No More Learning

The Land of Cokaygne has relatives in many lands; it lacks
the deep seriousness of the Wyclifian songs that came later, and
the light satirical way in which the subject is treated would
seem to imply that a French model had been used, but its
colouring is local and its purpose is evident.
Dame Siriz, an oriental tale showing traces of the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls, was put into English after
many wanderings through other languages, about the middle of
the thirteenth century, and is excellently told in a metre varying
between octosyllabic couplets and the six-lined verse of the Sir
Thopas type. Other renderings of the same story are contained
in Gesta Romanorum (28), Disciplina Clericalis (XI) and similar
collections of tales; and the imperfect poem in the form of a
dialogue between Clericus and Puella, printed by Wright and
Halliwell, may be compared with it. A tale of this kind was
certain of popularity, whether recited by wandering minstrel or
committed to writing for the pleasure of all lovers of comedy. To
the “common form” of an absent and betrayed husband, is added
the Indian device of the “biche" with weeping eyes (induced by
mustard and pepper), who has been thus transformed from human
shape because of a refusal to listen to the amorous solicitations of
Reliquiae Antiquae, 1, 145,
I cry.


## p. 366 (#386) ############################################

366 Later Transition English
a "clerc. " The device is used by the pander, Dame Siriz, who,
for twenty shillings, promises another “clerc” to persuade the
merchant's wife to yield to his desires.
There is, unfortunately, very little of the famous satirical beast
epic Reynard the Fox that can be claimed for England. Some of
the animals were known to Odo of Cheriton, the fabulist, who
makes use of stories of Reynard to point the moral of his sermons;
and a short fabliau of about the same period as those above
mentioned is extant; but this is about all In The Vox and the
Wolf is cleverly related, in bold and firm couplets, the familiar
story of the well and the device of Renauard for getting himself
out of it at the expense of the wolf Sigrim. The teller of the
story in Middle English is learned in his craft, and the poem is an
admirable example of comic satire, perhaps the best of its kind
left to us before the days of Chaucer. Not only are the two
characters well conceived, but they are made the vehicle, as in
the romance of the Fleming Willem, of light satire on the life of
the times. Before admitting the wolf to the paradise in the bucket
at the bottom of the well, the fox takes upon himself the duties of
a confessor, and the wolf, to gain absolution asks forgiveness, not
only for the ordinary sins of his life, but, after a little pressing
even repents him of the resentment shown when the confessor
made free with the penitent's wife. Few things show more clearly
the failings and vices current in the Middle Ages than do the
various stories of the deeds of Reynard in his ecclesiastical dis-
guises : stories that were carved in stone and wood and shown in
painted glass, as well as recited and written. His smug cowled face
looks out from pulpits and leers at us from under miserere seats.
The literary needs of those who were familiar with the
“romances of prys” in which deeds of chivalry were enshrined,
and who, with the author of Sir Thopas, could enjoy parodies of
them, were met by such salutary tales as The Turnament of
Totenham. A countryside wedding, preceded by the mysteries of
a medieval tournament, is described by Gilbert Pilkington, or by
the author whose work he transcribes, in language that would be
well understood and keenly appreciated by those of lower rank
than “knight and lady free. ” It is an admirable burlesque; rustic
"laddis" contend not only for Tibbe the daughter of Rondill the
refe, but for other prizes thrown in by the father :
He shalle have my gray mare [on which Tibbe “was sett"],
And my spottyd sowe;
and, therefore, Hawkyn and Dawkyn and Tomkyn and other noble


## p. 367 (#387) ############################################

The Tale of Gamelyn
367
youths “ffro Hissiltoun to Haknay," "leid on stifly,” “til theyre
hors swett,” with much “clenkyng of cart sadils” and many
“brokyn hedis," and
Woo was Hawkyn, woo was Herry,
Woo was Tomkyn, woo was Terry
when they sat down to the marriage feast of the winner. The
Tale of Thopas exercises its useful office with a rapier; if The
Turnament of Totenham performs its duty with a cudgel, the
result, so far as the victim is concerned, is none the less effective.
The middle of the fourteenth century gave us The Tale of
Gamelyn', which is dealt with elsewhere as a metrical romance and
in connection with the works of Chaucer. It forms an admirable
link between the courtly romance and the poetry of the outlaws •
of the greenwood. A younger brother, despoiled of his share
in the inheritance, is ill-clothed and given poor food by his
eldest brother, handed over to understrappers to be thrashed and
otherwise maltreated. But, after the fashion of Havelok, Gamelyn
proves himself adept at the staff and strong in the arm; and, after
a fair supply of adventures, with much success and further tribu-
lation, he becomes head of a forest band of young outlaws; then,
after justice has been done to his unnatural brother, he becomes
king's officer in the woodland. It is a "loveless” tale of the
earlier Stevenson kind; no courtly dame has part or parcel
therein; nevertheless, in the form in which we now have it, The
Tale of Gamelyn is quite excellent, is, in fact, typically English in
its sense of free life and open air.
Of the two collections of stories referred to above, one, the most
famous of its kind, and the source-book for many later English
writers, Gesta Romanorum, probably took shape in England, in
its Latin form, in the period under discussion. Early preachers
and homilists were only too willing to seize hold of stories from
every quarter in order to "point the moral," and their collections
have served many ends different from the purpose designed. If
the "moral" attached to each tale, and dragged in, often, on the
most flimsy excuse, be ignored, the tales in Gesta Romanorum
become readable, for they are often excellently, even though baldly,
told. Other Latin collections of cognate kind, the work of English
compilers, have been referred to in a preceding chapter", and
all are of importance in the light they throw on the manners of
the time. One, the Summa Praedicantium of John de Bromyarde,
a Dominican friar, scholar of Oxford and antagonist of Wyclif,
1 Volume I, p. 298, Volume 1, pp. 194 ft. See Chapter 3, Map, Neokham, eto.


## p. 368 (#388) ############################################

368 Later Transition English
devotes a thousand pages to subjects likely to be acceptable to
congregations, and deserves more attention than has hitherto been
paid it. In the legendaries and poems compiled and written
by monks for homiletic purposes, there are many germs of the
tale-telling faculty, and much folk-lore. Things charming and
grotesque are inextricably mixed. In the legends of the Child-
hood of Jesus, for instance, there is a delightful account of the
reverence paid by the animal creation and by inanimate nature to
the Infant during the journey to Egypt; and then the poem is
marred by the addition of crude miraculous deeds recorded as
afterwards wrought by Him. Many of our tales have originally
come from the east; but, in spite of the proverb, they have
gathered much moss in rolling westward, and flints from the same
quarry that have travelled a fairly direct course look strangely
different from others that have zigzagged hither.
Of Middle English political verses, the earliest preserved are,
probably, those on the battle of Lewes, which was fought in 1264.
The battle was celebrated by a follower of the fortunes of Simon de
Montfort, in a poem which is of considerable philological and
metrical importance. The number of French words it contains
reveals the process of amalgamation that was going on between the
two languages, and lets us into the workshop where the new speech
was being fashioned. The interest of the poem is also considerable
from the evidence it furnishes that the free-spoken Englishman was
beginning to make the vernacular the vehicle of satire against his
superiors in the realm of politics, following the example of the
writers of the Latin satirical poems then current. The educated
part of the race was beginning to show signs of the insular prejudice
against foreigners which is not even absent from it to-day—though
it could loyally support “foreigners” when they espoused the
national cause—and, more happily, it was showing signs of the
political genius which has ever been a quality of our people. Metri-
cally, these political lyrics in the vernacular are of importance
because of the forms of verse experimented in and naturalised
The minstrel who sang or recited political ballads had to appeal to
more critical audiences than had the composer of sacred lyrics; he
had to endeavour to import into a vernacular in transition some-
thing of the easy flow of comic Latin verse. The Song against the
King of Almaigne', above referred to, is in mono-rimed four-lined
stanzas, followed by a “bob,” or shorter fifth line, “maugre
* Richard of Cornwall, King of the Romans, brother of Henry III.


