Page:The study of the Anglo-Norman.djvu/15

 tended to supplant Norman barons by foreigners more amenable to royal authority; and the Provisions of Oxford, which marked the triumph of the barons, were drawn up in French.

Until the middle of the fourteenth century Anglo-Norman remained in every sense of the term a 'living' language, and the natural medium of expression of a considerable portion of the population, of the king's household, the nobility, the clergy, and even the merchants. Nay more, it was steadily gaining ground. A recent investigation has shown that before 1300 few letters were written in Anglo-Norman except by members of the aristocracy, but fifty years later all but the lowest classes of the community conducted their correspondence in that language. But bilingualism, the severance of intimate intercourse with Normandy (after 1204), and the gradual absorption of the Norman element in the population accelerated the decay of Anglo-Norman. For a long time, however, it maintained itself as the language of the aristocracy. In the fourteenth century it was used by William Twich in his Art de Venerye (a treatise on hawking), by Sir Thomas Gray in his Scalacronica (1355), and in many satires and political songs. The regulations of this University were drawn up in Latin and French, and students were forbidden to converse in any other language; and when Bishop Stapeldon