sits sometimes by the straw pallet, with the scroll that contains the labour of his leisure on his knee, charming away care and pain by telling through the sweet music into which he has turned the daily and familiar Areley speech, of Merlin and King Arthur, or the tale of Gorboduc, or of the stricken majesty of Lear. CHAPTER VIII. LAYAMON. THE extent to which, by fusion of races, the formation of English had advanced in the reign of Henry II. is indic Fusion of ated by the reply of " Magister" to " Discipulus," in the work named towards the close of the last chapter, the "Dialogue on the Exchequer "* to the question whether clandestine death should be imputed for the murder of an Englishman as of a Norman. "At the outset it was not, as you have heard ; but already by English and Norman cohabiting and taking wives from each other the nations are so thoroughly mixed that at this day it can hardly be discerned-I speak of the children-which is of English, which of Norman race; except only those ascribed to the soil, who are called villains, to whom their lords do not give liberty to depart from their condition." The change made by this time in the English language was one of development, not of disorganisation. There was loss of inflexion, and there was gradual enrichment of the vocabulary. John Selden compared our language to a garment full of patches various in colour and material. But the comparison misleads, for it implies rot and imperfect restoration. The true comparison would be to a house that, with the increasing wealth of its owner, becomes more and more suited to the uses and enjoyments of his life. Transition English retains the essential characters of First* Lib. I. cap. x. Quid Murdrum et quare sic dictum. metre of this work is regular in accent, but without alliteration and without intentional rhyme. The author tells of himself in the dedication that he was a canon regular of the order of St. Augustine, and that he composed the Homilies in English at the request of Brother Walter, also an Augustinian canon, for the spiritual improvement of his countrymen. His plan is, first, to give a metrical paraphrase of the Gospel of the day, and then to expound it in metre doctrinally and practically, with frequent borrowing from the writings of St. Augustine and Ælfric, and some borrowing from Bede. Of the homilies provided for nearly the whole of the yearly service, nothing remains beyond the thirty-second, and in what remains there is no sentence that points to the time when the work was written. The metre is in alternate verses of eight and seven syllables, imitative of a Latin rhythm, or in lines of fifteen syllables with a metrical point at the end of the eighth. Ormin has taken some pains to preserve his rhythm ; and over the lines of the MS. marks as of different acute accents, single, double, or triple, are set. These marks may have served as guides to a right elocution, but. for the right pronunciation of his vowels Brother Ormin took a precaution all his own. He doubled the consonant after a short vowel, and there only. Where the consonant was single, even a Norman or town-bred priest reading the simple English homily to the simple country congregation was thereby taught that the preceding vowel was a long vowel, and he was accordingly warned not to mispronounce it. Although Brother Ormin's version of the Scripture service of the day with homily upon it is good in rhythm but not poetical, yet it has one pleasant distinctive character. It is remarkable for its well-studied simplicity of expression. Without sacrifice of the dignity of the subject, each Scripture story is told in the easy language Local influ ences upon language. At court. In the chief towns, and wherever the king and his nobles held court, the Normans who, as an essential part of the policy of conquest and not only for the division of spoil, had been set in places of chief trust, naturally spoke in their own language to each other. It was also the reasonable courtesy of inferiors to address them, if they were able to do so, in the language they best understood; and for their own sakes pleaders would take care to put their causes into the form most clearly intelligible. Thus French found its way into law courts, and came to be generally taught in schools. As far as they could, the Norman barons, bishops, and abbots would, one man perfectly, another man imperfectly, acquire the language of the great mass of the people, and attempt to make themselves intelligible to those who had not learnt French; while on the other side there would be generally produced by the native some variety of the "French of Stratford-atte-Bow," racy enough of English soil. In the towns frequented by the court the result of such intercourse, after four or five generations of Normans and English dwelling together, and having their chief commerce with the English-speaking people at their doors, would be an English language with comparatively much Latin or French admixture. In the trading towns. In the trading towns, of which many soon became strong and prosperous, and of which the inhabitants were chiefly and patriotically English, the language would be on the whole less modified by French, although the intercourse and extension of trade would compel a frequent use of that language, and introduce a class of technical terms distinct from those of chivalry and the chase peculiar to courtly circles. And lastly, in the little towns and hamlets of the rural districts there was usually a Norman baron, districts. with an English wife or mother, set as the In rural influential centre of a Saxon people. The people would pick up and keep any convenient French terms dropped among them by the castle folk, but would on the whole oblige their lords and ladies, if they dwelt much on the estate, to learn the language of the land. Still, whether the lord of the soil were resident or not, the direct intercourse with him would not be very great; while as for the population of the villains or serfs, their intercourse remained almost exclusively among each other. Thus, in these rural districts the old language would stay in the old form for a much longer time than in large towns; for it is to be remembered that there was far less intercourse then than there now is between town and country, and that there was no wide circulation of books to diffuse knowledge of some common standard of right speech. In the same year, then, the language spoken in the capital, in a trading town, and in the rural districts of England, would differ so much, that we might, if not on our guard, be led to ascribe the rustic English to one period, the courtly to another. Differences in contemporary forms of English. Transition a literary language. While in Transition English (known commonly as Early English) change was being thus made at different rates of progress, there had long ceased to exist a cultivated literary class among the English that might English not have studiously maintained the old purity of inflexion. As at this day the German peasantry confuse the genders, and clip the inflexions of their language, so doubtless First-English was confused and clipped by the main body of the people, even in the best days of its literature. But when Norman influence ruled over literature, and the best native writers used either Latin or NormanFrench, complexities of gender and inflexion must needs go the way of nature rather faster than they usually do, but as they all sooner or later must go in the language of a vigorous and active people. |