Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "English Language" to "Epsom Salts"
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Title: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "English Language" to "Epsom Salts"
Author: Various
Release date: February 17, 2011 [eBook #35306]
Language: English
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Credits: Produced by Marius Masi, Don Kretz and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 11TH EDITION, "ENGLISH LANGUAGE" TO "EPSOM SALTS" ***
Produced by Marius Masi, Don Kretz and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's notes:
(1) Numbers following letters (without space) like C2 were originally
printed in subscript. Letter subscripts are preceded by an
underscore, like C_n.
(2) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.
(3) Side-notes were relocated to function as titles of their respective
paragraphs.
(4) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not
inserted.
(5) Small and capital EZH letters are subtituted with [gh] and [Gh]
respectively. Thorn is subtituted with th or Th, and eth is
subtituted with dh.
(6) [root] stands for the root symbol; [alpha], [beta], etc. for greek
letters.
(7) The following typographical errors have been corrected:
ARTICLE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: "The writers of each district wrote in
the dialect familiar to them; and between extreme forms the
difference was so great as to amount to unintelligibility ..."
'familiar' amended from 'familar'.
ARTICLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: "Even more portentous in its superhuman
dignity was the style of Edward Gibbon, who combined with the
unspiritual optimism of Hume and Robertson a far more concentrated
devotion to his subject ..." 'combined' amended from 'conbined'.
ARTICLE ENTERITIS: "The chief symptom is diarrhoea. The term
"enteric fever" has recently come into use instead of "typhoid" for
the latter disease; but see Typhoid Fever." 'symptom' amended from
'sympton'.
ARTICLE ENTRE MINHO E DOURO: "The methods and implements of the
farmers are, however, most primitive, and at the beginning of the
20th century it was not unusual to see a mule, or even a woman,
harnessed with the team of oxen to an old-fashioned wooden plough."
'it' amended from 'is'.
ARTICLE ENTRE RIOS: "... a province of the eastern Argentine
Republic, forming the southern part of a region sometimes described
as the Argentine Mesopotamia ..." 'southern' amended from
'sourthern'.
ARTICLE EPHRAIM: "... and Ephraim's proud and ambitious character
is indicated in its demands as narrated in Josh. xvii. 14; Judg.
viii. 1-3, xii. 1-6. throughout, Ephraim played a distinctive and
prominent part; it probably excelled Manasseh in numerical strength
..." 'throughout' amended from 'thoughout'.
ARTICLE EPIC POETRY: "... and Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544),
ridiculed the whole school in an Orlandino of 1526." 'Folengo'
amended from 'Folango'.
ARTICLE EPIDAURUS: "It was abandoned during the middle ages; its
inhabitants took possession of the promontory of Minoa ..."
'possession' amended from 'posession'.
ARTICLE EPILOGUE: "... and then explained to the audience what an
extremely interesting play it had been. In the second case, when
the author was less confident ..." 'extremely' amended from
'exremely'.
ARTICLE EPITHELIAL, ENDOTHELIAL: "It will be sufficient here to
give the more general characters possessed by these cells."