## p. 369 (#389) ############################################

Songs of the Soil
369
Wyndesore," "to helpe Wyndesore," etc. , and a constant, mocking,
two-lined refrain, with a kind of internal rime:
Richard, thah thou be ever trichard,
trichen shalt thou never more.
The recurrence of lines consisting of perfect ana paests? and
showing but little tendency towards alliteration, indicates the
direction in which popular rimes were looking.
In the civil struggles of the barons' wars, and in the years that
followed, the poetry of the people rose to the surface. The Robin
Hood ballads, to which we shall recur in a later volume, and a few
rude verses here and there, give voice, not only to the free, open life
of the outlaw in the greenwood, but, also, to the cry of the down-
trodden at the callous luxury of the rich. The real condition of
the poor is but rarely reflected in the literature of a nation: the
unfree in feudal times were voiceless, and the labouring free of
later times have been but little better. Patient beyond belief, the
children of the soil do not, as a rule, make literature of their wrongs:
we can only learn what is at work by conscious or unconscious
revelations in other writings. The ploughman in the eleventh-
century dialogue of Aelfric had said with truth, "I work hard. . . . Be
it never so stark winter I dare not linger at home for awe of my
lord. . . . I have a boy driving the oxen with a goad-iron, who is hoarse
with cold and shouting. . . . Mighty hard work it is, for I am not
frees. ” The “bitter cry" of the oppressed people was echoed in the
Old English Chronicle of the sad days of Stephen and, ignored
by court historians and writers of romance, centuries had to elapse
before it could find adequate expression in the alliterative lines of
Piers Plowman, and in the preaching of the "mad priest of Kent”
-one of the earliest among Englishmen, whose words are known
to us, to declare for the common and inalienable rights of man.
It is a far cry from the speech of the land slave to John Ball,
Jack Straw and Wat Tyler, and the intervening years show
but fragments of the literature of revolt, but the rude rimes
sent across the country by John Ball should no more be forgotten
in a history of English literature than the rude beginnings of
its prosody, for they contain the beginnings of the literature
of political strife, the first recognisable steps on the road of
political and religious liberty that was later to be trodden by
1 treacherous.
Sitteth alle stille & herkneth to me . . .
Sire Simond de Mountfort hath swore bi ya chyn, eto,
3 York Powell's translation in Social England, 1.
E. L. I. CH. XVII.
2+


## p. 370 (#390) ############################################

370
Later Transition English
Milton and Shelley and Cobbett. In the Song of the Husbandman
one of the notable poems of the alliterative revival, which may
be dated towards the close of the thirteenth century, in octaves
and quatrains rimed alternately on two rimes with linked ending
and beginning lines--a complicated measure handled with great
skill—the tiller of the soil complains that he is robbed and picked
“ful clene"; that, because of the green was, he is hunted “ase
hound doth the hare. ” And the insolence of the grooms and stable
boys, the lackeys and servants, of the great towards the peasantry
is told in the rude, coarse lines of A Song against the Retinues of
the Great People, preserved in the same MS! .
The luthernessed of the ladde,
The prude3 of the page,
are the subject of as keen invective as are the deeds of the
consistory courts', where the peasants are treated as dogs.
When Edward I died, the writer of an elegy on his death
expressed the pious hope that “Edward of Carnarvon” might
ner be worse man
Then is fader, ne lasse of myht
To bolden is pore-men to ryht
& understonde good consail.
It remained an unrealised hope; and the condition of things in the
times of Edward II is reflected in the fugitive literature of his
reign. The curiously constructed lines in Anglo-Norman and
English On the King's Breaking his Confirmation of Magna
Charta, preserved in the Auchinleck MS, Edinburgh, and the Song
on the Times in lines made up of Latin, English and Anglo-Norman
phrases, tell the same tale of ruin and corruption. Before the end
of the reign, Bannockburn had been fought and won, fought and
lost; Scottish girls could sing of the mourning of their southern
sisters for "lemmans loste"; and, in place of an elegy on the death
of a king who "ber the prys” “of Christendome",” we have a poem
in the Auchinleck MS on The Evil Times of Edward II, which, in
some 470 lines, pitilessly describes the misery of the state and
the evil of the church. It is a sermon on the old text, “Ye
cannot serve God and Mammon,” “no man may wel serve tweie
lordes to queme," and every line bites in, as with the acid of
an etcher, some fresh detail of current manners. As soon as the
1 Harl. 2253, ed. Wright.
8 conceit.
5 Elegy on Edward I, before cited.
· malicious ill-temper,
• Political Songs of England, 1839.


## p. 371 (#391) ############################################

The Black Death
371
young priest can afford it, he has a concubine; if those in high
places protest, “he may wid a litel silver stoppen his mouth"; the
doctor is the doctor of the comedies of Molière, a pompous
charlatan, ready enough to take silver for his advice, “thouh he
wite no more than a gos wheither” the patient "wole live or die”;
“the knights of old” no longer go forth on brave, if Quixotic,
quests, they are “liouns in halle, and hares in the field,” and any
beardless boy can be dubbed of their company; everywhere are
the poor of the land oppressed
Ao if the king hit wiste, I trowe he wolde be wroth,
Hou the pore beth i-piled, and ha the silver goth;
Hit is so deskatered bothe hider and thidere,
That halvendel sbal ben stole ar hit come togidere,
and acounted;
An if a pore man speke a word, he shal be foule afroanted.
Before the fourteenth century had come to a close, the ravages
of the Black Death had brought about radical changes in the
relations of labourers to the soil and had left indelible impressions
on life and letters. The presence of a disease that, at its height,
meant the death of one out of every two people in London and,
in the eastern counties, of two out of every three, led to a relaxa-
tion of the current laws of life and to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381.
The outbreak of lawlessness consequent upon the dislocation of
life in town and country, and the labour troubles that followed,
sent outlaws to the greenwood and helped to build up the legends
of Robin Hood. Murmurs of discontent grew in volume, and
protests against papal authority acquired fresh strength by the
existence of the Great Schism. The Lollards began their attacks on
social abuses and sought to reform the church at the same time.
The people "spoke,” and, though the “cause” was not “finished” for
many centuries to come, yet the end of many of the political and
religious ideals of the Middle Ages was in sight. Wyclif, and
those associated with him, had begun their work, the poems that
go by the name of Piers Plowman had been written and the
"commons," in the fullest sense of the word, were beginning their
long struggle for political freedom.
24—2


