-NRLF B 3 13T 720 Ifflli ^i m^' ,fir M^^K t m *i6 •Viilt'.lXVv'- V*. ' ijlf TJ. "? ^\\\\\W(«4 OF THE HISTORY OF THE EI{GLISH LANGUAGE FOR I :- THE USE OF THE JUNIOR CLASSES IN COLLEGES AND THE HIGHER CLASSES IN SCHOOLS. BY GEORGE L. CRAIK, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AXI) OF EXGLISH LITERATURE IX QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST. |i.it^ (Eiilifln, tmA Kiii .Sm^iriiiiri. LO]N'DO]N^: CHAP.-MAX AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1837. JOHN CHlLDri AND SON, PRINTERS. ±\ ADVERTISEMENT. These Outlines are an abstract from a portion of the Course of Lectures delivered in tlie Class of the English Language in Queen's College, Belfast, which is attended by undergraduates of the first year ; but the work has been drawn up with the design of presenting a connected though succinct view of the essentials of its subject, and so as to be adapted for the general reader as well as for being used as a Text- book in any place of education in which English Philology is one of the departments of study. To the series of propositions printed in a larger type, which embody the leading facts constituting the History of the Language, and which perhaps might be advantageously committed to memory by young persons, have been subjoined the more im- portant of those minor and subsidiary particulars brought forward in the Lectures of which I had been accustomed to direct that notes should be taken. 797 IV - ADVERTISEMENT. In this way tlie student or reader is put in posses- sion of all the information necessary for the com- plete understanding of the general statements, and for following the surve}^ of the subject so far as they carry it. Compendious, too, and elementary as the book is, it is constructed in part with a view to its serving as an introduction both to EnQ:lish Historv and to so much of the great modern science of Ethnology as depends upon the descent and relationship of lan- guages. In this new Edition the work has a2:ain been carefally revised throughout, and, although not much has been altered, a few slight additions have been in- troduced here and there. The customary terms Saxon and Ariglo- Saxon have now been everywhere dis- carded, as not only unauthorised by the facts of the case, but self-contradictor}^ and eminently misleading. If the people were Saxons, and the language Saxon, before the JSForman Conquest, nothing in that catas- trophe could possibly have converted either the one or the other into English. But, in truth, they have been always English ; — which is, andean be, the only reason why they are English now. January, 186i. CONTENTS. Section I. Internal and External Evidence Connexion of Languages PAGE Section II. (Bkitoks.) 1. Tacitus and Csesar on tlie Eritons . . View of Clerk and Pinkerton The Belgoe 2. Oldest Topographical Nomenclature of Britain Chalmers Garnett Edward Lhuyd : — Gwydhelians of "Wales 3. The present "\Vel-:h . . 3 4 4 4 4 5 o 6 Section III. (Romans.) Caesar's Invasions Halley ; Airy Roman Conquest and Colonization of Britain Mo7iumenta Historica Britannica . . Retirement of the Romans . . Saxon Chronicle ; Ethel-sverd Latin Language in Britain Limes Saxonicics Barbarians in Roman Britain 7 7 8 8 8 8 9 10 11 VI CO:S^TENTS Section TV. (Angles and Saxons.) page Historia Ecclesiastica of Beda . . . . . . • . 12 The Gothic Invaders . . . • 12 The VitcB (Jutes) . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The An2:les and Saxons 12 Arrival of Hengist and Horsa .. 13 Gildas; Nennins 13 Beda ; Camden ; D'Anville ; Hardy 14 Usher; Stillingfleet ; Gibson .. .. .. .. 14 Lappenberg; Herbert; Bruce; Guest 14 Settlements of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes . . . . 15 Frisians . . . . . . 15 Sir Francis Palgrave 15 Mr Kemble's Saxons in England . . . . . . 16 Angles and Saxons in how far distinct . . . . . . 16 Jutes; Dr Latham .. .. .. .. .. .. 17 Continental Country of the Saxons 17 Section V. (Danes.) The Northmen ; Danes ; Denmark 18 Modern Danish Populations . . , . . . . . 18 Danish Invasions of England . . . . . . . . 19 Guthrun ; the Danelagh . . . . , . . . . . 20 Danish Conquest of England 20 Section VI. (Normans.) Acquisition of Normandy by Eollo 21 Normans of France . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Relationship of English and Danes . . . . . . 22 Norman Conquest of England 22 Romance or Neo-Latin Tongues . . . . . . . . 22 Franks ; France ; French ; Francic or Frankish . . 23 Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oyl 23 Trouveres and Troubadours . . . . . . , . 23 Counts of Provence . . 23 Plantagenets of Anjou 24 Section VII. Indo-European Family of Languages 25 CONTENTS. vu Section VIII. Competition of Xanguages Intermixture of Languages PACK 27 29 Section IX. (Celtic.) Amount of Celtic in English Mr Garnett's account The Latin Multa, or Mulcta Bother ; Pother llr "\V. F. Edwards . . Existing Celtic Languages and Dialects 30 30 31 32 32 33 33 Section X. (Latin.) Latin of the First Period in English 34 Latin in Welsh 34 Latin of the Second Period 35 Concrete and Abstract terms . . 35 Section XI. (Germanic and Scandinavian.) Gothic Branch of Languages Germanic Languages High and Low Germanic Languages Scandinavian Languages Germanic or Scandinavian Extraction of the Angles ? Anglian and Saxon Dialects of English . . England ; English . . Domain of the Angles in England Eemaius of the Anglian Dialect Mr Kemhle's investigations Mr Garnett's Giraldus Cambrensis ; John of WaUingford ; Higden Scandinavianism in present English Latham ; Guest Durham Ritual ; St Cuthbert's Book The Engle and Sexe ; Guest Section XII. (Feench.) Reign of Edward the Confessor Norman Conquest 36 37 37 37 38 39 39 39 40 41 41 41 42 42 43 44 45 45 VUl CONTENTS. The Conqueror and the Enj^lish Language Norman and Plantagenet Kings of England Norman Settlers in England Legal Proceedings ; Laws ; Charters French Language in England : — Holcot ; Higden Section XIII. Concluding portion of Saxo7i Chronicle . . The term Anglo-Saxon Original English Grammar Written and Spoken Languages Chinese Vulgar Latin ; Romaic ; Pracrit Disintegration of Original English General Decay of Inflectional System in Germanic and Scandinavian Langiiages Murray ; Price . . . . Mr Guest's View Comparison of case of Original English Avith that of Latin and Greek Bunsen Section XIV. (Period of Seiii-Saxon, a.d. 1050—1250.) Layamon^ s Brut Mr Guest ; Sir Frederic Madden Locality of Layamon's Dialect Layamon's Grammar His Modifications of the regular Ancient English His Ntinnation Two Texts of his work Marks of "Western Dialect in Layamon . . Section XV. (Period of Early English ; a.d. 1250 — 1350.) The Ormnhim Tyrwhitt ; Guest . . Peculiar Spelling in the Ormulum Extract from the Ormulum . . The Ormulum most probably of the latter part of the 13th Century PAGE 46 46 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 52 53 53 54 54 56 59 61 63 63 64 65 65 66 66 66 68 68 69 69 71 CONTENTS. IX Importance of the Ormulum for tlie History of the Laneruaore . . Carta Henrici III. in Idiomate Anglico ; Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle . . Robert of Brimne's Chronicle De Brunne's English Prologue of De Brunne's Chronicle A.D. 1258 PAGE 71 72 75 76 76 76 Section XVI. Three Stages of the French Language in England Ingulf Croylandensis Historia Laws and Charters of the Xorman Kings Children taught Latin through French . . Books wiitten in French French extensiA^ely understood French Wars of Edward III. Discontinuance of French in Grammar Scliools Statute of 1362 Continuance of French as 'the Language of Statutes and of the Law 78 79 79 79 80 80 81 81 81 82 Section XVII. Lasting Impression made upon the English Language by the French 83 Chaucer 84 Commencement of the Intermixture of the two Lan- guages . . . . ■ . 85 Effects of the assumption by the English Language of a partially French character . . . . . . . . 85 Translations from the French 86 Intrusion of French Vocables facilitated by the weak- ened condition of the English Language . . . . 86 Latin in Original English . . . . . . . . . . 86 Section XVIII. Local Origin of Standard English Statement by Higden Guest's View . , Kingdom of Mercia . . 87 87 87 87 X CONTENTS. Northern and Southern Conjugations Oxford and Cambridge Northern and Southern Dialects . . Midland Dialect Leicestershire Dialect : — Guest ; Latham PAGE 88 88 89 90 90 Section XIX. (Period of Middle English : — a.d. 1350 — 1550.) Distinction of Semi-Saxon and Early 'English . . Distinction of Early English and Middle English English of Chaucer and his Contemporaries Its two Tendencies . . . . . . 1. Its looking away from the Gothic The Final e of Early and Middle English Tyrwhitt's Yiew Price's View Guest's View The Four Modes of indicating the Long Vowel Sound . Diverse Sounds of the English Vowels Prevailing Misconceptions Long and Short Syllables in English and in Latin Accent the only Principle of English Prosody . . The Original English e of Inflection ; Guest Summary of the Facts regarding e Final Other Peculiarities of Middle English 2. Its looking towards the French Its now obsolete Words mostly Gothic The Fabrication of "Words directly from the Latin Aureate Terms of the Writers of the 15th Century . The Latin that has fixed itself in the English . . Latin of the Third and Fourth Periods : Latham The fluctuating Accentuation at first of many Words borrowed from the French Fabrication of Scientific and Technical Terms from the vjrCGiC •• •• ,, ,. ,, ,. 91 91 92 92 92 91 95 96 97 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 lOS 108 109 109 110 111 Section XX. Scientific View of the History of the English Language 111 COFTEKTS. XI ILLFSTEATIVE SPECIMENS. PAGE SIMPLE ENGLISH :— 1. From the Voyage of Ohtlier in Alfred's Translation of Orosius, book i. : — before a.d. 900 . . . . . . 115 2. From the latter portion of the National Chronicle : — about A.D, 1100 116 BROKEN ENGLISH:— 3. Semi-Saxon Period : — Commencement of Layamon's "Brut:"— about A.D. 1200 118 4. Layamon's Description of the arming of Prince Arthur 120 CO:\rPOL\N'D ENGLISH :— 5. Early English Period : — Dedication of the Ormolum : — •about A.D. 1260 ? .. 123 6. Commencement of Eobert of Gloucester's Chronicle : — about A.D. 1300 123 7. From Robert de Brunne's Translation of Langtoft's Chron- icle : — about A.D. 1340 .. .. .. .. .. 125 8. Middle English Period : — From ^Minot's Battle of Halidon HHl : — about a.d. 1350 . . 126 9. Commencement of the Vision of Piers Ploughman : — about A.D. 1360 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 10. From Mande\irs Travels :— about a.d. 1370 . . . . 127 11. From ^Vvcliffe's Translation of the Bible :— about a.d. 1380 128 12. From Tre^-isa's Translation of Higden's Polychronicon : — A.D. 1385 . . . . . . . . . . . • . . 129 13. Beginning of the Reeve's Tale from Chaucer : — about a.d. 1390 . . • . . . . . . • • • • • . • 131 1-i. From the Parson's Tale, (in Prose), by Chaucer :— about a.d. 1390 132 15. From Lydgate'sPoem entitled his Testament : — about a.d. 1450 132 16. Conclusion of Caxton's English Translation of Higden's Polychronicon: — a.d. 1482 .. .. .. .. 134 17. Letter from Sir Thomas More to his Wife :— a.d, 1528 . . 135 18. From Tyndal's Translation of the Bible :— a.d. 1534 and 1536 136 Xll CO?fTE?fTS. 19. From Cranmer's Bible : — a. d. 1539 .. 20. Sonnet by the Earl of Surrey : — about a.d. 1545 . . 21. MoDEKN English Period : — From the Geneva New Testa- ment : — A.D. 1557 22. Commencement of Sackville's Induction in the " Mirror for Magistrates:" — a.d. 1559 23. From Ascham's " Schoolmaster : " — about a.d. 1583 24. From Sydney's " Apologie for Poetrie : " — about a.d. 1580 25. From the Rheims New Testament : — a.d. 1582 26. From Spenser's "Faerie Queene :" — about a.d. 1590 27. From Spenser's " View of the State of Ireland : " — about A,D. LOvO .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 28. From the Authorised Translation of the Bible : — a.d. 1611 PAGE 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 148 OUTLINES, &C. I. There are two kinds of Evidence by which the origin or composition of any product may be attested : — the Internal ; and the External, or Historical. The distinction is, that the Internal Evidence is fur- nished by the product itself; the External, bj some- thing else. And any fact considered in reference to the causes or circumstances out of which it may have arisen, or by which it may have been brought about, is a product. External Evidence is usually the clearer and more pre- cise in its intimations, as well as the more obtrusive or the more readily come by ; it is in these respects like other superficial or outside things ; but Internal Evi- dence, when its interpretation is free from doubt, is the more trustworthy and conclusive. It is the pure reason of the case, speaking to us directly, by which we cannot be deceived if we only rightly apprehend it. The mind, however, is not satisfied without a concurrence of the two kinds of evidence whenever the case seems to admit of it. It is very rarely, if ever, that Internal Evidence is ab- B 2 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF solutely wanting; External Evidence frequently is. A familiar instance of evidence which is purely internal, and yet sufficient, is that with which Paley sets out in his work on Natural Theology, of a watch in motion found by a person who had never seen or heard of such a contrivance, but who at once and without any doubt infers it to be the work of an intelligent and designing mind. His infer- ence to that extent could hardly have been strengthened by the addition of any amount of external evidence. In other questions, however, such as that of who wrote a book of unknown or disputed authorship, or who painted a particular picture, the internal evidence, which we always have, and without which in such a case no ac- cumulation of external evidence would be enough to pro- duce perfect conviction, at least to a mind of any critical sagacity, is usually endowed with much greater power of securing our acquiescence and reliance when it has the support of external evidence. It is the same with questions relating to the origin, or affiliation and connexion, of languages. Here, too, the internal evidence, or that presented by the languages themselves, is indispensable, and is the main considera- tion ; but such external evidence as is to be had is not to be disregarded. It demands, at least, always to be ex- plained, and to be shown to be consistent with the in- ternal evidence ; and it sometimes serves as a useful index to the direction in which the internal evidence is to be looked for or pursued. "Were it only for the latter reason, it would be conve- nient in questions of this nature to take the External or Historical evidence as the basis of our inquiries ; but it is also natural to begin with that, as consisting usually of facts that were well knovra long before much or almost anv attention was drawn to the Internal evidence. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. II. The First of the facts constituting the External or Historical Evidence that we have in regard to the sources of the English language is, that the country in which it is spoken and has grown up appears clearly to have been once occupied, in whole or in part, by a Celtic population. I. The earliest express statement that has come down to us in regard to the language spoken in the country now called England is that of Tacitus, who, writing in the first century of our era, says {Agricola, 11) of those of the Britons of his day who were nearest to Graul, that they were probably of Gallic extraction, and that their speech was not very different from that of the Gauls (sermo hand mulfum diversus). But Csesar {B. G. \. 12), writing a century before Tacitus, although he says nothing about the language of the Britons, in asserting as a fact what Tacitus advances as a probability, that the Britons dwelling along the coast opposite to Gaul had originally come from that country, particularises Belgium as the part of Gaul whence they had emigrated ; and elsewhere (i. 1, and ii. 4) he tells us that the Belgre were for the greater part of Germanic descent, and that both they and the Aquitani differed in language, as well as in institutions and laws, from the proper Gauls, or Celts as they were called in their own tongue. It has thence been argued by seme speculators that the language of this portion of the population of Britain must, when the country first became known to the Eo- B 2 4 OUTLINES or THE HISTORY OF mans, "have teen not a Celtic but a Germanic lano-uao-e. This view was first proposed bj tlie Scottish antiquary, iSir John Clerk of Pennicuick, in a " Dissertation on the Ancient Language of Britain," written in 1742, but first published in 1782, in the first volume of the Bihliotheca Topograpliica Britannica ; and it was afterwards taken up and maintained, with his usual cleverness and plausibility, by John Pinkerton, in his " Enquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the Eeign of Malcolm III," (2 vols. 8vo, Edinburgh, 1789 ; republished in 1794 and in 1814). Pinkerton states (i. 363) that he had not happened to see Clerk's Dissertation till after the materials for his ovm work were collected. It is still, however, matter of dispute whether the language of the Belgians was Germanic or Celtic. It is contended by many that Caesar's statement can only mean that they spoke a different dialect from the people of Celtic Gaul ; and that, if they were Germans by descent, they had, after their settlement in Gaul, ex- changed their ancestral speech for the common language of that country. II. In this undecided state of the question respecting the language of the BelgsD, recourse has been had, for evidence in regard to the earliest language spoken in Britain, to the ancient topographical nomenclature of the country, that is, the oldest names of places and natural objects in it. These, which are always originally significant, are the surest evidence we can have in regard to the language spoken in any country at the time when they were imposed. The ancient topographical nomen- clature of Britain is elaborately investigated by George Chalmers in the first volume of his Caledonia (3 vols. 4to, 1810 — 24) ; and the subject has also been more re- THE ENGLISH LANGTJAGE. 6 cently discussed by the late 'Rex. Hichard Garnctt in a paper printed in the Proceedings of the Philological So- ciety (i. 119). Whatever differences of opinion may still exist upon subordinate points, there is now no dissent from the general conclusion arrived at by both of these writers, that the oldest topographical nomenclature every- where in Britain is Celtic. This is the case in the parts of the country wliich Caesar states to have been colonized from Belgic Gaul, as well as elsewhere. Kenf^ for in- stance, is a Celtic name, and Thames is a Celtic name. Mr Garnett further holds the topographical nomencla- ture of France and that of ancient South Britain to be- long to the same form of the Celtic, namely, the Cambrian, or Welsh ; and he conceives that to be the earliest and least corrupted form now subsisting. It should be observed, however, that the fact of the most ancient topographical nomenclature of the Belgic parts of Gaul and Britain being Celtic does not prove that the Belgic colonists in eitlier case spoke a Celtic language ; for the names may have been imposed by pre- cedmg occupants of Celtic race. But it proves that the parts occupied by the Belgic colonists must, as well as the rest of the country, have been at one time in the possession of a Celtic population ; which is enough for the purpose in hand. It may also be mentioned that Mr Garnett's supposi- tion, of the most ancient British topographical names being all AVelsh, is inconsistent with a theory which was first put forward by the learned Edward Lhuyd, in the Preface to the AVelsh part of his Archceologia Britannica (folio, Oxford, 1707).* Lhuyd argues, from the names * Of this Preface, which is in "Welsh, there is an English translation in the Third Appendix to Archbishop Nicholson's Irish Historical Li- brary. 6 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOKr OE of rivers and mountains throughout both Wales and the rest of South Britain, that a Celtic people of the Irish or Graelic branch must have preceded the Welsh in the occupation of the country ; and that these Gwi/dhelians, as he calls them, had been forced by the Welsh to retire for the greater part to the North and to Ireland. III. But we must be held to have sufficient proof of the general statement at the head of the Section in the standing testimony of the great fact, that a considerable Celtic population, retaining its peculiar speech, still sub- sists in the occupation of a part of South Britain (the district that we now call Wales), its possession of which is historically known to be of very ancient origin, and cannot be probably accounted for otherwise than upon its own tradition, supported by the whole current of its na- tional literature, that it is the remnant of a race which the Eomans found spread over a much larger extent of the country, and the portion of which that escaped de- struction, or preserved its independence, on the Saxon invasion, was then forced to retire within its present nar- row limits. THE ENGLISH LAT^'GTJAGE. III. The Second fact is, that from about the middle of the First Century of our era till after the com- mencement of the Fifth, or for not much short of 400 years, South Britain was a Province of the Ro- man Empire, and extensively occupied by colonists speaking the Latin tongue. The first Eoman invasion of Britain under Julius Csesar took place late in the summer of the year B.C. 55. According to a calculation of Dr Edmund Halley, the eminent astronomer, published in the Philosophical Trans- actions,* the day was the 26th of August. On this occa- sion, the Eoman general remained only till about the 20th of September, nor did he advance into the country ; but he returned in the May of the year following, B.C. 54, when he compelled several of the princes and states in the south-eastern part of the island to surrender and give him hostages. t The Britons were left unmolested and * No. 193 (for March— June, 1691) ; vol. xvii. p. 495. f It has generally been supposed that Cajsar on both his expedi- tions to Britain landed on the east coast between Dover and Deal, having sailed from "Wissant, about midway between Boulogne and Calais ; but Professor Airy, the Astronomer Royal, has lately argued with great ingenuity that the Portus Itius, from which he embark- ed, was at the mouth of the Somnie, much farther to the south, and that he made his descent on the coast of Sussex, at or near the same point, between Pevensey and Hastings, which was selected for his in- vasion by William the Norman eleven centuries later. Professor Airy's views were first submitted in an anonymous communication to the Athenceufn, dated 29th March, 1851 ; and were afterwards more fully expounded in a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries, 8 OTJTLIXES OF THE HISTORY Or unvisited from this time, till, in B.C. 26, on Augustus threatening a new invasion, they sent an embassy to him m Gaul, and consented to acknowledge the Roman do- minion by the payment of tribute. The actual subjuga- tion of Britain, however, did not commence till a.d. 43, in the reign of the Emperor Claudius ; nor was it completed before a.d. 84, when Julius Agricola, who had been first appointed to the supreme command there in a.d. 78, in the reign of Vespasian, resigned and returned to Eome in that'Of Domitian, after having in seven campaigns over- run the country to a considerable distance beyond the Forth, and also sailed round the island and reduced the Orkne3's. The Roman dominion ceased to be acknowledged by the Britons in a.d. 409, in the reign of the Emperor Honorius ; and in a.d. 418, according to the National Chronicle, " the Romans collected all the treasures that were in Britain, and some they hid in the earth, so that no one has since been able to find them ; and some they carried with them into Gaul." The account given by the native historian Ethel werd (writing in Latin in the tenth century) is, that in this year those of the Roman race who were left in Britain, not being able to endure the multiplied menaces of the natives, buried their trea- sure in holes dug in the earth (scrohibus), imagining that they might have an opportunity of recovering it after- 8tli and 22d January, 1852, and printed in the Archccologia^ vol. xxxiv. pp. 231— 2o0. London, 1852. But sec " The Invasion of Britain by Juhus Caesar ;" by Thomas Lewin, Esq., of Trinity College, Oxon. Lon. 1859. Mr Lewin makes out a very plausible case for Cicsar having sailed from Boulogne, and landed at what is now called ItomnQy Marsh, — a name which he be- lieves still preserves the memory of the event. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 9 wards, a thing whicli never happened ; and, taldng only a part of it with them, assembled at or on the water (in undo), set sail, and retired to Gaul. The earlier nar- rative of Gildas, which is of the sixth century, but is ex- tremely confused and obscure, contains nothing to this effect, but speaks of Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Beda and other writers place at the head of the Britons in the latter part of the fifth century, as the only individual of Eoman extraction who was then left alive in the island. It is in the highest degree improbable that the retire- ment or expulsion of the inhabitants of Eoman descent can have been so complete as these statements would make it. From the number of settlements which both history and their remains on or under the soil prove the Romans to have possessed in all parts of the country, from the Channel to the Eriths of Forth and Clyde, com- prehending many towns and villas, as well as mere military stations, it is evident that in the space of between three and four centuries, during which the island had been a Eoman province, it had been extensively colonised, like most of the other provinces, from the original central seat of the empire, and that the portion of its population thus formed must in all likelihood have been very consider- able and very widely diffused. But, although it cannot be doubted that an extended Latin civilisation grew up in Britain in the course of the long space of time that it continued under the Eoman dominion, we are not informed by any express notices in the ancient writers in how far Latin became the language of the country. Tacitus, however, affirms (Agric. 21), that already by a.d. 79, when Agricola had made his second campaign, the sons of the chiefs, under his judicious measures, were beginning to be attracted to liberal studies, and to be becoming ambitious of excelling in the eloquent 10 otjtlhstes of the history op use of the Eoman tongue, which they had heretofore de- spised. And Juvenal about the same early date speaks {Saf. XT. Ill) of tlie art of oratorical pleading being taught to the Britons by their eloquent neighbours the Gauls, and of the feeing of counsel being now practised even in Thule. Agricola, Tacitus tells us, preferred (or, at least, professed to prefer) the natural genius of the Britons to the studied acquirements of the Gauls.* From the name of the Saxon Border {Limes Saxonicus) having been borne in the Roman time by a portion of the eastern and south-eastern coast of Britain (from Brano- dunum, now Brancaster, in J^f orfolk, to the Portus Adurni, probably either Pevensey or Aldrington, in Sussex), it has been argued that the Saxons must have already established themselves in some portion of this district. But the only Saxon settlement that could have given rise to the name would have been a settlement extendino: over the whole line of coast so denominated ; and it is im- possible that that should have passed unrecorded. There seems to be no reasonable objection to the commonlj'" received interpretation of the name, as meaning simply the coast along which the Saxon pirates were wont to make their descents.f Many small bodies of barbarians, however, were trans- * See upon this subject a paper by Dr Latham in the transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire for 1857. t This is the opinion of Mr Guest in his interesting and vahiable paper " On the Early English Settlements in South Britain," published in the " Memoirs communicated to the Annual Meeting of the xVrchpDO- logical Institute, held at Salisbury, July 18-19;" 8vo, Lond. 1851; pp. 33, 34. The other view, -which has been recently put forward by Palgrave, Lappenberg, and Kemble, may be found in D'Anville's Etats Formes en Eurojje, ^-c. Par. 1771 ; p. 20. — See also Selden's Mare Clausmn, lib. ii. cap. 6. