, and even inserts several spurious grants, which, however, are
of value as showing how incapable the writers were of scientific
forgery, and so as guarantees of the general accuracy of the document.
But in the main facts they all agree. Nor do they stop short at the
Norman Conquest. Most of them continue half through the reign of
William, and then cease; while one manuscript goes on uninterruptedly
till the reign of Stephen, and breaks off abruptly in the year 1154 with
an unfinished sentence. With it, native prose literature dies down
altogether until the reign of Edward III.

As a whole, however, the Conquest struck the death-blow of Anglo-Saxon
literature almost at once. During the reigns of AElfred's descendants
Wessex had produced a rich crop of native works on all subjects, but
especially religious. In this literature the greatest name was that of
AElfric, whose Homilies are models of the classical West Saxon prose.
But after the Conquest our native literature died out wholly, and a new
literature, founded on Romance models, took its place. The Anglo-Saxon
style lingered on among the people, but it was gradually killed down by
the Romance style of the court writers. In prose, the history of William
of Malmesbury, written in Latin, and in a wider continental spirit,
marks the change. In poetry, the English school struggled on longer, but
at last succumbed. A few words on the nature of this process will not be
thrown away.

The old Teutonic poetry, with its treble system of accent, alliteration,
and parallelism, was wholly different from the Romance poetry, with its
double system of rime and metre. But, from an early date, the English
themselves were fond of verbal jingles, such as "Scot and lot," "sac and
soc," "frith and grith," "eorl and ceorl," or "might and right." Even in
the alliterative poems we find many occasional rimes, such as "hlynede
and dynede," "wide and side," "Dryht-guman sine drencte mid wine," or
such as the rimes already quoted from Cynewulf. As time went on, and
intercourse with other countries became greater, the tendency to rime
settled down into a fixed habit. Rimed Latin verse was already familiar
to the clergy, and was imitated in their works. Much of the very ornate
Anglo-Saxon prose of the latest period is full of strange verbal tricks,
as shown in the following modernised extract from a sermon of Wulfstan.
Here, the alliterative letters are printed in capitals, and the rimes in
italic