TABULAR VIEW OLD ENGLISH PERIOD: FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST HISTORICAL EVENTS I. PERIOD OF ROMAN OCCUPATION OF BRITAIN. Cæsar's first invasion, 55 B.C. Permanent occupation The Jutes, invited by the Britons to aid them against Pope Gregory sends St. Augustine to England, 597. 4. DANISH INVASIONS: RISE OF WESSEX. Danes begin to raid Northumbria, 789. Political su- 5. END OF ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. Invasions of Northmen, 980. Cnut the Dane, king, Widsith, Deor's Lament, Beowulf, The Fight at 2. CHRISTIAN LITERATURE. (a) Literature of Northumbria (670 to about 825). (b) Literature of Wessex (880-1066). Alfred translates CHAPTER III MIDDLE-ENGLISH PERIOD: FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER I. THE COMING OF THE NORMANS TO ENGLAND: UNION OF THE TWO PEOPLES Character of the Norman People.-The Normans, or Northmen, were an extraordinary people. A century and a half before their invasion of England, they had appeared off the coast of France; and under their leader, Hrolf the Ganger (the "Walker"), they had pushed up the Seine in their black boats, wasting and burning to the very gates of Paris. The French won peace by giving over to them broad and rich lands in the northwest, known henceforth as Normandy. The Normans were a branch of the same Teutonic race which had sent out the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles to conquer England. But, unlike the other northern peoples, they showed a marvellous power of assimilating the civilization which Rome had spread among the Celts of Western Europe. The Normans married with the French women, adopted French manners and the French tongue. In a little over a century they had grown from a barbarous horde of sea-robbers into the most polished and brilliant people of Europe, whose power was felt in the Mediterranean and the far East. They united in a singular manner impetuous daring and cool practical sense. Without losing anything of their northern bravery in war, they managed to gather up all the southern suppleness and wit, all the southern love of splendor and art. When William advanced to meet King Harold at Senlac, a court minstrel, Taillefer, rode before the invading army, tossing up his sword and catching it like a juggler, while he chanted the Song of Roland-the French epic. Taillefer is a sym bol of the Norman spirit, of its dash, its buoyancy, its brilliancy. The Normans brought with them to England not only the terror of the sword and the strong hand of conquest, but also the vitalizing breath of song, the fresh and youthful spirit of romance. First Effects of the Norman Invasion.-The sternness and energy with which King William and his nobles set about planting their own civilization in the island, brought with it much oppression and hardship. The land was taken from its Saxon owners and distributed among Norman nobles. Over the length and breadth of England rose those strong castles whose gray and massive walls still frown over the pleasant English landscape. The strong and gloomy Tower of London, which was to be the scene of so much tragic history, was built to hold the capital city in terror. Less forbidding than these, but no less suggestive of the foreigner, splendid minsters gradually took the place of the gloomy little Saxon churches. Forest laws of terrible harshness preserved the "tall deer" which the king "loved as his life"; but when a man was found murdered, if it could be proved that he was a Saxon, no further notice was taken of the crime. The Saxon language, or "Englisc," as it had begun to be called in King Alfred's time, was the badge of serfdom; and not only in the court and camp and castle, but also in Parliament and on the justice-bench, French alone was spoken. Persistence of the Native Speech.-If a prophet had arisen to tell the Norman nobility of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that not French, but English, was destined to be the speech of their descendants, he would have been laughed at. But this incredible thing came to pass, because of the dogged persistency of the Anglo-Saxon nature in clinging to its own. At the Conquest English ceased to be written; with the one exception of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which continued to grow in the sheltered monastery of Peterborough, English literature "dives underground" in 1066, and does not reappear for a century and a half. But though no longer having a literary existence, the old tongue lived on the lips of the subjugated race, from father to son. About 1200 Coming of the Normans to England 27 it began to be used again as a language of books, disputing with rude and uncertain accents a place by the side of the polished language of the conquerors. When it reappeared, however, it was a changed tongue. It was no longer Anglo-Saxon, but English. In spite of many words now obsolete, many strange forms and spellings, the English of the thirteenth century is unmistakably the same language which we speak to-day. It had sloughed off its inflections, simplified its grammar, and required only to be enriched by French elements, and made flexible by use, to be ready for the hand of Chaucer. Fusion of the English and Norman-French Tongues. But to say that English was "enriched by French elements" is hardly to convey an idea of the extent to which the foreign tongue entered into the composition of the language. What really happened was that English absorbed nearly the whole body of the French speech, or rather that the two languages, like the two peoples that spoke them, gradually melted together and became one. The Saxon, however, formed the foundation of the new language, determined its grammar, and furnished the primary indispensable words. The words of French origin in our vocabulary outnumber the Saxon words three to one; but in ordinary speech, where only the common words of daily life and action are used, the Saxon words are greatly in preponderance. French furnished many of the more stately words, those which apply to matters of abstract thought, to law and theology, to ceremonious intercourse, and to the workings of a polished civilization. The result of this fusion was to increase enormously the power of the language to express thought and feeling. It has made English the most splendid poetic language of the modern world. The fusion was accomplished in a period of about a century and a half. When English first appeared, in 1200, after its long sleep, it contained almost no French ingredients; by the middle of the fourteenth century the process of blending the two tongues was beginning to draw to a close. Chaucer, the poet who was to complete it and fix the language in much the shape that it wears to-day, was then a boy in the streets of London. Fusion of the Saxon and Norman Peoples.-Hand in hand with the fusion of the Saxon and Norman-French languages, went the social fusion of the two peoples. The conquerors, we must remember, were originally of the same race as the conquered. By intermarriage with the French their character, it is true, had been much altered, but not so much but that a ympathy of nature existed still with their Saxon subjects. The Conquest put an end to warfare between the petty English kingdoms, and gave at once a political unity to the nation by placing supreme power in the hands of a single ruler. The struggle of the Conqueror's son, Henry I (1100-1135) with his turbulent barons, led him to draw nearer to the common people, and grant privileges to the towns; he still further strengthened the growing bond between the English and their foreign masters by taking a Saxon wife, a descendant of King Alfred. Under Henry II (1154-1189) the barons refused to furnish troops to be used outside of England; and the growth o national spirit which this shows was increased by the loss of Normandy, during the reign of John, in 1204. Shut in by the sea with the people they had conquered, the Norman noblemen began not only to look upon England as their home, but to find that they were drawn by common interests and a common enemy, closer and closer to the native population. Under Edward I, in 1265, this new feeling of national unity found expression in the establishment of a Parliament composed of both lords and commons, "a complete image of the nation," for the first time regularly and frequently summoned by the king. During the next hundred years the pro ess of unifying the nation and the language progressed rapidly, aided by intermarriage and by daily intercourse; until, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the very terms "Norman" and "Saxon" had begun to lose their meaning. All were Englishmen, and the long process of fusion was nearly complete. |