## p. 372 (#392) ############################################

CHAPTER XVIII
THE PROSODY OF OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH
OF Old English poetry, anterior to the twelfth century
and, perhaps, in a few cases of that century itself, it has
been calculated that we have nearly thirty thousand lines. But
all save a very few reduce themselves, in point of prosody, to
an elastic but tolerably isonomous form, closely resembling
that which is found in the poetry of other early Teutonic and
Scandinavian languages. This form may be specified, either
as a pretty long line rigidly divided into two halves, or as a
couplet of mostly short lines rhythmically connected together by
a system of alliteration and stress. Normally, there should be
four stressed syllables in the line, or two in each of the half
couplets; and at least three of these syllables should be allite-
rated, beginning with the same consonant or any vowel, as in this
line (29) of The Wanderer:
Wenian mid wynnum. Wat se be cunnað.
Around or between the pillar or anchor stresses, unstressed
syllables are grouped in a manner which has sometimes been
regarded as almost entirely licentious, and sometimes reduced, as
by Sievers, to more or less definite laws or types. Probably, as
usual, the truth lies between the two extremes.
To any one, however, who, without previous knowledge of the
matter, turns over a fair number of pages of Old English verse, a
singular phenomenon will present itself. For many of these pages
the line-lengths, though not rigidly equated, will present a coast-
line not very much more irregular than that of a page of modern
blank verse. And then, suddenly, he will come to pages or
passages where the lines seem to telescope themselves out to
double their former length. The mere statistical process of enu-
meration, and of subsequent digestion into classes of more or less
resembling type, finds no difficulty in this, and merely regards it


## p. 373 (#393) ############################################

Old English Verse
373
as an instance of "stretched” or “swollen " verses, with three or
four accents in each half instead of two. Curiosity of a different
kind may, perhaps, pine for a little explanation of a more real
nature—may wish to know whether this lengthening was parallel,
say, to Tennyson's at the close of The Lotos Eaters-a definitely
concerted thing—or whether it was a mere haphazard licence.
But there are no means of satisfying this curiosity except by
conjecture. Further, our means of deciding whether, as is usually
said, the stressed syllables were bound to be “long” beforehand or
not are very scanty. It seems admitted that more than one short
syllable may do the duty of one long; and this is of the highest
importance. What, however, is certain is that, in spite of this
great variation of length, and in spite of considerable differences,
not merely in syllabic volume, between the members of the
"stretched” and unstretched groups respectively, there is a certain
community of rhythmical tone, sometimes full, sometimes muffled,
which not only distinguishes the whole body of this ancient poetry,
but is distinguishable, with some alteration, in the later revived
alliterative verse of Middle English up to the beginning of the
sixteenth century. In order to detect and check this, the student
should take the Corpus Poeticum of Old English and read pages of
different poems steadily, letting his voice accommodate itself to the
rhythm which will certainly emerge if he has any ear. Different ears
will, perhaps, standardise this rhythm differently, and it certainly
admits of very wide variation and substitution. The simplest
and most normal formula-not necessarily the one which mere
statistics will show to be commonest as such, but that which, in
itself, or in slight variations from it, predominates—appears to the
present writer to be
tum-ti-ti
tam-ti | tum-ti tum-ti.
ti-tum-ti)
These are almost the lowest terms of a fully resonant line. They
are sometimes further truncated; they are often enlarged by the
addition of unstressed syllables ; but they are never far off except
in the obvious and admitted “magnums. "
Long or short, these lines, in all but an infinitesimal proportion
of the total, are arranged in mere consecution. A kind of para-
graph arrangement—which is, in fact, a necessity—may be often
noticed; but there are, save in one famous exception, no "stanzas. ”
This exception is the extremely interesting, and, to all appearance,
extremely early, poem Deor. Here, things which are undoubtedly


## p. 374 (#394) ############################################

374 Prosody of Old and Middle English
like stanzas (though the number of lines in them is variable) are
formed by a refrain:
baes oferoode, pisses swa maez.
With some rashness, it has been assumed that this semi-lyrical
arrangement was the earlier, and that it broke down into the
continuous form. It may be so; but, in Old English, at any rate,
we have no evidence to show it
Further, in the main range of this poetry, though not to such
an exclusive extent, rime is absent. Attempts have been made
to discover it in some of the mainly rimeless poems of later
dates ; but the instances adduced are probably accidental. In
fact, the majority of them, alleged chiefly by German critics,
are not properly rimes at all, and are often mere similarities
of inflection. The real exceptions are (1) the famous piece in
the Exeter Book called, significantly, The Riming Poem, which
exhibits a system, probably imitated from the Norse, of internal,
and sometimes frequently repeated, consonance at the ends
of lines and half lines ; and (2) a few fragments, especially
the inset in the Chronicle about the imprisonment and death of
the "guiltless aetheling" Alfred. They are exceptions which
eminently prove the rule. A quest for assonance has also been
made, and a few instances of something like it have been pointed
out. But they are very few. Assonance, in fact, has never held
any important place in English prosody; and, where it exists in
unsophisticated times and instances, it is always, most probably,
the result either of inattention or of an attempt to rime. On
the whole, the body of Old English verse, as we have it, is
one of the most homogeneous to be found in any literature.
Alliteration, accent and strict separation of lines or half-lines
for its positive laws; rimelessness for its negative: these nearly
sum up its commandments, and its result is dominated by an
irregular quasi-trochaic rhythm which will retreat, but always
comes back again.
When, after the lapse of some two centuries, which furnish only
scraps of verse, we meet, at, or before, the end of the twelfth
century, with a fresh crop of English poetry, the results of prosodic
scrutiny are strikingly different. Instead of the just summarised
regularity-not in the least cast-iron, but playing freely round two
or three recognised principles, which are never absolutely deserted,
I see ante, p. 86.