'sufficient' amended from 'sufficent'.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE
AND GENERAL INFORMATION
ELEVENTH EDITION
VOLUME IX, SLICE VI
English Language to Epsom Salts
ARTICLES IN THIS SLICE:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EPHEBI
ENGLISH LAW EPHEMERIS
ENGLISH LITERATURE EPHESIANS, EPISTLE TO THE
ENGLISHRY EPHESUS
ENGRAVING EPHESUS, COUNCIL OF
ENGROSSING EPHOD
ENGYON EPHOR
ENID EPHORUS
ENIGMA EPHRAEM SYRUS
ENKHUIZEN EPHRAIM
ENNEKING, JOHN JOSEPH EPHTHALITES
ENNIS EPI
ENNISCORTHY EPICENE
ENNISKILLEN, WILLIAM COLE EPICHARMUS
ENNISKILLEN EPIC POETRY
ENNIUS, QUINTUS EPICTETUS
ENNODIUS, MAGNUS FELIX EPICURUS
ENNS EPICYCLE
ENOCH EPICYCLOID
ENOCH, BOOK OF EPIDAURUS
ENOMOTO, BUYO EPIDIORITE
ENOS EPIDOSITE
ENRIQUEZ GOMEZ, ANTONIO EPIDOTE
ENSCHEDE EPIGONI
ENSENADA, CENON DE SOMODEVILLA EPIGONION
ENSIGN EPIGRAM
ENSILAGE EPIGRAPHY
ENSTATITE EPILEPSY
ENTABLATURE EPILOGUE
ENTADA EPIMENIDES
ENTAIL EPINAL
ENTASIS EPINAOS
ENTERITIS EPINAY, LOUISE D'ESCLAVELLES D'
ENTHUSIASM EPIPHANIUS, SAINT
ENTHYMEME EPIPHANY, FEAST OF
ENTOMOLOGY EPIRUS
ENTOMOSTRACA EPISCOPACY
ENTRAGUES, CATHERINE DE BALZAC D' EPISCOPIUS, SIMON
ENTRECASTEAUX, BRUNI D' EPISODE
ENTRE MINHO E DOURO EPISTAXIS
ENTREPOT EPISTEMOLOGY
ENTRE RIOS EPISTLE
ENVOY EPISTYLE
ENZIO EPISTYLIS
ENZYME EPITAPH
EOCENE EPITHALAMIUM
EON DE BEAUMONT EPITHELIAL and GLANDULAR TISSUES
EOTVOS, JOZSEF EPITOME
EPAMINONDAS EPOCH
EPARCH EPODE
EPAULETTE EPONA
EPEE, CHARLES-MICHEL EPONYMOUS
EPEE-DE-COMBAT EPPING
EPERJES EPPS
EPERNAY EPREMESNIL, JEAN JACQUES DUVAL D'
EPERNON EPSOM
EPHEBEUM EPSOM SALTS
ENGLISH LANGUAGE. In its historical sense, the name _English_ is now
conveniently used to comprehend the language of the English people from
their settlement in Britain to the present day, the various stages
through which it has passed being distinguished as Old, Middle, and New
or Modern English. In works yet recent, and even in some still current,
the term is confined to the third, or at most extended to the second and
third of these stages, since the language assumed in the main the
vocabulary and grammatical forms which it now presents, the oldest or
inflected stage being treated as a separate language, under the title of
_Anglo-Saxon_, while the transition period which connects the two has
been called _Semi-Saxon_. This view had the justification that, looked
upon by themselves, either as vehicles of thought or as objects of study
and analysis, Old English or Anglo-Saxon and Modern English are, for all
practical ends, distinct languages,--as much so, for example, as Latin
and Spanish. No amount of familiarity with Modern English, including its
local dialects, would enable the student to read Anglo-Saxon,
three-fourths of the vocabulary of which have perished and been
reconstructed within 900 years;[1] nor would a knowledge even of these
lost words give him the power, since the grammatical system, alike in
accidence and syntax, would be entirely strange to him. Indeed, it is
probable that a modern Englishman would acquire the power of reading and
writing French in less time than it would cost him to attain to the same
proficiency in Old English; so that if the test of distinct languages be
their degree of practical difference from each other, it cannot be
denied that "Anglo-Saxon" is a distinct language from Modern English.
But when we view the subject historically, recognizing the fact that
living speech is subject to continuous change in certain definite
directions, determined by the constitution and circumstances of mankind,
as an evolution or development of which we can trace the steps, and
that, owing to the abundance of written materials, this evolution
appears so gradual in English that we can nowhere draw distinct lines
separating its successive stages, we recognize these stages as merely
temporary phases of an individual whole, and speak of the English
language as used alike by Cynewulf, by Chaucer, by Shakespeare and by
Tennyson.[2] It must not be forgotten, however, that in this wide sense
the English language includes, not only the literary or courtly forms of
speech used at successive periods, but also the popular and, it may be,
altogether unwritten dialects that exist by their side. Only on this
basis, indeed, can we speak of Old, Middle and Modern English as the
same _language_, since in actual fact the precise _dialect_ which is now
the cultivated language, or "Standard English," is not the descendant of
that dialect which was the cultivated language or "Englisc" of Alfred,
but of a sister dialect then sunk in comparative obscurity,--even as the
direct descendant of Alfred's Englisc is now to be found in the
non-literary rustic speech of Wiltshire and Somersetshire. Causes which,
linguistically considered, are external and accidental, have shifted
the political and intellectual centre of England, and along with it
transferred literary and official patronage from one form of English to
another; if the centre of influence had happened to be fixed at York or
on the banks of the Forth, both would probably have been neglected for a
third.