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. H ferred to and located in Britain by the Eomans them- selves. Upwards of forty barbarian legions, it has been reckoned, composed some of natives of G-ermany, some of Moors, Dalmatians, and Thracians, after having served their time in the armies of the empire, were settled and put in possession of lands in various parts of the island, principally upon the north-eastern coast, and in the neighbourhood of the Eoman walls (Palgrave's Jlistori/ of the Anglo-Saxons, 1838, p. 20). But these small bodies must have soon melted into the surrounding population, and can neither have preserved their own dialects nor produced any distinguishable effect upon the general language of the coimtry. 12 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF rV. The Third fact, and the most important of all, is, that, after the extinction of the Eoman dominion, the country was in great part conquered, taken possession of, and occupied by certain tribes of Gothic race and language, whose descendants have ever since formed the bulk of its population. The commonly received account rests principally upon the authority of tbe Ulstoria Ecclesiastica of Beda, who was born at Jarrow, in the bishopric of Durham, a.d. 673, and died a.d. 735. Beda makes the invaders, to whom he gives the general name of Angles or Saxons (^Anglorum sive Saxonum gens), to have consisted of three nations or tribes, properly distinguished as the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes (or Vitcs).* The Saxons, he says, came from that region in G-er- many which was in his own day known by the name of the country of the Old Saxons ; that is, the modern Duchy of Holstein, or the country between the Elbe and the Eider. The Angles he brings from a district immediately to the north of that occupied by the Saxons ; from his account, combined with others, the native country of the Angles has been supposed to have * Dr Smith, in his note to Beda, Hist. Eccles. I. 15, seems to say that Vitce is the reading of all the MSS. : — " Omncs librariorum, qui Vitas volunt, conatus." Yet Camden, quoting this very passage {Britannia, Gibson's translation, 1722, I. clviii.), expressly affirms that the MS. reading is not Vita;, but Gutcc. The editors of the Monumenta 5riVan?uVa, adopting Jutim the text, give T'lVtsas the MS. reading in the notes to two passages (i. 15 and iv. 16) ; but at a third passage (also in iv. 16) no other reading than Juti is noted. THE EXGLESH LANGUAGE. 13 been the part of the Duchy of Sleswig, still bearing the name of Angel or Angeln, lying between the Eider and the arm of the Baltic called, after the town at its extrem- ity, the Plensborg Wyck, or Fiorde. Beda says this dis- trict was reported to have remained uninhabited (desertus) ever since the invasion. The original country of the Jutes he places immediately to the north of that of the Angles, by which he may mean merely the npper part of Sles- wig, which is still also called South Jutland, although commonly the name Jutland is now restricted to the portion of the peninsula anciently known as North Jut- land. Beda is not quite consistent with other authorities, nor even with himself, in regard to the dates at which these several invading tribes arrived. The chronology which has been commonly deduced from his various statements is, that the Jutes came first, under the brothers Hengst and Hors, or Hengist and Horsa, in a.d. 449, or rather 450 ; next the first division of the Saxons, nnder Ella, in 477, and the second, under Cerdic, in 495 ; then the first body of the Angles in 527, but their principal host, under the command of Ida, not till 547. Mr Hardy, however, the learned editor of the Monumenta Historica B7ntannica (Chronological Abstract, 143), prefers the computation in the Historia Britonum of Nennius (a writer of the ninth century), according to which the arrival of Hengist and Horsa and their band would be in a.d, 428.* This * Gildas (10, 11) and Xennius (23) both state that, when Clemens Maximiis revolted against the Emperor Gratian, he carried over with him to the continent all the military force then in Britain, and that these soldiers never returned, but settled in Armorica (Bretagne). This was in a.d. 383. We know, however, that long after this, in a.d. 407, the Roman army in Britain was powerful enough to set up, one after another, thi-ee pretenders to the empire, Marcus, Gratian, and Con- 14i OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF is a point of little or no importance for our present pur- pose. But, supposing the three tribes to have spoken, as they probably did, different dialects, it becomes very im- stantine. In a subsequent passage (27) Nennius speaks of the Roman generals {duces Rommiorum) having been on three several occasions [tribus vicibus) put to death by the Britons. Yet, after all this, it is added, the latter sought the help of the Romans against the Picts and Scots, and, having sworn submission, had an army sent to them. Gil- das (12, 14), and Beda, who follows and amplifies his account {Hist. i. 12, 13), make three successive embassies to have been sent to Rome, the first and second of Avhich were each successful in obtaining such as- sistance as sufficed to repel the barbarians for the time ; but the third, addressed to the Consul Aetius, proved ineflTectual. From what Beda says here, and with more precision in his tract De Sex Aetatibus Sceculi, the first and second of these embassies would appear to have been de- spatched between a.d. 414 and 419, the third in 446. The force, therefore, which was accorded in compliance with the second embassy, and which would, according to this version of the story, be the last Roman force that visited the island, may very well have left in the year 418, as asserted in the National Chronicle, and by Ethel werd. (See arde, p. 8.) Beda states the first arrival of the Saxons to have taken place in the first year of the reign of the Emperor Marcian, which was A.D. 450, although he seems to have taken it for 449. There is no dis- pute about the date of the third embassy, in 446 ; but Mr Hardy sup- poses the first to have been despatched probably in 396, and the second in 435, assigning the arrival of the Saxons, as stated in the text, to the year 428 in the intervening space. This is also the date that is adopted by Camden, who is followed, among others, by D'Anville, Etats Formes en Europe, pp. 199, 200. But see the objections stated by Gibson (in part after Stillingileet and Usher), Britannia, translation of, (1722), pp. clx. and elxi. Considt upon the history of Roman Britain Lappenberg's England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, translated by Thorpe (2 vols. 8vo, Lond. 1845), I. 6 — 73; the Hon. Algernon Herbert's Britannia after the Romans, 2 vols. 4to, Lond. 1836 and 1841, and his Annotations to the edition of the Irish Translation of Netmius, printed by the Irish Arcb geological Society, 4to, Dub. 1848 ; the Rev. J. C. Bruce's Roman Wall, 8vo, Loud. 1851 ; and Mr Guest's paper in the 1851 volume of the Memoirs of the Archccological Institute, ab'cady referred to. And THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 15 portant, in tracing the origin and Listory of the common language which grew up among them, to understand in what parts of their new country they severally settled. The accepted account of this matter derived from Beda and other sources, is, that the Jutes occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, with part of the opposite coast of Hampshire ; that the Saxons established themselves in all the rest of the country to the south of the Thames and of the Bristol Avon, and also in Essex and Middlesex, and the southern part of Hertford ; and that the Angles took possession of all the rest of England, which also received its name (origmaRj Aen^Ia-lancl, or Engla-lancT) from them, their dominion extending, apparently, as far north as to the Eorth and the Clyde. The various bodies of the old Celtic population, however, maintained their independ- ence in the kingdoms or principalities of Strath- Clyde (or Beged, that is, the Kingdom), Cumbria (or Cumberland), North and South Wales (Cambria), and Cornwall, along the whole line of the western coast. There is little doubt that among the invaders there must also have been a considerable proportion of Frisians, either from the Greater Erieslaud {Frisia Major), former- ly extending from the Scheld to the Weser, or from the Lesser Eriesland (Frisia Minor), lying on the western coast of Sleswig, opposite to the Isle of North- Strand, whence these northern Frieslanders were called Strand- frisii. Beda himself, in another place (Ilist. Eccles. \. 9), enumerates the Fresones among the nations from whom the Angles or Saxons inhabiting Britain are known to have derived their origin. Sir Francis Palgrave goes the length of saying {Hist. Anglo- Sax. 33, 34), that " the upon the general subject of the Romans in Britain, see an interesting article in the Editihuryh Review, No. 191 (for July 1851), pp. 177— 204, 16 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF tribes by wbom Britain was invaded appear principally to have proceeded from the country now called Fries- land ; for, of all the continental dialects, the ancient Frisick is the one which approaches most nearly to the Anglo-Saxon of our ancestors." — (See also his " Rise and Progress of the Eng. Commonwealth," 41, 42.) The whole account preserved by Beda of the invasion of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes has been treated as of scarcely any historical value by. Mr Kemble in his work entitled " The Saxons in England," 2 vols. 8vo, 1849 (see vol. i. pp. 1 — 34). But, whatever force may be allowed to the reasoning by which Mr Kemble would establish, on the one hand, the mixture of poetical or fabulous elements in the narrative, and, on the other, its unauthorised character for the greater part, it seems very unlikely that it can be wholly without foundation in so far as respects the only portion of it with which we are here concerned, namely, that comprising the descent of the invaders from a diversity of tribes, the locations of the diiferent tribes in the conquered country, and also the districts on the Continent whence they had severally come. Some distinction between the Saxons and Anefles. indeed, is sufficiently attested by the existence of those two general appellations, to say nothing of those of Buch particular states or districts as Essex, Sussex, "Wessex, East Anglia, &c. In discriminating the Saxon and Anglian populations, Beda was dealing with facts lying under his eye, and as to which he could hardly be mistaken, more especially if, as is nearly certain, the original difference of descent was still marked by a dia- lectic difference of speech. And, perhaps, this may not have been the only difference that divided, and always had divided, the Anglian and Saxon states. ]N"or would THE ElfGLTSH LANGUAGE. 17 two distinct and possibly rival populations, set down be- side one another in a new country, readily lose the me- mory of their original seats. Indeed, it hardly can be seriously made matter of dispute that the Angles and Saxons of Britain were offshoots from the Angli and Saxones of the Continent : — t\[.Q Angli, wh.o are first men- tioned by Tacitus in the first century ; the Saxones, wdio are first mentioned (at least under that name) in the second century by Ptolemy. With regard to the Jutes, however, the case is not so clear. In the third edition of his work on the English Language (London, 1851), Dr Latham (pp. 10 — 12) has endeavoured to show that, although Jutland in Denmark undoubtedly took its name from a people called the Jutes, the derivation of any part of the invaders of Britain, after the fall of the Roman Empire, from that people, is a mis- take arising from Beda (whose name for them, as we have seen, appears to be, not Juti, but Vifce), or, it may be, some preceding writer whom he copied, having confounded the Celtic element Wiht in Wiht-saetaii (the Wight-peo- ple, or inhabitants of the Isle of AVight) with the similar element in Vit-land, or With-land, which are other forms of the name of the peninsula commonly called Jutland. It has been usual, also, with modern WTiters to assume that the continental region from which the distinctively Saxon portion of the invaders of Britain was derived was not confined to Beda's Old Saxony, or the district now called Holstein, but probably extended as far westward along: the coast of the North Sea as to the Weser, or even to the Ehine. 18 OUTLINES or THE HISTOBY OE V. The Fourth fact is, that in the latter part of the ninth century extensive settlements were effected in the North-eastern parts of England by a Scandi- navian people, the Northmen or Danes. Whateyer may be the origin or etymological meaning of the term Danes, it had come by the eighth century to be the common name for those bands of piratical rovers, from the countries around the Baltic, who were otherwise called Northmen or Normans. They are held to have been drawn from every part of the extensive region which the ancients designated Scandinavia ; but it is remarkable that, whereas that appellation is understood in its strictest sense to include only the modern Sweden and Norway, it is to Denmark that the Danes have left their name. The geographical position of Denmark, divided from the proper Scandinavian countries by so considerable an ex- tent of sea, wiU hardly allow us to interpret the name as signifying the Border land of the Danes, taking onm^Jc here in the same sense which it has in the names of the Anglian kingdom of Mercia (bordering on Wales), the old French country of La Marche (bordering on Limou- sin), and the Mark of the G-ermans, and the Marca of the Italians, in various instances. In other cases, however, mark must be understood as meaning merely a district or territory marked off, or simply what we commonly call a land or country. . It is further worth noticing that the modern kingdom of Denmark comprehends all the districts from which issued, accordiug to the old accounts, the several tribes THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 19 who invaded Britain upon the fall of the Eoman empire. And the Danes proper (who may be considered to repre- sent the Jutes) ; the Angles, who live between the Bight of Flensborg and the river Schley on the Baltic ; the Frisons, who inhabit the islands along the west coast of Jutland, with a part of the bailiwick of Husum in Sles- wig ; and the Germans of Holstein (Beda's Old Saxons) are still all recognised by geographers and ethnographers as distinct races (See ZT?iiversal Geography of Malte-Brun and Balbi, English translation, p. 478). The Latin mediaeval chroniclers, under whatever notion, often speak of the Danes by the name of Daci, or Dacians. The earliest notice of the appearance of the Danes in England occurs in the National Chronicle under the year 787. The passao;e is as follows : — Her nom Beorhtric cyning Offan dohtor Eadburhge to wive. And on his dagum cuomon aerest 3 scipu Northmanna of Haeretha lande. And tha se gerefa thaerto rad, and hie wolde drifan to thaes cyninges tune, thy he nyste hwaet hie waeron ; and hiene mon thaer ofslog. Thaet waeron tha aerestan scipu Deniscra monna the Eangelcynnes lond gesohton." That is : — " This year took King Beorhtric [of Wessex] King Offa's daughter Eadburhge to wife. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Haeretha land.* And then the reeve thereto rode ; and them would have driven to the king's toAvn, because he wist not what they were ; and him they there slew. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English race." * The word Haeretha, I believe, is not elsewhere found. It might almost be suspected to be a perversion or corruption of Haethena (of the Heathen). A common name for the Danes, with the Latin chroni- clers, is Gentiles, or Pagani. c 2 20 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF In 867 the Danes made themselves masters of all the eastern portion of the kingdom of Northumbria, comprising the modern counties of Northumberland, Durham, and York, and also, in part, of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire, along the western coast. This conquest was speedily followed by the acquisition of many of the prin- cipal towns in Mercia (or the Midland Counties) ; which, along with East Anglia and the former kingdoms of Kent and Sussex, had for some time acknowledged the sove- reignty of the King of Wessex, now beginning to be looked up to, in virtue of this extended dominion, as the supreme ruler of England. East Anglia (comprising Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridge) was next attacked; then AVessex itself; and at last, in the year 878, King Alfred was glad to conclude the war by a treaty with Godrum, or Guthrun, the Danish king or chief, by which he consented to cede to the invaders all the country lying along the eastern coast from the Humber to the Thames. Here accordingly, and in their conquered kingdom of Northumbria, farther to the north, these foreigners set- tled, probably in considerable numbers, and, although acknowledging themselves the subjects of the English king, were governed by their own laws ; so that this part of the kingdom came from henceforth to be knoAvn by the name of the Danelac/h (or Dane-law). Einally, in 1013 the conquest of all England Avas ef- fected by the Danish king Sweyu; and the crown con- tinued in the possession of his descendants till 10^2. During all tliis space, however, it is to be observed, the laws continued to be promulgated for the Euglish in their own tongue. Nor is there any reason for supposing that the Danes generally ever extended their occupation of the country beyond the limits of the territory made over or abandoned to them in the reijjrn of Alfred. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 21 VI. The Fifth fact, and the one next in importance to the Third, is, that in the middle of the eleventh century England was conquered by the Normans, who were Danes by origin, but had been settled in France for about a century and a half, and had by this time exchanged their ancestral Scandijaa- vian tongue for the Neo-Latin tongue called French. A BODY of Danes, or Northmen, under their leader Hrolf, or Eollo, surnamed the Ganger (whatever may have been intended to be expressed by that epithet), after an unsuccessful attempt to make good a footing in England, had, a few years before Gruthrun and his follow- ers obtained their cession of territory from King Alfred, turned to the opposite coast of France, and effected their first descent in the province which at last, in 912, was yielded up to them by King Charles the Third, styled the Simple, and thereupon received the name of ]N"ormandy, which it retains to this day. The cession of Normandy to Rollo by Charles the Simple would seem to have been a transaction very much of the same kind with the cession of the Danelagh to Gruthrun by Alfred the Great. But, while the North- men of England, after the death of Gruthrun, appear to have been left without a head of their own race, those of France preserved at least the form of a distinct nation- ality under the descendants of Eollo, who continued to rule over the territory which their ancestor had acquired as all but independent sovereigns, with the title of Earls, Marquesses, or Dukes of Normandy. It is probable, nevertheless, that the intermixture of*" 22 OITTLTIS'ES OF THE HISTORY OF the Frencli Nortlimeii -wdth the previous population of their new country may have been fully as great as in the case of the Danes settled in England. "We know that both alike, after a few generations, dropped the use of the language of their ancestors, and adopted that of the na- tion in the midst of which they had set themselves down. This was a much greater change for the Normans of Trance than for the English Danes ; for the jSTorse and Anglian were tongues of the same Grothic stock, what- ever may have been their dialectic, or little more than dialectic, differences ; whereas the Erench was a tongue, as will be presently explained, of quite another descent. The comparatively near relationship between the lan- guages of the English and the Danes must have facilitated and hastened that amalgamation of the two races, or ab- sorption of the one into the other, which appears to have beei^ completed before the next political revolution that the country underwent. , This was its conquest by the Erench Normans in the year 1066, under their Duke AVilliam the Second, who thereupon took the title of AVilliam the First of England, and the designation of the Conqueror. He was the seventh Duke of Normandy, and the fifth in descent from Kollo. With the Norman king and court, and a numerous following of nobility, landowners, and soldiers, established in England by this revolution, was imported and ex- tensively introduced into use the language spoken by the Normans, which, as has been just stated, was by this time Erench. The French is one of what are called the Romance or Neo-Latin tongues, by which terms are meant those cor- rupted forms of Latin that, in Italy and other countries, especially France and Spain, which had long been Eoman provinces, were employed after the fall of the Western THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 23 Empire, first as the spoken and ultimately also as the literary languages. The names, however, of France and French have been given to the countrj formerly called Gaul, and to its general population and this their Keo- Latin speech, from its having been conquered in the latter part of the fifth century by a Grerman people (or rather confederacy of various tribes), called the Franks, who spoke, of course, a Germanic or Teutonic, that is a Gothic, language. The proper language of the Franks is distinguished in modern philology from the French by being termed the Francic, or Frankish. There were formerly two great dialects of the French language : that spoken to the south of the Loire, called the Langue d' Oc (or by modern philologists the Occifauian) ; and that spoken to the north of the Loire, called the Langue (VOyl. Oc and Oyl (the latter now vocalised into Oui, and probably a corruption of Volo) were '-the words expressive of assent, or answering to our Yes, in the two dialects. The French brought over to England by the Normans w^as a form of the Langue d^ Oyl ; and it is out of that dialect chiefly that the present standard French has grown. Its great literary cultivators were the poets known as the Trouveres (from trouver, to find or invent). The poets, again, of the south of France were denominated Troubadours, which is merely the form of the same word proper to the southern dialect, often called the Frovengal tongue, from the poets who com- posed in it in the age of its glory (the twelfth century) having been mostly patronised at the court of the Counts of Provence (first at Aries in that province, afterwards at Toulouse in Languedoc). It still subsists as a living tongue, though in ruins, and degraded to the condition of a patois, or merely rustic and unwritten dialect, or, rather, of a number of such dialects. 24 OUTLIIS^ES OP THE HISTORY OF Although, however, it was the Northern French that was brought over at the Korman Conquest, the Pro- veu9al language and literature were also made familiar in England after another century by the accession to the crown (in 1154) of Henry (Plantagenet), Earl of Anjou, as Henry IL, whose marriage with Eleanor of Poitou had made him master of Poitou and Gruienne in the south-west of France, in addition to Normandy and his paternal domains of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. Several Proven9al compositions are attributed to his son and successor, Hichard the First. THE ENGLISH LA-NGUAGE. 25 VII. It would thus appear that the languages which have been imported into and established in Eng- land by the successive populations that have con- quered or settled in it, and which may each, there- fore, have in a greater or less degree contributed to the formation of its existing language, belong to three several branches of the Indo-European Family ; the Celtic, the Gothic, and the Classical. "What is called the Indo-European family of languages may be conveniently considered as distributed into the following branches : — ■ 1. The Sanscrit, including all the Asiatic tongues which appear to be derived from the Sanscrit, or from the Zend (the language of the ancient Per- sians, or, rather, of the Medes). This is some- times called the Iranian or Arian branch, from Iran, the native name of Persia, of which Aria and Ariana appear to be other forms which came latterly to be commonly applied to particular pro- vinces of the empire. 2. The Celtic. 3. The Classical, comprising the Grreek and the Latin, with their modern derivatives, the Eomance tongues of Italy, Prance, and Spain. 4. The Gothic. 5. The Slavonic, or Sarmatian (under which may be included, not only the languages of the Hussians, Poles, Bohemians, and other proper Slaves, but also the Old Prussian, and the dialects of Lithuania 26 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OE and Courland, wliicli are known by the names of the Lettonian or Lettish, and the Curonian or Livonian) . The term Indo-European has been substituted for Indo- Germonic since it has come to be generally admitted that the Celtic languages belong to this family. It will be seen from what has been stated that in investi- gating the immediate sources of the English tongue we have nothing to do with either the Iranian or the Sarma- tian branch of the Indo-European family. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 27 VIII. But the facts constituting the External or His- torical Evidence that we have regarding the sources of the language leave us nearly altogether uninformed as to the proportionate amount of each of its several probable ingredients, and as to the precise results that have been produced by their intermixture. This we can only learn from the Internal Evidence, or that afforded by the language itself. Wheneyee two or more populations, speaking different languages, are placed alongside of one another, under the same government, there arises a tendency, which, sooner or later, will, to a greater or less extent, become operative, towards the establishment of uniformity of speech. No such tendency arises in the case of contiguous populations living under different governments. The result of such a competition of any two languages will depend partly upon the genius and circumstances of the languages, partly upon those of the populations speaking them. This is, probably, all the length that we can safely go in stating the general law. The languages will be distinguished from each other in respect of their comparative states ot advancement and cultivation, the facility with which they may be acquired (which, again, may vary with the ac- quirers), the degree of tenacity and affection with which they are clung to (depending, it may be, upon their in- herent qualities, it may be upon merely their history and fortunes, or those of the races by whom they are spoken), and the attractions which they hold out, either by their 28 OTJTLTNES Or THE HISTORY OF natural beauty and capabilities, their expressiveness, their convenience or importance politically, commercially, or for general purposes, or the amount and value of their literary stores. The populations speaking them will be distinguished by their comparative numbers, by the po- litical relation in which they stand to each other, by their respective social conditions, and even by the disposition of each, on the one hand to adopt new customs, or on the other to impose its own laws and usages upon its neigh- bours. The result, therefore, it is manifest, may be in- finitely modified, both in itself and in the manner in which it is brought about. The following cases, among others, may be con- sidered : — The retention of their proper language by the Grreeks throughout all the vicissitudes of their history. The establishment of the Latin language in Gaul and several other countries after their conquest by the Eomans. The imposition of their own language by the Turks in those portions of their empire that were earliest wrested from the Christians. The substitution of the Arabic for the old lano:uao:es in Egypt and the other Mahometan countries along the northern coast of Africa. The substitution, after the overthrow of the Eoman empire, in some of its provinces of a Grothic, in others of a semi-G-othic, speech, in place of the Latin. The abandonment of their ancestral languages by the Franks, after their conquest of Gaul ; by the Normans, after their settlement in England ; and by the Manchoos, after their conquest of China. The retention of their ancestral language by the Angles and Saxons after their conquest of Britaiiu THE ElfQLISH LATfGrAGE. 