Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/315

Rh SOCIAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL CHANGES.] Ij N G L A IN I) 299 iu accordance with the continental notion of a bishop, by which he was looked on as primarily bishop of a. city, while in English ideas he was rather the bishop, first of a tribe, and then of a district. But this very change, one made by the Norman bishops themselves, may well have helped to bring about that separation between the bishop and his church which dates from this time. The bishop who had become a feudal lord, even when he was not alto gether away from his diocese on the king s service, com monly fixed his dwelling-place in his rural castle rather than in his palace in the city. tie Nor- The social results of the Conquest were such as natu- ans rally followed on the general transfer of the greatest, ril f estates and highest offices of the country. The Conquest itself, the military occupation of &quot;William, was followed by a peaceful immigration of Normans and other strangers into England, especially into the merchant towns. London, above all, received a crowd of citizens of Norman birth. That these men, and the Norman settlers generally, turned into Englishmen in a wonderfully short time is one of the great features of our history. The causes are easy to see : with most men, if there be no special reason to the contrary, place of birth goes for more than descent by blood, and the stranger is gradually assimilated by the people among vhom he dwells. And in the case of Normans and English, we can hardly doubt that original kindred went for something The Norman was simply a Dane who had adopted the French tongue and some French fashions ; he was easily won back into the Teutonic fold. But the circumstances of William s conquest, his pretended legal claim to the crown and the whole system of legal fictions which grew round that claim, helped largely to bring all classes of his subjects together. Th;? Norman ssttled in England was driven to become in some sort an Englishman. He held his estates of the King of the English, according to English law. The fusion of the two races was so speedy that a writer little more than a hundred years after the Conquest, the author of the famous Diiloyus de Scaccario, could say that, among the fr.ie population, it was impossible to tell who was of Norman and who was of English birth. That is to say, tha gre.it nobles must still have been all but purely Norman ; the lowest classes must have been all but purely English. In the intermediate classes, among the townsmen and the smaller landowners, the two races were so intermixed, and they had so modified one another, that the distinction between them had been forgotten. Ve might 1 nges&quot; say that the effect of the Norman Conquest was to thrust ocfol every class, save one, of the older English society a step downwards. The churl, the simple freeman, had been gradually sinking fora long time before the Conquest. In the course of the century after the Conquest, he finally sank into the villain. On the other hand, if the churl gradually sank to the state of villainago, the slave gradually rose to it. The Norman Conquest, while thrusting down every other class, undoubtedly helped to raise the most wretched and helpless class of all. airy. But while the Normans who settled in England changed into Englishmen with remarkable speed, they of course, by the very fact of their fusion, did much to modify the character of Englishmen. A way was now opened for all that class of ideas which, for want of better names, may ba called feudal and chivalrous. Chivalry is rather French than Norman ; and its development comes rather under the Angevin than under the Norman kings. Still, so far as Normandy was influenced by France, so far as the Norman Conquest opened a way for French influence, and, we may add, French kings, in England, so far this whole clasa of ideas and feelings miy be set down as results of the Norman Conquest. But in England chivalry never was really dominant. Teutonic notions of right and common sense were never wholly driven out. For the man unassisted by birth to rise was harder in some ages than in others. There was no age iu England when it was wholly impossible. The greatest of the outward changes which were caused Effectson by the Norman Conquest was its effect on the language and language, literature of England. In the matter of language, as in other matters, the Conquest itself wrought no formal change. Whatever change happened was the gradual result of the state of things which the Conquest brought about, French Late us was never substituted for English by any formal act. Docu- of French, ments were written in English long after the Conquest; and, though the use of English gradually dies out in the twelfth century, it dies out, not in favour of French, but in favour of Latin. French documents are not found till the thirteenth century ; they are not common till the latter part of that ceiitury. As it was with institutions, so it was with language. The old language was neither proscribed nor forgotten, but a new language came in by the side of it. William himself tried to learn English; his son Henry, if no other in his family, understood English, and seems even to have written it. Henry II. understood it, but seemingly did not speak it. By the end of the twelfth century, English English seems to have been the most usual tongue among people of the com - all classes. It was the language of common speech and mon , of purely popular writings; French. was the more polite and fashionable language, the language of elegant literature; Latin was the language of learning. Every educated man in the latter part of the twelfth century must have been familiar with all three. A foreign language was thus brought into England along- Changes side of the native language, and it displaced the native in the language for certain purposes. Such a state of things could nglis not fail to have a great effect on the English language itself. That effect largely took the usual form of strengthening tendencies which were already at work. The two changes which took place were the loss of the eld Lossofin- inflexions and the infusion of foreign words into the flexions. vocabulary 7 Neither of these processes began with the Conquest ; the Conquest simply strengthened and quickened them. The other Low-Dutch and Scandinavian tongues, which were brought under no such influences as English was by the Conquest, have lost their inflexions quite as thoroughly as English has. Even the High -Dutch, which keeps a comparatively large stock of inflexions, has lost a large part of the forma which were once common to High and Low. We may be sure then that we should have lost our inflexions, or most of them, even if the Normans had not come. Indeed, in one form of English, the dialect of the North, the inflexions had largely given way already, chiefly, it would seem, through the influence of the Danes. But when English lost its place as a polite and literary speech, when, though spoken by all classes, it was written only for the lower classes, there was no longer any fixed literary standard; the grammatical forms therefore became confused and inaccurate. We see the change at once in those parts of the Chronicles which were written iu the twelfth century. On the other hand, the English tungue had taken in a few foreign words from the first coming of infusion the English into Britain. The Roman missionaries brought offoreign in another stock. The Normans brought in a third. But wortls - the third stock, like the second, consisted for a while mainly of words which were more or less technical, they were new names for new things. Through the twelfth century the two languages stood side by side, without either borrowing much from, the other. It was not till the thirteenth century that French words came iu to any great extent to express things for which the English tongue had names already. Thus the English tongue gradually put on its later cha-