the reign of Edward the Confessor furnishes examples, must have tended to increase the Gallicizing character perceptible in Anglo-Saxon writings previous to the Conquest. In tracing the influence of that mighty revolution on the language, the institutions, and the national character of the people, it will be advisable to advert separately to its effects as regarded from a political, a social, and a philological point of view.

The most important change consequent upon the subjugation of the country by the Normans was obviously the establishment in England of the great feudal principle of the military tenure of land, of the chivalric spirit and habits which were the natural result of feudal institutions, and lastly, of the broad demarcation which separated society into the two great classes of the Nobles and the Serfs. It is unnecessary to say that the feudal institutions, which lay at the bottom of all these modifications, were totally unknown to the original Saxons who established themselves in England, and were indeed utterly repugnant to that free democratic organization of society which they brought with them from their native Germany, and which Tacitus shows to have universally prevailed among the primitive dwellers of the Teutonic swamps and forests. The Scandinavian pirates, who carried devastation over every coast accessible to their "sea-horses," and who, under the valiant leadership of Hrolf the Ganger, wrested from the feeble and degenerate successors of Charlemagne the magnificent province to which they gave their own North-man appellation, adopted, from the force of circumstances, that strong military organization which could alone enable a warlike minority to hold in subjection a more numerous but less vigorous conquered people. Like the Lombards in Italy, like a multitude of other races in different parts of the world and in different historical epochs, they found feudal institutions an indispensable necessity of their position; and what had been forced upon them at their original occupation of Normandy they naturally practised on their irruption into England. But as the invasion of William was carried on under at least a colorable allegation of a legal right to the inheritance of the English throne, his investiture of the crown was accompanied by a studied adherence to the constitutional forms of the Saxon monarchy; and it was perhaps only the obstinate resistance of the sullen, sturdy Saxon people, that at length wearied him into treating his new acquisition with all the rigor of a conquering invader. The whole territory was by his orders carefully surveyed and registered in that curious monument of antiquity, which still exists, entitled Domesday Book: the severest measures of police, as for example the famous institution of the Curfew (which was, however, no new invention of William to tyrannize over the enslaved country, but a very common regulation in feudal states), were introduced to keep down the rising of the people; the territory was divided into 60,000 fiefs; the original Saxon holders of these lands were as a general rule ousted from their estates, which were distributed, on the feudal conditions of homage and general defence, to the warriors who had enabled him to

subjugate the country; vast tracts of inhabited lands were depopulated and transformed into forests for the chase, and the higher functions of the Church and State were with few exceptions confided to men of Norman blood. The natural consequence of such a state of things, when it continued, as it did in England, through the reigns of the long series of Norman and Plantagenet sovereigns, was to create in the country two distinct and intensely hostile nationalities. The Saxon race gradually descended to the level of an oppressed and servile class; but being far superior in numbers to their oppressors, they ran no risk of being absorbed and lost in the dominant people. The high qualities, too, of the Norman race, qualities which made them greatly superior in valor, wisdom, and intellectual activity, to any other people then existing on the continent of Europe, no less saved them from gradually disappearing in the subjugated population. It required several ages to amalgamate the two nationalities; but, partly in consequence of their high, though very different merits, and partly in consequence of a most peculiar and happy combination of circumstances, they were ultimately amalgamated, and formed the most vigorous people which has ever existed upon earth. In the present case the two nationalities were not dissolved in each other, but like some chemical bodies their affinities combined to form a new and powerful substance. But for several centuries the two fierce and obstinate races felt nothing but hatred towards each other, a hatred cherished by the memory of a thousand acts of tyranny and contempt on the one part, and savage revenge and sullen degradation on the other. Macaulay has well observed that, "so strong an association is established in most minds between the greatness of a sovereign and the greatness of the nation which he rules, that almost every historian of England has expatiated with a sentiment of exultation on the power and splendor of her foreign masters, and has lamented the decay of that power and splendor as a calamity to our country. This is, in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro of our time to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Lewis XIV., and to speak of Blenheim and Ramillies with patriotic regret and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth generation were not Englishmen : most of them were born in France : their ordinary speech was French: almost every high office in their gift was filled by a Frenchman: every acquisition which they made on the continent estranged them more and more from the population of our island." Though every trace of this double and hostile nationality has long passed away, abundant monuments of its having once existed may be still observed in our language. The family names of the higher aristocracy in England are almost universally French, while those of the middle and lower orders are as unmistakably German. Thus our peerage abounds in Russells (Roussel), Mortimers (Mortemar), Courtenays, and Talbots, while the Smiths, Browns, Johnsons, and Hodgkins plainly betray their Teutonic origin. Under the Norman régime the Saxon subdivisions of the country were transformed from the democratic shire into the feudal county, administered by a military governor