29 When one of two competing languages completely gives way and disappears before the other, that result is always preceded by both languages having been generally spoken for a considerable period by the population that is destined to relinquish its ancestral speech, and by at least one generation of that population having grown up in the knowledge and use of both languages from childhood. It is only a language which it has itself acquired in childhood that one generation will ever transmit to another. But in some cases, when two languages come into com- petition, the one does not retire and altogether disappear before the other, but a combination takes place between them ; or, if one of them acquires the ascendancy, it is still more or less modified by the other. It is probable that some languages are naturally more impressible by a foreign element or influence than others. And the same language will vary in its impressibility at different stages of its growth, or according to the temper or circumstances of the population speaking it. It will also be more apt to be affected by the contact of one foreign language than of another. Most commonly the effect produced by one language upon another is confined to the vocabulary. It is very rarely, if ever, that two distinct grammatical structures become intermixed ; although sometimes, perhaps, a lan- guage may suffer some derangement of its grammar from coming into collision with another language.* * See some good observations upon this subject in tbe late M. Fauriel's "Dante, et les Origines do la Langue et de la Litterature Itallienues " (Paris, 1854) ; torn, ii., pp. 409^ et seq. 30 OUTLINES or THE HISTORY OF IX. The number of words which the English langniage appears to have derived from the Celtic of the original Britons, or their descendants the Welsh, is considerable ; but they are scattered and un- connected, and do not constitute a distinguishable department of its vocabulary. No stream of words has flowed into it from that quarter. There has been no chemical combination of the two lan- guages ; only a mechanical intermixture to a cer- tain extent. The most elaborate investigation that the question of the amount of Celtic in English has received is contained in a paper read before the Philological Society in 1844 by the late Eev. Kichard Garnett, and published in the So- ciety's Proceedings, vol. i. pp. 169 — 180. Mr Garnett enumerates about two hundred English ■words (some of them, however, only provincial) , which he conceives to have been borrowed from the Welsh, and he affirms that twenty times as many might be produced. Among those which he instances are the following : funnel, from ffynel, literally, an air-hole ; garter, from gar tas, a shank tie ; kick, from cic, the foot ; cuts, in the expression " to draw cuts," from cwtws, a lot ; to iced, from gweddu, to yoke; hride, from priawd, meaning one won and possessed. The word leather Mr Garnett gives as an instance of a term which is found in many Teutonic (or Gothic) as well as in all the Celtic dialects, but which there are, neverthe- THE EKGLISH LANGrAGE. 31 less, reasons for believing to be originally Celtic, in whicb class of languages alone its proper or primary meaning is to be detected. Tbe Celtic terra (IJed in "Welsh, and leathan in Gaelic) signifies ^a^ or hroad* * Another of Mr Garnett's instances is the word mutton. This "word we have, doubtless, received immediately from the French mouton, anciently moulton : its termination being the common augmentative one of the modern Italian, in which language the word assumes the form of montone. But its emphatic portion, ?nw^, mont., or moult, is found in all the leading Celtic tongues ; it is mollt in Welsh and Irish, mult in Gaelic, moltz in Cornish, and maut in Armorican. A curious theory with regard to this element has been started by Mr Grant of Corriraony, in his " Thoughts on the Origin and Descent of the Gael," 8vo, Lond. 1827 ; he contends that it is identical with the Latinmz^Z^a, or mulcta, the legal term for a pecuniary penalty, whence we have our E iglish mulct, with the same meaning. There can be little doubt that the c has been inserted only to distinguish the word from the feminine of multiis ; and the common explanations, therefore, connect- ing it either with mulceo or with mulco (founded mainly upon the presence of that letter) may be at once dismissed. If it is to be regarded as identical with the midta of multus, its true signifi- cation is probably numbered or counted; and this view has the advantage of explaining the adjective also. It is nearly that taken by tbe learned Joseph Scaliger, who, in his Commentary on Yarro, makes it an obsolete imperative of the same signification with numera. Varro himself, in his work on the Latin Language (De Lingua Latina, iv. 36), conjectures that it must be an old form of una. On the other hand, the following passages from the Elder Pliny (writing in the first century of our era), and from Aulus Gellius (in the second), seem to lend considerable support to the view taken by Mr Grant : — " Pecunia ipsa apecore appellatur Multatio quoque non nisi ovium boum- que impendio dicebatur : non omittenda priscarum legura benevoleutia ; cautuni quippe est, ne bovem priusquam ovem nominaret qui indiceret multam." — PUn. Nat. His. xviii. 3. " Muita quae appellatur suprema instituta est in singulos duarum ovium, boum triginta ; pro copia scilicet boum, proque ovium penuria Minima multa est avis unius. . . .... Quando igitur nunc quoque a magistratibus populi Eomani more 32 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF Some existing English words are historically recorded to have been originally Celtic. One instance is the word lasket, which is spoken of as having been a British word both by Juvenal {Sat. ccii. 46) and by Martial (Epig. xiv. 99). Its Welsh form is hassgawd, apparently from lasc or lasg, an interweaving or netting. But it may still, perhaps, be questioned whether it was introduced into the English directly from the "Welsh, or through the medium of the Latin. It is argued by Mr. Garnett that the borrowing by the English from the Britons of such words as this, significant of articles or of arts and processes with which they had been previously unacquainted, is a thing in itself likely to have happened. In other cases, he thinks, the new- comers may have been led to adopt a Celtic word now and then from its mere oddity. In illustration of this he quotes the word bother, which is commonly stated to be only another form of pother, no further account being given of either, but which Mr Grarnett holds to be a Celtic term often occurring in the Irish translation of the Scriptures in the sense of "to be grieved or troubled in mind." But it may perhaps be suspected iha,t pother, at any rate, whatever may be the case with hother, is rather majorum multa dicitnr, vel minima vel supreraa, observari solet tit ores genere virili appellentiir. Atque ita M. Varro verba haec legitima, quibus minima multa diceretur, concepit : — 'M. Terentius, quando citatus ncquo respondet neque excusatus est, Ego ei xmum ovetn rmiUam dicoj Ac, nisi eo genere diceretur, ncgaverunt justam videri multam." — Atcl. Gell. Nod. Att. xi. 1. It is remarkable, that, as the penalty designated multa was, it would thus appear, understood by the Romans to be in some way or other, though nobody could tell how, connected not only with a sheep, but specially with a male sheep, so the latter, or more strictly a vervex, or wether, is the kind of sheep which the Celtic terms properly denote. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 33 connected Avitli the German poltern, to make a noise, to bluster, and gepolter, a rumbling noise.* It is to be remembered, in tlie consideration of this question, that, diverse and almost hostile as the Celtic and Gothic forms of speech are, they are still both branches of the same Indo-European family, and that they niust have radically much in common. In the Latin language, too, from which the English has derived so large a portion of its vocabulary in later stages, there are both a Celtic and a Gothic element. A late French writer, Mons. W. E. Edwards, in a work entitled "Eecherches sur les Langues Celtiques," 8vo, Paris, 1844, has (pp. 11 — 13) attempted to show that certain existing peculiarities of English pronunciation are to be attributed to the contact and action of the AYelsh language. The two principal subsisting Celtic languages are the "Welsh and the Irish: the Cornish and the Breton, or Armorican, being subordinate varieties of the former; the Scottish Gaelic and the Manks (or dialect of the Isle of Man), of the latter. * But in Shakespeare we have the -word in a somewhat different form : — " Let the great gods. That keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads, rind out their enemies now." — Lear, Hi. 2. This is the reading of all the Folios. The first Quarto (1608), however, has poicther. 34 OTJTLTXES OF THE HISTOET OF X. There are scarcely to be found any words in our pre- sent English wMch it can be supposed to have in- herited from the Latin spoken by the Eoman co- lonists who had preceded the Angles and Saxons in the dominion, and, to a great extent, in the occupa- tion, of the country. Almost the only words of Latin origin that had established themselves in the lan- guage before the Norman Conquest are a few which it had received from the Roman ecclesiastics, whose visits commenced at the close of the sixth century, or from books. Such Latin ingredient as the English language maj contain, derived from the speech of a portion of the population when the country was a province of the Eo- man empire, has been designated the Latin of ihe First I'eriod. But it can hardly be said to exist. The only fragments or vestiges of it that have been instanced are the caster, cester, chest er, and whatever other variations they may be of the Latin castra (a camp) preserved in such names of places as Lancaster, Manchester, Leicester, &c. ; the coin of Lincoln, and a few other towns, an abridgment or corruption of colonia (a colony) ; and the word street, from stratum or strata. But this last is pro- bably as much a Gothic as a Latin word. AVhat of the Latin language of Britain sur^'ived the imperial dominion would appear to have been preserved only in the Celtic of AVales. But it is still an unsettled question how much of Latin there is in the AYelsh. The Latin ingredient introduced into the English lan- guage by the Eoman churchmen, and by the learniag THE EXGLISn la:n'guage. 35 Trliich tliey imported, has been distinguislied as the Latin of tlie Second Period. Attention was first di- rected to this part of the language by Mr Guest, who, in his "History of English Ehythms" (2 vols. 8to, Lond. 1838, vol. ii. pp. 108, 109), has instanced the fol- lowing Latin words, among others, as found in manu- scripts of a very early date : — JSIynster (from monasteri- um), a minster or monastery; portic (from porticus), a porch; cluster (from claustrum), a cloister ; muniic (from monachus), a monk; lisceop (from episcopus), a bishop; sanct (from sanctus), a saint ; calic (from calix), a chalice ; 'proddician (from, prcedicare), to preach; leon (from leo), the lion; 2^eterselige (from petroselinum), parsley; pipor (from ^9?/:)er), pepper ; &c. Mr Guest observes that the Latin terms introduced into the English at this stage of the language are nearly all concrete terms (or significant of things), whereas those introduced at a later date are mostly alstraci (or signifi- cant of notions). It may be added, that in most of the instances men- tioned above the modern English word is not a modi- fication of the original formation, but a new formation obtained either directly from the Latin or through the medium of the Erench. This is evidently the case with monastery, porch (Fr. porcJie), cloister (old Er. cloistre), saint (Er. saint), preach (Er. precher), lion (Er. lion), parsley (Yv. persil). D 2 36 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEl 07 XI. It has not yet been clearly proved that any con siderable part of the standard form of the English language is, in its origin, Scandinavian as dis- tinguished from Germanic ; though a Scandinavian element appears to be more or less recognisable in some of the. provincial dialects, and farther investi- gation may probably show that its influence has been more extensive than has hitherto been gener- ally supposed. The Gothic branch of the Indo-European Pamily of Languages may be conveniently distributed into the fol- lowing subdivisions : — 1. The Mceso-Grothic (the language spoken by the Goths, who, about A. D. 376, were permitted by the Emperor Yalens to occupy the Lower Moesia, now Bulgaria, near the mouth of the Danube and on the right bank of that river, having previously resided for at least a century on the opposite or northern bank, and having been recently converted to Christianity by IJlphilas, whose translation of part of the New Testament is the only specimen of their language that remains, being, however, the oldest specimen that exists of any Gothic tongue). 2. The Germanic, or Teutonic (the various dialects spoken by the German nations). 3. The Scandinavian (tbe various dialects spoken by the nations settled around the Baltic, or in tbe countries included by the ancients under tbe some- what vague appellation of Scandinavia, and now known as ISTorway, Sweden, and Denmark). THE EXQLIStt LAKGUAGE. 37 Of these subdivisions the second, or Germanic, fur- tlier separates into the High Grermanic and the Low Grer- manic (meaning the dialects or languages respectively of Southern and of Northern Germany, of which the former is a comparatively elevated, the latter a low-lying, region). The principal, or what may be called the representative, High Germanic language is what is commonly known as the German, and is called by the Germans themselves the Hoch Deufsch, which used to be Englished High Dutch. The chief exclusively Low Germanic tongue is that of Holland, to which the term Dutch has now come in this country to be restricted, and of which it is sig- nificant without any distinctive epithet. Ancient Ger- many, it is to be remembered, included the countries now known as Holland and the Netherlands. The principal existing Scandinavian dialects, again, are the Icelandic, the Danish and Norwegian (which are nearly the same), the Perroic, and the Swedish. The Icelandic, which is regarded as the standard Scandina- vian tongue, is often called the Old Danish, or Norse ; and the latter term is sometimes used, in a larger accept- ation, to include all the Scandinavian dialects. The substance of the above statement may be thus exhibited in a tabular form : — GOTHIO. MCESO-GOTHIC. 1 Germanic. 1 Scandinavian. High Ge 1 KMANIC Low Ge -1 RMANIC. / Icelandic. \ Danish or Nor German, &c. ' Dutc 1, &C. I wec^ian. 1 Ferroic. V Swedish. Of the Gothic invaders and conquerors of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Saxons may be admitted 38 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OP to have come, apparently, rather from LoAver Germany than from Scandinavia. But the Continental localities assigned in the received account to the Jutes and the Angles would make them both to have been Scandinavian, at least according to modern notions. The subject, how- ever, is surrounded with obscurity. It is questioned, as we have seen, whether there were any Jutes among the invaders. Beda's account even of the quarter whence the Angles came is disputed. Little or nothing can be gathered from the manner in which they are mentioned either by Tacitus or by Ptolemy. Finally, we do not know that the languages .of the Germanic and those of the Scandina\dan stock were so widely distinguished at this date as they now are. The probability is, however, that there was a dialectic difference between the speech proper to the Saxons, distinc- tively so called, and that of the Angles, and also that the latter at least approximated more than the former to that of the Danes. The two facts from which these inferences may be drawn are ; — the first, that certain peculiarities of a Scandinavian character are to be found in the Anglian, even of a date anterior to the first Danish occupation of a part of England in the latter half of the ninth century ; the second, that the Scandinavian dialect imported by the Danish settlers and the Anglian, although it is un- questionable that they differed considerably, yet, if they were not from the first mutually intelligible, appear to have coalesced and melted into one language with much more facility than they would have done if there had not been also a near natural relationship between them. The differences between the Anglian and the standard form of the language spoken or written in England, and the traces of Scandinavianism to be found in the former and in the provincial dialects descended from it, have THE EXGLISH LANGUAGE. 39 been expoimded by Mr Kemble and by Mr Garnett in several papers read before tbe Philological Society in 1844 and 1845, and printed in the second volmne of the Society's Proceedings. Although the Grothic conquerors of Britain were col- lectively called Saxons by the Celts whom they dispos- sessed (that having been the name by which the latter had been accustomed to know the persevering enemies from the opposite continent by w^hom their coasts had been so long assailed), they and their language were com- monly called English, that is, Anglian, by themselves, and the country England, or* the land of the Angles. This, it has been argued, would seem to indicate that the said language was probably first employed in literature, not by the Saxons Proper of the south, but by the An- gles of the north. Even the political supremacy which was at last acquired by the former never was able to ob- literate the appellations bestowed upon the nation and upon the language by or with reference to the latter, any more than the .anguage spoken by the Eomans ever ceased to be called Latin, either by themselves or others. The head district of the Angles, as distinct from the Saxons, in Britain was the Kingdom of Northumbria, which in its full extent stretched from the Humber to the Prith of Perth, and included the modern counties of Northumberland, Durham, and York, with at least the eastern parts of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire, besides all the south-east of Scotland. Bat East Anglia, comprehending modern jSTorfolk and Suffolk, with Cambridgeshire and a part of Bedfordshire, was also, as its name implies, an Anglian kingdom. So was Mercia in the main. Now these parts of the island, which had been taken possession of by the Angles in the sixth century, were also those that fell under the power of the 40 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF Danisli invaders of the nintli century, and in whicli they settled in considerable numbers. The Danelagh, as the range of country in question came to be called from the time of Gruthrun's treaty with Alfred the Great (in 878), appears to have comprehended all East Anglia and the greater portion of Mercia and ISTorthumbria. The remarkable circumstance of the Danes havins; thus seated themselves exclusively in the Anglian districts cannot but awaken a suspicion that they found in the Angles a race more nearly related to themselves in blood and in lan- guage than the Saxons were. Specimens of the Anglian dialect of Northumbria have come down to us, extending certainly from the close, possibly from the commencement, of the seventh century to the latter part of the tenth, and therefore embracing a considerable period both before and after the Danish invasion. Mr Kemble arranges them in three classes : the first, consisting of a few inscriptions upon stones, mostly in runic characters, and of " imcertain, but pro- bably very great, antiquity;" the second, consisting of proper names found upon coins ; the third and most im- portant, of literary compositions. Of these last the prin- cipal are, a translation of the Psalms in one of the Cotton Manuscripts, which has been conjectured to be possibly as old as the beginning of the seventh century ; a frag- ment of verse attributed to the poet Caedmon, which, if it be genuine, must be of the latter half of that century ; a hymn composed on his death-bed by Beda, who died in the year 735 ; and two works which appear to belong to the latter part of tlie tenth century, the one knoAvn as the Durham Ritual, the other a Oloss, or literal interlined translation, of the Latin Gospels, in what is called St CtctJ/herfs or the Durham Boole. This succession of specimens of the Anglian dialect, THE EIS'GLTSH LAKGrAGE. 41 examined in clironological order, appears to afford evidence that the dialect, after the Danish occupation, gradually underwent certain changes which would be accounted for by the supposition of its having been subjected to the action of a Scandinavian element or influence. The most remarkable of these changes is that of the proper termination of the infinitive an into the old Norse termination a. The form a, or cb, appears in two or three instances in one of the stone inscriptions, that on the Euthwell Cross, which Mr Kemble, by whom it was first deciphered and explained, conjectures to be probably of the ninth century ; but in the Durham Bitual and in >S'^ Cuthherfs Booh, which are both of the latter part of the tenth century, the new infinitive in a is used in all verbs, with the exception only of the substantive verb, hian, to be. INIr Grarnett further adduces, in support of this theory of the gradually increased Scandinavianisation of the Anirlian dialect under the contacjion of that of the Danish settlers, the evidence afforded by certain specimens of the jS'orthumbrian English of the fourteenth century, and also various peculiar forms and vocables still retained in the speech of the northern counties. The topographical nomenclature of the country occupied by the Danes is to this day partially Scandinavian. It is known historically, indeed, that they gave their present names to the towns of Derby and Whitby, the terminat- ing syllable of which is the Norse form of the word for a town (otherwise wic, or wicli, as in many English names, or vie, as in the Latin vic-us), and the same which makes part of the compound hye-laws (properly the laws of the town as distinguished from the general laws of the realm). In the twelfth century Griraldus Cambrensis, and in the thirteenth John of Wallingford, speak of both the 42 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF population and the language of tlie northern parts ol Eno-land as still bearins: manifest traces of a Danish orifrin. And in the middle of the fourteenth century Hio-den, after having: mentioned the mixture of the oriorinal Eno-lish, first with the Danes, and then with the Xormans, adds, that the whole speech of the Northumbrians, espe- cially in Yorkshire, was so harsh and rude that the south- ern men, of whom he himself was one, could hardly under- stand it. It is generally admitted that, whatever may be the case with the standard English, several of its provincial dialects still exhibit more or less of a Danish or Scandi- navian element. Dr Latham {English Language, third edit. pp. 551, &c.), while he regards the Lowland Scotch as being " probably more Danish than any South British dialect," describes the Danish admixture as very great in the dialect of Northumberland, as considerable in the dialects of the North and part of the West Eiding of Yorkshire, at its minimum in those of Shropshire, Stafford- shire, and West Derbyshire ; the language of Lincolnshire he characterises as only " not Danish in proportion to the other signs of Scandinavian intermixture to be found in the district, such as the prevalence of the Danish termin- ation hy in the names of towns, the Danish traditions, and the Danish physiognomy of the people ; " and the language of the old metrical romance of " Havelok the Dane," the subject of which is a Lincolnshii-e tradition, he declares to be " preeminently Danish." Mr Gruest, nevertheless {English Rhythms, ii. 186 — 207), finds traces of Danish " neither in our MSS. nor in our dialects." He admits, indeed, that there may possibly be something of the kind in the language of certain parts of the British islands which were " wholly peopled with "Pforthmeu — as the Orkneys, Caithness, and much of the THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 43 eastern coast north of Eorth;" but, as for the vestiges of Dano-English commonly produced, he observes that " these may be found in districts where the Northman never settled, and are missing from counties where he certainly did ; " and he argues that the peculiarities which have always distinguished northern from southern English are to be sufficiently accounted for by the fact of the Angles having, before they left the continent, been the neighbours of the Danes. At the same time he holds that the language brought over by the Danes who settled in the country in the ninth century cannot have differed very much from English — that it must have been " little more than an English dialect." But is this likely after a separation of more than three centuries, even if the two languages had been previously ever so nearly related ? In an article on the " Saxon Language and Literature " in the Penny Cyclopcsdia (published in 1841), Mr Guest refers to the Gloss in St. Cuthhert's Book and to the Durham Ritual as furnishing the strongest of all the argu- ments against the supposed influence of the language of the Danish settlers, inasmuch, he observes, as we have all the peculiarities of the northern dialect in every page of the Gloss, and in many parts of the Bitiial, although both were written before the Danish settlement took place. But, as we have seen, so far is this last assumption from being established that the Gloss and the Ritual are both assigned by others to the latter part of the tenth century. This is the judgment, not only of Mr Grarnett and Mr Kemble, but also, at least as to the Ritual, of Dr Latham {English Language, 549). Nor is the Ritual assigned by its editor (Mr Stevenson), as Mr Gruest supposes, to the early part of the ninth century ; Mr Stevenson only ex- presses an opinion that no part of the writing can be older than the commencement of that century. The Gloss^ 4f4i OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF again, is declared in a memorandum on the MS. to have been made for a Bishop Aelfsig, who was probably either Aelfsig Bishop of "Winchester from a.d. 951 to 958, or Aelfsig Bishop of Chester-le-street from 968 to 990. " The Sea^e;' says Mr Guest {English Bhjthns, ii. 190), " came from the south-western corner of the ancient Ongle, and were parted only by the Elbe from the Nether- landish races ; while the Engle, who landed at Bam- borough, came from the north-eastern coast, and were neighbours to the Dane." And to this statement he appends the following note : — " There is reason to believe that this word Sexe meant nothing more than Seamen, and that it was first given to such of the Eiigle as made piracy their trade. But after the Sexe settled in Britain, though, as it would seem, they sometimes called their speech JEnglisJi, their new country Engleland, and them- selves the Engle-Jcin, yet they were, for the most part, distinguished from the Engle of the north — the phrase Engle and Sexe being made use of when thewTiter would include the entire English population of the island. That the Sexe ivere a tribe of Engle, I think there can be little doubt. Everything tends to show, that at the beginning of the fifth century there were oiAj four great Grothic races in the north of Europe — the Sweon, the Bene, the Engle, and the Swefe.'" The Sweon are the Siiiones of Tacitus, supposed to have given its name to Sweden ; the Swefe are the Suevi of the ancients, held to be the same with the modern Suabians. