childlike wonder or terror of their superstitious fancies, their strong primitive emotions, find their direct and natural, if somewhat crude and primitive, expression. The whole soul of the nation goes out into them. In our day the thousands go to the newspaper or the novel for their sensations. Then the people were glad to crowd about some wandering gleeman by the wayside, or in the village alehouse. Then, huddled at dusk about the winter's fire, the country folk whispered the old wives' talk of elf and ghost and goblin; then, from "The spinsters and the knitters in the sun," lar song. ture. from the plowman in his furrow, or the milkmaid bringing home her pail, arose the music of the popuIt seems probable that the Norman Conquest made no break in this English popular literaWe know that a little scrap of song ascribed to Canute was kept alive by oral tradition from his time to the days of Henry II.,* when a chronicler chanced to preserve it in his history. Doubtless there were thousands of popular songs which never found their way into the written literature, and gradually perished on the people's lips. In prose a defiant patriotism delights in stories of Hereward, the English outlaw, and of how he held out in the Fens against the Conqueror, or, later, legend and ballad cluster about the outlawed Robin Hood. These rude *"Merie sungen the munaches binnan Ely," etc. (Pleasantly sang the monks in Ely). Morley's English Writers, iii. p. 240. The story is told by Thomas of Ely, who wrote a history of his monastery to 1107. rhymes, probably dating back as far as the thirteenth century, are the very breath of the popular spirit. Robin Hood is their hero; he embodies the English hatred of the Norman rule, their love of a free and manly life in the merry greenwood, their delight in archery, in ale, in singlestick, and shrewd strokes. This popular hero hoodwinks sheriffs and defies the law, yet he has the courtesy, fairness, and gentleness that appeal to the English heart. He suffers no woman to be molested; "poor men's goods he spared, abundantly relieving them with that which by theft he got from abbeys and the houses of the rich earls." And in these ballads we get out into the sunshine and free air, by little artless touches that tell us of lives at home under the open sky. "When shaws* been sheene, and shradds † full fayre, And leaves both large and longe, Itt is merrye walking in the fayre forrést To heare the small birdes songe." + The famous Cuckoo Song, composed before 1240, has a yet fresher breath of nature; the lines have caught the rhythm of that buoyant pleasure that sets the blood dancing in the spring: "Summer is a-coming in. Loud sing cuckoo : Groweth seed and bloweth mead And springeth the wood now. Sing cuckoo, cuckoo. * Shaws, etc., "Woods are shining." Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. Ewe bleateth after lamb, Cow after calf calls, Bullock sterteth, buck verteth Merry sing cuckoo. Cuckoo, cuckoo, well sings the cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo.* So under the crust of the Norman chanson or romance, or under the Latin of the scholastics, we find the true English literature, flowing like a fresh and living stream under the ice which will melt at last into its moving waters. IV. THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE After the Conquest French was the language of the court and ruling classes in England, and, with a few exceptions, it became that of literature. English was despised by the polished Norman as the barbarous tongue of a conquered people. The mass of English still used it, but as it almost ceased to be a written or literary language, many words not used in ordinary speech were lost from its vocabulary. For a time Norman-French and English in its various dialects continued in use, side by side, as distinct languages, but it cannot have been very long before the Normans who had permanently settled in England began to learn the native speech. The two races grew closer together, and, by the loss of Normandy in 1204, the connection with a foreign and French-speaking power was broken. Parisian French had indeed come with the Plantagenet kings; during the reigns of John (1199-1216) and Henry III. (1216-1272) it was *The song as here given is in modernized English. the fashion at court, and for some time later it continued to be the language of state documents, of society, education, and the courts of law. Yet, in spite of this, English began to be more generally employed by the French-speaking people outside of court circles. A writer of the latter part of the thirteenth century declares: "For unless a man knows French people regard him little; but the low men hold to English and to their own speech still."* By the fourteenth century this stubborn "holding to English" had made the triumph of that language certain. The Hundred Years' War against France, begun in Edward III.'s reign (1327-1377), may have helped to bring French into disfavor, and hastened, but not caused, the more general use of English. By 1339 English instead of French was employed in nearly all the schools as the medium of instruction. In 1362 Parliament passed an act providing that the pleadings in the law courts should henceforth be in English, "because the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm, be not commonly known in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, showed, and judged in the French tongue." t But while French was being thus given up, there was as yet no one national English established and understood throughout the whole of England. One kind of English was spoken in the north, another in the middle districts, and a third in the south, and even these three forms were split up into further dialects. These three dialects are commonly known * Robert of Gloucester's Rhyming Chronicle, Cir. 1298, as the Northern, Midland, and Southern English. During the latter part of the fourteenth century the East Midland English, or that spoken in and about London, which was in the eastern part of the Midland district, asserted itself above the confusion and gradually became accepted as the national speech. Midland English had an importance as the language of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as that of the capital and the court, and its supremacy was further due to its being made the language of literature. The language of Wyclif's translation of the Bible (1380), a variety of this Midland form, is plainly the parent of the noble Bible English of our later versions. The poet John Gower (1325 ?-1408) gave up the use of French and Latin to write in the King's or Court English, and, more than all, it was in this same East Midland English of the Court that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the poems which became so widely read. These works gave to East Midland English a supremacy which it never lost. Now this East Midland dialect was not a pure English; for there, as elsewhere, the local variety of the native speech had been modified by a large infusion of French. When, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the tendency toward a general adoption of English grew too strong to be resisted, that English was neither the AngloSaxon of an earlier time, nor a mere outgrowth of it, but a Frenchified tongue. The language of Chaucer was thus a mixed language, in its foundations of grammar and construction still substantially English, in its vocabulary showing a considerable |