h; everything was changed by the conqueror's right, and
the Saxons were entirely subjected.

ITS OPPRESSION.--In short, the Norman conquest, from the day of the battle
of Hastings, brought the Saxon people under a galling yoke. The Norman was
everywhere an oppressor. Besides his right as a conqueror, he felt a
contempt for the rudeness of the Saxon. He was far more able to govern and
to teach. He founded rich abbeys; schools like those of Oxford and
Cambridge he expanded into universities like that of Paris. He filled all
offices of profit and trust, and created many which the Saxons had not. In
place of the Saxon English, which, however vigorous, was greatly wanting
in what may be called the vocabulary of progress, the Norman French,
drawing constantly upon the Latin, enriched by the enactments of
Charlemagne and the tributes of Italy, even in its infancy a language of
social comity in Western Europe, was spoken at court, introduced into the
courts of law, taught in the schools, and threatened to submerge and drown
out the vernacular.[13] All inducements to composition in English were
wanting; delicious songs of Norman Trouveres chanted in the _Langue
d'oil_, and stirring tales of Troubadours in the _Langue d'oc_, carried
the taste captive away from the Saxon, as a regal banquet lures from the
plain fare of the cottage board, more wholesome but less attractive.

ITS BENEFITS.--Had this progress continued, had this grasp of power
remained without hinderance or relaxation, the result would have been the
destruction or amalgamation of the vigorous English, so as to form a
romance language similar to the French, and only different in the amount
of Northern and local words. But the Norman power, without losing its
title, was to find a limit to its encroachments. This limit was fixed,
_first_, by the innate hardihood and firmness of the Saxon character,
which, though cast down and oppressed, retained its elasticity; which
cherished its language in spite of Norman threats and sneers, and which
never lost heart while waiting for better times; _secondly_, by the
insular position of Great Britain, fortified by the winds and waves, which
enabled her to assimilate and mould anew whatever came into her borders,
to the discomfiture of further continental encroachments; constituting
her, in the words of Shakspeare,

"... that pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,
And coops f