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 45 XII. The foreie^n element wMch has mingled to by far the largest extent with the original substance of the English language is that peculiar modification of the Latin which grew up in the northern part of what was once the Roman province of Gaul, and which now forms the classical French. Theee was a good deal of intercourse between Eng- land and IS^ormandy in the reign of the last of the so- called Saxon kings, Edward styled the Confessor, who, when he came to the throne in the year 10J:2, was nearly forty years of age, and had resided ever since his boy- hood at the Korman court ; for the Dukes of ]S'ormandy were his nearest relations, he and the father of AYilliam the Conqueror being cousins-german. He was, therefore, notwithstanding his birth and descent by the father's side, much more a Frenchman than an Englishman ; and we are told that he gave great offence to his subjects by the preference which he showed for the language of France, as well as by the number of ecclesiastics and others whom he drew over out of that country, and ap- pointed to offices and livings in England. But what planted the French language in England was, as has been already observed, the acquisition of the do- minion of the country by William Duke of Normandy in the memorable year 1066. There is no probability in the assertion which has often been made that the Conqueror sought to extirpate the Eng- lish language, and to substitute the French in its place. He was incapable of entertaining a project so palpably im- 46 OUTLI>'ES OF THE HISTOET Or practicable. So far, in fact, Tvas lie from cherishing any dislike to the language of his new subjects that he is re- corded to have at first applied himself vigorously to learn English, till more pressing occupations compelled him to give up the attempt. He probably found that to conquer the language was harder work than to conquer the country at the age at Avhich he had arrived ; for he was about forty when he became king. Among the consequences, however, of the great revolu- tion that had taken place, were the following : — 1. A French-speaking royal family was placed upon the throne, surrounded, of course, by a French-speaking court. Even when the male line of the Conqueror died out, it was succeeded by another, that of the Plantagenets of Anjou, which was also French. It is known, in fact, that French continued to be the lanoTiao:e in common use with every English king from the Conqueror down to Kichard the Second inclusive, or to the end of the four- teenth century ; it is not known that, with the exception, perhaps, of Eichard the Second, any one of them ever did or could speak English. 2. A very great number of jS'ormans, all speaking French, were brought over and settled in the kingdom. There were the military forces, by which the conquest was achieved and maintained, both those in command and the private soldiers ; there was a vast body of churchmen, spread over the land, and occupying eventually every ecclesiastical office in it, from the primacy down to that of the humblest parish or chapel priest, besides half filling, probably, all the monastic establishments ; there were all the officers of state and inferior civil functionaries down to nearly the lowest grade; finally,there were, with few excep- tions, all the landholders, great and small, throughout the kingdom. The members of all these classes and their fami- THE E:NGLISn LA^'GI:AGE. 47 lies must have been at first entirely ignorant of English, and they and their descendants would naturally continue for a longer or shorter time to use only the language of their ancestors. 3. Although it may be inferred from the expressions of Ordericus Yitalis, a contemporary chronicler, that at first causes at law were pleaded in English even before the Conqueror himself, — for it was specially in order to be able to understand the pleadings wdthout the inter- vention of an interpreter that William, according to that writer, set himself to study the language, — it would yet appear that Erench soon came to be exclusively the language of oral pleadings, at least in all the superioi courts. It could not well be otherwise, while the judges in those courts were all Normans. No law or express ordinance introducing such a practice is upon record; but there is an act of the legislature, as we shall presently find, which distinctlv attests the fact of its existence. Neither laws nor deeds, however, were ever drawn up in Erench till more than a century and a half after the Con- quest ; all the new laws that were promulgated were in Latin till after the accession of Edward the Eirst (in 1272), when they began to be sometimes in Latin, sometimes in Erench. Even the judgments or deci- sions of the courts in which the pleadings were in Erench were not always enrolled in that language, but often in Latin. And the charters granted by the Norman kings were frequently in English down to the accession of Henry the Second (in 1154), when Latin was substituted, which had been the language uniformly employed for the same purpose by the old kings down to the time of Alfred the Great. (See Palgrave's Rise and Progress of the ]£nglish Cominonicealtli, i. 56 ; or J^reface to E-ecord Commission edition of the Statutes of 48 OUTLI^'ES OF THE HISTOEY OF the Realm; or Luders's Tracts^ 8vo, Baih^ 1810, Trad Sixth.) The results were : — 1. That, Latin continuing to he as heretofore the language in which all learned works were written, in popular and fashionahle literature the native language of the country was completely supplanted by the foreign tongue which the Normans had imported. 2. That French came to be for a time understood and spoken extensively even by the population of English blood. Robert Holcot, writing in the beginning of the four- teenth century, informs us that there was no English taught in the schools of his time, but that the first lan- guage children learned was the French, and that through the medium of that when they w^ent to school they were afterwards taught Latin. This practice, he says, was introduced at the Conquest, and had continued ever since. The teachers, in fact, who were all churchmen, were most of them foreigners, and altogether, or nearly altogether, unacquainted with English. Holcot' s state- ment is repeated by Ealph Higden about the middle of the same century, with some additional particulars.* * See tke passage from Higden, as translated by Trevisa, in the Ai^pendix, THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 49 XIII. In the new circumstances, political and social, in which England was placed by the ITorman Con- quest, the old literary language of the country perished with the peculiar civilisation of which it formed a part, somewhat as did the classical Latin after the overthrow of the Western empire ; but more rapidly, in consequence of the important ad- ditional disadvantage of having to encounter the rivalry of a new civilisation, and of another tongue also beginning to be employed in literature. Ceas- ing to be read or patronised, it ceased to be written; and, no longer written, it soon came to be no longer understood. But there was still left in use as the common or vernacular tongue a species or form of English, differing from the English that was written before the Conquest chiefly by its comparative want or neglect of inflections ; and this became the germ of our modern national speech, or at least of so much of it as is of native origin. The only considerable composition in the original form of the English language that is known to have been written after the Norman Conquest is the portion of the National (or so called Saxon) Chronicle, extending from that event to the death of King Stephen (in 1154). Eefore the latter date this Original English had apparently begun to be looked upon as a dead language, and to be only studied as such by a few antiquaries, like the Latin chroniclers Elorence of Worcester and Henry of Hunting- don. It is commonly designated Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon. 50 OTJTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF The term Anglo-Saxon, wlietlier as applied to tlie lan- guage or to the people by whom it was spoken, must be understood to mean properly Saxon of England as dis- tinguished from Saxon of the Continent ; just as Anglo- Norman means N'orman of England, as distinguished from Norman of the Continent. It is a compound formed on the principle of assuming Saxon as the name of the people and of the language, and England as that of the country. The Anglo-Saxon is merely one dialect of Saxon, as the Continental or Old Saxon is another. It cannot mean, as is sometimes supposed, the language of the An- gles and Saxons.^ Tlie following are some of the principal grammatical peculiarities in which the Original English (or Anglo- Saxon) differs from what is now called English : — The nouns, both substantive and adjective, are of three genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter. * Our ancestors, by whom tMs language was spoken, usually called their country England [Enqla-land or Anglia), and themselves and their language English. These are the terms commonly used in the Chronicle, Beda entitles his Latin History Historia Ge^itis Anglorum Ecclesiastica, and, in enumerating the languages spoken in Britain, he designates that of the Angles and Saxons generally as lingua Anglo- rum. Sometimes, however, he has Angli sive Saxones, and Atiglica sive Saxonica (lingua). The Latin chroniclers after the Conquest, meaning by the English the then mixed population and language, com- monly take advantage of the term Saxon to distinguish the people and the language before that revolution. It may be doubted, perhaps, in what sense exactly we are to imderstand the Angidsaxones of Asser, the biographer of Alfred the Great, before the Conquest, and the An- gulsaxones, Angli- Saxones, and Ayiglo- Saxones oi Florence of Worces- ter after it, — whether, that is to say, as meaning the Saxons of England or the Angles and Saxons ; but in modern philology,' at any rate, by Anglo-Saxon Ave can only be understood to mean, as has been said the Saxon (or English) of England as distinguished from the Old Saxnn of the Continent. THE ETfGLISn LAIs'GTJAGE. 51 The cases are formed by variations of the termination, the terminations being : — Sing. Norn «, e, u, otv, or a consonant. Ace e, u, ow, or a consonant. Dat. & A.bl. a, e, or a consonant (commonly an or uni). Gen a, e, or a consonant (commonly es or an). Plur. jSTom a, e, u, or a consonant (commonly an or as). Xl-VV* • • • • always the same mth the jS'om. Dat.&Abl. always urn. Gen generally a, ena, or o^a, some- times u. The definite article se, seo, thaef, is also nsed both as the demonstrative and as the relative pronoun. And the relative pronoun is often expressed by the indeclinable the, which has now come to be used as the definite article. The indefinite article was sometimes expressed by sum (our modern some), and often (as in Greek or Latin) was not expressed at all. The personal pronouns, — Ic {I), tliu (tliou), lie, lieo, hit (he, she, it), — as well as the possessive and interroga- tive pronouns, are also all declined. He and hit make his in the genitive sing. ; heo makes hire : whence evi- dently our his (down to a comparatively recent date used also as the genitive of the neuter, where we now say its) and he)\ Our their appears to be the gen. plur. 7^^Va (common to all the genders) ; as our thei/ is the nom. plur. hi. Him, again, is the original dat. sing. masc. and neut., and dat. plur. in all the genders. In the Original English verb, the infinitive ends in a7i ; the present participle in ende, the past participle in od, or E 2 52 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF ed, or d. The prefix ge is found with all parts of the >erb, but most commonly with the parts expressing past time. In the present indicative the termination of the 2d pers. sing, is ast or st., that of the 3d pers. atli or tli ; that of the plural persons atli. The terminations of the singular persons of the past tense are in the indicative, de^ dest, de ; in the subjunctive, de throughout ; so that both tenses are completely distinguished from the past participle passive. The plural persons in both tenses aL end in don. The written form of our earliest English, it thus appears, is, like the Greek or the Latin, what may be called an in- flectional language. But we do not know that this was the only form of the language in use even before the Con- quest. In any country, the standard or literary language of which is highly inflectional, it would seem to be only what might be looked for, that there should exist also an oral dialect of a less artificial character and looser texture ; for it is found that, whatever may be the advantages of a certain kind which an elaborate system of inflection gives to a language, all the ordinary purposes of communication can be sufficiently attained with very little inflection, or even with none at all. It is remarkable that the lano:ua2:e which is, perhaps, the oldest in the world, the Chinese, is also the least inflected. It is generally held, indeed, that the Chinese has probably never passed through or reached the inflected stage. But still the fact of its actual con- dition might awaken a suspicion that, perhaps, the latest stage of language may consist in its complete emancipa- tion from inflection and the shackles of grammar. Here, as in other cases, the simplest form of the instrument may be found to be the most perfect. It does not appear that the Chinese language is found by those to whom it THE ENGLISH LAIS^GFAGE. 53 is native to be, in consequence of its scanty or no gram. mar, deficient either in distinctness or even in rhetorica. and poetical expressiveness. A few particles and other auxiliary or connecting words are stated to have made their way into the modern form of the language ; but it does not appear to have acquired anything of inflection properly so called. Indeed, the acquisition or growth of inflection by a language is probably unknown as an actual phenomenon. It has been conjectured that the Italian language, or soni^thing not very unlike the modern Italian, may have been a spoken dialect among the ancient Eomans. It is possible that in the same manner each of the other Iseo- Latin tongues, as they are called, may have sprung up and acquired in great part its peculiar form before the AVestern Empire was overthrown, and its provinces over- run, or at least taken possession of, by the northern bar- barians. What is called the Eomaic, or modern Greek, may be substantially a popular idiom of ancient times. The great literary language of India, the Sanscrit, has its less elaborately artificial form, the Pracrit. So may there have been, even in the best days of the written or classical Anglo-Saxon, or Original English, a spoken dialect of the language which was comparatively uninflectional ; and this, preserved on the lips of the people, may have sur- vived the Norman Conquest, when the literary language sunk before its foreign rival. But if, as is commonly assumed, the irregular English, or Semi- Saxon, as it is commonly called, which we find to have been in use after the Conquest was a new form of speech, which had in some way or other been produced by that catastrophe, — was, in other words, the old na- tional language in ruins, — it may be held as certain that 54 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF it was not througli any direct action of the Frencli lan- guage upon it, as used to be the received explanation, that the corruption of the Original English was brought about. There is not a trace of Trench to be found in the supposed new dialect. Nor would an intermixture of Trench have produced the peculiar change which dis- tinguishes that dialect from the old regular English, or Saxon. It has been urged, moreover, that such a change, con- sisting in the breaking up of the inflectional system of the language, if it cannot be affirmed to have taken place in conformity with a tendency inherent in all languages, is at least only what has happened, in a greater or less degree, to every other language of the stock to which the Original English belongs. The first English writer by whom attention was called to this last consideration was probably the late Dr Alexander Murra}^, who died in 1813, though his History of European Languages was not given to the world till 1823. He there observes (i. 21), speaking of the change which the English language is supposed to have undergone in the period immediately subsequent to the Conquest: — "A similar process was observable, at the same time, in the kindred dialects of Holland and Germany, though exposed to no external violence These continental tongues insensibly lost the greater part of the inflections which they inherited from antiquity." But the fullest and most distinct state- ment upon the whole question is that of the late ]\Ir Price, in the Preface to his edition of Warton's History of English Eoetry (1824, p. 109) :— " An influx of foreign- ers, or a constant intercourse with and dependence upon them, may corrupt the idiom of a dialect to a limited ex- tent, or charge it with a large accumulation of exotic THE ENGLISH LANGrAGE. 55 terms, but this change in the external relation of the people speaking the dialect will neither confound the original elements of which it is composed nor destroy the previous character of its grammar. The lingua franca, as it is called, of the shores washed by the Mediterranean Sea contains an admixture of words requiring all the powers of an erudite linguist to trace the several ingredi- ents to their parent sources ; yet, with all the corruptions and innovations to which this oddly assorted dialect has been subjected, it invariably acknowledges the laws of Italian grammar. A similar inundation of foreign terms is to be found in the German writers of the seventeenth century, where the mass of Latin, Greek; and French ex- pressions almost exceeds the number of vernacular words ; yet here again the stranger matter has been made to accommodate itself to the same inflections and modal changes as those which govern the native stock That some change had taken place in the style of com- position and general structure of the language since the days of Alfred, is a matter beyond dispute; but that these mutations were a consequence of the Norman in- vasion, or were even accelerated by that event, is wholly incapable of proof; and nothing is supported upon a firmer principle of rational induction than that the same efl'ects would have ensued if "William and his followers had remained in their native soil. The substance of the change is admitted on all hands to consist in the sup- pression of those grammatical intricacies occasioned by the inflection of nouns, the seemingly arbitrary distinc- tions of gender, the government of prepositions, &c. How far this may be considered as the result of an innate law of the language, or some general law in the organisa- tion of those who spoke it, we may leave for the present oG OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OP undecided ; but that it was in no way dependent upon external circumstances is established by this undeniable fact, — that every branch of the Low Grerman stock, from whence the Anglo-Saxon sprang, displays the same simpli- fication of its grammar. In all these languages there has been a constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinc- tions, and detect as it were a royal road to the inter- change of opinion." The assumption here proceeded upon with regard to the simplification of their grammatical structure under- gone by all the languages of the Low Germanic stock has been extended by more recent T^Titers to the Scan- dinavian languages of Denmark and Sweden; so that, whether the English is to be regarded as belonging ex- clusively to the Low Gi-ermanic or partially to the Scan- dinavian stock, its transition from an inflected to a comparatively uninflected condition would be accounted for upon this theory by a tendency probably inherent in its constitution. Mr Gruest, making no distinction here between what are commonly called the stages of Semi-Saxon and of Old or Early English, offers the following explanation of the way in which he conceives the transformation of the lan- guage to have been brought about {Eng. Bhythms, ii. 105, &c.) : — " The causes which in the twelfth century gave birth to the Old English worked nearly at the same time a like change in aU the kindred dialects, save the most northerly, which, safe from their influence amid the snows of Iceland and of Sweden, long retained (and in- deed still retain) many of the earliest features of our language. . . A difference is always to be found between THE ENGLISH LATv'GTJAGE. 57 tlie written and tlie spoken language of a people. The look, tlie tone, the action, are means of expression which the speaker may employ, and the writer cannot ; to make himself understood, the latter must use language more precise and definite than the former. There is also another reason for this difference. AVhen a lanfruase has no written literature, it is ever subject to a change of pronunciation ; and so determinate is the direction of these changes, that it may be marked out between limits much narrower than any one has yet ventured to lay down. But with a written literature a new element enters into the calculation. A standard for composition now exists, Avhich the writer will naturally prefer to the varying dialect of the people, and, as far as he safely may, will do his best to follow. In this way the written and the spoken languages will act and react upon each other ; and it must depend upon the value of the litera- ture and the reading habits of the people, which of them shall at last prevail. . . The language of our earlier litera- ture fell at last a victim, not to the Norman Conquest, for it survived that event at least a century — not to the foreign jargon which the weak but well-meaning Edward first brought into the country, for French did not mix with our language till the days of Chaucer ; — it fell before the same deep and mighty influences which swept every living language from the literature of Europe. AVhen the South regained its ascendancy, and Eome once more seized the wealth of vassal provinces, its lavourite priests had neither the knowledge requisite to understand, nor tastes fitted to enjoy, the literature of the countries into which they were promoted. The road to their favour and their patronage lay elsewhere ; and the monk giving up his mother tongue as worthless, began to pride himsell only upon his Latinity. The legends of his patron saint 58 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF he Latinized, the story of his monastery he Latinized ; in Latin he wrote history, in Latin he wrote satires and ro- mances. Amid these labours he had little time to study the niceties of Anglo-Saxon grammar ; and the Homilies, the English Scriptures, Caedmon's paraphrase, the na- tional songs, the magnificent Judith, and other treasures of native genius, must soon have lain on the shelves of his cloister as httle read, or, if read, almost as little under- stood, as if they had been written in a foreign tongue. "When he addressed himself to the unlearned, noble or ignoble, he used the vulgar dialect of his shire, with its idioms, which the written dialect had probably rejected as wanting in precision, and with its corrupt pronunciation, which alone would require new forms of grammar. In this way many specimens of our old English dialects have been handed down to us ; and these, however widely they differ from each other, agree in one particular, — in con- founding the characteristic endings of the Anglo-Saxon.'* This last statement is explained by a preceding para- graph : — " The Anglo-Saxons had three vowel-endings, a, 6, and u, to distinguish the cases of the noun and the dif- ferent conjugations of the verb. In the Old English all these vowel-endings were represented by the final e ; and the loss of the final e is the characteristic mark of our modern dialect. It is obvious that either of these changes must have brought with it a new language. The confu- sion of the vowels, or the loss of the final e, was a con- founding of tense and person, of case and number ; in short, of those grammatical forms to which language owes its precision and its clearness. Other forms were to be sought for, before our tongue could again serve the pur- poses of science or of literature." Mr Guest's solution of the case would, therefore, ap- pear to be, that what brought about the corruption of the THE ENGLISK LANGUAGE. 