that there was a period, and that of considerable duration, during which the English language did not exist, or at least was not, and could not be applicable to any literary purpose. The language of the church was Latin; that of the king and nobles, Norman; that of the people, Anglo-Saxon: the Anglo-Norman jargon was only employed in the commercial intercourse between the and the conquered. It was likely to be composed almost entirely of synonymous terms, which evidently can only encumber, without enriching the

speech of

conquerors

any nation; and that this was the case, is proved by our existing language, in which the names of the necessaries of life, as ox and beef, sheep and mutton, flesh and meat, besides many other words of frequent recurrence, had originally an identical meaning. This state of things would necessarily continue so long as the Norman and Anglo-Saxon people were separated by mutual hatred and prejudice; and their languages could only be amalgamated into one common and consistent form of speech, when the conquerors and

the

conquered became confounded in the same mass, by intermarriages, and by a general unity of interest. Hence, the Norman and Anglo-Saxon, which for some time existed in England as distinct and rival tongues, have long since disappeared;

while, from a series of opposite causes, the Welch has continued to the present day; and it is probable that, by a careful examination of our political and legal history alone, we might be able to trace the gradations of our language with tolerable accuracy. In the mean time it is impossible not to see, that a great deal too much has been attributed to the personal character of the Conqueror, and that historians have ascribed, to particular parts of his policy, effects directly opposite to those which they were naturally calculated to produce.

We are told, for instance, that William hated and determined to eradicate the language of this island, and to introduce the Norman in its place; and this has been so often repeated, that Mr. Tyrwhitt has thought it necessary to refute the assertion by the authority of Ordericus Vitalis, a contemporary historian, who tells us, that William had, in fact, taken great pains to acquire the AngloSaxon. But surely, the absurdity of the charge is its best refutation. William must have known, that the Franks who conquered Gaul, and his own ancestors who subdued Neustria, had not been able to substitute the Teutonic for the Romance language in their dominions,; that the measure was not at all necessary to the establishment of their power; and that such an attempt is, in all cases,

no less impracticable than absurd, because the patient indocility of the multitude must ultimately triumph over the caprice and tyranny of their armed preceptors. But, having conquered a kingdom, and wishing to retain his conquest, he introduced a code of laws which placed his power on a military basis; and he introduced it in the language in which it was originally compiled, and which was familiar to that army to which he looked for his security. By encouraging the study of French in the schools, he gave his subjects the means of understanding the laws which he expected them to obey. He did this, perhaps, tyrannically and harshly; but it is not proved that he did it with the view of making the Norman the universal language of his subjects, or that he expected them, at their return from school, to talk French in their own families: he might, with equal wisdom, have supposed that they would converse habitually in Latin, which they learnt in the same schools. Even during the reign of Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon had ceased to be cultivated; and after the conquest, it was sure to become more and more barbarous, because it was the language of an oppressed and enslaved people; but it continued to exist. Indeed, the obscurity of our earliest poets is well known to arise from this source; and the great influx of

French words which was ultimately introduced, and thus formed, the Anglo-Norman or English language, was so far from being a consequence of the tyrannical policy of the Conqueror, that it was most rapid at the very period when that policy was abandoned; that is to say, a little before the time of Minot, Gower, and Chaucer; and was the natural result of the increasing intercourse between the Norman nobles and their English vassals.

In the mean time, the English monarchs were the most liberal, and, perhaps, the earliest patrons of French poetry; indeed we are told by a correct and diligent antiquary, M. de la Rue, Royal Professor of History in the University of Caen (V. Archæologia, Vol. XII. pages 50 and 297, for his able dissertations on this subject,) that “IT WAS FROM ENGLAND AND NORMANDY THAT THE FRENCH RECEIVED THE FIRST WORKS WHICH DESERVE TO BE CITED IN THEIR LANGUAGE." The historians of Provence have assigned to the first specimens of their poetry, a very high degree of antiquity; but La Combe, in his short account of the French poets prefixed to the second volume of his Dictionn. du Vieux Langage, supposes the earliest troubadours of eminence, William Count of Poitiers, and Raymond Count of Thoulouse, to have flourished in 1071 and 1092, so that the only

known poet confessedly anterior to the reign of William the Conqueror, is Thibaut de Vernon, Canon of Rouen, who translated, from Latin into French verse, the lives of Wandril and some other saints, held in reverence by the Normans.

The next names with which we become acquainted, are those of the minstrel TAILLEFER, who is said to have been the first person that broke into the English ranks at the battle of Hastings; and of BERDIC, another French minstrel attached to the Conqueror, by whom he was rewarded with the gift of three parishes in Gloucestershire. The succeeding reign was principally distinguished by numbers of serventois, or satyrical songs, from which it is not improbable that Robert of Gloucester may have borrowed his sarcasms against William Rufus but we do not possess any monuments of the poetry of this early period, nor have the names of the writers been transmitted to posterity.

:

The first Anglo-Norman poet mentioned by M. de la Rue, is PHILIPPE DE THAN. He composed, for the use of the clergy, a didactic French poem, under the title of "LIBER DE CREATURIS ;" it is a treatise of practical chronology, full of erudition, and dedicated to his uncle Humphrey de Than, Chaplain to Hugh Bigod, who became Seneschal to Henry I. in the year 1107, soon after which