## p. 375 (#395) ############################################

The Transition
375
and attempting nothing beyond their rangewe find what may, at
first, look like chaos; what has sometimes been taken for the same
dispensation a little obsolescent and broken down, but, when
examined fully and fairly, is seen to be a true period of transition.
The old order finds itself in face of a new, which does not by any
means merely replace it or destroy it; but, after an inevitable
stage of confusion, blends with it and produces something different
from either, something destined to be permanent as far as we can
yet see. In all the pieces usually dated a little before or a
little after 1200—the fragments of St Godric, Paternoster, The
Moral Ode and others, as well as the two long compositions of
Layamon and Orm-this process and its results are observable.
The new agency is the syllabic prosody (accentual, also, in general
character, but strictly syllabic) of French and of contemporary
Latin, with its almost invariable accompaniment of rime, and its
tendency, invariable also in French, though by no means so in
Latin, to iambic rhythm. It must be sufficient here to examine
the working out of this clash in the two long poems just referred
to, Ormulum and the Brut, with slighter remarks on the others.
In both poems it is possible to trace the older principle of
a rimeless line of more or less length, divided sharply in the
middle, or a rimeless couplet of two halves, in which, though not
invariably, there is a certain tendency to shorten the second. But
the two writers have been affected by the opposite and newer
system in ways curiously different, but quite intelligible as results
of the clash. Orm has unflinchingly kept to the old principle of
rimelessness; but he has as unflinchingly adopted the new
principles of uniformity in syllabic volume and of regular iambic
metrical beat. His lines are invariably of fifteen syllables, or his
couplets of eight and seven. That he achieves—as any example,
however selected, must show-nothing but the most exasperating
and wooden monotony, does not matter to him, and it ought not
to matter to us. He has sacrificed everything to regularity in
number and cadence, and he has achieved this.
Layamon's result, if not more actually important, is much more
complicated, much more interesting, with much more future in it;
but, for these very reasons, it is much less easy to summarise.
In fact, to summarise it in uncontroversial terms is very nearly
impossible. At first sight, if we can suppose an eye familiar with
Old English poetry and not familiar at all with Middle English,
it may seem to present no great difference from the former; and
there are still some who think that it does not present any that


## p. 376 (#396) ############################################

376
Prosody of Old and Middle English
is vital. But, when it is examined a little more carefully, differences
the most vital, if as yet sometimes not more than embryoni-
cally vital, emerge. Regarded as alliterative verse of the old
pattern, it can only be called very bad verse—verse which turns
the already abundant liberties of the original into mere chaotic
licence, for the most part, and which very seldom conforms at all
successfully. But, in addition to this, it succumbs, constantly
though irregularly, to the temptation which, except in late and
few instances, the old verse had rigidly resisted, and which Orm
was resisting absolutely—the temptation of rime. And this rime
seems to be forcing on it a new regularisation, that of equal-halved
distichs rimed together in the exact fashion of the French
octosyllabic couplet.
When we turn to the other and smaller poems of the period we
find this process of “slowly quickening into other forms” even
more importantly and interestingly exhibited. The Paternoster
is wholly in more or less regular rimed couplets of the kind just
noted. In The Moral Ode, the fifteen-syllabled line of Orm,
which, by the frequency of feminine endings, already promises
the reduction to fourteen, comes even nearer to the ballad metre
of eight and six, and exhibits a still more valuable characteristic
in its tendency towards maintaining the old syllabic freedom and
substitution of trisyllabic feet for the strict dissyllables of Ormulum.
Further, this heritage of Old English manifests itself in the
octosyllabic couplet; and, in the version of Genesis and Exodus,
which is assigned to about the middle of the thirteenth century,
anticipates exactly the Christabel metre which Coleridge thought
he invented more than five hundred years later. And, before very
long, though at dates impossible to indicate with precision, owing
to the uncertainty of the chronology of the documents, other
approximations of the old staple line or couplet to the metres
of French and Latin (especially the rime couée or combination
of two eights and a six doubled) make their appearance. These
transformations, however, as the liberty of their forms shows, and
as may be specially studied with greatest ease in the various
adaptations of the octosyllabic couplet, are neither mere aimless
haphazard experiments, nor mere slavish following of French and
Latin forms previously existing and held up as patterns. They
may be much more reasonably regarded as attempts to adjust
these latter to the old couplet with its middle division, and its
liberty of equality or inequality of syllabic length in the halves;
though, in all cases, the special rhythm of the older line or stave


## p. 377 (#397) ############################################

Foreign Influence
377
has become faint in the ear, and the new metrical swing prevails.
An equal division of the halves gives a distich which, for some
time, hesitates between eight and six syllables, the latter having
the additional assistance of the French alexandrine as pattern.
But it proves less suitable for English verse than the longer form,
and it is dropped or very rarely used. An unequal division-from
the first most popular-into eight and seven or eight and six,
gives the long line of Robert of Gloucester-sometimes called, for
convenience, a “fourteener” or, by Warton and others, but most
improperly, a "long alexandrine. ” This, when itself “disclosed”
in “golden couplets,” becomes at once the famous “common" or
ballad measure, the most distinctly popular metre for seven hundred
years past, and, at certain times, one yielding the most exquisite
harmony possible, though very easily degraded and reduced to
sing-song. In the course, moreover, of the give and take of this
commerce between material and mould, the beginnings of the
great decasyllabic, five-foot, or five-stress line emerge with a
frequency which has, for the most part, been inadequately noted;
as well as, more rarely, the alexandrine itself. In fact, it furnishes
the poet, by luck or design, with every possible line from four,
or even fewer, syllables to fourteen; while his examples in Latin
and French in turn furnish almost endless suggestions of stanza-
combination.
In one all-important particular, however, the foreign influence
exercised—by French altogether and, by Latin, in the greatest
part by far of its recent and accentual verse writing—in the
direction of strict syllabic uniformity, is not, indeed, universally,
but, to a very large extent, and stubbornly, resisted. The rime-
lessness of Old English might be given up with pleasure; its
curious non-metrical, or hardly more than half-metrical, cadences
might be willingly exchanged for more definite harmony; the
chains of its forced alliteration might be attenuated to an agreeable
carcanet worn now and then for ornament; and its extreme length-
licence might be curtailed and regularised. But, in one point which
had made for this latter, English refused to surrender; and that
was the admission of trisyllabic feet, as some phrase it, or, as some
prefer to describe the process, the admission of extra unstressed
syllables. The question was, indeed, not settled ; as a question it, no
doubt, never arose; and, when such problems came to be considered,
there was a dangerous tendency from late in the sixteenth century
till later in the eighteenth to answer them in the wrong way. But
practice was irreconcilable. Of the octosyllabic couplet there were,


## p. 378 (#398) ############################################

378 Prosody of Old and Middle English
almost from the first, two distinct forms, the strict and the elastic;
in nearly all other metres the licence is practically assumed. By
1300, or a little later, say 1325—to admit the latest possible dates
for the Harleian lyrics and the bulk of the early romances—all the
constitutive principles of modern English prosody are in operation,
and are turning out work, rougher or smoother, but unmistakable.
One curious postscript has to be made to these few general
remarks. During the period just referred to—from Layamon, that
is to say, to the appearance of William of Palerne and other
things, at a time probably nearer to the middle of the fourteenth
century than to its beginning--attempts at the old alliterative metre
are absolutely wanting. It is not unusual to meet with assumptions
that, though wanting, they must have existed, at any rate in
popular literature; and to these assumptions, as to all such, no
reasonable answer can be made, except that it may have been so.
So far, however, no trace of any such verse in the period referred
to has been discovered; nor any reference to such ; nor any
evidence, direct or indirect, that it existed. About the end of the
period it reappears : sometimes, simple of itself, with a cadence
altered, indeed, but not out of all likeness, after the fashion that
was to produce its capital example in The Vision of Piers
Plowman; sometimes, in a very remarkable blend with rime, and
with metrical and stanza arrangement, after the fashion of which
the most notable instances, in less and more regular kind, are
Gawayne and the Grene Knight and Pearl. But this revival
or reappearance has no effect on the main current of English
verse; which continues to be distinctly metrical, to be, in effect
universally, rimed and to use alliteration only for a separable and
casual ornament, not as a constituent and property.