59 classic Original English (or Saxon) was simply tlie neglect of that language on the part of the Eomish Churchmen, and the preference they were led to give, for literary pur- poses, to the Latin. But how was it that this cause did not begin to operate til] the twelfth century ? In Eng- land, as elsewhere, Latin had been the professional lan- guage of the clergy from the first introduction of Christi- anity, and had been all along the language in which they usually wrote : witness Beda, Nennius, Asser, and others who lived before the Conquest. Why did not the cor- ruption of the regular into the irregular English, if this was the sole cause of it, take place in the eighth or ninth century ? "We venture to think that our recent philology has gone much too far in denying all connexion between the breaking up of the inflectional system of the native lan- guage and the Norman Conquest. The view which formerly prevailed was erroneous in regard to the modus operandi, or manner in which it was supposed that the effect was produced ; it must be admitted that it was not by the Conquest letting in a new language to de- stroy the purity of the old one by intermixing with it, or to drench it and dissolve its cohesion like an inundation. But that it was really this great political and social revolution which occasioned, though in an- other way, the extinction, or disuse as a living tongue, of the ancient language of the country in the form in which we have it preserved in the literary wotks and other writings that have come down to us from the times before the Conquest, seems too evident to admit of being seriously questioned. The facts are only to be explained upon that assumption. There is no similarity between this case and that of the other G-ermanic and Scandinavian languages which are asserted to have passed GO OUTLINES or THE HISTORY OF from a highly inflected to a comparatively tminflected state ; even if it could be admitted to have been clearly shown that the dissolution or derangement of the original inflectional structure of the other Low Grermanic and Scandinavian tongues which have been referred to had been always a purely spontaneous process. The peculi- arity of the case of the English is, that it had been highly cultivated and largely employed as a literary language. It may be safely affirmed that no instance can be produced of a language so circumstanced which can be shown to have undergone anything like the same complete and rapid disintegration or metamorphosis except under the operation of external causes. Although the principle of change is continually at work in language, as in everj^thing else that is not absolutely dead (as if movement and life were one), its action is always extremely gradual and slow where it has to contend with the conservative force of a living literature. The Latin language preserved its gram- matical structure in complete integrity so long as it con- tinued to be employed as the literary language of the West ; the Greek did the same for a thousand years longer, while it occupied a similar position in the East ; and there seems to be no reason for thinking that either might not have done so to the present day. It was evidently only the overthrow of the AVestern Eoman empire and of western civilisation that occasioned the extinction of the old grammatical Latin as a living language ; and the destruction of the Christian civilisation of the East Avhen Constantinople was conquered and taken possession of by the Turks that brought the old Greek in like manner to an end. The stream of the Latin literature, in the one case, after having flowed on for some eight centuries from the date of the poets Livius Androiiicus and Cneius Kaevius, ceased with Boethius and Cassiodorus : that of THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 61 the Grreek, in the other, was as suddenly arrested after an existence three times as long. And, in both cases, with the literature the literary language expired. Precisely in the same circumstances and in the same way the old grammatical English appears to have passed out of exist- ence or use. The Conquest of England by the Normans over- threw the peculiar civilisation of which it was at once the creation and the exponent, and the entire social system and condition of things to which it addressed itself and by which it was fed and sustained ; after the Conquest there was no demand for any literature written in the old language, or any public to read it, any more than there remained any public in Italy after the middle of the sixth century sufficiently educated to appreciate works written in good Latin and to stimidate their production, or any educated and wealthy Greek public in Eastern Europe after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. In all the three cases we have exactly the same sequence of events, the same chain of causes and consequences : — first, the overthrow of the old social system ; next, the cessation of the literature, which was part and parcel of the abolished condition of society and of ci\dlisation ; lastly, the breaking up of the language, which had hitherto been preserved from that fate only by its constant em- ployment in literature. If even so slightly inflected a language as our present English were to cease to be written and to be read, how long would it continue to be correctly spoken ? Hardly for a generation probably. "The birth of a new language," Mr Bunsen well ob- serves, "presupposes the death of an old one. No language dies without a great crisis occurring in the tribe or nation which speaks it. This crisis may be a great physical revoUitioUj or a volimtary change of country by emigra- 62 OUTLIKES OF THE HISTOET OF tion, or a dissolution of the ancient form of political society by external human force, by invasion, conquest, subjugation. A new language and a new nation are so far identical, that a new language cannot originate with- out the dissolution of an ancient nationality " {^Christianity and Mankind, iv. 93). THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 63 XIV. In reference to the progress of the vernacular language, the space from about the middle of the Eleventh to the middle of the Thirteenth century, or the first two centuries after the Conquest, has been designated the Period of Semi-Saxon. In the popular dialect of this period we have a work of considerable length in verse, the Chronicle of Layamon. Latamo^^'s -work has been edited by Sir Trederic IMadden, under the title of " Layamon's Brut, or Chro- nicle of Britain ; a poetical Semi-Saxon Paraphrase of the Brut of "VYace," with a literal translation, notes, and a glossary, in 3 yds. royal 8vo, Loudon, 1847. AYaee was a Xorman poet, whose metrical chronicle of Britain, called Brut cV AngJeterre, was written about the middle of the twelfth century. Layamon, who calls himself a priest of Ernleye upon Severn, that is, of Areley-Eegis, near Stourport, in Worcestershire (as first pointed out by Mr Guest in Fenny Cyclopcedia, xx. 488), otherwise called Lower Areley, appears to have written in the latter part of the same century, or in the first half of the second century after the Conquest. Sir Frederic Madden thinks that his work, which extends to above fourteen thousand long verses (di\dded by Sir Frederic into double that number of hemistichs), was probably completed about a.d. 1200. The views that have been taken of his language, even by the most competent among recent authorities, are not 04 OUTLINES OP THE HISTOEY OP altogetlier accordant. Mr Price {Preface to Warton, 109), commenting upon a remark of Mr Mitford (in his Harmony of Language) ,t\idit it "displays all the appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of those who spoke it," affirms that, so far from this being the case, " nearly every important form of Anglo-Saxon grammar is rigidly adhered to ; and so little was the language altered at this advanced period of Norman in- fluence, that a few slight alterations might convert it into genuine Anglo-Saxon." Mr Guest {Eng. Bhythms, ii. Hi, &c.), having observed that one of the most striking peculiarities of Layamon's language is its nunnation (from iV^i^?^, the name of the letter n in Hebrew), proceeds; — " Many words end in w, which are strangers to that letter, not only in the Anglo-Saxon, but in all the later dialects of our language ; and, as this letter assists in the de- clension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs, the grammar of this dialect becomes, to a singular degree, complicated and difficult." Afterwards (p. 186) he says ; *' Layamon seems to have halted between two languages, the written and the spoken. Now he gives us what appears to be the Old English dialect of the west ; and, a few sentences further, we find ourselves entangled in all the peculiarities of the Anglo-Saxon." In the Fenny Cyclopaedia (xx. 488) he remarks that Layamon most probably used the dialect of "Worcestershire, the part of the country in which he lived. His English, or Saxon, at any rate, is clearly southern as opposed to northern, and western as opposed to eastern. Sir Erederic Madden {Pref xxv.) also holds that the dialect of Layamon's poem must be taken to be that of North Worcestershire, the district in which the writer lived. Although this locality was within the bounds of what was called the kingdom of Mercia, the dialect, he THE ENGLISH LANGTIAGE. 65 observes, is decidedly that of the west, which was sub- stantially the same with that of the south, of England. He thinks there can be no doubt that the written lan- guage of the country, previous to ' the Conquest, was more stable in its character and more observant of gram- matical accuracy than the spoken; and that there are many reasons to induce us to believe that the spoken language in the reign of Edward the Confessor did not materially differ from that which is found in manuscripts a century later (Pre/! xxvii.) . " The language of Laya- mon," he then goes on, " belongs to that transition period in which the groundwork of Anglo-Saxon phraseology and grammar still existed, although gradually yielding to the influence of the popular forms of speech. We find in it, as in the later portion of the Saxon Chronicle, marked indications of a tendency to adopt those termina- tions and sounds which characterise a language in a state of change, and which are apparent also in some other branches of the Teutonic tongue." The peculiarities distinguishing it from the pure Anglo-Saxon he enumer- ates as being : — " The use of a as an article ; — the change of the Anglo-Saxon, or classic English of the earliest form, terminations a and an into e and en, as well as the disre- gard of inflections and genders ; — the masculine forms given to neuter nouns in the plural ; — the neglect of the feminine terminations of adjectives and pronouns, and confusion between the definite and indefinite declensions ; — the introduction of the preposition to before infinitives, and occasional use of weak tenses of verbs and participles instead of strong ; — the constant occurrence of en for on in the plurals of verbs, and frequent elision of the final e ; — together with the uncertainty of the rule for the government of prepositions." There are also, it is added, 66 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF numerous vowel-clianges, wliich, however, are not alto- gether arbitrary. The nunnation in which Layainon indulges, or his " addition of a final n to certain cases of nouns and ad- jectives, to some tenses of verbs, and to several other parts of speech," is characterised by his editor as being by no means uniform or constant, and as in numerous instances of final rhyme possibly used only for the sake of euphony, that is, of supplying the requisite conso- nance. Its use. Sir Frederic thinks, was probably re- stricted to the dialect in which the poem is written. "We have the poem in two texts, both apparently of the thirteenth century, but one probably a little later than the other. There is less of nunnation in the later text. And even in the earlier, we are told, " there are many passages in which it has been struck out or erased by a second hand, and sometimes by the first ; so that it is manifest that some doubt must have existed as to the propriety of its usage." The distinguishing marks of the western dialect in Layamon are enumerated by Sir Frederic as being chiefly " the termination of the present tense plural in th, and infinitives in i, ie, or y ; the forms of the plural personal pronouns, lieo, Jieore, Jieom ; the frequent occursence of the prefix * before past participles ; the use of v for/, and prevalence of the vowel to for i or y, in such words as dude, hudde, kulle, 2^1^^^^, htci^e, &c." In the later text he con- ceives an Anglian or northern element to have probably been infused into the dialect. This text he thinks ma}^ per- haps have been written on the east side of Leicestershii-e. " The structure of Layamon's poem," says Sir Frederic, '' consists partly of lines in which the alliterative system of the Anglo-Saxons is preserved, and partly of couplets of THE ENGLISH LA^GTIAaE. 67 unequal length rhiming together. Many couplets, indeed, occur which have both of these forms, Tvhilst others are often met with which possess neither. The latter there- fore must have depended wholly on accentuation, or have been corrupted in transcription. The relative proportion of each of these forms is not to be ascertained without extreme difficulty, since the author uses them everywhere intermixed, and slides from alliteration to rhime, or from rhime to alliteration, in a manner perfectly arbitrary. The alliterative portion, however, predominates on the whole greatly over the lines rhiming together, even in- cluding the imperfect or assonant terminations, which are very frequent." And he refers to the fullest and most learned discussion which the subject has received, that by Mr Guest, who, in his History of English Bliythns, ii. 114 — 124, gives a long specimen of the poem with the accents marked, both of the alliterative and rhiming coup- lets, and shows that the latter " are founded on the models of accentuated Anglo-Saxon rhythms of four, five, six, or seven accents," those of six and of five accents being used most frequently.* * "An Anglo-Saxon verse," says Mr Guest (Pen. Cycl. xx. 489, art. Saxon Laiigiiage and Literature), "is made up of two sections, Avhich together may contain four, five, six, or even more accented syllables. These sections are bound together by the law of alliteration, or, in other words, each verse must have at least two accented syllables (one in each section) beginning with the same consonant or with vowels." But he adds . — " It is very incorrect to call this alliteration the ' essence ' or the ' groundwork' of Anglo-Saxon verse. It is certainly an important part, but still a mere adjunct. The purposes it served were similar to those which are provided for by the final rhyme of our modern versification. The essence of Anglo-Saxon verse consisted in its system of rhythm." F 2 68 OrTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF XV. After the middle of the Thirteenth century, the language assumes the general shape and physi- ognomy of the English which we now write and speak. It may be called English rough-hewn. The space from about the middle of the Thirteenth to the middle of the Fourteenth century has been usually designated the Feriod of Old or (better) Early JEnglish. Another work in verse is commonly mentioned along with Layamon's Chronicle as of the same age ; that known as the Ormulum, from its author, who calls him- self Onnin or Orm. Considerable extracts from the Ormulum had been given by Hickes and AYanley, and in Mr Gruest's and other modern works ; but the whole has now been printed.* Hickes goes so far as to place it among the first writings after the Conquest. Tyrwhitt, who, in his JEssay on the Language and Versi- fication ofCliaucer, was the first to point out that it was written in verse, only ventures to say that he cannot conceive it to be of earlier date than the reign of Henry the Second (or the latter half of the twelfth centur}-). Mr Guest, who, although he seems in one place {Eng. Rhythms, i. 107) to speak of Ormin as having written in the beginning of the thirteenth century, elsewhere (ii. * "Edited from the original Manuscript in tlie Bodleian, with Notes and a Glossary, by Robert Meadows "White, D.D., formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford ; " 2 vols. 8vo, Oxford, 1852. (At the University Press.) THE e:n^glish language. 69 185) assigns his poem to the latter half of the twelfth, considers it " the oldest, the purest, and hy far the most valuable specimen of our Old English dialect that time has left us." He adds : — " Ormin used the dialect of his day ; and, when he wanted precision or uniformity, he fol- lowed out the principles on which that dialect rested. "Were we thoroughly masters of his grammar and vocabu- lary, we might hope to explain many of the difficulties in which blunders of transcription and a transitional state of the language have involved the syntax and the prosody of Chaucer." {Ibid.) Afterwards (ii. 209), he intimates that, if he were called upon to say in what part of Eng- land a dialect such as Ormin's was ever spoken, he would fix upon some county north of Thames and south of Lincolnshire. The Ormulum consists of a series of metrical homilies and passages from Scripture read in the service of the Church. "WTiat we have appears to be only a portion of the work ; but it extends to about 20,000 lines, two of which, however, may be considered as making only one line in another kind of measure. Ormin has given a re- markable appearance to his language by a spelling pecu- liar to himself, which seems to consist in always doubling the consonant after a vowel having any other than the sound that would be given to it by a single consonant followed by a silent e. He attaches great importance to this device, expressly charging all who may copy his book to write the letters twice wherever he has himself done so, and assuring them that otherwise they will not Avrite the word aright. The effect will be seen in the following short specimen : — " Godd seggde thuss till Abraham; Tacc Ysaac thin ■wennchell, And snith itt, alls itt wrere an shep, And legg itt upponn allterr, And brenn itt all till asskess thser, And offre itt me to lake. '0 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF And Abraham wass forrthrihlit bun To don Dribhtiness vnRe, And toe biss sune sone anan, And band itt fet and hande, And leggde itt upponn allterr swa, And drob biss swerd off sb^tbe, And bof tbe swerd upp witbtb biss bannd To smitenn itt to deede ; Forr tbatt be wollde ben till Godd Herrsumm onn alio wise. And Godd sabb tbatt be wollde slaen Tbe cbild -witbtb swerdess egge, And seggde tbuss till Habrabam, Tbatt witt tu wel to sotbe, Hald, Abrabam, bald upp tbin bannd, Xe sla tbu nobbt tin wenn- chell; Nu wat I tbatt tu draedesst Godd, And lufesst Godd witbtb berrte ; Tacc tbser an sbep bafftenn thin bacc, And ofFre itt fon- tbe wennchel!. And Abraham tha snath tbatt sbep, And lett biss sune libbenn ; Forr tbatt be wollde ben till Godd Hersumm onn alle wise." V. 14,664—14,693. That is, in our present English : — God said thus to Abrabam :— Take Isaac, thine cbild, And slay it as it were an sheep, and lay it upon [the] altar, And burn it all to ashes there, and offer it me for gift. And Abraham was forthwith bound [engaged in proceeding] to do [the] Lord's will, And took bis son soon anon, and bound bira foot and band,* And laid it upon [the] altar so, and drew bis sword [out] of sheath, And heaved the sword up with bis hand to smite it to death ; For that he would be to God obedient in all wise. And God saw that be would [was willing to] slay the cbild with sword's edge. And said thus to Abrabam (that wot thou well for sooth) ; Hold, Abrabam, bold up thine band, nor slay thou not thine child ; Now know I that thou dreadest God, and lovest God with heart. Take there an sheep behind thine back, and offer it for tbe child. And Abraham then slew tbe sheep, and lot bis son live ; For that he would be to God obedient in all wise. * Mr Guest translates " feet and hands," understanding tbe e in handc to be tbe sign of tbe plural. See pout, under Sect. xix. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 71 It is impossible to compare Laijamon and tlie Ormulmn without being led to entertain the strongest doubts as to the correctness of the common assumption that they are works of the same age. They do not exhibit the lan- guage in the same stage, or, at least, in the same state. The grammar of Layamon is half, or more than half, that of Original English, or the English of the time before the Conquest ; it may be questioned if that of the Orimdum have retained a vestige of what is peculiar to that form of the language. If it were certain that the two works were contemporary, we should be compelled to conclude that the people of the west were still speaking Encflish of the first form while those of the eastern counties were speaking English of the second form. But, in truth, there is no evidence that the Onnulum is as old as Layamon. Like many other pieces which have been assigned to the twelfth century, the Ormulum is much more probably of the latter part of the thirteenth.* In that case, Layamon and it will belong, according to the arrangement here adopted, to different periods in the history of the language. (Vid. Sect, xx.) Ormin's peculiar spelling may probably have preserved something of the history of the language. If it was his * "It may be proper to observe bere," says Price, in a note on tbe First Section of Warton's History, — in wbicb several of tbese pieces are brougbt forward, although the Ormulum is not mentioned, — " that the dates assigned to the several compositions quoted in this Section are extremely arbitrary and uncertain. Judging from internal evi- dence — a far more satisfactory criterion than Warton's computed age of his MSS. — there is not one which may not safely be referred to the thirteenth century, and by far the greater number to the close of that period." Many important additional remarks upon these compositions will be found in the Notes to the Second Edition of Pi-ice's Warton (3 vols. 8vo, 1840), vol. i. pp. 1—42. 72 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF rule always to leave the consonant single after the long or name sound (as in maie, meet, mite, mote, onute'), and to double it after every vowel otherwise sounded, then from the short passage which has been quoted above we should learn that, while God, thus, till, up, will, Ms, off, wit, for, edge, lach, it, his, icith, on, that,^eTe all pronounced in his day, as at present, with the shut sound, thine, sheep, smite (or smiten), child, took, as they now do, the name somid ; that the e in legg (lag) and in the first syllable of seggde (said) was sounded as in our egg; that s?iifh and snath rhymed not to our lith and lath, but to our lithe and lathe ; that bun was probably pronounced boon, and don, doon or dun ; that toe was called iooh, and the first syllable of sothe, sooth, as at present; that hof^iii^ probably sounded hofe, or hove ; that they probably said, not hffest or lovest (as we do), but loaf est or loovest ; that an was sounded ain (as in lane) ; that heart was called hert (not heert) ; and that, on the other hand, the word for a sword was pronounced not swerd, but siceerd. And, however, which is usually indicated in the MS. by a contraction, was probably pronounced as at pre- sent. What is commonly given as our earliest specimen of English (as distinguished from what is called Semi-Saxon) is a proclamation issued in 1258, in the name of King Henry III., while under the control of the Council ap-. pointed at what is called " the mad parliament " of Oxford, of which the following is the copy addressed to the people of Huntingdonshire : — " Henr' thurg godes fultume King on Engleneloande Lhoauerd on Yrloand Duk on IS'orm' on Aquitain' and Eorl on Aniow, send igretinge to alle hise halde, ilaerde and ilaewed, on Huntendon' schir' THE EZS'GLISH LANGUAGE. 73* "■ Thaet witen ge wel alle tliaet we willen and vnnen thaet, thaet lire raedesmen alle other the moare dael of heom thaet beoth ichosen thurg us and thurg thaet loandes folk one vre kuneriche habbeth idon and schullen don in the worthnesse of gode, and on vre treowthe for the freme of the loande thiiro^ the besigte of than to foreniseide redesmen beo stedefaest and ilestinde in alle thinge abiiten aende " And we hoaten alle vre treowe in the treowthe thaet heo Ys ogen thaet heo stedefaesliche healden and swerieu to healden and to werien the isetnesses thet been imakede and beon to makien thurg than to foren iseide raedesmen other thui'g the moare dael of heom alswo also hit is biforen iseid. " And thaet aehc other helpe thaet for to done bi than ilche othe agenes alle men rigt for to done and to foangen. and non ne mine of loand ne of egtewherthurg this besigte muge beon ilet other iwersed on onie wise. And gif oni other onie cumen her ongenes we willen and hoaten thaet alle vre treowe heom healden deadlicheistan. " And for thaet we willen thaet this beo stedefaest and lestinde We senden gew this writ open iseined with vre seel to halden amanges gew ine hord. Witnesse usselvien aet Lunden', thane egtetenthe day on the mOnthe of Oetobr' in the two and fowertighte yeare of vre cruninge." Henry, through God's help, King in England, Lord in Ireland, Duke in Normandy, in Aquitain, and Earl in Anjou, sends greeting to all his subjects, learned and lay, in Huntingdonshire. This know ye well all that we will and grant that that our counsel- lors, all or the more part of them, that be chosen through us and through the land's folk in our kingdom, have done and shall do, in the honour of God and in our truth [allegiance], for the good of the land, through the business [act] of those to-foresaid counsellors, be steadfast and lasting in all things but [v^ithout] end. 74- outli:n"es of the histoet op And we enjoin all our lieg'es, in the truth [allegiance] that they us owe, that they steadfastly liold, and swear to hold and to defend, the ordinances that be made and he to make through the to-foresaid counsellors, or through the more part of them, all so as it is before said. And that each other help that for to do, by them [to] each other against all men right for to do and to promote. And none, nor of my land nor elsewhere, through this business may be let [hindered] or damaged in any wise. And if any man or any woman come them against, we will and enjoin that all our lieges them hold deadly foes. And, for that we will that this be steadfast and lasting, we send you this writ open, signed with our seal, to hold amongst you in hoard [store]. Witness ourselves at London, this eighteenth day in the month of October, in the two and fortieth year of our crowning.* But tliis official paper can scarcely be safely quoted as exhibiting the current language of the time. Like all such documents, it is made up in great part of established phrases of form, many of which had probably become ob- solete in ordinary speech and wi'iting. The English of the proclamation of 1258 is much less modern than that of the Orinulum, and fully as near to the earlier form of * This proclamation was first printed by Somner, in his Dictiona- rium Saxo7iico-Latmo-A7iglicum, fol. Oxon. 1659. In the Record Commission edition of Rijmer's Fosdera, vol. i. (1816), p. 378, it is entitled, " Carta Regis in idiomate Anglico, ad singulos comitatus Angliae et Hibernian super reformatione status regni per proceres ejusdem regni ;" and is stated to be there given as transcribed fi-om the original among the Patent Rolls in the Tower of London (" Pat. 43, Hen. III. m. 15, in Turr. Lond."). The present transcript, how- ever, will be found, we believe, to be more correct than any hitherto published. " This proclamation," Dr Lingard observes, " is in both languages [English and French], the first of that description which has been pre- served since the reign of Henry I., though I do not understand how such proclamations could have become known to the people unless they were published in the English language." Hist. Eng. III. 125. THE EJfGLISn LAr^GTJAGE. 7o the language, both in the words and in the grammar, as any part of Layamon's Chronicle, if not rather more so. Exclusive of the Ormidum, the two principal literafry works belonging to this period, 1250 — 1350 (commonly known as that oi Early English), are the metrical Chron- icles of Hobert of Gloucester and Hohert of Brunne. The Chronicle of Eobert of Grloucester was edited by Thomas Hearne in 1724. The writer may be regarded as belonging to the first half of the present period : it has been shown by Sir Frederic Madden {Introd. to HaveloJc, Hi.) that he must have survived the year 1297. The following passage is doubly curious in reference to the history of the language : — " Thus come lo ! Engelond into Xormannes honde, And tlie Xormans ne coutlie speke tho bote her owe speche, And speke French as dude atom, and here chyldi-en dude al so teche ; So that heymen of thys lond, that of her blod come, Holdeth alle thulke speche that hii of hem nome ; Vor bote a man couthe French me tolth of hym wel lute : Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss and to her kunde speche yute. Ich -wene ther ne be man in world contreyes none That ne holdeth to her kunde speche, bote Engelond one. Ac wel me wot vor to conne both wel yt ys ; Vor the more that a man con, the more worth he ys." * That is, in modern words : — Thus came lo !• England into Normans' hand. And the Normans no could speak then but their own speech, and spake French as [they] did at home, and their children did all so teach ; so that high-men of this land, that of their blood come, hold all the same speech that they of them took ; for but a man know French one \Jiomme, or ori] telleth [reckoneth] of * Hearne, 364; Harl.MS. 201, fol 127, r°. 