y language seemed doomed to disappear. What
was the good of writing in English, when there was hardly any one who
cared to read it, and even those few were learning French, and coming by
degrees to enjoy the new literature? But it turned out that the native
English writers had not been swept away for ever. Their race, though
silenced, was not extinct; they were not dead, but only asleep.

The first to awake were the scholars, the men who had studied in Paris.
It was quite natural that they should be less deeply impressed with
nationalism than the rest of their compatriots; learning had made them
cosmopolitan; they belonged less to England than to the Latin country,
and the Latin country had not suffered from the Conquest. Numerous
scholars of English origin shone forth as authors from the twelfth
century onwards; among them Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Arthurian fame,
Joseph of Exeter, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Nigel Wireker, and many
others of European reputation.

In the thirteenth century another awakening takes place in the palace
which the Norman enchanter had doomed to a temporary sleep. Translators
and imitators set to work; the English language is again employed; the
storm has abated, and it has become evident that there still remain
people of English blood and language for whom it is worth while to
write. Innumerable books are composed for them, that they may learn,
ignorant as they are of French or Latin, what is the thought of the day.
Robert Manning de Brunne states, in the beginning of the fourteenth
century, that he writes:

"Not for the lerid bot for the lewed,
Ffor tho that in this land wone,
That the Latyn no Frankys cone,
Ffor to haf solace and gamen
In felawschip when thay sitt samen."

They are to enjoy this new literature in common, be it religious, be it
imaginative or historical; they will discuss it and it will improve
their minds; it will teach them to pass judgments even on kings:

"And gude it is for many thynges
For to here the dedis of kynges
Whilk were foles and whilk were wyse."[8]

In their turn the English poets sang of Arthur; in all good faith they
adopted his glory as that of an ancestor of their own. Among them a man
like Layamon accepted the French poet Wace for his model, and in the
beginning of the thirteenth century, devoted thirty-two thousand lines
to the Celtic hero; nor was he ever disturbed by the thought that
Arthur's British