rench in the new vocabulary corresponds to the
branches of activity reserved to the new-comers. From their maternal
idiom have been borrowed the words that composed the language of war, of
commerce, of jurisprudence, of science, of art, of metaphysics, of pure
thought, and also the language of games, of pastimes, of tourneys, and
of chivalry. In some cases no compromise took place, neither the French
nor the Anglo-Saxon word would give way and die, and they have both come
down to us, alive and irreducible: _act_ and _deed_; _captive_ and
_thrall_; _chief_ and _head_, &c.[402] It is a trace of the Conquest,
like the formula: "La Reine le veut."

Chaucer, in whose time these double survivals were naturally far more
numerous than they are to-day, often uses both words at once, sure of
being thus intelligible to all:

They callen love a woodnes or a folye.[403]

Versification is transformed in the same proportion; here again the two
prosodies arrive at a compromise. Native verse had two ornaments: the
number of accents and alliteration; French verse in the fourteenth
century had also two ornaments, the number of syllables and rhyme. The
French gave up their strict number of syllables, and consented to note
the number of accents; the natives discarded alliteration and accepted
rhyme in its stead. Thus was English verse created, its cadence being
Germanic and its rhyme French, and such was the prosody of Chaucer, who
wrote his "Canterbury Tales" in rhymed English verse, with five accents,
but with syllables varying in number from nine to eleven.

The fusion of the two versifications was as gradual as that of the two
vocabularies had been. Layamon in the thirteenth century mingled both
prosodies in his "Brut," sometimes using alliteration, sometimes rhyme,
and occasionally both at once. The fourteenth century is the last in
which alliterative verse really flourished, though it survived even
beyond the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century a new form was tried;
rhyme was suppressed mainly in imitation of the Italians and the
ancients, and blank verse was created, which Shakespeare and Milton used
in their masterpieces; but alliteration never found place again in the
normal prosody of England.

Grammar was affected in the same way. In the Anglo-Saxon grammar, nouns
and adjectives had declensions as in German; and not very simple ones.
"Not only had our old adjectives a declension in three genders, but more
than this, it