## p. 379 (#399) ############################################

CHAPTER XIX
CHANGES IN THE LANGUAGE TO THE DAYS OF
CHAUCER
1. CONTINUITY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
THE three Germanic peoples-the Jutes from Jutland, the
Angles from Schleswig and the Saxons from Holstein—who, in
the fifth and sixth centuries, made themselves masters of the
greater part of south Britain, spoke dialects so nearly allied that
they can have had no great difficulty in understanding each other's
speech. It does not appear, however, that, in their original seats,
they had any general name for their common race or their common
language.
The sense of their unity, with the consequent need for
a general designation for themselves, would, naturally, be the pro-
duct of the time when they found themselves settled among a
population speaking an alien and unintelligible tongue. In fact,
it was probably not by themselves, but by other nations, that the
Jutes, Angles and Saxons of Britain were first regarded as forming
an ethnic whole; just as in earlier times the larger kindred of
which they were part had received the name of Germans from the
Celts. The Britons applied to all the Germanic invaders of their
country the name of Saxons, because, in the days of Roman rule,
that nation had been the most conspicuous among those who
ravaged the coasts of Britain; and, as is well known, the Celtic-
speaking inhabitants of the British islands still continue to call the
English people and its language "Saxon. ” On the Continent, the
Germanic conquerors of Britain seem, for a long time, to have been
called indiscriminately sometimes Saxons, after the Celtic practice,
and sometimes Angles, the latter being the name of the people
which had the largest extent of territory. At the end of the sixth
century, Pope Gregory I uses only the name Angli. This is a
somewhat remarkable fact, because the missionaries sent by Gregory
laboured in the Jutish kingdom of Kent, which, at that time, was
paramount over all the country south of the Humber. Possibly,
the explanation of Gregory's choice of this name may be found in


## p. 380 (#400) ############################################

380
Changes in the Language
the famous story, according to which his zeal for the conversion of
the pagans of Britain was first awakened by his admiration of the
beauty of the boy slaves from the Anglian kingdom of Deira.
On the other hand, about A. D. 660, pope Vitalian, writing to an
Angle king, Oswiu of Northumbria, addresses him as rex
Saxonum.
The Roman missionaries naturally followed Gregory's practice;
and it was probably from the official language of the church that
the Jutes and Saxons learned to regard themselves as part of the
“Angle kindred” (Angolcynn, in Latin gens Anglorum). The
political ascendency of the Angle kingdoms, which began in
the seventh century, and continued until the time of the Danish
invasions, doubtless contributed to ensure the adoption of this
general name. In the early years of the eighth century, Bede
sometimes speaks of Angli sive Saxones, thus treating the two
appellations as equivalent. But, with this sole exception, his
name for the whole people is always Angli or gens Anglorum, and
he calls their language sermo Anglicus, even when the special
reference is to the dialect in which the Kentish laws were written.
When he does speak of lingua Saxonica, the context, in every
instance, shows that he means the language of the East or West
Saxons. It is true that Bede was an Angle by birth, and this fact
might seem to detract from the significance of his use of the name.
But, a century and a half later, the West Saxon king Alfred, whose
works are written in his native dialect, never uses any other name
for his own language but Englisc—the language of the Angles. It
is in the great king's writings that we find the earliest vernacular
examples of the name which our language has ever since continued
to bear.
In a certain sense it may be said that this name, as applied to
the language of the south of England, became more and more
strictly appropriate as time went on. For the history of southern
English, or of the language of English literature, is, to a consider-
able extent, concerned with the spread of Anglian forms of words
and the disappearance of forms that were specifically Saxon.
Moreover, several of the most important of the processes of change
that transformed the English of Alfred into the English of Chaucer
—the loss of inflections and grammatical gender, and the adoption
of Danish words—began in the Anglian regions of the north, and
gradually extended themselves southward. Leaving out of account
the changes that were due to French influences, we might almost
sum up the history of the language during five centuries in the


## p. 381 (#401) ############################################

“English” and “Saxon”
381
formula that it became more and more "English" and less and less
"Saxon. ”
It will be convenient at this point to give some account of the
history of the nomenclature of the various stages in the development
of the English language. When, in the sixteenth century, the re-
mains of vernacular literature earlier than the Norman conquest
began to attract the attention of scholars, Englishmen naturally
found it inconvenient to apply the name of "English" to what to
them was, practically, a foreign language, requiring not less study
to understand than the Flemish of their own day. It became
customary, therefore, to speak of this language as “Saxon. ” As the
few pre-Conquest texts then known were written in the south, this
designation may be said to have been accurately descriptive. It
was so, however, merely by accident, for those who employed it
were accustomed to use the term “Saxons” as a general name for
the Germanic inhabitants of England before the Norman conquest.
The popular view was that the "English" people and the "English"
language came into being as the result of the fusion of “Saxons”
and Normans. Traces of this misuse of names, indeed, are to be
found in various forms of expression that are still current. Although
the double misnomer of “the Saxon heptarchy" no longer appears
in our school histories, modern writers continue to speak of “the
Saxon elements in the English vocabulary," and to misapply the
epithet “Saxon” to the architecture of the parts of the country
inhabited by the Angles.
The term “Saxon,” besides being historically incorrect as a
designation for the whole early Germanic population of Britain,
was inconveniently ambiguous, because it survived as the proper
appellation of a portion of the inhabitants of Germany. In the last
years of the reign of Elizabeth, Camden revived the use of the old
name Anglosaxones, and, probably for the first time, used lingua
Anglosaxonica for the language of England before the Norman
conquest. He explains that Anglosaxones means the Saxons of
England, in contradistinction to those of the continent; and, in his
English Remains, he, accordingly, renders it by “English Saxons. ”
Throughout the seventeenth century, and even later, "English
Saxon” continued to be the name ordinarily applied by philo-
logists to the language of king Alfred, but, in the eighteenth
century, this gave place to “Anglo-Saxon. ”
Camden's explanation of the compound name was, there can be
little doubt, historically correct. In its early use, it was applied
to distinguish those Saxons who were considered part of the


