Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/263

 re-instatement of English was a jubilee gift which Edward gave to his country in 1362, when Parliament ordered legal pleadings to be conducted in the popular speech, on the ground that French was "much unknown." The date of this statute may be taken as the first turning-point of the English language and literature, as it was within a little of being the turning-point of religion in England. The change itself, to be sure, had not been so sudden as its formal sanction was striking and authoritative. The mass of the people, it need not be said, had always spoken English—a varying and undigested English, without standard or model for three hundred years, in one part favouring a German type, in another French, and in some cases even tending to a sort of spurious latinisation, but still essentially the English of Alfred and Edward and Harold.

It is impossible without a vigorous effort of the imagination to realise the condition of our ancestors between the middle of the eleventh century and the middle of the fourteenth, divided as they were in heart and sympathy from the ruling race by this most effectual of all barriers, and thrown back upon themselves not only in matters connected with law and government, but also, as it must have been to a very large extent, in religion and social life. Everyone remembers the patriotic complaint, that "children in school, against the use and manner of all other nations, be compelled for to leave their own language and for to construe their lessons and their things in French; and so they have since Normans first came to England." There must have been the