documents, and a note was added declaring
that "if the king was illiterate," he was to swear in French[386]; it
was in the latter tongue that Edward II. took his oath in 1307; the idea
that it could be sworn in English did not occur. But when the century
was closing, in 1399, an exactly opposite phenomenon happened. Henry of
Lancaster usurped the throne and, in the Parliament assembled at
Westminster, pronounced in English the solemn words by which he claimed
the crown: "In the name of Fadir, Son and Holy Gost, I, Henry of
Lancastre, chalenge yis Rewme of Yngland."[387]

During this interval, the union of the two languages had taken place.
The work of aggregation can be followed in its various phases, and
almost from year to year. In the first half of the century, the "lowe
men," the "rustics," _rurales homines_, are still keen to learn French,
_satagunt omni nisu_; they wish to frenchify, _francigenare_,[388]
themselves, in order to imitate the nobles, and be more thought of.
Their efforts had a remarkable result, precisely for the reason that
they never succeeded in speaking pure French, and that in their
ill-cleared brains the two languages were never kept distinctly apart.
The nobles, cleverer men, could speak both idioms without confounding
them, but so could not these _rurales_, who lisped the master's tongue
with difficulty, mixing together the two vocabularies and the two
grammars, mistaking the genders, assigning, for want of better
knowledge, the neuter to all the words that did not designate beings
with a sex, in other words, strange as it may seem, creating the new
language. It was on the lips of "lowe men" that the fusion first began;
they are the real founders of modern English; the "French of
Stratford-at-Bow" had not less to do with it than the "French of Paris."

Even the nobles had not been able to completely escape the consequences
of a perpetual contact with the _rurales_. Had these latter been
utterly ignorant of French, the language of the master would have been
kept purer, but they spoke the French idiom after a fashion, and their
manner of speaking it had a contagious influence on that of the great.
In the best families, the children being in constant communication
with native servants and young peasants, spoke the idiom of France
less and less correctly. From the end of the thirteenth century and
the beginning of the fourteenth, they confuse French words that bear
a resemblance to each other,