The English language, thus defined, is not "native" to Britain, that is,
it was not found there at the dawn of history, but was introduced by
foreign immigrants at a date many centuries later. At the Roman Conquest
of the island the languages spoken by the natives belonged all (so far
as is known) to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic
family, modern forms of which still survive in Wales, Ireland, the
Scottish Highlands, Isle of Man and Brittany, while one has at no
distant date become extinct in Cornwall (see CELT: Language). Brythonic
dialects, allied to Welsh and Cornish, were apparently spoken over the
greater part of Britain, as far north as the firths of Forth and Clyde;
beyond these estuaries and in the isles to the west, including Ireland
and Man, Goidelic dialects, akin to Irish and Scottish Gaelic,
prevailed. The long occupation of south Britain by the Romans (A.D.
43-409)--a period, it must not be forgotten, equal to that from the
Reformation to the present day, or nearly as long as the whole duration
of modern English--familiarized the provincial inhabitants with Latin,
which was probably the ordinary speech of the towns. Gildas, writing
nearly a century and a half after the renunciation of Honorius in 410,
addressed the British princes in that language;[3] and the linguistic
history of Britain might have been not different from that of Gaul,
Spain and the other provinces of the Western Empire, in which a local
type of Latin, giving birth to a neo-Latinic language, finally
superseded the native tongue except in remote and mountainous
districts,[4] had not the course of events been entirely changed by the
Teutonic conquests of the 5th and 6th centuries.
The Angles, Saxons, and their allies came of the Teutonic stock, and
spoke a tongue belonging to the Teutonic or Germanic branch of the
Indo-Germanic (Indo-European) family, the same race and form of speech
being represented in modern times by the people and languages of
Holland, Germany, Denmark, the Scandinavian peninsula and Iceland, as
well as by those of England and her colonies. Of the original home of
the so-called primitive Aryan race (q.v.), whose language was the parent
Indo-European, nothing is certainly known, though the subject has called
forth many conjectures; the present tendency is to seek it in Europe
itself. The tribe can hardly have occupied an extensive area at first,
but its language came by degrees to be diffused over the greater part of
Europe and some portion of Asia. Among those whose Aryan descent is
generally recognized as beyond dispute are the Teutons, to whom the
Angles and Saxons belonged.