or count. The ancient Saxon witanagemote, or thing, was metamorphosed into the feudal Parlement, the members of which occupied their seats, not as elective representatives of the people, but in their feudal capacity as vassals in the enjoyment of military fiefs. Thus the great ecclesiastical dignitaries took part of right in the deliberations of the legislative body, in their quality of holders of lands, and as such disposing of a certain contingent of military force.

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But it is with the effects of the Norman Conquest upon the language of the country that we are at present concerned and it is here that the task of tracing the process of admixture between the two races becomes at once more complicated and more interesting. On their arrival in Normandy, the piratical followers of Hrolf the Ganger had found themselves exposed to the civilizing influences which a small minority of rude conquerors, placed in the midst of a subject population superior to them in numbers as well as intellectual cultivation, can never long resist with success. Like the hordes of barbarian invaders who shared among them the territories of the Roman empire, the Northmen, with the Christianity of the conquered nation, imbibed also the language and civilization so intimately connected with that Christianity, and in an incredibly brief space of time exchanged for their native Scandinavian dialect a language entirely similar, in its words and grammatical forms, to the idiom prevalent in the northern division of France. It was a repetition of the introduction of Greek art and culture into republican Rome :

Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes.

The language thus communicated by the subject to the conquered nation was a dialect of that great Romance speech which extended during the Middle Ages from the northern shore of the Mediterranean to the British Channel, and which may be defined as the decomposition of the classical Latin. It was soon divided into two great sisteridioms, the Langue-d'Oc and the Langue-d'Oil (so called from the different words for yes), the general boundary or line of demarcation between them being roughly assignable as coinciding with the Loire. The former of these languages, spoken to the south of this river, was closely allied to the Spanish and Italian, and was subsequently called the Provençal; the latter was the parent of the French. Knowing the circumstances under which such a dialect as the Romance was formed, it is no difficult problem to establish à priori the changes which the mother-tongue, or Latin, must have undergone, in its process of transformation into what, though afterwards developed into regular and beautiful dialects, was at first little better than a barbarous jargon. The language of ancient Rome, a highly inflected and complicated tongue, naturally lost all, or nearly all its inflections and grammatical complexity. Thus the Latin substantive and adjective lost all those terminations which in the original language expressed relation, as the various cases of the different declensions; these relations being thenceforward indicated by the simpler expedient of prepositions.

