The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, compiled about 1300, abounds in the words of law and government borrowed from France, words that still keep their hold upon us. The Sir Tristrem, translated in the North about thirty years earlier than Robert's work, is most interesting as giving us more than 200 French terms of war, hunting, law, leechcraft, religion, and lady's dress. The mischief was now done; we must not be hard on Colonel Hamley, or on Blackstone, or on the compilers of the Anglican Prayer Book, or on the describer of a fashionable wedding in the Morning Post, or on the chronicler of the Lord Mayor's feast, or on the Editors of the Lancet and the Builder, for dealing in shoals of foreign terms; nearly six hundred years ago it was settled that the technical diction of their respective crafts must to a great extent be couched in French or Latin.1 There were about 150 Romance words in our tongue before 1066, being mostly the names of Church furniture, foreign plants, and strange animals. About 100 more Romance words got the right of English citizenship before the year 1200. Lastly, 800 other Romance words had become common with our writers by the year 1300; and before these came in, many hundreds of good old English words had been put out of the way. Fearful was the havock done in the Thirteenth Century; sore is our loss: but those of us

1 It was once my lot to treat of a code of law; I find, on looking over my book, that at least one half of my substantives, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs dealing with this subject, are of Latin birth; so impossible is it for the most earnest Teuton to shake off the trammels laid on England in the Thirteenth Century.

who love a Teutonic diction should blame, not Chaucer or Wickliffe, but the Franciscans of an earlier age; they, if I guess aright, were the men who wrought the great change in our store of words. The time of King Henry the Third's death is the moment when our written speech was barrenest; a crowd of English words had already been dropped, and few French words had as yet been used by any writer of prose or poetry, except by the author of the Ancren Riwle; hitherto the outlandish words had come as single spies, henceforward they were to come in battalions. I have already touched upon the French expressions that came in about 1300, and are now so common in our mouths; such as 'he used to go.'

These strangers, long before the Norman Conquest, had been forced to take an English ending before they could be naturalized. In the Twelfth Century, some of them took English prefixes as well; we find not only a word like maisterlinges, but also bispused. In Layamon's poem of 1205, we see our adverbial ending tacked on to a French word, as hardiliche. In the Ancren Riwle, a few years later, we find French adjectives taking the English signs of comparison, as larger and tendrust. the last decade of the Thirteenth Century, French words were coming in amain. The Alexander (published by Weber), and Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, both of which belong to this date, swarm with foreign terms, the bricks that were to replace our lost stone. It was now not only nouns, verbs, and adverbs that came hither from France; we see, in Robert's Chronicle (page 54), save used to express præter: 'save lym and lyf.' He

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also shows us the first germ of our new word because. In page 24, he tells us that the Humber was so called, 'for pe cas pat Homber . per ynne adreynt was.' He has also that most curious compound pece-mele. A new idiom is found in the Life of Becket, at page 40: 'he upe the poynte was to beo icast.' A still greater change is seen in the Alexander; the French word round, which had not taken root in England much before 1300, was used as a Preposition :

'This is round the mydell erd.'—Page 29.

In the Life of Becket this word takes an English prefix, and becomes around. A great change was coming over England about the year 1300, from the Severn to the Wash; the old Teutonic sources of diction had been sadly dried up and could no longer supply all her wants; Germany was to have a happier lot, at least in speech. Nothing can more clearly set forth the inroad of the French than the following sentence, which is made up of words in the every-day use of the lowest among us :

'Of course I immediately just walked quite round the second of the walls, because perhaps it might have been very weak.'

We should find it hard to change these foreign words in italics for Teutonic equivalents, without laying ourselves open to the charge of obsolete diction. England, too careless of her own wealth, has had to draw upon France even for prepositions and conjunctions. After reading such a sentence as the one above, we are less astonished to find words like face, voice, dress, flower, river, uncle, cousin, pass, touch, pray, try, glean,

which have put to flight the commonest of Teutonic words. Strange it is that these French terms should have won their way into our hovels as well as into our manor houses.

I give a few instances of Manning's use of French words; his lines on Confirmation show plainly how much foreign ware we owe to the clergy. He sticks pretty close to the French poem he was translating, as in page 107, une cote perece is Englished by a kote percede; and this gives us some idea of the number of new words that must have been brought in by translators. We see the terms verry (verus), oure (hora), prayere, anoynt, age, renoun, morsel, tryfyl, savyoure, straitly, in vein (frustra), bewte, usurer, valeu, a fair, affynyte, sample, trespas, spyryt, revyle, moreyne (pestis), pestelens, veniaunce, hutch, tremle. It may be laid down, that in his diction this writer of 1303 has more in common with us of 1873 than he had with any English poet of 1250.

A few other changes must be more specially pointed out. Hitherto Englishmen had talked of cristendom, but Robert (page 346) speaks of crystyanyte.

He has dropped the old word syfernes, and translates the kindred French sobreté by soberte, our sobriety.

He has both verement and verryly: the first in its foreign adverbial ending points to mind, the second in its English adverbial ending points to lic (body). In page 149 charyte stands for alms, coming from the French line, la charite luy enveia. In the same page, nycete stands for folly.1

This French word has had a most curious history in England. Nice stood for foolish down to about 1580; then it came to mean

In page 56, joly stands for riotous, as is seen by the context :

Yyf a man be of joly lyfe.

This French jolif is said to come from the Yule of the conquerors of Normandy.

In page 75, we see the word party get its modern

sense:

Pys aperyng, yn my avys,

Avaylede to bope partys.

In page 228, there is a piling up of French and English synonyms:

On many maner dyvers wyse.

In page 273, en le geor is turned into yn pe chaunsel. In page 276, we find our county court, when he translates the French:

In

Seculer plai, cum est cunte.

Lay courte, or elles counte.

page 100, escharnir is translated by scorn, the word used by Orrmin a hundred years earlier.

precise; and a hundred years ago it got the meaning of pleasing. Mrs. Thrale, in Miss Burney's Diary, is the earliest instance I can recollect of any one using nice in the last-named sense, in free everyday talk. The young lady of our time who is helped through her hoop at croquet by some deft curate, thinks to herself, O nice creature!' These are the very words that Chaucer, in his Second Nun's Tale, puts into the mouth of St. Cecilia, when that most outspoken of maidens wishes to call the Roman governor'a silly brute.' Nice is now applied to a sermon, to a jam tart, to a young man; in short, to everything. The lower classes talk of 'nice weather.' We have become mere slovens in diction; the penny-a-liners now write about a splendid shout.'