The Teutonic or Germanic people, after dwelling together in a body,
appear to have scattered in various directions, their language gradually
breaking up into three main groups, which can be already clearly
distinguished in the 4th century A.D., North Germanic or Scandinavian,
West Germanic or Low and High German, and East Germanic, of which the
only important representative is Gothic. Gothic, often called
Moeso-Gothic, was the language of a people of the Teutonic stock, who,
passing down the Danube, invaded the borders of the Empire, and obtained
settlements in the province of Moesia, where their language was
committed to writing in the 4th century; its literary remains are of
peculiar value as the oldest specimens, by several centuries, of
Germanic speech. The dialects of the invaders of Britain belonged to the
West Germanic branch, and within this to the Low German group,
represented at the present day by Dutch, Frisian, and the various
"Platt-Deutsch" dialects of North Germany. At the dawn of history the
forefathers of the English appear to have been dwelling between and
about the estuaries and lower courses of the Rhine and the Weser, and
the adjacent coasts and isles; at the present day the most English or
Angli-form dialects of the European continent are held to be those of
the North Frisian islands of Amrum and Sylt, on the west coast of
Schleswig. It is well known that the greater part of the ancient
Friesland has been swept away by the encroachments of the North Sea, and
the _disjecta membra_ of the Frisian race, pressed by the sea in front
and more powerful nationalities behind, are found only in isolated
fragments from the Zuider Zee to the coasts of Denmark. Many Frisians
accompanied the Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Old English was in
many respects more closely connected with Old Frisian than with any
other Low German dialect. Of the Geatas, Eotas or "Jutes," who,
according to Bede, occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, and formed a
third tribe along with the Angles and Saxons, it is difficult to speak
linguistically. The speech of Kent certainly formed a distinct dialect
in both the Old English and the Middle English periods, but it has
tended to be assimilated more and more to neighbouring southern
dialects, and is at the present day identical with that of Sussex, one
of the old Saxon kingdoms. Whether the speech of the Isle of Wight ever
showed the same characteristic differences as that of Kent cannot now be
ascertained, but its modern dialect differs in no respect from that of
Hampshire, and shows no special connexion with that of Kent. It is at
least entirely doubtful whether Bede's Geatas came from Jutland; on
linguistic grounds we should expect that they occupied a district lying
not to the north of the Angles, but between these and the old Saxons.
The earliest specimens of the language of the Germanic invaders of
Britain that exist point to three well-marked dialect groups: the
Anglian (in which a further distinction may be made between the
Northumbrian and the Mercian, or South-Humbrian); the Saxon, generally
called West-Saxon from the almost total lack of sources outside the
West-Saxon domain; and the Kentish. The Kentish and West-Saxon are
sometimes, especially in later times, grouped together as southern
dialects as opposed to midland and northern. These three groups were
distinguished from each other by characteristic points of phonology and
inflection. Speaking generally, the Anglian dialects may be
distinguished by the absence of certain normal West-Saxon vowel-changes,
and the presence of others not found in West-Saxon, and also by a strong
tendency to confuse and simplify inflections, in all which points,
moreover, Northumbrian tended to deviate more widely than Mercian.
Kentish, on the other hand, occupied a position intermediate between
Anglian and West-Saxon, early Kentish approaching more nearly to
Mercian, owing perhaps to early historical connexion between the two,
and late Kentish tending to conform to West-Saxon characteristics, while
retaining several points in common with Anglian. Though we cannot be
certain that these dialectal divergences date from a period previous to
the occupation of Britain, such evidence as can be deduced points to the
existence of differences already on the continent, the three dialects
corresponding in all likelihood to Bede's three tribes, the Angles,
Saxons and Geatas.
As it was amongst the _Engle_ or Angles of Northumbria that literary
culture first appeared, and as an Angle or _Englisc_ dialect was the
first to be used for vernacular literature, _Englisc_ came eventually to
be a general name for all forms of the vernacular as opposed to Latin,
&c.; and even when the West-Saxon of Alfred became in its turn the
literary or classical form of speech, it was still called Englisc or
_English_. The origin of the name _Angul-Seaxan_ (Anglo-Saxons) has been
disputed, some maintaining that it means a union of Angles and Saxons,
others (with better foundation) that it meant _English Saxons_, or
Saxons of England or of the Angel-cynn as distinguished from Saxons of
the Continent (see _New English Dictionary_, s.v.). Its modern use is
mainly due to the little band of scholars who in the 16th and 17th
centuries turned their attention to the long-forgotten language of
Alfred and Aelfric, which, as it differed so greatly from the English of
their own day, they found it convenient to distinguish by a name which
was applied to themselves by those who spoke it.[5] To these scholars
"Anglo-Saxon" and "English" were separated by a gulf which it was
reserved for later scholarship to bridge across, and show the historical
continuity of the English of all ages.
