the Normans were about as far behind the
people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made
themselves masters of Greece; and it was not till some two generations
after the Conquest, that learning and literature regained in England
somewhat of the position which they had occupied two centuries
earlier. And this new literary culture was naturally confined to the
French dialect of the conquerors, which had become the language of
court and castle, of church and law, of chivalry and the chase; while
the rich and cultured tongue of Alfred and AElfric was left for
generations without literary employment, during which time it lost
nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic
vocabulary, retaining only the words of common life and everyday
use[4]. And for more than 300 years after the Conquest English
lexicography stood still. Between 1066 and 1400, Wright-Wuelcker shows
only two meagre vocabularies, occupying some twenty-four columns of
his volume. One of these, of the twelfth century, is only an echo of
the earlier literary age, a copy of a pre-Conquest glossary, which
some scribe who could still read the classical tongue of the old West
Saxon Court, transliterated into the corrupted forms of his own
generation. The other is a short vocabulary of the Latin and
vernacular names of plants, a species of class-vocabulary of which
there exist several of rather early date.

But when we reach the end of the fourteenth century, English is once
more in the ascendant. Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng of Brunne,
Dan Michel of Canterbury, and Richard Rolle of Hampole, William
Langland and John Wyclif, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, and many
other authors of less known or entirely unknown name, have written in
the tongue of the people; English has been sanctioned for use in the
courts of law; and, as John of Trevisa tells us, has, since the
'furste moreyn' or Great Pestilence of 1349 (which Mrs. Markham has
taught nineteenth-century historians to call the 'Black Death'), been
introduced into the grammar schools in the translation of Latin
exercises, which boys formerly rendered into French. And under these
new conditions lexicographical activity at once bursts forth with
vigour. Six important vocabularies of the fifteenth century are
printed by Wright-Wuelcker, most of them arranged, like the Old English
one of AElfric, under subject-headings; but one large one, extending to
2,500 words, entirely alph