic character, and have left to the English of our day, at least, one-third of pure Anglo-Saxon descent, and that third the most indispensable, essential and life-giving portion; but they have taken from it the plastic power of moulding its own elements into new forms, and that innate richness and admirable regularity which the German sister has, in most parts, more successfully preserved.

The effect of Conquest on Language is, then, not always