76 OUTLIlfES OF THE HISTOET OF him well little [hien peu] : but low men hold to English and to their natural speech yet. I ween there no be man in world countries none that no holdeth to their natural speech, but England [al-]one. But well I wot for to know both weU it is ; for the more that a man know, the more worth he is. Some of the peculiarities in the language of Eobert of Gloucester are probably to be attributed to the dialect he uses being that of the west of England. Robert ofBrunne^ that is, Bourne, in Lincolnshire, may be assumed to have written in that of the east country. His proper name appears to have been Robert Manning ; and he may be placed nearly half a century later than Eobert of Glouces- ter. His Chronicle is stated to have been finished in the year 1338. It consists of two parts ; the first of which is in octo-syllabic rhyme, and is a translation from AVace's Brut, the same original upon which Layamon worked ; the second is in Alexandrine verse, and is translated from a French chronicle recently written by an Englishman, Piers or Peter de Langtoft, a canon regular of St. Austin, at Bridlington in Yorkshire. Only the second part has been printed : it was edited by Hearne in 1725. Eobert de Bruune distinctly claims to be considered as writing in English ; and he is said to be tlie earliest writer after the Conquest who uniformly and pointedly gives that name to his language. The following passages are from the Prologue to the First Part of the Chronicle, which Hearne has printed in the Preface to his edition of the Second Part : — *' Lordynges \_Lords] that be now here, If ye wille listene and lere [learn'] All the story of Inglande, Als [as] Robert Mannyng wrytcn it fand [written it found], THE EKGLISH LANGUAGE. And on [m] Inglysch has it scliewed, Kot for the lered [learyied], hot for thelewed [tinlearned] ; For tho [those] that on this lond wonn [dweW] That the Latin ne Frankys conn \_Latin nor French knoic]., For to haf solace and garaen [game, ejijoyment^ In felauschip when thai [they] sitt samen [together']. After the Bretons the Inglis camen ; The lordschip of this lande thai namen [took] ; South and north, west and est, That calle men now the Inglis gest [history f] When thai first among the Bretons, That now ere [are] Inglis, than [then] were Saxons, Saxons, Inglis, hight alle oliche [ivere called all alike]. • ••••••• I mad noght for no disours [diseiirs, professed tale-tellers],, Ne [nor'] for no seggers [sayers, reciters] no [nor] harpours, But for the luf [love] of symple men, That strange Inglis can not ken [know, understand] ; For many it ere [there are] that strange Inglis In ryme wate [wot, know] neuer what it is. • •••••• Of Brunne I am, if any me blame ; Robert Mannyng is my name : Blisstd be he of God of heuene [heaven'], That me Robert with gudewille neuene [named]. In the thrid Edwarde's tpne was I "When I wrote alle this story. In the hous of Sixille I was a throwe [ichile'] ; Dans [Dominus] Robert of Maltone, that ye know Did [paused] it write for felawes [brother monks'] sake, "When thai wild solace make." 78 OTJTLII^ES OF THE HISTOET OP XVI. Meanwhile, in the literature of the country, and also in the oral intercourse of the most influential classes of the population, the native language may be said to have been for the First century after the Norman Conquest completely overborne by the French ; for the Second, to have been in a state of revolt against that foreign tongue; during the Third, to have been rapidly making head against the intruder, and regaining its old supremacy. Or the three stages may be thus distinguished : — The first, comprehending the reigns of the Conqueror, his two sons, and Stephen, a space of 88 years; the second, the reigns of Henry II., his two sons, and Henry III., a space of 118 years ; the third, the reigns of Edward I., II., and III., a space of 105 years.* In a loose or general way the first and second of these spaces will correspond to what has been designated the Period of Semi-Saxon, the third to what is commonly called the Period of Early English. What professes to be our earliest notice of the intro- duction of the Erench tongue into England, and of the extent to which it speedily came to be used, is found in * The reign of William I. (the Conqueror) began in 1066 ; that of his son, William 11. (Rufus), in 1087 ; that of his brother, Henry 7., in 1100 ; that of StejjJien in 1135 ; that of Henry II. in 1154 ; that of his son, Richard I. {Cccur de Lion), in 1189 ; that of his brother, John, in 1199 ; that of his son, Henry III., in 1216 ; that of his son, Edward I., in 1272 ; that of his "son, Edward II., in 1307 ; that of his son, Edward III., in 1327; and he reigned till 1377, or 311 years from the Conquest. TUE ENGLISH LA^TGUAGE. 79 tlie work styled the History of the Abbey of Croyland by lugulphus {Inguljl Croylandensis Sistoria). Ingul- phus was abbot of the monastery of Croyland, or Crow- land, in Lincolnshire, from a.d. 1075 till 1109, when he died at the age of eighty. He was, therefore, at the time of the Norman Conquest, a man of between thirty and forty. But the History which bears his name is now generally regarded as being in the main a forgery of a later age, most probably of the beginning of the four- teenth or the end of the thirteenth century. It may, however, have been founded in part upon traditions or even documents of earlier origin. The amount of what it states upon the present subject is : — That even before the Conquest, in the reign of the Confessor, all the English nobility, following the fashion of the king, himself a Norman in all his habits and feelings, and of the other Normans with whom he had filled the highest ofiices in the kingdom, began both to speak French and to have their charters and other writings drawn up in that language ; and that, after the Conquest, not only were the laws and statutes of the realm promulgated in French, but that language was substituted for English in teaching boys at school the elements of grammar. The fact, how- ever, is, as has been already stated, that the laws were published in Latin for more than two centuries after the Conquest. -If they were ever also published in French, which is doubtful, and can hardly have been the case ex- cept in a few instances, the French was apparently a translation from the Latin.* * This, at any rate, was probably the case with what are called the Laws of the Conqueror, which are given by Ingulphus in French (See Sir Francis Palgrave's Rise and Progress of the English Cormnontcealth^ pp. 00 et seq., and his Proofs and Illustrations, pp. Ixxxviii — civ., con- taining the Latin text, published for the first time from the Holkham so OUTLINES or THE HISTOET OF Warton and Tyrwhitt have collected various testimonies which amply confirm what is stated in the Croyland History as to the employment of French in the education of youth, and the general prevalence of that language in England for a long time after the Conquest. It is men- tioned by Grervase of Tilbury, a writer of the early part of the thirteenth century, that in his time the English nobility always sent their children to be brought up in France. The statements of Eobert of Grloucester at the close of that century, and of E-obert Holcot in the begin- ning and Ralph Higden about the middle of the next, have been already referred to {Vid. pp. 48 and 75). It is also known, not only from the recorded names and accounts of the writers, but from many remains that have come down to us, that an abundant production of literature in the French language was carried on botli by foreigners resident at the English court and by Eng- lishmen for some centuries after the Conquest, lu all light or popular literature French was at first the only language employed ; it continued to predominate for some time after the English had begun to come into use ; nor, even after the latter had acquired the ascendancy, did its foreign rival cease to be occasionally resorted to. It is evident that French must have been more familiar than English to a considerable section of the inhabitants of England down to the end of the fourteenth centurj".* MS.). An opposite view, however, has heen taken by Liiders {Tracts, pp. 392, 393) of the French text of Magna Charta, first published in D'Achery's Spicilcffium, which he regards as the original. * See, however, what has been advanced by Mr Guest in opposition to or in qualification of this view, in his History of English Rlnjthms, ii. 427. He conceives that the French, or Eomance language as it was called, was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries " a dead lansruaofe, learnt only from books j " and, while he allows that it "must have been THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 81 Tlie declension and extinction of the French lan^nase in England were probably precipitated by the strong anti-G-allican feeling engendered by the Erench ^vars of Edward III., ^Yhich began a few years before the middle of the fourteenth century. The discontinuance of Erench as the medium for the instruction of boys in Latin is expressly noted by John de Trevisa, in a paragraph which he inserts in his transla- tion of Higden's Chronicle after the passage recording the fact of the previous usage, to have taken place about that date, or, as he puts it, immediately after the first great plague, which was in the year 1349. The authors of the innovation, he says, were a grammar school-master, named John Cornwall, and his pupil, Eichard Pencrich. Trevisa Avi^ites this account in the year 1385.* Meanwhile, in 1362, the 36th year of Edward III., it was ordered by act of parliament that all trials at law should henceforth be conducted in En2:lish. In the preamble of the act it is averred that the Erench tongue, in which pleas had heretofore been pleaded, was become much uiiknown in the realm, so that the people who impleaded or were impleaded in the king's and other courts had no knowledge nor understanding of what was said for them or against them by their sergeants and other pleaders. more or less familiar to the scholar as well as to the courtier," he holds it to be clear that " it did not reach to the great body of the people," from "the many versions of Romance poems made /or the leiced man" a phrase which, he observes, includes both lord and yeoman. But how are we to account for the existence of the Eomance oris^inals of those versions, and of a large body of Eomance literature besides, which we have no reason to believe ever was translated, except upon the supposition that the French language was more familiar than the English to a large portion of the English reading public ? * See it in Appendix. 6 82 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF Yet this very statute is in French, as all statutes con- tinued to be for more than a century longer. The first in English is in the 1st year of Henry YII. (1485) ; and even that is also in Trench. It is only from 1488-9, the 4th of Henry YII., that English alone is used. The proceedings of the House of Lords were recorded in French down to a still later date. Certain parliamentary forms, indeed, are still in that language. French also continued to be the language in which the published re- ports of law cases were usually drawn up till the middle of the seventeenth century ; nor did its employment for that purpose altogether cease till some time after the commencement of the eighteenth. By the statute of 1362 pleas were ordered to be always entered and enrolled in Latin (instead of sometimes in Latin, sometimes in French, as had been heretofore the practice). This would seem to show that the statute was instigated more by spite against the French language than by affection for the English. THE EIS'QLISH LAIS'GUAGE. 83 XVII. In the course of the contest between the two languages the English had undergone a consider- able alteration of its vocabulary by the reception of words from the Erench, many of which had pro- bably displaced or rendered obsolete equivalent terms of native origin ; so that, by the time it had come to be fully established and recognised, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, as the proper literary language of the country, it had been trans- formed from a purely Gothic into a partially E"eo- Latin language. The French language in England was only an exotic, which, introduced by force, was for a time sustained, and even disseminated within certain limits, by the same force which had imported it, but could not, in the nature of things, continue to maintain an independent existence in the country after the originally foreign domination with which it was brought in had come to be completely nationalised. Yet in the same manner, and, perhaps, nearly in the same degree, in which the old political constitution of the country has been permanently modified by that which the Normans established in its stead, has the old language been affected and changed by intermixture with that of the Normans. It may be held to be now admitted on all hands that it is only in the vocabulary of the English language that any intrusion or direct action of the Erench is to be G 2 84 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF traced. Sucli cliange as tlie grammar has undergone certainly has not heen produced by the adoption of any part of the grammar of its rival. There has been considerable difference of opinion, how- ever, in regard to the date at which the partial trans- formation of the vocabulary of the Enghsh by absorption from the Erench began to show itself. Tyrwhitt refers to the writings both of Eobert of Brunne and Eobert of Gloucester as evidencing that this process had fairly com- menced in the thu-teenth century ; Mr Guest, neverthe- less, as we have seen (see ante, p. 57), has intimated his adherence to the old opinion, that " French did not mix with our language till the days of Chaucer," or till nearly a century after the time of Eobert of Gloucester. Tyrwhitt asks if it be credible that " a poet writing in English [as was Chaucer's case] upon the most familiar subjects would stuff his compositions with Erench words and phrases," if such words and phrases had not been generally inteUigible to his readers, that is to say, if they had not already taken their place in the common or na- tional language ? " Or," it is added, " if he had been so very absurd, is it conceivable that he should have imme- diately become, not only the most admired, but also the most popular, writer of his time and country?" Chaucer has nowhere evinced any special partiality for the Erench language. He derides (in his description of the Prioress in the Prologue to the Canterhury Tales) the Erench spoken in England ; and in his prose tract entitled The Testament of Love he speaks with contempt of such of his countrymen as still continued to " speke their poysy mater " in that foreign tongue ; adding, " Let, then, clerkes endyten in Latyn, for they have the pro- pertye in science and the knowinge in that facultye, and lette Erenchmen in their Erenche also endyte their queynt THE E^S'GLISn LA^'GUAGE. 85 termes, for it is kyndlj \_naturaT] to theyr moutlies ; and let us shewe our fantasyes in such wordes as we learneden of our dames tonge," — that is, what we now call our mother tongue, the tongue we learn from our mothers. The proportion of words of French derivation in the English, not only of Chaucer, but of the generality of Chaucer's contemporaries, in that, for instance, of Man- devil and AYiclif, is far too large to be accoimted for except on the hypothesis that the vocabulary of the one lanofuaffe had then been flowing into the other for a con- siderable time. It is probable that this process had been going on almost from the birth of the new form of the English lan- guage and of English literature, as distinguished from what have been called Saxon and Semi-Saxon, that is to say, from the middle of the thirteenth century. It was the natural consequence of the relative position of the two languages and the two literatures, — the one (the English) mainly the offspring and imitator of the other (the Erench), and seeking to make itself acceptable to the same community the most influential portion of which had so long patronised its predecessor. The English language, probably, would not have ac- quired the ascendancy so soon as it did if it had not thus assumed a partially Erench guise or character, and so enabled itself the more easily to become a substitute for Erench, and to win its way with the most cultivated class of readers. It was, no doubt, principally through the medium of literary compositions that Erench words were at first introduced into the English language. Many of the earliest works written in English were translations, more or less free, from the Erench ; and the translator would in many cases have every temptation to retain an ex- 86 OUTLIJTES OF THE HISTOET OE pressive term in his original, rather than to beat his brains in attempting to find or to fabricate a vernacular equivalent. A French word introduced now and then would be an impediment to no reader, and would b j many or most be regarded as rather ornamental. At the same time the intrusion of words formed from the French was, probably, facilitated by the broken down or uncemented condition of the English language at this date, which disabled it from producing new terms, when wanted, out of his own resources as readily as the primi- tive form of the language, with its more inflectional struc- ture, might have done. The total, or all but total, absence of Latin in the Original English (with the exception only of the theolo- gical and learned words for which it was indebted to the E-oman ecclesiastics) is a remarkable fact, and one of great importance ; but rather in reference to the history of the country than to that of the language. It is some- what strange that few or none even of the words which the Gothic conquerors of Britain are supposed to have adopted from the Welsh language appear to be of Latin original. THE ETs'GLISn LANGUAGE. 87 XVIII. Our modern standard English, in so far as it is of native origin, appears to have grown out of a dialect formed in the Midland Counties by such an intermixture of the K'orthern and Southern dialects as rejected the more remarkable peculiarities of both. The question of the local origin of standard English forms the subject of an interesting disquisition by Mr Guest, which will be found in the History of English Bhjthns, ii. 187—207. Mr Guest's view is founded in part upon a passage (already referred to) in the Latin Chronicle of Ealph Higden, written about or shortly before the middle of the fourteenth century, in which, after stating that the English had originally among them three different dia- lects, — southern, midland, and northern, — but that, having become mixed first with Danes, and afterwards vn.t\\ Nor- mans, they had in many respects corrupted their OAvn tongue, and now afiected a sort of outlandish babble, Higden goes on : — " In the above threefold Saxon tongue, which has barely survived among a few country people, the men of the east agree more in speech with those of the west — as being situated under the same quarter of the heavens — than the northern men with the southern. Hence it is that the Mercians,* or midland English — * The name of Mercia, or the March, was given to that one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which bordered on the "Welsh territory, and ■which in its greatest extent came to include all the middle of England, or (with the exception of "Wales in the west and East Anglia in the east) the whole range of country between the Trent and the Eibble in the north, and the Thames and the Bristol Avon in the south. 88 o^TLI^'ES of the history or partaking, as it were, the nature of the extremes — imder- stand the adjoining dialects, the northern and the southern, better than those last imderstand each other. The whole speech of the jS'orthumbrians, especially in Yorkshire, is so harsh and rude, that we southern men can hardly un- derstand it." The country of the northern dialect, or dialects, Mr Guest extends as far south as to the Thames. That the dialects spoken to the north of that river possessed a com- mon character, which long distinguished them from the southern dialects, he thinks may be shown even at the present day. The inflections of the northern verb, in particular, differ from those of the southern : — The pres. ind. was, in the southern, Icli liop-e, Thou Iwp-est, He Jiop-etJi, We, Te^miiop-eih; in the northern, //^oj9-e5. Thou hop-es, He hop-es, We, Ye, Hi hop-es : the second per. sing, perf. ind. was, in the southern, Thou hoped-est ; in the northern, Thoic hoped-es : the second per. sing. pres. imper. was, in the southern, Hop-eih ye ; in the northern, Hop- es ye : the pres. infin. was, in the southern. To hop-en ; in the northern, To hope. In the northern inflections, Mr Guest holds, we may detect those of a conjugation which is fully developed in the Swedish. Then, after noticing other peculiarities, he proceeds ; — " It is a cimous fact that both our universities are situated close to the boundary line which separated the northern from the southern English : and I cannot help thinking, that the lealonsies of these two races were consulted in fixing upon the sites. The histories of Cambridire and Oxford are filled with their feuds ; and more than once has the king's authority been interposed, to prevent tlie northern men retiring, and forming within their OAvn limits a university at Stamford or Northampton. The union of these two races at the university must have favoured the growth of THE E^s'GLISH LAIfGTJAGE. 89 any intermediate dialect ; and to sucli a dialect the cir- cumstances of the country, during the ninth and tenth centuries, appear to have given birth. While the north was sinking beneath its own feuds and the ravages of the Northman, the closest ties knit together the men of the midland and the southern counties ; and this fellowship seems to have led, among the former, to a certain modi- fication of the northern dialect. The change seems to have been brought about, not so much by adopting the peculiarities of southern speech, as by giving greater prominence to such parts of the native dialect as were common to the south. The southern conjugations must, at all times, have been familiar (at least in dignified com- position) to the natives of the northern counties, but other conjugations ^qyq popularly used, and in the gradual disuse of these, and other forms peculiar to the north, the change consisted." By these and other reasons Mr Guest is led to the conclusion " that in the middle of the fourteenth century there were tliree great English dialects — the northern, the midland, and the southern;" and he thinks, "that, even amid the multiplied varieties of the present day, these three divisions may yet be traced." Two vigorous efi'orts, he adds, were made to detain and preserve the northern dialect as it was retreating northwards, and to fix it as a literary language : the first, in the thirteenth century, by the men of Lincolnshire ; the second, in the fifteenth century, by the men of Lothian ; " but the con- venience of a dialect essentially the same as the northern, and far more widely understood, its literary wealth, and latterly the patronage of the court, gave the midland English an ascendancy that gradually swept all rivalry before it." The southern dialect, however, kept its ground more firmly than the northern ; little more thai* 90 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OT two centuries having gone by smce it first began to give way before the midland dialect. Mr Guest divides the midland dialect into six varie- ties ; and one of them, which he would term the Leices- tershire dialect, and which is described as "remarkable for its want of tone/' has, he conceives, " contributed, more than any of our [other] living dialects, to the form- ation of our present standard English." Dr Latham (JSnglish Language, 555), holding that the parts where the purest English is most generally spoken are those between Huntingdon and Stamford, and agreeing with Mr Gruest so far as to think it nearly certain " that the dialect most closely allied to the dialect (or dialects) out of which the present literary language of England is developed is to be found either in Northamptonshire or the neighbouring counties," is inclined to look for it, not with Mr Gruest, in Leices- tershire, on the western side of that county, but rather in Huntingdonshire, on the eastern side. THE e:s'glish lattguage. 91 XIX. The space from about the middle of the Fourteenth to the middle of the Sixteenth Century has been styled the Period of Middle Englisli ; and that de- signation may be understood to express not only the position of the Period, but the fact that the ex- isting Modification of the language, in respect both of its vocabulary and of its grammar, was then in a state of transition from its earliest and rudest form to that in which it was ultimately to rest. To the commencement of this Period belong the writings of Chaucer, the Homer of our Poetry and the true Father of English Literature. As has been pointed out by Mr Gruest {Eng. HJiytlims, ii. 105), the cliaracteristic distinction of Old (or Early) English, as compared with the original form of the lan- guage, is the employment of the one termination e, in the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs, to re- present indiscriminately the three ancient vowel-endings, a, e, and u. In this way the ancient nama, ende, and iviidu became in Early English nam-e, end-e, and wood-e, or wood'de. Now the distinction of Middle English, as compared with Early English, may be defined as being the tendency to drop this final e as a distinct syllable, and, along with that simplification, to throw off" also whatever else remained of the original inflectional system of the language. Chaucer is believed to have died, at the age of seventy- two, in the year 1400. His 'WTitings may, therefore, be 92 outli:n'es of the nisTOET or received as exemplifying tlie state of the language in the first half century of the present period. Even if we had no positive evidence on the subject, it would he impossible to believe that the language of a great popular poet could be other than substantially the language of his own age, — written, perhaps, with more regularity and refinement by him than by others, but certainly not with any absolute innovations or peculiari- ties either in the vocabulary or the grammar. In the case of Chaucer we have the most conclusive evidence that he wrote the common English of his day in the identity of his language in all essential respects with that of other writers who were his contemporaries. Moreover, by comparing him and his contemporaries with their predecessors and their followers, it is found that the changes undergone by the language exhibit only its natural progress under the operation of its inherent principles or tendencies. The English of the age of Chaucer, being the earlier part of the Middle or Transitional Period of the lan- guage in its modified form, though reduced or restored to considerable regularity, has evidently not yet attained its final shape and structure, but is still in a state of growth or movement under two tendencies which had been for some time previous at work in it, and had brought it to its actual condition : — the first, a tendency to drop more of the ancient native tongue ; the second, a tendency to assume more from the Erench. I. The tendency to retreat still fixrther from the native tongue is evinced by the gradual loosening and falling off of such of the signs or vestiges of the old inflectional system as had not yet been quite got rid of, as well as by the continued disappearance of Teutonic vocables. , THE ENGLISH LAIS^GUAGE. 93 Thus : — tlie original termination of the infinitive, which had been already attenuated from an to en, is now often reduced to e ; e. g. the original spaecan, or specan (to speak), which had already in the previous stage of the language become speken, is now frequently written (and was, probably, still more frequently pronounced) sp)eke (in two syllables). In the present indicative the singular is only slightly altered from -e, -ast, -afh, to -e, -est, -eth (lujige, lufast, liif- ath, becoming lov-e, lov-esf, lov-etli) ; but the termination of the plural persons, which had been originally ath, and had been first changed into eth, is now often further softened or shortened into en ; e. g. the original ive, ge, hi, lujiath, had become we, ye, hi, or they loveth, or loven. Trevisa commonly has loveth ; Chaucer and Mandeville, loven. In the second person plural of the imperative, the eth (which also had been originally ath^ was some- times shortened, not ibto en, but into e, — loveth ye, or love ye* * The second person singular of the imperative may probably be re- garded as being the verb in its elementary or most naked form. Such, at least, has always been the case in English. Thus, in Chaucer : — "Our hoste saw that he was di'onkeu of ale, And sayd, Abide, Eobin, my leve brother." Cant. Tales, 3131. " The Eeeve answered and saide, Stint thy clappe." Ibid. 3146. " Say forth thy tab, and tarry not the time." Ibid. 3903. But both in this and in the other moods, as at present, the second person plural, with its proper pronoun, is commonly used in a singular sense; as: — " Now telleth ye, Sire Monk, if that ye conne, Somewhat to quiten with the Knightes tale." Cant. Tales, 3121. 