lost their jurisdiction over civil cases. In the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189), great grandson of William the Conqueror, judges went on circuits, and the germ of the jury system was developed.

Parliament grew more influential, and the first half of the fourteenth century saw it organized into two bodies, — the Lords and the Commons. Three kings who governed tyrannically or unwisely were curbed or deposed. King John (1199-1216) was compelled to sign the Magna Charta, which reduced to writing certain foundation rights of his subjects. Edward II. (1307–1327) and Richard II. (1377– 1399) were both deposed by Parliament. One of the reasons assigned for the deposition of Richard II. was his claim that "he alone could change and frame the laws of the kingdom."

The ideals of chivalry and the Crusades left their impress on the age. One English monarch, Richard the LionHearted (1189-1199), was the popular hero of the Third Crusade. In Ivanhoe and The Talisman, Sir Walter Scott presents vivid pictures of knights and crusaders.

We may form some idea of the religious spirit of the Middle Ages from the Gothic cathedrals, which hold the same relative position in the world's architecture as Shakespeare's work does in literature. Travelers often declare that there is to-day nothing in England better worth seeing than these cathedrals, which were erected in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.1

The religious, social, and intellectual life of the time was profoundly affected by the coming of the friars (1220), who included the earnest followers of St. Francis (11821226), that Good Samaritan of the Middle Ages. The

1 For the location of all the English cathedral towns, see the Literary Map,

p. XII.

great philosopher and scientist, Roger Bacon (1214-1294), who was centuries in advance of his time, was a Franciscan friar. He studied at Oxford University, which had in his time become one of the great institutions of Europe.

The church fostered schools and learning, while the barons were fighting. Although William Langland (p. 76), a fourteenth-century cleric, pointed out the abuses which had crept into the church, he gave this testimony in its favor:

"For if heaven be on this earth or any ease for the soul, it is in cloister or school. For in cloister no man cometh to chide or fight, and in school there is lowliness and love and liking to learn.”

The rise of the common people was slow. During all this period the tillers of the soil were legally serfs, forbidden to change their location. The Black Death (1349) and the Peasants' Revolt (1381), although seemingly barren of results, helped them in their struggle toward emancipation. Some bought their freedom with part of their wages. Others escaped to the towns where new commercial activities needed more labor. Finally, the common toiler acquired more commanding influence by overthrowing even the French knights with his long bow. This period laid the foundation for the almost complete disappearance of serfdom in the fifteenth century. France waited for the terrible Revolution of 1789 to free her serfs. England anticipated other great modern nations in producing a literature of universal appeal because her common people began to throw off their shackles earlier.

This period opens with a victorious French army in England, followed by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech at home

and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English armies on French soil, resulting in the capture of Calais, which remained for more than two hundred years in the possession of England.

At the close of this period we find Wycliffe, “the morning star of the Reformation," and Chaucer, the first great singer of the welded Anglo-Norman race. His wide interest in human beings and his knowledge of the new Italian literature prefigure the coming to England of the Revival of Learning in the next age.

It will now be necessary to study the changes in the language, which were so pronounced between 1066 and Chaucer's death.

1

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ENGLISH

Three Languages used in England. For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, three languages were widely used in England. The Normans introduced French, which was the language of the court and the aristocracy. William the Conqueror brought over many Norman priests, who used Latin almost exclusively in their service. The influence of this book Latin is generally underestimated by those who do not appreciate the power of the church. The Domesday survey shows that in 1085 the church and her dependents held more than one third of some counties.

In addition to the Latin and the French (which was itself principally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower classes of the English stubbornly adhered.

The Loss of Inflections. Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing endings, like modern German. If a Saxon

wished to say, "good gifts," he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and his expression was gode giefa. For "the good gifts," he said da gödan giefa, inflecting "the" and at the same time changing the case ending of "good."

The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has never entirely lost. We, however, no longer decline articles or ordinary adjectives. Instead of having our attention taken up with thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. Although our pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like ox, oxen, or mouse, mice, is the addition of 's, s, or es for the possessive and the plural. Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings. How did English have the good fortune to lose them?

Whenever two peoples, speaking different languages, are closely associated, there is a tendency to drop the terminations and to use the stem word in all grammatical relations. If an English-speaking person, who knows only a little German, travels in Germany, he finds that he can make himself understood by using only one form of the noun or adjective. If he calls for "two large glasses of hot milk," employing the incorrect expression, zwei gross Glass heiss Milch, he will probably get the milk as quickly as if he had said correctly, zwei grosse Gläser heisse Milch. Neglect of the proper case endings may provoke a smile, but the tourist prefers that to starvation. Should the Germans and the English happen to be thrown together in nearly equal numbers on an island, the Germans would begin to drop the inflections that the English could not understand, and the German language would undergo a change.

If there were no books or newspapers to circulate a fixed form of speech, the alteration in the spoken tongue would be comparatively rapid.

Such dropping of terminations is precisely what did happen before the Norman Conquest in those parts of England most overrun by the Danes. There, the adjectives lost their terminations to indicate gender and case, and the article "the" ceased to be declined.

Even if the Normans had not come to England, the dropping of the inflections would not have ceased. Many authorities think that the grammatical structure of English would, even in the absence of that event, have evolved into something like its present form. Of course the Norman Conquest hastened many grammatical changes that would ultimately have resulted from inherent causes, but it did not exercise as great an influence as was formerly ascribed to it. Philologists find it impossible to assign the exact amount of change due to the Conquest and to other causes. Let us next notice some changes other than the loss of inflections.

Change in Gender. Before any one could speak AngloSaxon correctly, he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to nouns : trousers" was feminine; "childhood," masculine; "child," neuter. During this period the English gradually lost those fanciful genders which the German still retains. A critic thus illustrates the use of genders in that language: "A German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on mas. cuiine sheets of neuter paper, and incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."