Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/245

216 the grim year 1066, the weightiest year that England has seen for the last twelve centuries, has left its mark deeply graven both on our history and on our speech. Every time almost that we open our lips or write a sentence, we bear witness to the mighty change wrought in Eng&shy;land by the Norman Conqueror. Celt, Saxon, Angle, and Dane alike had to bow their heads beneath a grind&shy;ing foreign yoke. It is in English poetry that we can trace the earliest change. Poetry always clings fast to old words, long after they have been dropped by prose; and this was the case in England before the Conquest. If we take a piece of Old English prose, say the tales translated by Alfred, or Ælfric's Homilies, or a chapter of the Bible, we shall find that we keep to this day three out of four of all the nouns, adverbs, and verbs em&shy;ployed by the old writer; but of the nouns, adverbs, and verbs used in any English poem, from the Beowulf to the song on Edward the Confessor's death, about half have dropped for ever. From Harold's death to John's grant of the Charter, English prose did not let many old words slip. But it was far otherwise with Eng&shy;land's old poetic diction, which must have been arti&shy;ficially kept up. Of all the weighty words used in the Song on the Confessor's death, as nearly as possible half have dropped out of our speech. In the poems written a hundred years after the Conquest, say the rimes on