## p. 382 (#402) ############################################

382
Changes in the Language
“Angolcynn," and whose language was called “English,” from the
"Old Saxons," who remained in Germany; and the structure of the
native form Angulseaxe shows that the first element was intended
as a descriptive prefix. It was, however, natural that the com-
pound should be interpreted as meaning “Angle and Saxon," and,
apparently, it was taken in this sense already at the end of the
seventeenth century by George Hickes, who also applied the
analogous name “Dano-Saxon” to the Old Northumbrian dialect,
under the mistaken notion that its peculiar features were the
result of Scandinavian admixture. As thus misunderstood, the
term “Anglo-Saxon” was accepted as supplying the need for a
general name applicable to the Anglian and Saxon dialects in
their fully inflected stage. In this comprehensive sense it con-
tinues to be extensively used. The proposal of some scholars to
restrict its application, on grounds of historical propriety, to the
Saxon dialect failed to gain acceptance, because what was wanted
was an inclusive name for the early language of England, as the
object of a well-defined branch of linguistic study. When pro-
fessorships of “Anglo-Saxon” had been founded at Oxford and
Cambridge, it was hardly possible to narrow the meaning of the
name to a part of the subject which the professors were appointed
to teach.
As a popular designation, the name "Anglo-Saxon” has the
merits of definiteness and intelligibility, which may possibly long
preserve it in use. It has, however, the great disadvantage of con-
cealing the important fact that the history of our language from
the earliest days to the present time has been one of continuous
development. When this fact became evident through the atten-
tion bestowed by scholars on the language of the thirteenth
century, the inconvenience of the traditional nomenclature could
not escape recognition. The language of this period was too
different from the Anglo-Saxon of the grammars to be conveniently
called by the same name, while, on the other hand, it could hardly
be called English, so long as "English" was understood to mean a
language which the unlearned reader could at once perceive to be
substantially identical with his own. An attempt was made to
meet the difficulty by the invention of the compound "Semi-
Saxon," to denote the transitional stage between “Anglo-Saxon”
and “English," but this name was so obviously infelicitous that its
introduction helped to procure acceptance for a nomenclature
which recognised that the language of Caedmon was no less
"English" than that of Chaucer. The great German philologist,


## p. 383 (#403) ############################################

Periods of English
383
Jacob Grimm, had introduced the practice of dividing the history
of a language into three periods, designated by the prefixes “Old,"
“Middle," and "New" or "Modern”; and, in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, many scholars in this country adopted “Old
English" as the name for that stage of the language which had, till
then, been known as Anglo-Saxon. The change found much oppo-
sition, on the not wholly unreasonable ground that “Old English”
was popularly applied to any form of English that was characterised
by abundance of obsolete words and by antiquated spelling, so that
the novel use could not but lead to frequent misunderstanding.
The advantages of the new nomenclature for purposes of historical
treatment are, however, so considerable that it has now come into
general use, although a few philologists, both in England and
Germany, still decline to adopt it.
The main reason for restoring to the language of Caedmon and
Alfred its historical name of “English,” is to emphasise the truth
that there was no substitution of one language for another in
England after the Norman conquest, but only a modification of
the original language by gradual changes in pronunciation and
grammar, by the accession of new words and the obsolescence of
old ones. The change of nomenclature will be a mere useless
pedantry if we allow ourselves to imagine that there was any
definite date at which people ceased to speak “Old English" and
began to speak “Middle English," or even that there ever was a
time when the English of the older generation and that of the
younger generation differed widely from each other. Nevertheless,
owing partly to the fact that the twelfth century was an age of
exceptionally rapid linguistic change, and partly to other causes
hereafter to be explained, it is quite true that, while the literary
remains of the first half of the century exhibit a form of the
language not strikingly different from that of preceding centuries,
those of the latter half present such an amount of novelty in
spelling and grammatical features as to make the most superficial
observation sufficient to show that a new period has begun. The
date 1150, as the approximate point of demarcation between the
Old and Middle periods of English, is, therefore, less arbitrary
than chronological boundaries in the history of a language usually
are; though, if we possessed full information respecting the spoken
English of the twelfth century, we should have to be content with
a much less precise determination. While the Middle English
period has thus a definite beginning, it has no definite ending.
It is, however, convenient to regard it as terminating about


## p. 384 (#404) ############################################

384
Changes in the Language
1500, because the end of the fifteenth century coincides pretty
closely with the victory of the printing-press over the scriptorium;
and many of the distinctive features of literary Modern English
would never have been developed if printing had not been invented.
2. CHANGES IN GRAMMAR
The most striking characteristic of Old English, as compared
with later stages of the language, is that it retained without
essential change the inflectional system which it possessed at the
beginning of its history. So far as regards the verbs, this system
was very imperfect in comparison with that of Greek, or even of
Latin. There was no inflected passive, the need of which was
supplied by the use of auxiliaries; and there were only two
inflected tenses: the present, which often had to serve for a future,
and the past. The use of auxiliaries for forming compound tenses
was comparatively rare. The three persons of the plural had only
one form, which, prehistorically, had been that of the third person;
and, in the past tense, the first and third person singular were alike.
On the other hand, the system of declension was nearly as elaborate
as in any of the languages of the Indogermanic family. Substantives
had four cases : nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. The
adjective had two sets of inflections for gender, number and case-
the one used when the substantive was "definite” (as when pre-
ceded by the article or some equivalent), and the other when it
was "indefinite. " So far as this description goes, it might appear
that the Old English machinery for expressing the grammatical
relations of substantives, adjectives and pronouns was as adequate
for its purpose as even that of Greek. But, owing to the effect of
prehistoric changes of pronunciation, which had assimilated many
terminations that were originally distinct, the Old English declen-
sion of these parts of speech was, in fact, full of inconvenient
ambiguities. This will be evident if we place side by side the
paradigms of the word guma, a man, in Gothic (which, in this
instance, agrees very nearly with primitive Germanic) and in Old
English.
Gothic. Old English
Sing. Nom.
guma
guma
Accus.
guman
guman
guming
gaman
Dative gumin
guman
Plur. Nom.
gumans
guman
Accus.
gumans
guman
Gen.
gumanē
gumena
Dative
gumam
Gen.
gumum


## p. 385 (#405) ############################################

Old English Grammar 385
The Gothic declension of this noun, it will be seen, has only one
weak point, namely, that the accusative plural had assumed the form
of the nominative. But, in Old English, the one form guman had
five different functions. There were, in Old English, many other
declensions of nouns besides that of which the word guma is an
example; and all of them were, more or less, faulty. The accusa-
tive had nearly always the same form as the nominative. In some
nouns the genitive singular, and in others the nominative plural,
did not differ from the nominative singular.
These observations apply to the West Saxon or southern dialect
of Old English, in which most of the extant literature is written.
But, while the West Saxon system of noun-inflection was thus
seriously defective, that of the Northumbrian dialect was far
worse, because, in that dialect, the final -n had come to be regularly
dropped in nearly all grammatical endings; and, further, the
unaccented final vowels were pronounced obscurely, so that we
often find them confused in our texts. It was quite an exceptional
thing for the case and number of a substantive to be unambiguously
indicated by its form. The ambiguities were, to some extent, ob-
viated by the inflection of the accompanying article or adjective;
but the declension even of these parts of speech, though better
preserved than that of the substantive, had, itself, suffered from
wear and tear, so that there were only a few of the endings that
had not a multiplicity of functions.
The imperfection of the Old English system of inflections must
sometimes have caused practical inconvenience, and some of the
changes which it underwent were due to instinctive efforts to
remedy its defects. These changes naturally began where the evil
was greatest, in the northern dialect. It used to be believed and
the notion is not altogether extinct-that the almost universal
substitution of -es for the many Old English endings of the geni-
tive singular and the nominative and accusative plural was a result
of the Norman conquest. But, in fact, the beginnings of this
alteration in the language can be traced to a far earlier time. In
the Northumbrian writings of the tenth century we find that, very
often, when the traditional ending of a noun failed to indicate
properly its case and number, the required clearness was gained by
assimilating its declension to that of those nouns which made
their genitives in -es and their plurals in -as. As -es was the
only ending of nouns that never marked anything but a genitive
singular, and -as the only ending that never marked anything but
a nominative or accusative plural, the improvement in lucidity was
E. L. I. CH. XIX,


