The Anglo-Saxons and the Normans lived side by side. It must not be
supposed, however, that either the two peoples or the two languages were
welded instantaneously. They grew together, and the growth was slow.
There were special reasons why such should be the case. The conqueror
was of alien blood. National animosity existed between him and the
conquered. In the north, more especially than in the south, William’s
conquest was ruthless. Harvests were destroyed, cattle killed or carried
off, implements of husbandry sacrificed, towns and villages burned,
and the inhabitants slain or driven across the border. The entire soil
was confiscated, and the land, upon condition of military service,
parcelled out among a score or more of great vassals, among hundreds
of inferior crown vassals, and among the higher clergy. The meanest
Norman was raised to opulence and influence in the new dominion. By the
establishment of this modified feudal system, the masses were reduced to
a species of serfdom. They became mere tillers of the soil. Shoals of
Norman ecclesiastics came across the Channel, and the people were forced
to accept religious instruction and consolation from the strangers.
Everywhere, in the palace and among the nobility, in the law courts and
the schools, as authority dictated, another language than their own
prevailed. A keen sense of the scorn with which their lack of culture and
their “barbarous tongue” were regarded, added to a painful consciousness
of their social and political degradation, only served the more to
heighten their aversion to the strangers, and to make the problem of
coalescence slow and difficult.
But the influences at work were not wholly those of repulsion. Living
together as they did, they had to meet each other in the field and in
the town. They were forced to buy from each other and to sell to each
other. Time could not but lessen the arrogance of the one, and modify
the moroseness of the other. Definite rights were gradually acquired by
the subject race. His services became limited, and could be commuted
for money considerations. The ownership of his hut and of the plat of
ground surrounding it, and the privilege of using the waste land of the
manor for the pasturage of his cattle, which were mere indulgences at
first, grew into rights that could be pleaded at law. The serf became a
power. He was struggling to grow to a copyholder, and the copyholder,
to a freeholder. Such things had their effects. The military strength
of the nobles waned, the courts of the feudal baronage were shorn of
their influence, and the feudal system was fast sinking into decay.
In education, as well as in material things, the Anglo-Saxons were
improving. Intermarriages were common, and strong social and national
feelings were springing up, before which their mutual antagonism was
giving away.
The vast possessions, partly hereditary and partly acquired by marriage,
held by the English kings in France, served but to aid this feeling. To
hold these against the French kings required not only a united people,
but a people unified by the strong sentiment of nationality. And to make
progress against the encroachments of their own kings the nobility were
forced to make common cause with the people. To what extent the interests
of barons and commons were identified may be seen from the provisions of
the Great Charter extorted from King John in 1215.
For a long time after the Conquest there existed in England the singular
spectacle of two languages declining to coalesce and yet spoken by two
peoples living together. Neither language would give way to the other.
How little these two languages had blended in the vocabulary of authors,
may be seen when it is said that Layamon’s _Brut_, a poem of thirty-two
thousand lines, written in 1205, does not contain a hundred and fifty
French words; and that in the _Ormulum_, a poem of twenty thousand lines,
which appeared in the year of Magna Charta, hardly fifty French words
are found. But the difficulties in the way of coalescence were slowly
diminishing. Such as were political have already been spoken of, but
those more properly linguistic will now be considered.
This period was, to the subject race, one of general depression. Very
little literature, and that of an indifferent quality, was produced.
Their language was no longer spoken, and their standards in it forgotten.
Anglo-Saxon had been banished from the schools, was no longer used at
the palace and castles of the nobles, or in the courts. Few were writing
it. It seems to have been left in the care, if care it can be called, of
those ignorant of its literature and grammar, and familiar only with the
vocabulary employed in colloquial speech. The effect of all this upon the
language can be easily inferred. A large fraction of the vocabulary, the
more dignified and scholarly portion, fell into neglect and then into
oblivion. The grammatical inflections, denoting case, person, number,
tense, of the words kept in circulation, almost entirely perished. These
inflections would only be retained by those who knew their importance,
but they sloughed off as the words fell from the tongues of those who
were ignorant of them. When, then, this Anglo-Saxon speech had forced
itself upon the Normans, as it had fairly done by the latter half of the
fourteenth century, it was far easier to master than would have been
the case immediately after 1066. Nearly one-half of the words in the
vocabulary before the Conquest, it is estimated, dropped out of it in the
three hundred years immediately following, and it is certain that the
grammar had been vastly simplified. With one-half of its words lost, and
the remaining half nearly flectionless, the work of learning the language
was made comparatively easy for the Norman.
This forcing of the tongue of a conquered people upon its conquerors was
a signal achievement and of far-reaching consequences. Upon the authority
of John of Trevisa, we are told that, after the great pestilence of
1349, the instruction of youth was revolutionized. John Cornwall changed
the instruction in the grammar-school from French into English, and was
followed by Richard Pencrich and others, so that in 1335 in all the
grammar-schools of England the children were being taught English rather
than French. In 1362 French was exchanged for English in the courts of
law, Parliament having passed an act that year ordering that in all the
courts “all pleas ... shall be pleaded, shewed, defended, answered,
debated, and judged in the English tongue.” Great writers had now
arisen—Wyclif, 1324-1384, in prose; Chaucer, 1340-1400, in poetry. They
wrote in English, and their influence upon the plastic language of their
day, and upon all subsequent writers, is simply incalculable.
The adoption of the Anglo-Saxon by the Norman was greatly facilitated by
the fact that the French he was using was not the French of Paris, but
the degenerate tongue of Normandy, which was at best but provincial. But
during the centuries of its use in England it had been kept from free
contact with the dialect of Normandy, and so had deteriorated even from
the imperfect standard. Even the Norman himself had grown ashamed of it,
and was not unwilling to part with it.
When it is said that by 1400, or even earlier, English was generally
used, it is meant a speech not in existence by itself till long after the
Norman Conquest, a speech neither Anglo-Saxon nor French, but Anglo-Saxon
and French. It was a speech to which both of these languages contributed,
to form which both of these were combined. The adoption of words was not
all done by the Norman. While he borrowed many from the Saxon, the Saxon
borrowed some from the Norman. English may, therefore, be considered
a compromise, a compound. It is one speech after the union, but not
univocal, not all of a piece, every speaker of which being bilingual.
The tongue brought over by the Conqueror has been called Norman-French.
It is in reality Latin. Just before the Christian era Julius Cæsar
subdued the people then in possession of Gaul, what is now France, and
imposed upon them his language, which was that of Rome. This language,
used for a thousand years by a people to whom it was not the vernacular,
was acquired by the Normans, of still another alien stock, and by them
introduced into England. Spoken a whole millennium by people whose
mother-tongue it displaced, and from them learned by strangers, it is
not at all unreasonable to suppose that the words had lost much of their
original form and meaning. Proofs, in the words themselves, are not
wanting to sustain the assertion. Outwardly they were almost invariably
shortened. By a dropping of vowels or consonants, or of both, two or
three syllables had been squeezed into one, as some examples will
conclusively show. French _sûr_, our _sure_, came originally from the
Latin _securus_; French _règle_, our _rule_, from Latin _regula_; French
_île_, English _isle_, from _insula_. And not unfrequently the final and
unaccented syllable or syllables seem not to have been caught by the
subject Gaul, or, if caught by his ear, were not retained on his tongue.
The Latin _domina_, for instance, appears in French as the truncated
_dame_; _medius_ as _midi_; and _malum_, as _mal_. Though changed, yet it
must be patent to all that the French words are Latin, as their essential
identity with the words used by Horace and Virgil unmistakably show.