§ 7. The literary models introduced into England by the Norman invasion were no less important than the linguistic changes consequent upon the admixture of their Romance dialect with the Saxon speech. Together with the institutions of feudalism the Normans brought with them the poetry of feudalism, that is, the poetry of chivalry. The lais and romances, the fabliaux and the legends of mediæval chivalry soon began to modify the rude poetical sagas and the tedious narratives of the lives of saints and hermits which had formed the bulk of the literature of Saxon England. Few subjects have excited more lively controversy among the learned than the origin and specific character of the Romance literature. In particular the distinction between the compositions of the Norman Trouvères and of the Provençal Troubadours has given rise to many elaborate dissertations and many contending theories: and yet the fundamental question may be easily, and, we think, not unsatisfactorily, solved by the simple comparison of the two terms. Trouvère and Troubadour are obviously the two forms of the same word as pronounced respectively by the population who spoke the Langue-d'Oil and the Langue-d'Oc. The natural and picturesque definition of a poet as a finder or inventor bears some analogy with the term Skald, or polisher of language, by which the same idea was represented among the Scandinavians, with the Greek notis, a term exactly reproduced in the Maker of the Lowland Scots; and the beautiful qualification of the poetic art as el gay saber and la guaye science, no less faithfully corresponds to the idea contained in the Saxon term gleeman, applied to the singer or bard, whose invention furnished the joy of the banquet. Now, if we keep in mind the characteristic differences which are universally found to distinguish a Northern as compared with a Southern people, we shall generally find that in the former the imagination, the sentiments, and the memory are most developed, while the latter will be more remarkable for the vivacity of the passions and the intensity and consequently also the transitory duration - of the affective emotions. We might therefore predict à priori, given respectively a Northern and a Southern population, that among the former an imaginative or poetical literature would have a natural tendency to take a narrative, and among the latter a lyric, form: for narrative is the necessary type in which the firstmentioned class of intellectual qualities would clothe themselves, while ardent and transitory passion would as inevitably express itself in the lyric form. And this is what we actually find, on comparing the prevailing literary type of the Trouvère with that of the Troubadour literature. It is evident that the composition of long narrative recitals of real or imaginary events would require a certain degree of literary culture, as well as a considerable amount of leisure; and therefore many of the interminable romances of the Trouvères may be traced to the ecclesiastical profession; while the shorter and more lively lyric and satiric effusions which constitute the bulk of the Troubadour literature were frequently the productions of princes, knights, and ladies,

the power of writing verse being considered as one of the necessary accomplishments of a gentleman : —

"He coude songes make, and wel endite."

Concerning the source from which the Romance poets, both of the Northern and Southern dialects, drew the materials for their chivalric fictions, great diversity has prevailed; and the various theories which have been broached on this curious subject may be practically reduced to two hypotheses; the one tracing these inventions to an Oriental, and the other to a Celtic source; while a third class of investigators have endeavored to assign to them a Teutonic paternity, whether in the general German or the exclusively Scandinavian nationality. Each of these theories has been supported with much ingenuity, and defended with an immense display of learning: but they are all equally obnoxious to the reproach of having been made too exclusive: the existence of the well-marked general features of Chivalric Romance long before the European nations acquired, by the Crusades, any familiarity with the imagery and scenery of the East renders the first hypothesis untenable in its full extent; while the second is in a great measure invalidated by the comparatively barbarous state into which the Celtic tribes had generally fallen at the time when the Chivalric literature began to prevail, and the little knowledge which the Romance populations of Europe possessed of the ancient Gaulic language and historical legendary lore. It is true that the Trouvères almost invariably pretend to have found the subjects of their narratives in the traditions, or among the chronicles of the "olde gentil Bretons," just as Marie de France refers her reader to the Celtic or Armorican authorities; but this was in all probability in general a mere literary artifice, like that which induced other poets to place the venue of their wondrous adventures in some distant and unknown region:

"In Sarra, in the lond of Tartarie."

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The important part played in these legends by the half-mythical Arthur and his knights might seem to argue in favor of a Celtic origin for these fictions; for if ever such a personage as Arthur really existed he must have been a British prince; but when we remember that Arthur, though mentioned in the authentic traditional poems of the ancaint Britons, is a comparatively insignificant character, and that these same traditions contain no trace whatever of the existence of that chivalric state of society of which Arthur and his preux are the ideal, we shall find ourselves as much warranted in accepting the authenticity of a Celtic origin on these grounds, as in attributing the chivalric character with which Alexander, Hector, and Hercules are also invested in the mediæval poets, to an intimate acquaintance with the Homeric .and classical poems, from which the Troubadour may indeed have borrowed some striking names and leading incidents, but with the true spirit of which every line shows him to be unacquainted.* § 8. For two centuries after the Norman conquest, the Anglo-Saxon of

* See Notes and Illustrations (B), Anglo-Norman Literature.

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