years went on, and as men more and more aped their betters, the French words would drive out the Old English words; and the latter class would linger only in the mouths of upland folk, where a keen antiquary may find some of them still. So mighty was the spell at work, that in the Fourteenth Century French words found their way into even the Lord's Prayer and the Belief; the last strongholds, it might be thought, of pure English. It was one of the signs of the times that the old boda made way for the new prechur; prayer and praise both come from France.

1

But the influence of the friars upon our speech was not altogether for evil. St. Francis, it is well known, was one of the first fathers of the New Italian; a friar of his Order, Thomas of Hales, wrote what seems to me the best poem of two hundred lines produced in English before Chaucer.2 This Luve ron,' addressed to a nun about 1250, shows a hearty earnestness, a flowing diction, and a wonderful command of rime; it has not a score of lines (these bear too hard on wedlock) that might not have been written by a pious Protestant. Hardly any French words are found here, but the names of a string of jewels. English poets had hitherto made but little use of the Virgin Mary as a theme. But her worship was one of the great badges of the Fran

auctioneer was a master of English, and a better guide to follow than Bunyan or Defoe.

How often does the word predicai (prædicavi) occur in the journal of the Franciscan, who afterwards became Sixtus V.!

2 Old English Miscellany, p. 93 (Early English Text Society). Dr. Morris thinks that the friar wrote in Latin, which was afterwards Englished.

ciscan Order; and from 1220 onward she inspired many an English Maker. However wrong it might be theologically, the new devotion was the most poetical of all rites; the dullest monk is kindled with unwonted fire, when he sets forth the glories of the Maiden Mother. To her Chaucer and Dunbar have offered some of their most glowing verse.

The first token of the change in English is the everwaxing distaste for words compounded with prepositions. After 1220, these compounds become more and more scarce, though we have kept to this day some verbs which have fore, out, over, and under prefixed; those beginning with to (the German zer) lived on for a long time before waning away. We have a second copy of Layamon's Brut, written, it is thought, soon after 1250. Scores of old words set down fifty years earlier in the first copy of 1205 had become strange in the ears of Englishmen ; these words are now dropped altogether. Some French words, unknown to Layamon, are found in this second copy.

We have an opportunity of comparing the old and the new school of English teachers, as they stood in the Middle of this Century. We find one poem, written shortly before 1250, about the time that Archbishop Edmund was canonized: this must have been composed by a churchman of the good old St. Albans' pattern, a preacher of righteousness after Brother Matthew's own heart. The rimer casts no wistful glance abroad, but appeals to English saints and none others; he strikes hard at Rome in a way that would have shocked good Franciscans. He is an exception to the common

rule; for the proportion of English words, now obsolete, in his lines is as great as in those of Orrmin.' Most different is another poem, written in a manuscript not later than 1250. The Maker may well have been a Franciscan; he pours out his wrath on priests' wives and on parsons; he handles the sins of Jankin and Malkin in most homely wise. He has some French words that he need not have employed, such as sire and dame instead of father and mother; his proportion of obsolete English is far less than that which we see in the lines of his brother-poet. I suspect that the Ancren Riwle (it still exists in many copies) must have been a model most popular among the friars, who perhaps did much to bring into vogue the French words with which it swarms.

About the year 1290, we find Churchmen becoming more and more French in their speech. Hundreds of good Old English words were now lost for ever, and the terms that replaced them, having been for years in the mouths of men, were at length being set down in manuscripts. The Life of a Saint (many such are extant, written at this time) was called a Vie. In that version of the Harrowing of Hell which dates from the aforesaid year, the transcriber has gone out of his way to bring in the words delay, commandment (this comes twice over), and serve all these are crowded into five lines. Still more remarkable are the few and short Kentish sermons, translated from the French about the same time, 1290.4 Never were the Old and the New 2 Do., p. 186.

1 Old English Miscellany, p. 89.

Page 36 of Dr. Mall's edition.

Old English Miscellany, p. 26 (Early English Text Society).

brought face to face within narrower compass. We see the old Article with its three genders, se, si, pet (in Sanscrit sa, sú, tat), still lingering on in Kent, though these forms had been dropped everywhere else. On the other hand, we find about seventy French words, many of which, as verray, defenden, signefiance, orgeilus, commencement, were not needed at all. When reading the short sentence, 'this is si signefiance of the miracle,' our thoughts are at one time borne back to the abode of our earliest forefathers on the Oxus; at another time we see the fine language of the Victorian penny-a-liner most clearly foreshadowed. After 1290, we hardly ever find a passage in which the English words, now obsolete, are more than one-seventeenth of the whole; the only exception is in the case of some Alliterative poem. This fact gives us some idea of the havock wrought in the Thirteenth Century.

But the friars of old did not confine themselves to preaching; all the lore of the day was lodged in their hands. Roger Bacon's life sets before us the bold way in which some of them pried into the secrets of Nature. One of the means by which they drew to themselves the love of the common folk was the practice of leechcraft; in the friars the leper found his only friends. The best scientific English treatise of the time of Edward the First is the Pit of Hell,' printed by Mr. Wright: this also deals with the shaping of the human frame.2 There are in it about 400 long lines, containing forty French

6

1 That is, leaving out of the calculation all but the weighty words.'

2 Popular Treatises of Science, p. 132.

words: among them are air and round. It is strange to contrast the language of this with the obsolete English of a treatise on Astronomy, put forth three hundred years before, and printed in the same book of Mr. Wright's.

our leechcraft we owe a There are many English functions of the human

To these early forefathers of further change in our tongue. words for sundry parts and frame, words which no well-bred man can use; custom has ruled that we must employ Latin synonyms. The first example I remember of this delicacy (it ought not to be called mawkishness) is in Robert of Gloucester, writing about 1300. When describing the tortures inflicted by King John on his subjects in 1216, and the death of the Earl Marshal on an Irish field in 1234, the old rimer uses Latin terms instead of certain English words that would jar upon our taste. But a leech who flourished eighty years after Robert's time is far more plain-spoken, when describing his cures, made at Newark and London.2 Indeed, he is as little mealy-mouthed as Orrmin himself. It was not, however,

On this head there is a great difference between Germany and England. Teutonic words that no well-bred Englishman could use before a woman may be printed by grave German historians. See Von Raumer's account of the siege of Viterbo in 1243, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen. Of course I know that this does not prove Germans to be one whit more indelicate than Englishmen; custom is everything.

2 John Arderne's Account of himself, Reliquiæ Antiquæ, I. 191. Charles II. was the best bred Englishman of his time, yet he writes to his sister:-'Poor O'Nial died this afternoon of an ulcer in his guts.'-Curry's Civil Wars in Ireland, I. 308. So swiftly does fashion change!