Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/270

Rh 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 out&shy;landish 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. In 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 prœter: ‘save lym and lyf.’ He