## p. 386 (#406) ############################################

386
Changes in the Language
very considerable. We lack definite evidence as to the rapidity
with which these two endings came, in the northern dialect, to
be applied to nearly all substantives, but the process probably
occupied no very long time. The change of declension syn-
chronised with a tendency, which prevailed in all dialects, to
obscure the pronunciation of the vowels in all unstressed final
syllables, so that -as became -28. The practice of forming genitives
and plurals, as a general rule, with this ending spread from the
northern to the midland dialect; perhaps this dialect may, in part,
have developed it independently. In the Peterborough Chronicle
(about 1154), and in the north midland Ormulum (about 1200),
we find it fully established. The English of educated Londoners
had, in the fourteenth century, lost most of its original southern
peculiarities, and had become essentially a midland dialect.
Hence, the writings of Chaucer show, as a general rule, only the
-es plurals and the -es genitives; the “irregular plurals,” as we
may now call them, being hardly more numerous than in modern
standard English. Words adopted from French often retained
their original plurals in -8. The dative case disappeared from
midland English in the twelfth century, so that Chaucer's de-
clension of substantives is as simple as that of our own
day.
In purely southern dialects, the history of the noun-inflections
was quite different. The case-endings of Old English-West
Saxon and Kentish-were, to a great extent, retained, with
the alterations that resulted from the general reduction of their
vowels to an obscure e. One consequence of this "levelling" of
vowels was that there was a large number of nouns of which the
nominative singular ended in -e and the nominative plural in -en,
as name, namen, tunge (tongue), tungen (in Old English nama,
naman, tunge, tungan); and, as the -n was, in these words, felt as a
formative of the plural, it was dropped in the oblique cases of the
singular. Hence, in these words all the cases of the singular ended
in -e, and the nominative and accusative plural in -en. To the
extensive declension thus arising all nouns ending in -e came to be
assimilated, including feminine nouns in which this ending had
been extended from the oblique cases to the nominative singular,
such as honde hand (Old English hond, dative honda), sunne sin
(Old English synn, dative synne). We observe here the same
instinctive struggle against the ambiguities induced by the pro-
gress of phonetic change that we have seen in the noun-declension
of the northern and midland dialects, although the remedial


## p. 387 (#407) ############################################

Changes in Declension 387
devices adopted were different. In the period with which we are
here concerned, southern English did not greatly extend the es
genitives beyond their original range, while -es, as a plural ending,
was nearly confined to those nouns that had -as in Old English,
and to neuters (like word) in which the singular and plural
nominatives had had the same form. The Old English termination
-um, which marked the dative plural in all declensions, survived
as -en. The genitive plural had two forms, e and -ene (Old
English -a, -ena); the latter, as the more distinct, encroached on
the domain of the former, so that "king of kings" was kingene
king instead of kinge king (Old English cyninga cyning).
The history of pronominal forms, like that of the declension
of nouns, exhibits certain changes serving to relieve the want of
distinctness in the traditional system. These changes began in the
Anglian districts, and did not, for the most part, reach the Saxon
region till after Chaucer's time. The forms of the Old English
pronouns of the third person, in all dialects, were, in several
instances, curiously near to being alike in pronunciation. The
masculine nominative hê was not very different from the feminine
nominative and accusative hēo (also hie, hi), and this closely
resembled the plural nominative and accusative hie or hi. The
dative singular masculine and neuter was him, and the dative
plural was heom. The genitive and dative singular of the feminine
pronoun was hire, and the genitive plural was heora. The one
form his served for the genitive both of the masculine hē and of
the neuter hit. (The forms here cited are West Saxon, the diver-
gences of the other dialects being unimportant. ) As the pronouns
were most commonly unemphatic, such differences as those between
him and heom, hire and heora, would, usually, be slighter in speech
than they appear in writing, and with the general weakening of
unstressed vowels that took place in Middle English they were
simply obliterated. In southern Middle English the resulting
ambiguities remained unremedied; but, in the north and a great
part of the midlands, they were got rid of by the process (very rare
in the history of languages) of adopting pronouns from a foreign
tongue. In many parts of these regions the Danes and Northmen
formed the majority, or a powerful minority, of the population, and
it is from their language that we obtain the words now written
they, their, them and, perhaps, also she, though its precise origin is
not clear. She (written scw) occurs in the Peterborough Chronide
about 1154. It does not appear in Ormulum (about 1200), which
retains the native pronoun in the form zho; the somewhat
25—2


## p. 388 (#408) ############################################

388
Changes in the Language
later east midland Genesis and Exodus has both words, ghe or ge
and sge or sche. After 1300, scho is universal in the northern
dialect and sche in east midland; but ho was common in west
midland down to the end of the century, and still remains in
the local speech of many districts. Ormulum has always they
(written þe33), but retains heore, hemm beside the newer their,
them (written þezzre, þezzm); in the fourteenth century they,
their, them are found fully established in all northern and east
midland writings, while, in the west, hy for “they" continued
in use. Early in the twelfth century, the accusative form of all
pronouns, except the neuter hit, had been replaced by the dative.
Chaucer uses she and they; but his her serves both for “her”
(accusative, genitive and dative) and for "their,” and he has
always hem for "them. ” In the south, the curious form hise or
is was used for “them. ” With regard to the other pronouns it will
suffice to mention that the form ich (with ch pronounced as in
“rich”) was general in the south, while, elsewhere, the Old English
ic became I early in the thirteenth century.
The Old English inflections of adjectives and article, and, with
them, the grammatical genders of nouns, disappeared almost entirely
early in Middle English. The Kentish dialect of the fourteenth
century, indeed, was exceptionally archaic in these points; in the
Ayenbite (written 1340) we find, for instance, the accusative
masculine form of the adjective and article in “ane gratne dyeuel"
(a great devil) and "thane dyath,” for which Chaucer would have
written "a gret deuel” and “the deeth. " In other districts of
the south, also, considerable traces of grammatical gender and
adjective inflection are found quite late. But the north midland
English of Ormulum is, in these respects, nearly identical with
that of Chaucer. The article is regularly the undeclined; gender
is determined purely by sex; and the adjective (with rare ex-
ceptions) has no other inflectional endings than the final -e used
when the adjective precedes a definite or a plural noun. In the
north, where final unstressed vowels had been silent, the adjec-
tive and article were uninflected, and grammatical gender had
ceased to exist, before the fourteenth century.
Among the most easily recognisable characteristics of Middle
English dialects are certain differences in the conjugation of
the verb. In Old English, the third person singular, and all the
persons of the plural, of the present indicative, ended in -th, with a
difference in the preceding vowel: thus, lufian to love, læran to
teach, give (in West Saxon) he lufath, he læreth, and we lupiath,