94 OTJTLITfES OF THE HISTOBT OF The termination of tlie present participle, originally ende, has now, for the most part, passed into the more rapidlj pronounceable ing, though it is still sometimes found as ende or end, ande or and, ente or ent, ante or ant. l^inallj, the termination e, both in the verb and in other parts of speech, even while it continued to be writ- ten, was beginning to be dropped in the pronunciation ; and in some words it was occasionally omitted in writing. According to Mr Gruest {^^ng. Bhythms, i. 34), the word hire is always a monosyllable with Chaucer, whether it represents the Anglo-Saxon liire (her), or }ieo7'a (their) ; and the e, he adds, " was also lost in other cases when it followed r, and, perhaps, when it followed other letters." In the first and third persons singular of the preterite of verbs, again, which regularly terminated in ede (the en- tire tense running, I lovede, thou lovedest, he lovede, ive loveden, ye loveden, they loveden), the e was beginning to be occasionally, though rarely, omitted (thus, / loved, he loved, as at present). It is admitted that in the earliest form of the lansruasre the termination e made always a distinct syllable, as much as a or u. And , this appears to be the case also in the prosody of Chaucer, except only in a very few words, in which, as just observed, the e had by his time begun to be dropt in the pronunciation, although it was still re- tained in writing. The only other circumstances in which it counts for nothing are when it is elided in consequence of the following word beginning with a vowel. JEd and es in like manner certainly were then in all cases pro- nounced as distinct syllables ; thus, lov-es, lov-ed, lov-ed- est, lov-ed-en. But many words also were then written with a final e which have now lost that termination. It follows, therefore, that a great many words at this THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 95 stage of the language had a syllable more than the same words now have. In some eases the final e, which con- stituted the syllable in question, has disappeared only in the pronunciation ; in other cases it has disappeared en- tirely, not only in our speech but in our writing. It does not seem to be disputed that Tyrwhitt has given a correct account of the origin of one class of these lost final e's. '' "With respect to words imported directly from Prance," he observes, "it is certainly quite natural to suppose that for some time they retained their native pronunciation." Thus such a word as Jioste would con- tinue to be both written with an e final (called e feminine) and to be pronounced as a dissyllable, as it was in Trench, and as its modern representative, hote, still is, at least in verse and in the more formal style of elocution. It is tt) be supposed that in the anglicised word the final e was first dropt in the pronunciation and then retrenched in the spelling. In other words, again, borrowed from the Trench, the e, though dropt in the pronunciation, has been retained in the spelling, usually with the view of in- dicating a particular way of sounding a preceding vowel or consonant ; as in lar^e, where it softens the y, or in face, where it both softens the c and gives its name sound to the a. " We have not, indeed," T^Twhitt proceeds to say, "so clear a proof of the original pronunciation of the Saxon part of our language ; but we know, from general observ- ation, that all changes of pronunciation are usually m.ade by small degrees ; and, therefore, when we find that a great number of those words which in Chaucer's time ended in e originally ended in a, we may reasonably pre- sume that our ancestors first passed from the broader sound of a to the thinner sound of e feminine, and not at once from a to e mute. Besides, if the final e in such 96 OUTLIIS'ES OF THE HISTOET OF words was not pronounced, why was it added ? From the time that it has confessedly ceased to be pronounced, it has been gradually omitted in them, except where it may be supposed of use to lengthen or soften the preceding syllable, — as in hope, name, &c. But, according to the ancient orthography, it terminates many words of Saxon original where it cannot have been added for any such pur230se, as Jierte, childe, olde, wilde, &c. In these, there- fore, we must suppose that it was pronounced as an e feminine, and made part of a second syllable ; and so, by a parity of reason, in all others in which, as in these, it appears to have been substituted for the Saxon a." In a note he adds : — " In most of the words in which the final e has been omitted its use in lengthening or softening the preceding syllable has been supplied by an alteration in the orthography of that syllable. Thus, in gi^ete, mete, stele, rede, dere, in which the first e was originally long, as closing a syllable, it has, since they have been pro- nounced as monosyllables, been changed either into ea, as in great, meat, steal, read, dear, or into ee, as in greet, meet, steel, reed, deer. In like manner, the o in hote^fole, dove, gode, mone, has been changed either into oa^ as in hoat^ foal, or into oo, as in door, good, moon.^^ It is only a part of this view of the origin of the e final in words even of native extraction that has been contro- verted. It is not denied that Tyrwhitt is right in regard to such words as in their original form ended either in e or in some other vowel which was equally represented by e in Early and Middle English. The only dispute is about such words as kerte, bote, gode, &c., referred to by Tyrwhitt in the two last sentences of the passage above quoted, and in the annexed note. The theory of the late Mr Price is that the e in such cases \\as an addition made by the Norman scribes, or dis- THE E]S'GLISH LAISTGFAGE. 97 ciples of the Norman school of writing, for the purpose of marking or indicating according to their principle ot orthography that elongation of the preceding vowel which in the native English system was denoted by an accentual mark. Thus, for example, what in English orthography was god was in jN^orman gode ; what in the former was lif, was in the latter life; "and hence," concludes Mr Price, "the majority of those e's mute upon which Mr Tyrwhitt has expended so much unfounded speculation." * Tyrwhitt can hardly be said to have expended any specu- lation upon the particular class of words which ]Mr Price thus seeks to explain. The question has been since examined more at length by Mr Gruest. It was, according to Mr Gruest, a funda- mental rule of ancient English orthography to double the final consonant in an accented syllable when the vowel was a short one, that is, when it had what has been called the sJiuf sound ; and hence it came to be imagined tliat such a vowel should be followed and denoted by the doubling of the consonant, whether the syllable was ac- cented or no. This, as w^e have seen, appears to have been the principle which Ormin followed, only regu- lating his spelling in conformity Avith it more uniformly or precisely than any other writer has done. But the old rule, Mr Gruest conceives, also gave rise to another practice w^hich has had a greater eifect in deranging the orthography of the language. As the doubling of the consonant indicated a short or shut vowel sound, it fol- lowed that a single consonant would be the mark of the long, or what has been called the name sound ; in such words, for instance, as mone (the moon), tiiiie (time) name (name), that would be the sound of the vowel in * See Ms edition of Warton's History of English Poetry (1824), Preface (114), and vol. i. p. cii. H 98 OTJTLIKES or THE HISTOEY OF the first syllable. "Xow, in the Anglo-Saxon," the statement proceeds, " there was a great number of words which had, as it were, two forms ; one ending in a con- sonant, the other in a vowel. In the time of Chaucer, all the different vowel-endings were represented by the e final ; and so great is the number of words which this writer uses sometimes as monosyllables, and sometimes as dissyllables with the addition of the e, that he has been accused of adding to the number of his syllables whenever it suited the convenience of his rhythm. Id his works we find liert and lierte, hed and hedde, ertli and ertlie, &c. In the Anglo-Saxon we find corresponding duplicates, the additional syllable giving to the noun in almost every case a new declension, and in most a new gender. In some few cases the final e had become mute even before the time of Chaucer ; and it was whollv lost in the period which elapsed between his death and the accession of the Tudors. Still, however, it held its ground in our manuscripts, and ure (our), rose (a rose), &c., though pronounced as monosyllables, were still writ- ten according to the old spelling. Hence, it came gradu- ally to be considered as a rule that, when a syllable ended in a single consonant and mute e, the vowel was long." Mr Gruest has no doubt whatever that this is the origin of the. very peculiar mode of indicating the long vowel which prevails in English orthography. To ]Mr Price's notion that the mode of spelling in question was the work of the Normans, he objects that the final e, which Mr Price conceives to have been annexed merely to de- note the long vowel, or to be a substitute for the ac- centual mark of the native system, was not mute in Norman French. — {Eng. RhjtJims, i. 109.) It is not quite clear whether in Mr Guest's view there are any cases in which the e may be supposed to THE ENGLISH la:n'gi:age. 99 have had nothing corresponding to it in the Original English word, and to have been affixed merely to denote that the preceding vowel had the long or name sonnd after it had come, in the way that has been explained, to be a received rule of pronunciation that that was the soimd to be borne by a vowel whenever it was followed by a single consonant and an e. Mr Price appears to have considered the final e generally to have originated in this v/ay ; and in that notion he probably held it a mistake to imagine that it had ever been pronounced as a distinct syllable.* One result, Mr Gruest goes on to observe, of this em- ployment of the final e mute to indicate a long vowel was to save many of our monosyllables from the dupli- cation of the final consonant. The mere absence of the e would be held to imply that the vowel had its short or shut sound. Having the name sound in ivTiite, pate, and rote, it would have the shut sound in whit, pat, and rot. Mr Gruest holds that there have been four systems employed at different periods to mark the quantity (in reference at least to the more recent stages of the lan- guage we ought rather to say the quality) of our English vowels. 1. In the so-called Anglo-Saxon or original form of the language the long time was properly marked by the acute accent : thus, god (good) was distinguished from God (God). 2. Next it came to be marked in many instances by the doubling of the vowel : thus god was written good (perhaps originally pronounced as we * Mr Price's views were to have been more fully explained in a volume wMcli was announced in his edition of Warton as shortly to be published, but which has never appeared, entitled " Illustrations of Warton' s History of English Poetry; containing An Ex- amination of Mr Tyrwhitt's Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer," itc. H 2 100 OTJTLINES OF THE HISTOET OP now pronounce _9'0fl'^) . 3. The long or name sound was indicated simply by leaving the following consonant single ; thus, Ormin probably intended his sliep to be sounded slieep. 4. The same effect was produced by the mute e. And our modern practice, Mr Guest thinks, is to a certain extent a combination, or rather a confusion, of the three last systems. {Eng. BTiytJims, i. 110.) It is never to be forgotten, in the consideration of this subject, that every one of our English vowel letters re- presents, in our established system of orthography, not only different quantities of the same sound, but totally different sounds. After the explanations we have quoted, Mr Guest proceeds: — "We have hitherto denominated certain vowels long and short, as though we considered the only difference between them to be their time ; as, though, for instance, the vowel in meet differed from that in met only in its being longer. The truth is, they are of widely different quality. The spelling of many words has remained unchanged for a period during which we have the strongest evidence of a great change in our pro- nunciation. When the orthography of the words oneet and met was settled, the vowels in all probability differed only in respect of time ; but they have now been changing for some centuries, till they have nothing in common be- tween them but a similarity in their spelling." The assumption that sounds which are represented by the same letter are always either the same or differ only in quantity is what has most perplexed the treat- ment of this subject. The fact is, that in some cases the sounds are totally different in kind. Even the a in fan, the a in lath, and the a in was, are, strictly speaking, all distinguishable in quality, though perhaps nearly related, and having a tendency to pass into one another ; the same may be said of the o in note, and the o in liog (which, THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 101 again, is the same sound in quality or kind ■vritli that of the a in was^, and perhaps of the it in hut, and the u in full (the same essentially with the oo in good), and the u in tune (which is otherwise represented by eiv, as in pew ; by ue, as in due ; by eau, as in heauty ; and, it may be, in other ways). But the sound of a in 'pane (the same, only longer, with that of e in pen) is totally different from the sound given to the same letter in pan. So is the sound of e in men from its sound in me. So, finally, is the sound of i in pin from its sound in pine. In all these cases the difference is one not merely of length, or not of length at all, but of quality or kind ; and the two sounds are fully as distinct, or as wide apart, as any two vowel sounds in the language. The English way of reading Latin is to read it exactly as English is read. Eor instance, the long a in orator, being the accented syllable (as the penult always is when long), is sounded like the a in pane; but the equally long a in oratoris, not having the accent upon it, is sounded like the a in pan. The vowel is treated in the two words exactly as it is in the two English words oration and oratory. The effect of this system is that, at least in all penults (although not always in other syllables), a long a is pronounced like the a in pane, a long e like the e in one, and a long / like the i in pine ; while a short a takes commonly the sound of a in pan, a short e that of e in net, and a short i that of i in pin. English writers upon the subject of pronunciation have thus been very generally led to assume that the two sounds, connected in these several cases by being repre- sented by the same letter, are similarly connected as cor- responding long and short sounds in nature. There is scarcely a disquisition on the subject to be found in the 102 OUTLIN-ES or THE HISTOUT OF language which is not more or less tainted with this fal- lacy. Even where it is perceived and admitted that the two sounds differ in kind, or, in other words, that they are quite distinct sounds, a notion or half notion is still apt to lurk, both in the nomenclature and in the reason- ing, that the one is naturally the short sound of the other. The fact is, that, in so far as respects mere length, the sounds in question can hardly be characterised as dis- tinguishable into two sets. At any rate, a syllable, the vowel sound in which is what is called the short «, e, or t, may certainly be made to occupy, and often does occupy, as much time in the enunciation as one in which the vowel sound is what is called the long «, e, or i. Every classical scholar, indeed, is familiar with one form of this fact, in the prolongation of a short vowel in the G-reek and Latin by what is called position, or the cir- cumstance of its being followed by two consonants. Even in these ancient languages, however, it is worth noting that, while position makes a short vowel long, or, as we are told, doubles its time, it is not held, at least in pro- sodical effect, to make a long vowel either twice as long, or any longer at all. But in English, two things are re- markable in connexion Avith this matter : — 1. That, upon any definition or understanding of the terms long and short that can be proposed, what is called a short vowel, or the syllable in which it stands, may be long without position ; 2. That such a vowel or syllable may be short with or notwithstanding position. Here again, however, English scholars have almost universally been blinded to the plainest facts in their own language by their classical preconceptions. Because a vowel followed by two consonants is long in Greek and Latin, it has been commonly assumed that it is always THE E>'^aLTSn LANGUAGE. 103 long in a similar position in English too. And this un- founded notion has been productive of the greater coi> fusion, inasmuch as it runs directly counter to the other prejudice just adverted to, which holds the sound that a vowel commonly has in this situation to be short. Thus, for examjDle, while the monosyllable ivin is held to be short, the same combination of letters, retaining precisely the same sound, when it comes to form the first syllable of the word winter, is half regarded as long ; and thaj: although it is hardly pretended that any more time is taken to pronounce it in the one case than in the other. In truth, however the matter may stand in Latin, in English some of the syllables that would be accounted long under the rule of position are among the sliglitest and shortest in the language ; such, for instance, as the conjunction and, and the terminations ant and ent. In regard to this point there can be no doubt that the pro- nunciation of the one language is constructed upon a difierent principle from that of the other. "Whatever may be the true nature of the distinction between what are denominated long and short syllables, which is im- questionably the basis of Latin prosody and Latin verse, it is certain that a vowel standing in position, and the syllable containing that vowel, are uniformly ranked with and treated as belonging prosodically to one of the two classes into which all vowels and syllables are divided, — namely, to that which is described as long. It is possible that by the terms long and sliort the ancient grammarians may have meant nothing more than accented and imac- cented. All that is necessary to be affirmed here is, that accent is, at any rate, the sole principle of English prosody and of English verse. And in English a syllable of which the vowel is in position is by no means necessarily 10-1 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF an accented syllable, or one having prosodically the force of such. Mr Gruest believes that the e final in Chaucer and other writers of the same age is frequently the e ox a of inflection of the original form of the language. Thus, in the opening couplet of the Canterhury Tales, — " Whanne that April with his shoures sote The drought of March had perced to the rote," he holds the e of sote to be the sign of the plural, and the e of rote to be most probably the sign of the dative singular ; the common form of the original word for root being rot. Again, he conceives that in the following verse, " Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Loy," otlie represents the ancient genitive plural atlia ; so that hire gretest otlie means Tier greatest of oaths. In support of this interpretation he adduces from the Geste of King Horn the expression " Eiche menne sones " (that is, sons of rich men) ; from IBiers Plowman., that of " poure menne cotes" {^'poor men^s cots) \ and from Grower's Confessio Amantis, that of " her horse knave " (their horses groom) .* Moreover, he looks upon the final e of the adjective as being not only the sign of the plural (as in shoures sote), and the mark of what is called the definite declension, or the form which the adjective takes after the^ or this, or that, or a possessive pronoun (as in the gret-e see, and this sik-e man, and hire lohit-e voluper-e, that is, her lohite cap), but the affixed e which in the Original English con- * Enff. Rhytlvns, i. 30—33. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 105 verted an adjective into an adverb. Thus, in the line from the Gierke's Tale, in the Canterhury Tales, "And in a clotli of gold tliat bright-e shone," he regards Irigld-e as representing, not our present ad- jective hright, but our adverb hrightly. In the super- lative, however, he observes, it is not the adverb, but the adjective, that takes the e ; in other words, that IrigTitest is Irighteste, and that hrightliest is Irightest.^ The full account, then, of that most remarkable among the peculiarities which distinguish the English of Chau- cer from that of the present day, the e terminating so many of his words, and always forming a syllable, which has now disappeared altogether from the pronun- ciation, and in great part from the spelling, of the lan- guage, may be comprised in the five following proposi- tions: — 1. In words borrowed from the French it is, as pointed out by T3rrwhitt, the e feminine of that lan- guage, still universally retained both in French ortho- graphy and French prosody, though in English it has ceased to be pronounced, and only continues to be written where its presence is necessary to indicate the sound of a preceding vowel or consonant. 2. In nouns of native origin it is, in many cases, as * Eng. Rhythms, i. 29. The example that Mr Guest gives of this last canon is the following line in the Prologue to the Canterhury Tales :— " And fro the time that he^rs^e began." And so, indeed, the line is printed by Tyrwhitt. But it is evident that, according to the canon, ^rs^e ought to hejirst. And that amend- ment is also required by the prosody, if, as is believed to be the case, the final e in Chaucer always (except in hire, and, it may be, two or three other words) makes a distinct syllable when the following word begins with a consonant. lOG OUTLINES or THE HISTOET OF also pointed out by Tjrwliitt, tlie substitute for, or rem- nant of, the ancient nominative singular termination (which was either e, or «, or u). 3. In other native nouns, according to IVIr Gruest, it is the e ov a of the old dative singular, or genitive plural, or nominative plural in adjectives, or the sign of the definite form of the adjective, or of the adverb as distinguished from the adjective, or of the superlative of the adjective as distinguished from the superlative of the adverb> 4. In the verb, as pointed out by Tyrwhitt, it is the termination, in the stage at which the language had ar- rived through the decay of the ancient grammatical system, of the first person singular of the present indicative and the first and third persons singular of the perfect, and of one form of the second person plural of the imperative, and one form of the infinitive. 5. In many words of native derivation, howsoever it may have originated — whether from some primitive form, or, as Mr Price conceives, merely in an orthographical expedient — it probably gave the name sound to a preced- ing vowel, or served to indicate that it had such sound ; being itself, however, at the same time a distinct syllable in this as well as in all other cases. The other principal peculiarities that distinguish the grammar of Chaucer's English from that of the English of the present day are the following : — The substantive verb to hen (our to he) was inflected in the singular of the present indicative as it still is ; but the form throughout the plural was aren or hen. So iu the imperfect the plural form was weren. Our to have was to haven, or to han, w^hich in the pre- sent was inflected by have, havest or hast, haveth or hath for the singular, and by haven or han for the plural ; and THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 107 in the imperfect by hadde, Tiaddest, Tiadde for tlie singular, and liadden for tlie plural. They then said sJial in the singular, but sliullen in the plural, of the present ; shulde in the singular, and shulden in the plural, of the imperfect. In the present they said ivil or ivol in the singular, ii'illen or wollen in the plural ; in the imperfect, icolde in the singular, loolden in the plural. In the present they said can or con in the singular; and connen in the plural ; in the imperfect, coude in the singular, and couden in the plural. Our established spelling of could with an I has arisen from its being as- sumed by mistake that its original form was similar to those of should and would. May then made in the present may or mow in the singular, and mowen in the plural; in the imperfect, mouglite or migTite in the singular, mongliten or might en in the plural. The first personal pronoun was generally J, as at pre- sent, but sometimes Ich, or IcJie ; in the plural of the pronoun of the second person ye was always used for the nominative, you for the accusative ; our they was some- times hi ; them was usually hem (nearly the same with our present colloquial 'em, which little more than a cen- tury ago was commonly used also in writing) ; and their was usually hire, which (pronounced in all its senses as a monosyllable) was also the form both for the adjective pronoun her and for the accusative of the personal pro- noun she. II. The tendency of the English of the age of Chaucer to approximate still more to the Erench is indicated by the continued adoption of new words of French extrac- 108 OTJTLINES OF THE HISTOET OP tiou, often in substitution for native ones ; and tliis pro- cess goes on, for the most part at an accelerating rate, to about the end of the fifteenth century. JS'o additional words were now borrowed or revived from the English of the period before the Conquest. Of the words used by Chaucer and the other writers of that time which have now become obsolete, some in- deed are Trench, but the greater number are of native growth. This fact, while it indicates the tendency of the language, or of its vocabulary, goes also to corroborate the probabihty that Chaucer, in the extent to which he employed words of Erench origin, only followed, and did not by any means go beyond, the demand of the time, and the natural movement of the language. Out of the practice of borrowing words from the French there grew another of fabricating similar words directly from the Latin, the great source of the Erench. In this way many words of Latin formation found their way into the English which the Erench had never pos- sessed, but which were all constructed nevertheless upon the model of those that had been received through the medium of that language. Thus, for example, every such word formed from a Latin substantive in tio was made to end in tion, and every one formed from a Latin substan- tive in itas in ity (after the Erench ite) . These are the aureate terms, their pedantic and excess- ive employment of which Campbell {JEssay on English Poetry, xlviii) objects in particular against the Scottish versifiers of the fifteenth century, the generality of whom, he observes, " when they meant to be most eloquent, tore up words from the Latin, which never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither." THE EKGLTSH LANGUAGE. 109 But, although many of the words thus transplanted from the Trench and Latin never effected a cohesion Tvith the soil of the language, and some may perhaps never have been used except by the writer who introduced them, many took firm root, and they now constitute a large and indispensable portion of our national speech. Among them are all our substantives ending in Hon and sion ; all those in ify ; all in ance and ancy^ ence and ency, with their connected adjectives in ant and ent ; most of those in ment (for some are hybrids, made up of this Latin termination annexed to an English root) ; all in tor, torij, and ure ; all adjectives in ary and ory, in ic and ical, in ive, He, and ible, and most of those in able ; and all verbs in ate, act, ect, ict,SLndfy ; besides various smaller classes of words.