ere were two languages spoken
in England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes
and English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in
the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the
national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King
Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly
{12} stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words,
and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman
lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of
dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and
of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals
contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the
mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living
animals, _ox, swine, sheep, deer,_ was left to the Saxon churl who had
the herding of them, while the dressed meats, _beef, pork, mutton,
venison,_ received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman
master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the
Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became
intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching
to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with
English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day;
their _medicine_, _botany,_ and _astronomy_ displaced the old
nomenclature of _leechdom_, _wort-cunning,_ and _star-craft_. And,
finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to
transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym,
particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the
innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so
that _voice_ drove out _steven_, _poor_ drove out _earm_, and _color_,
_use_, and _place_ made good their footing beside _hue,_ {13} _wont_,
and _stead_. A great part of the English words that were left were so
changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new.
Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred
Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than
from the latter's. To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language
as it is to us.

The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect,
spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French
had displaced this as the language of