st a few
words of Latin origin, but not many; they were words recalling the great
works of the Romans, such as _street_ and _chester_, from _strata_ and
_castrum_, or else words borrowed from the language of the clerks, and
concerning mainly religion, such as _mynster_, _tempel_, _bisceop_,
derived from _monasterium_, _templum_, _episcopus_, &c. The Conquest was
productive of a great change, but not all at once; the languages, as has
been seen, remained at first distinctly separate; then in the
thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth century, they permeated
each other, and were blended in one. In 1205, only fifty words of Latin
origin were found in the sixteen thousand long lines of Layamon's
"Brut"; a hundred can be counted in the first five hundred lines of
Robert of Gloucester about 1298, and a hundred and seventy in the first
five hundred lines of Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in 1303.[400]

As we advance further into the fourteenth century, the change is still
more rapid. Numerous families of words are naturalised in England, and
little by little is constituted that language the vocabulary of which
contains to-day twice as many words drawn from French or Latin as from
Germanic sources. At the end of Skeat's "Etymological Dictionary,"[401]
there is a table of the words of the language classified according to
their derivation; the words borrowed from Germanic or Scandinavian
idioms fill seven columns and a half; those taken from the French, and
the Romance or classic tongues, sixteen columns.

It is true the proportion of words used in a page of ordinary English
does not correspond to these figures. With some authors in truth it is
simply reversed; with Shakespeare, for instance, or with Tennyson, who
exhibit a marked predilection for Anglo-Saxon words. It is nevertheless
to be observed: first, that the constitution of the vocabulary with its
majority of Franco-Latin words is an actual fact; then that in a page of
ordinary English the proportion of words having a Germanic origin is
increased by the number of Anglo-Saxon articles, conjunctions, and
pronouns, words that are merely the servants of the others, and are, as
they should be, more numerous than their masters. A nearer approach to
the numbers supplied by the lists of Skeat will be made if real words
only are counted, those which are free and independent citizens of the
language, and not the shadow nor the reflection of any other.

The contributive part of F