* Dr Latham {Englisli Language, 3rd edit., 101) de- scribes what he designates the Latin of the Third Period or that which was introduced between the Norman Con- quest and the revival of literature (which for England may be understood to mean the beginning of the six- teenth century), as having " chiefly originated with the monks, in the universities, and, to a certain extent, in the courts of law." But the fact is, that most of the words of Latin or Erench derivation, which found their way into the language in this interval, were introduced by the authors of the most popular literature of the day. * The most complete examination to which the English language has been subjected with a view to the determination of the proportion which its vocabulary contains of Latin or French is that which it has received in a little work by Dr J. P. Thommerel, entitled " Eecherches sur la Fusion du Franco-Normand et de I'Anglo-Saxon," Paris, 1841. I have discussed this question in the Second of a series of papers entitled "Curiosities of the English Language," published in the Dublin University Magazine for October 1857. 110 OUTLITTES OF THE HISTORY OF Perhaps it would be "better not to distinguisli this Latin of the Third Period from what Dr Latham calls the Latin of the Fourth Period, or that introduced between the re- vival of literature and the present time, but to regard the latter as only a continuation of the former. Up to about the commencement of the sixteenth century French and Latin may be said to have flowed into the language in a stream, or to have been drunk up by it as if it were athirst ; but about that date the point of saturation would seem to have been reached, or the appetite of absorption to have been quenched : it has since received only single words, as occasion arose. The unripe or unconsolidated condition of the language, more especially at the commencement of the period of Middle English, or of its passage from Early English to Modern English, is indicated by the fluctuating accentua- tion of many of the words it was then appropriating from the French. Chaucer has, for instance, in one p'ace virtue, in another virtue ; in one place nature, in another nature ; in one place langdge, in another Idngage ; the first of the two modes of accentuation in each case being the French, the second the English one. For some time probably the former would be the more prevalent ; but ultimately all these imported words adopted the English accentua- tion, and entirely lost their native one ; thus shomng that the predominant genius of the language in its music, as well as in its grammar, was still English. Latin, either in its original state, or transformed into French, is the only foreign element with which the G-othic basis of our language has combined to any large extent. In modern times, it is true, a vast number of scientific THE ES^GLTSH LAITGUAGE. Ill and technical terms have been fabricated from the Greek ; and tbis is tbe only manufacture of additions to our voca- bulary upon a considerable scale tbat still goes on. But such words do not belong to the flesh and blood of the language at all ; they may be styled its non-natural part, or an artificial appendage to it ; they stand in the same relation to its proper substance in which the tools that a man works with stand to his living person. 112 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OP XX. Confining ourselves to the history of the English language since the Norman Conquest, we may call the First Century after that date its Infancy ; the Second its childhood ; the Third its Boyhood ; the Fourth and Fifth its Youth, or Adolescence ; and the time that has since elapsed its Manhood. Its Infancy and Childhood will thus correspond with what is usually designated the Period of Semi- Saxon ; its Boyhood with that of Early English ; its Youth with that of Middle English ; its Man- hood with that of Modern English. It is evident, from what has been stated in the preced- ing Sections, that the only natural, or scientific, division of the history of the English language in its entire extent is into the three following stages : — 1. That of its original form, when it retained intact both the integrity of its Grammar (or inflectional system) and the homogeneousness of its Vocabulary ; being that in which it subsisted during the period preceding the Norman Conquest, and in which it is commonly spoken of by modern philologists under the name of the Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon ; 2. That of its degradation into an illiterate patois by the breaking up of its Grrammar, though without the in- trusion of any foreign element into its Vocabulary (cor- responding to what is commonly called the Semi-Saxon) ; being that in which it is found for the first two centuries after the Conquest ; THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 113 3. That of its acquisition of both a new form and a new spirit or genius by the combination of the original Gothic basis of its Vocabulary with a Latin (Romance, Norman, or French) element ; being that in which it still is, and comprehending the periods usually called those of Early English, of Middle English, and of Modern English. The three successive and distinct states or forms may be most properly designated : — the Eirst, that of Pure or Simple English ; the Second, that of Broken or Semi- English; the Third, that of Mixed or Compound English.* But the following Table gives us a convenient enough technical division (convenient to be known, at any rate, as being that currently assumed) of so much of the histor}'- of the language as is subsequent to the Norman Conquest, at which date it may be considered to have, as it were, started upon a new career :t — * See this scheme of the true History of the Language explained and illustrated in Chapter First of " The Curiosities of the English Language," published in the Dublin University Magazine for Jidy 1857. t The dates in the Table are accommodated to the Kinjrs' reisrns : but the Periods and Ages may be most conveniently considered as ex- tending from about the middle of one century to the middle of another, and as therefore consisting in each case of one or more centuries. And, of course, as with the human being to which it is compared, the lan- guage was making progress during or Avithin each of the stages iuto which its history may be thus divided, as much as in passing from one to another of them. H OQ tq a '^ o o 1— I o a O '^ I— I CO C5 CO I— ( H • CO 03 ood: ears. • • CO C o o o 03 O «1 o ^ 1— I 2oo 6- o o H B 5^ • d o • r-i o a _ =1^ ^ 08 <-i z c-i B o ^ z "73 r-rj • 1 "■ TS 1 o M 55 3 (h2 > 2 CO 'o W )—' a fl a K CO 1— ( 1— I I-H I-H '^ . 00 >o t^ t^ »o '-' CM CO wa ^ r-l I— 1 I-H l-H m 1 1 1 ■ » CO ^ -. a o w -i b to O M w • 1— i rj O 03 F IrH o c3 .a 1 — 1 • l—t >: g >. « f' ^ o H • • 5 02 M M hi h^ HH CS O • ►-5 . t^ • y^ • •• CO o 2 W O O o H-, « ^ 5?; r^^ iM lO ^ Ph P^ CO CD tJ o Q °^ s hIh c^ rt <-* K rH o n • s CO • • 1— 1 • > ^ H-l I-H 1— 1 1— 1 1—1 h-t ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. I. Original English ; English Pure or Simple (Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon). 1. From the Voyage of OlitJier in Alfred's Translation of Orosius, JBooh i. : — hefore a.d. 900. And thaer is mid Estum dlieaw, thonne thser bidh man dead, thset he lidh inne unforbserned mid his masmn and freondum monadh, ge hwilum twegen, and tha kyn- ingas and tha odhre heahdhungene men swa micle lencg swa hi maran speda habbadh ; hwihim heaK gear thset hi beodh unforba)rned, and licgadh bufan eorthan on hyra hnsum. And, ealle tha hwile the thset lie bidh inne, thser sceal beon gedrync and plega, odh thone dagg the hi hine forbsernadh. [And there is with Esthonians a custom, -when there is one dead, that he lieth within unbiu'nt with his kinsmen and friends a month, yea sometimes (whiles, Scot.) t^'ain, and the kings and the other high- spoken-of men so much (mickle, Scot.) longer as they more wealth {lit. speed) have ; sometimes [it is] half a year that they be unburnt, and lie above earth in their houses. And, all the while that the corpse is within, there shall be [it is the custom that there be] drinking and play until the day that they it burn.] 1 2 116 ILLTJSTEATIVE SPECIMENS. 2. From the latter portion of tlie Chronicle: — about 1100. A.D. 1087. — . . . DMssuni tlius gedone, se cyng Willelm cearde ongean to ISTormaudige. . . He swealt on Normandige on tlione nextan daeg sefter nativitas See Marie ; and man begyrgede hine on Cathum set See [Sci?] Steplianes mjTistre. . . Gif hwa gewilniged to gewitane hu gedon man he was, odhdhe hwilcne wurdh- scipe he hsefde, odhdhe hu fela lande he waere hlaford, thonne wiUe we be him awritan swa swa we hine ageaton ; we him onlocodan, and odhre hwile on his hirede wunedon. . . He saette myeel deorfridh, and he Isegde laga thaer widh ; thset swa hwa swa sloge heort odhdhe hinde thaet hine man seeold blendian. He forbead tha heortas,* swvlce eac tha baras. Swa swidhe he lufode tha heodeor swylce he waere heora fseder. Eac he saette be tham haran thaet hi mosten freo faran. His riee men hit maen- don, and tha earme men hit beceorodan ; ac he waes swa stidh thaet he ne rohte heora eaUra nidh. [This thus done, the King "William turned again to Normandy. . . He died in Normandy on the next day after (the) nativity of St Marv {Nativitas SanctcB Marice) ; and man (Ger. ma7i, Fr. o?i, anciently homme) buried him in Caen, at St Stephen's minster. . . If any may wish to know how to do man (what kind of man) he was, or what worship he had, or of how many lands he was lord, then will we by (in regard to) him write so as we him knew : we him beheld, and other while in his household wonned (dwelt) . . . He set much deer free-ground (he made many deer-parks), and he laid (down) laws therewith ; that whoso slew hare or hind that him man should blind. As he forbade * "We ought, apparently, to read— ^A«< hwa stca sloge heort, and Stva he forbead tha heortas. The passage, from He scette mycel deor- fridh is probably in rhyme, although Dr Ingram's proposed substitu- tion of blinde for blendian is inadmissible without a verb in the in- finitive after seeold. ILLUSTEATIYE SPECIMETS^S. 117 [to slay] the harts, so also the boars. So much he loved the high-deer as he were their father. Also he set by (appointed regarding) the hares that they must free fare. His rich men it moaned, and the poor men it lamented ; but he was so stern, that he recked not the hatred of them all.] The element printed dh in these two extracts is to be sounded as the h in this. It is represented in the MSS., and in the common so-called Saxon printing, by one character ; as the th heard in thin is by another. But there is by no means a perfect correspondence, as to this matter, between the old language and our present English ; nor, indeed, are the two characters distinguished with any uniformity of usage in the MSS. 118 ILLTJSTEATIYE SPECTMEIs'S. II. Broken English, or Semi-English (Semi-Saxon ) : A.D. 1050—1250. 3. The Commencement of Layamon's JBnit, according to tlie oldest of the two Versions, 3IS. Coit. Calig. A. ix. : —about 1200.* An preost wes on leoden ; Layamon wes ihoten ; He wes Leovenadhes sone : Lidhe him beo Drihte. He wonede at Ernleye, At sedhelen are cliirechen, TJppen Sevarne stalhe : Sel thar him thuhte ; On fest Radestone ; Ther he bock radde. Hit com him on mode, And on his mern thonke, Thet he wolde of Engle Tha sedhelsen tellen ; Wat heo ihoten weoren, And wonene heo comen, Tha Englene londe .^rest ahten * In this and other Extracts the ancient fashion of "vvriting and print- ing i (or J, u for v, and v for ic, in particular circumstances, has not heen adhered to, though preserved by some of the modern editors. It is merely a diifcrcnt mode of forming the letters in question, which cannot be supposed to have affected their sound. ILLrSTEATITE SrECIMENS. 119 ^fter than flode, The from Drihtene com, The al her a-quelde Quic that he fimde, Buten Noe and Sem, Japhet and Cham, And heore four wives, The mid heom weren on archen. [A priest was on earth (or, perhaps, in the land, or among the people) ; Layamon was [he] (called); he was Leovenath's son; gra- cious to him be [the] Lord. He wonned (dwelt) at Ernley, at a noble church, upon Severn's bank, — good there to him [it] seemed — near Radestone ; there he book read. It came to him in mind, and in his chief (?) thought, that he would of Englishmen the noble -deeds tell ; what they called were, and whence they came, that English land first owned, after the flood, that from [the] Lord came, that all here quelled (destroyed), quick (alive) that it found, but Noah and Shem, Japheth and Ham, and their four wives, that with them were in [the] ark.] In the later version, IMS. Cott. Otho, C. xiii., the passage stands thus : — A prest was in londe ; Laweman was hote ; He was Leucais sone : Lef him beo drifte. He wonede at Ernleie, "Wid than gode cnithte ; Uppen Sevarne ; ]\lerie ther him thohte ; Taste bi Kadistone : Ther heo bokes radde. Hit com him on mode. And on his thonke, 120 ILLrSTEATIVE SPECIMENS. That he wolde of Engelond The riftnesse telle ; "Wat the men hi-hote weren, And wancne hi comen, The Englene lond ^rest afden After than flode, That fram God com ; That al ere acwelde Cwic that hit funde, Eot Noe and Sem, Japhet and Cam, And hire four wifes, That mid ham there weren. In this version Sir F. Madden conjectures that hote, in line 2, should be ihote ; that Aeo, in line 10, should be he ; and that wancne, in line 16, should be icanene. 4. Layamon's Description (with the two hemistichs, or short lines, printed as a single verse) of the arming of Prince Arthur hefore the Battle of B addon Hill, or Bath {A.D. 520?), from the Brut, 21,149— 21,168 ; Madden, ii. 464-5 : — also given, with one or two variations, hy Guest, Eng. Bh. ii. 118, 119 : — from MS. Cott. Calig. A. ix : — aiout 1200. He heng an his sweore senne sceld deore ; His nome was on Bruttisc Pridwen ihaten : Ther was innen igraven mid rede golde staven An on-licnes deore of Drihtenes moder. His spere he nom an honde, tha Eon wes ihaten. Tha he hafden al his iweden tha leop he on his steden. ILLUSTEATIYE SPECIlIElJfS. 121 Tha lie mihte behalden tha bihalves stoden Thene vseireste crdht the verde scolde leden ; Ne isaeh naevere na man selere cniht nenne Theime him wes Ardhur, adhelest cunues." That is, literally : — He hung on his neck a dear [precious] shield ; Its name was in British called Pridwen : There was within [on it] engraven with red gold tracings A dear likeness of the Lord's mother. His spear he took in hand, that was called Ron. "When he had all his weeds [accoutrements], then leapt he on his steed. Then they might hehold that beside stood The fairest knight that host should lead ; Nor saw never no man better knight none Than he was, Arthur, noblest of kin. In the later version, MS Cott. OtLo, C. xiii. (1250?), this passage stands : — He heng on his swere one sceald deore ; His name was in Bruttisse Pridewyn ihote ; That (thar ?) was hine igraved on anlichnesse of golde, That was mid isothe Drihtene moder. His spere he nam an honde, that Eon was ihote. Tho he hadde al his wede, tho leop he on his stede. Tho hii mihte bi-holde that thar bi-halves were Thane fairest cniht that ferde sal leade. (The two concluding lines do not occur in the later MS.) The y which occurs in Layamon^ Ernleye^ and some other words, stands for a character in the original the form of which, as well as its position, would seem to indicate that it represented a sound com- 122 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMEI^'S. bining that of g and y, or intermediate between the tvro. In the modern language it has for the most part become y before a vowel, and g hard, or gh, elsewhere. It never can have had any resemblance to the sound of z, by which it has sometimes been ignorantly rendered in modem reprints of old English and Scottish texts. .In the later version of Layamon this character appears much less frequently than in the earlier version, and that representing dh does not occur at all. ILLTTSTEATIVE SPECIME^^S. 123 III. Compound English ; A.D. 1250— (Early English ; 1250-1350). 5. Dedication hy tlie Author of the Ormulum to his brother : — about 1260 ? Nu, brotlierr Wallterr, brotherr min affterr the flaeshess kinde; And brotherr min i Crisstenndom thnrrh fiilluhht and thurrh trowwthe ; And brotherr min i Grodess hus, yet o the thride wise, Thurrh thatt witt hafenn takenn ba an reghellboc to follghenn, Unnderr kannnnkess had and lif, swa summ Sannt Awwstin sette ; Ice hafe don swa summ thu badd, and fortheddte thin wille; Ice hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh goddspelless halghe lare, AfFterr thatt little witt tatt me min Drihhten hafethth lenedd. [No-w, brother "Walter, "brother mine after the flesh's kind ; And brother mine in Christendom, through baptism and through truth (faith) ; And brother mine in God's house, yet in the third wise, Through (for) that we have taken both one rule-book to follow, Under (the) canon's rank and life so as Saint Austin ruled ; I have done so as thou badest, and furthered thy will (wish) ; I have turned into English [the] Gospel's holy lore, After that little wit that me my Lord hath lent.] 6. The Commencement of Bohert of Gloucester's Chronicle, as printed hy Hearne: — about 1300. Engelond ys a wel god lond, ich wene of eche lend best, Yset in the ende of the world, as al in the AVest. 124 ILLTISTEATIVE SPECIME]!?"S. The see goth hym al a boute, he stont as an yle. Here fon heo durre the lasse doute, but hit be thorw gyle Of fol of the selve lond, as me hath y seye wyle. From South to North he is long eighte hondred myle ; And foure hondred myle brod from Est to AVest to wende, Amydde tho lond as yt be, and noght as by the on ende. Plente me may in Engelond of alle gode y se, Bute folc yt for gulte other yeres the worse be. For Engelond ys ful ynow of fruyt and of tren, Of wodes and of parkes, that joye yt ys to sen ; Of foules and of bestes, of wylde and tame al so ; Of salt fysch and eche freseh, and fayre ry\Tres ther to ; Of Welles swete and colde ynow, of lesen and of mede ; Of selver or and of gold, of tyn and of lede ; Of stel, of yrn, and of bras ; of god corn gret won Of whyte and of wolle god, betere ne may be non. [England is a very good land, I -ween of every land [the] best ; set in the end of the world, as [being] wholly in the west. The sea goeth it all about ; it standeth as an isle. Their foes they need the less fear, except it be through guile of folk of the same land, as one hath seen sometimes. From South to North it is long eight hundred mile ; and four hundred mile broad from East to West to wend, amid the land as it be, and not as by the one end. Plenty one may in England of all good see, except (were it not for) folk that for guilt some years the worse be. For England is full enough of fruit and of trees ; of woods and of parks, that joy it is to see ; of fowls and of beasts, of wild and tame also ; of salt fish and eke fresh, and fair rivers thereto ; of wells sweet and cold enow, of pasture and of mead ; of silver ore and of gold, of tin and of lead ; of steel, of iron, and of brass ; of good corn great store ; of wheat and of good wool, better may be none.] ILLTJSTEATIYE SPEClilElS'S. 125 7. Robert cle Briinne^s Account of the Alteration of the Coinage hy Edward I. in 1282, from his Translation of Peter Langtoffs Chronicle : — about 1310. jS'ow turnes Edward ageyn to London his cite, And wiUe wite certeyn ^ who schent ^ has his mone. Of clippers, of roungers,^ of suilk ^ takes he questis ; Old used traitoures ilk at other hand kestis. Ilk these other oiit said, ilk a schrewe other greves ;^ Of fele ^ were handes laid, and hanged ther as theves. Edward did smyte "^ rounde peny, halfpeny, ferthing. The croise^ passed the bounde of alle thorghont the ryng. The kjnge's side salle he the hede and his name writen ; The croyce side what cite it was in coyned and smyten. The povere man ne the preste the peny prayses no thing. Men gyf God the lest,^ the fesse^^ him with a ferthing. A thousand and two hundred and fourscore yeres mo,^* Of this mone men wondred first when it gan go.* 1 Know certainly. 2 Corrupted. ' Xippers. * Such. 5 Ilk and ilk a mean every with De Brunne, as they still do in the Scottish dialect ; and kestis is casts ; but, perhaps, scarcely more than a doubtful sense can be extracted from these two lines, as Hearne has printed them. His Glossary affords no aid towards their interpret- ation. ® Many. 7 strike. ^ Cross (the oi or oy being; probably pronounced nearly as our o in the modem form of the word, or somewhat as the oi in the French croix). 9 Least. 10 They feast. ^ ii More. * From Hearne's Edition, 238, 239. — Of course the e makes a dis- tinct syllable in such words as cite and mone. 126 ILLUSTEATIVE SPECIMENS. (Middle English. A.D. 1350—1550). 8. Commencement of Minofs Foem on the Battle of Halidon Hill, fought a.d. 1333 : — about 1350. Trew king, that sittes in trone, Unto the I tell my tale, And unto the I bid a bone ^ Tor thou ert bute ^ of all my bale : Als thou made midelerd and the mone,^ And bestes and fowles grete and smale, Unto me send thi socore sone, And dresce my dedes in this dale.^ ^ Offer a prayer. ^ Boot, remedy. 3 As thou madest middle-eartli and tlie moon. * Direct my deeds in this vale (of misery). 9. Commencement of the Vision of Piers Ploughman, from Wright's Edition, 1842 -.—about 1360. In a somer seson "Whan softe was the sonne, I shoop me into shroudes ^ As I a sheep ^ weere, In habite as an heremite Unholy of werkes, ILLUSTEATITE SPECIMENS. 127 "Went wide in this world Wondres to here ; Ac^ on a May morwenjnge On Malverne hilles Me befel a ferly / Of fairye me thoghte. I was wery^ for-wandred, And went me to reste Under a brood ^ bank By a bournes syde ; And as I lay and lenede, And loked on the watres, I slombred into a slepyng, It sweyed so muryeJ 1 I put myself into clothes. 2 Shepherd. 3 And. * Wonder. s Weary. « Broad. 7 It sounded so pleasant. 10. Commencement of the Seventh Chapter of Sir John MandeviVs Travels, entitled " Of the Pilgrimages in Jerusalem, and of the Holy Places thereaboute^'* from the Cotton MS. Titus, C. xvi., which is believed to have been loritten about the year 1400 : — about 1370.* After for to speke of Jerusalem the holy cytee, yee schull iindii'stonde that it stent full faire betwene hilles, and there be no ryveres ne welles, but watar cometh by * This text was first published in a contribution to the " Pictorial History of England " by Sir Henry Ellis. 128 ILLTJSTEATIYE SPECIirE:S'S. condyte from Ebron. And yee scbulle understonde tliat Jerusalem of olde tyme, unto the tyme of Melchisedech, was cleped Jebus ; and after it was clept Salem, unto the tyme of Kyng David, that put these two names to gider, and cleped it Jerosolomye. And after that men cleped it Jerusalem, and so it is cleped yit. And aboute Jeru- salem is the kyngdom of Surrye {Syria). And there besvde is the lond of Palestvne. And besyde it is Asco- Ion. And besyde that is the lond of Maritanie. But Jerusalem is in the lond of Judee ; and it is clept Jude for that Judas Machabeus was kyng of that contree. And it marcheth estward to the kyngdom of Araby ; on tlie south syde to the lond of Egipt ; and on the west syde to the Grrete See. On the north syde toward the kyngdom of Surrye, and to the see of Cypre. 11. Beginning of the IQth Chapter of St Liike^from the Earlier of the two Versions ascribed to WycUffe and Ms followers \ — about 1380.* Forsothe he seide also to his disciplis, Ther was sum riche man, that hadde a fermour, ether a baily ; and this was defamyd anentis him, as he hadde wastid his goodis. And he clepide him, and seide to him, AVhat heere I this thing of thee ? yeld resoun of thi ferme, for now thou schalt not mowe holde thi ferme. Forsoth the fermour seide with ynne him silf, What schal I do, for my lord * According to the text published in " The Holy Bible . . . made from the Latin Vulgate, by John Wycliffe and his followers : Edited by the Rev. Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden, K.H." 4 vols. 4to. Oxford, 1850. ILLUSTllATIVE spectme:s"s. 129 talvitli awey fro me tlie ferme ? I may not delve, I am aschamyd to begge. I woot what I sehal do, that, whaniie I schal be removyd fro the ferme, thei receyve me in to her hoiisis. And, alle the dettours of the lord clepid to gidere, he seide to the firste, Hon moche owist thou to my lord ? And he seide to him, An hundrid barelis of oyle. And he seide to him, Taak thin obligaeioun, and sitte soon, and wryt fyfti. Aftir\Yard he seide to another, Sothli hou moche owist thou ? Which seide. An hundrid mesnris of whete. And he seide to him, Tak thi lettris, and wryt foure score. And the lord preiside the fermour of wickidnesse, for he hadde don prudently ; for the sones of this world ben more prudent in her generacioun than the sones of light. And I seie to you, make to you frendes of the richesse of wickidnesse, that, whan ye shulen fayle, thei receyve you in to everlastynge taber- naclis. 12. From Trevisa's Translation of Iligclen's Polyclironl- con, Book I. chap. lix. : as printed hy Tyrwliitt in his edition of Chaucer's Canterhurfs Tales, from MS. Harl. 1900 :— 1385. This apayringe {disparaging) of the birthe tonge is by cause of tweye thinges : oon is for children in scole, agenes the usage and maner of alle other naciouns, beth compelled for to leve her owne langage, and for to con- strewe her lessouns and her thingis a Trensche, and haveth siththe that the IN'ormans come first into England. Also gentil mennes children beth jiiaught for to speke Frensche from the tyme that thei beth rokked in her 130 ILLrSTKATIVE SPECIMEJTS. cradel, and kunnetli speke and plaje witli a childes brooclie. And uplondish men wol likne hem self to gentil men, and fondeth witli grete bisynesse for to speke Erensche, for to be the more ytold of. — (Treyisa.) This maner was myche jiised to fore the first moreyn {imir- rain, plague), and is siththe som del ychaungide. For John Cornwaile, a maistre of gramer, chaungide the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frensch into Englisch, and E,ichard Pencriche lerned that maner tech- ing of him, and other men of Pencriche. So that now, the yere of our lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde King E,ychard after the Conquest nyne, in alle the gramer scoles of Englond children leveth Erensch, and construeth and lerneth an (in) Englisch, and haveth therby avauntage in oon side and desavaun- tage in another. Her avauntage is, that thei lerneth her gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont to do. Desavauntage is, that now children of gramer scole kun- netli no more Erensch that can her lifte (knows tlieir left) heele. And that is harm for hem, and thei schul (an they shall) passe the see and travaile in strange londes, and in many other places also. Also gentil men haveth now mych ylefte for to teche her children Erensch. TLLTJSTEATIYE SPECIMEIfS. 131 13. Beginning of tlie Heeve's Tale, from Cliaucer's Can- terbury Tales, after the Text in Wrighfs Edition, 1847 -—about 1390. At Trompjngtoun, nat fer ^ fra Cantebrigge, Ther goth a brook, and over that a brigge, Upon the whicbe brook then stant a melle ;^ And this is yerray sothe that I yon telle. A meller was ther dAvellyng many a day ; As eny pecok he was prowd and gay ; Pipen he coude, and fisshe, and nettys beete,^ And turne cuppes, wrastle wel, and scheete ;"* Ay by his belt he bar a long panade,^ And ^ of a swerd ful trenchannt was the blade ; A joly popper "^ bar he in his pouche ; Ther was no man for perel durst him touche ; A SchefFeld thwitel bar he in his hose ; Eound was his face, and camois ^ was his nose ; As pyled^ as an ape was his skuUe; He was a market-beter ^^ at the fnlle ; Ther dnrste no wight hand upon him legge,^' That he ne swar anon he schuld abegge.'^ 5 Not far. 2 stands a mill. s Mend. * Shoot. A kind of two-edged knife. ^ Sliould apparently be ^s 7 Dagger. 8 j^lat. 9 Peeled (bald). '0 A swaggerer in the market ? ^^ Lay. '^ Suffer for K 2 132 ILLTJSTRATITE SPECTirE>'S. 14. From tlie Persones (Parsons) Tale, in Chance/