## p. 389 (#409) ############################################

Conjugation in Middle English 389
wa lærath. In the northern dialect, this -th had, in the tenth
century, already begun to give way to -8; and northern writings
of about 1300 show -es both in the third singular and in the plural
as the universal ending. The midland dialect, from 1200 onwards,
had in the plural -en, perhaps taken over from the present sub-
junctive or the past indicative; this ending, often reduced to e,
remains in the language of Chaucer. The third singular ended in
-eth in midland English (so also in Chaucer); but the northern -8,
which has now been adopted almost everywhere, even in rustic
speech, is found in many midland writings of the fourteenth
century, especially in those of the west. The southern dialect
preserved the West Saxon forms with little change: we find he
luveth, we luvieth in the fourteenth century. The plural indicative
present of the verb to be had several quite unconnected forms in
Old English: sindon and bēoth in all dialects, earon, aron in North-
umbrian and Mercian. In the thirteenth century, sinden occurs
in the north midland Ormulum and some southern writings. In
the fourteenth century, northern writings have are (monosyllabic),
midland varies between aren or are and been, ben, while the
southern form is beoth or buth.
The Northumbrian dialect had, in the tenth century, already
reduced the -an of the infinitive to -A, and, in the northern
English of the fourteenth century, the infinitive and the first
person singular present were destitute of endings (the final -e,
though often written, being shown by the metre to be silent). In
other dialects, the infinitive ended in -en, for which -e occurs
with increasing frequency from the thirteenth century onwards.
Chaucer and Gower have both forms; their metre requires the
final -e to be sounded in this as in most of the other instances, but
it is probable that, in ordinary speech, it was generally silent before
A. D. 1400.
The forms of the present participle, which, in Old English, ended
in -ende, afford a well-marked criterion of dialect in Middle English.
The northern dialect had falland, the southern fallinde; in the
midland dialect, fallande or fallende gradually gave place to
fallinge, which is the form used by Chaucer.
It is impossible in this chapter to pursue the history of
early English inflections in all its details, but, before leaving the
subject of the development of the grammar, we must say a few
words on the question how far the rapid simplification of the
declension and conjugation in the twelfth and succeeding centuries
was an effect of the Norman conqueste The view, once universally


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390
Changes in the Language
held, and still entertained by many persons, that the establishment
of Norman rule was the main cause by which this change was
brought about, is now abandoned by all scholars. We have seen
that, in the north of England, the movement towards a simpler
grammatical system had made no small progress a hundred years
before duke William landed; and the causes to which this move-
ment was due were such as could not fail to be increasingly
effective. The intimate mixture of Danish and native popula-
tions in the north and over a great part of the midlands must, no
doubt, have had a powerful influence in reinforcing the tendencies
to change that already existed. So far as these districts are
concerned, it is not too much to say that the history of English
grammar would have been very nearly what it actually was if the
Conquest had never taken place. It is peculiarly worthy of note
that the southern dialect, which we should expect to be most
affected by the French influence, and which, with regard to
vocabulary, certainly was so, was, of all dialects of Middle English,
the most conservative in its grammar. And there is good reason
to believe that, even in the south, the spoken language had
travelled a considerable distance towards the Middle English
stage before the fateful date A. D. 1066. Only twenty years after
the Conquest, the Norman scribes of Domesday Book, writing
phonetically and without influence from English tradition, spell local
and personal names in a way which shows that the oral language
bad undergone certain changes that do not regularly manifest
themselves in native writings until much later. And some of the
charters of the time of Edward the Confessor, which exhibit
modernisms that are commonly attributed to the scribes of the
late MSS in which they are preserved, are, probably, less altered
from their original form than is generally imagined. This remark
applies especially to informal documents not proceeding from
professional scriveners, such, for instance, as the interesting letter
of the monk Edwin about 1057, printed in Kemble's Codex
Diplomaticus, No. 922.
What the Norman conquest really did was to tear away the
veil that literary conservatism had thrown over the changes of the
spoken tongue. The ambition of Englishmen to acquire the
language of the ruling class, and the influx of foreign monks into
the religious houses that were the sources of literary instruction,
soon brought about the cessation of all systematic training in the
use of English. The upper and middle classes became bilingual;
and, though English might still be the language which they


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Influence of the Norman Conquest 391
preferred to speak, they learned at school to read and write
nothing but French, or French and Latin. When those who had
been educated under the new conditions tried to write English,
the literary conventions of the past generation had no hold upon
them; they could write no otherwise than as they spoke. This is
the true explanation of the apparently rapid change in the
grammar of English about the middle of the twelfth century.
It would, however, be a mistake to say that the new conditions
produced by the Conquest were wholly without influence on the
inflectional structure of the spoken language. Under the Norman
kings and their successors, England was politically and adminis-
tratively united as it had never been before ; intercourse between
the different parts of the country became less difficult; and the
greater freedom of intercommunication assisted the southward
diffusion of those grammatical simplifications that had been
developed in the northern dialect. The use of the French
language among large classes of the population, which has left
profound traces in the English vocabulary, must have tended to
accelerate the movement towards disuse of inflectional endings ;
though this influence must remain rather a matter of abstract
probability than of demonstrable fact, because we have no means
of distinguishing its effects from those of other causes that
were operating in the same direction. Perhaps the use of the
preposition of instead of the genitive inflection, and the polite
substitution of the plural for the singular in pronouns of the
second person, were due to imitation of French modes of expression;
but, in other respects, hardly any specific influence of French upon
English grammar can be shown to have existed.
In the main, therefore, the differences between the grammar of
Old English and that of the English of Chaucer's day must be
ascribed to internal agencies, helped to a certain extent by the
influence of the language of the Scandinavian settlers. The French
influence introduced by the Norman conquest had only a com-
paratively small effect.
3. PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLING.
The runic alphabet that had been used by the heathen English
was, soon after their conversion, superseded (for most purposes) by
the Latin alphabet of 22 letters, to which afterwards were added
the three characters p (w, called wynn), Þ (th, called thorn), which


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392 Changes in the Language
belonged to the runic alphabet, and , differentiated from d by the
addition of a cross-bar. The last-mentioned character was used
indifferently with ḥ, the two sounds of our modern th (in thick and
in this) not being graphically distinguished. The u or v, and the i,
were, in ordinary Old English spelling, used only as vowels, the
Latin practice of using them as consonants not being followed.
On the early coins, the sound expressed in modern French by u
and in German by ü was rendered by writing a V with an I inside
it. This compound character in MSS became y, and this was
identified with the Roman y. Instead of qu, the combination cp
was used in Old English; k occurs in some MSS, but was commonly
replaced by c; % was used, though very seldom, with its con-
temporary Latin value of ts.
It is not necessary to give in this place any account of the
changes in orthography during the Old English period. About
A. D. 1000, the vowels were probably sounded nearly as in modern
Italian, except that æ stood for a sound intermediate between
those of a and e (i.