As already hinted, the English language, in the wide sense, presents
three main stages of development--Old, Middle and Modern--distinguished
by their inflectional characteristics. The latter can be best summarized
in the words of Dr Henry Sweet in his _History of English Sounds_:[6]
"Old English is the period of _full_ inflections (_nama_, _gifan_,
_caru_), Middle English of _levelled_ inflections (_naame_, _given_,
_caare_), and Modern English of _lost_ inflections (_name_, _give_,
_care_ = _nam_, _giv_, _car_). We have besides two periods of
transition, one in which _nama_ and _name_ exist side by side, and
another in which final e [with other endings] is beginning to drop." By
_lost_ inflections it is meant that only very few remain, and those
mostly non-syllabic, as the _-s_ in stones and loves, the _-ed_ in
loved, the _-r_ in their, as contrasted with the Old English stan_-as_,
lufadh, luf_-od-e_ and luf_-od-on_, tha_-ra_. Each of these periods may
also be divided into two or three; but from the want of materials it is
difficult to make any such division for all dialects alike in the first.
As to the chronology of the successive stages, it is of course
impossible to lay down any exclusive series of dates, since the
linguistic changes were inevitably gradual, and also made themselves
felt in some parts of the country much earlier than in others, the north
being always in advance of the midland, and the south much later in its
changes. It is easy to point to periods at which Old, Middle and Modern
English were fully developed, but much less easy to draw lines
separating these stages; and even if we recognize between each part a
"transition" period or stage, the determination of the beginning and end
of this will to a certain extent be a matter of opinion. But bearing
these considerations in mind, and having special reference to the
midland dialect from which literary English is mainly descended, the
following may be given as approximate dates, which if they do not
demarcate the successive stages, at least include them:--
Old English or Anglo-Saxon to 1100
Transition Old English ("Semi-Saxon") 1100 to 1150
Early Middle English 1150 to 1250
(Normal) Middle English 1250 to 1400
Late and Transition Middle English 1400 to 1485
Early Modern or Tudor English 1485 to 1611
Seventeenth century transition 1611 to 1688
Modern or current English 1689 onward
Dr Sweet has reckoned Transition Old English (Old Transition) from 1050
to 1150, Middle English thence to 1450, and Late or Transition Middle
English (Middle Transition) 1450 to 1500. As to the Old Transition see
further below.
The OLD ENGLISH or Anglo-Saxon tongue, as introduced into Britain, was
highly inflectional, though its inflections at the date when it becomes
known to us were not so full as those of the earlier Gothic, and
considerably less so than those of Greek and Latin during their
classical periods. They corresponded more closely to those of modern
literary German, though both in nouns and verbs the forms were more
numerous and distinct; for example, the German _guten_ answers to
_three_ Old English forms,--_godne_, _godum_, _godan_; _guter_ to
_two_--_godre_, _godra_; _liebten_ to _two_,--_lufodon_ and _lufeden_.
Nouns had four cases. _Nominative_, _Accusative_ (only sometimes
distinct), _Genitive_, _Dative_, the latter used also with prepositions
to express locative, instrumental, and most ablative relations; of a
distinct _instrumental_ case only vestiges occur. There were several
declensions of nouns, the main division being that known in Germanic
languages generally as strong and weak,--a distinction also extending to
adjectives in such wise that every adjective assumed either the strong
or the weak inflection as determined by associated grammatical forms.
The first and second personal pronouns possessed a dual number = _we
two_, _ye two_; the third person had a complete declension of the stem
he, instead of being made up as now of the three stems seen in _he_,
_she_, _they_. The verb distinguished the subjunctive from the
indicative mood, but had only two inflected tenses, present and past
(more accurately, that of incomplete and that of completed or "perfect"
action)--the former also used for the future, the latter for all the
shades of past time. The order of the sentence corresponded generally to
that of German. Thus from King Alfred's additions to his translation of
Orosius: "Donne thy ylcan daege hi hine to thaem ade beran wylladh
thonne todaeladh hi his feoh thaet thaer to lafe bidh aefter thaem
gedrynce and thaem plegan, on fif odhdhe syx, hwilum on ma, swa swa
thaes feos andefn bidh" ("Then on the same day [that] they him to the
pile bear will, then divide they his property that there to remainder
shall be after the drinking and the sports, into five or six, at times
into more, according as the property's value is").
The poetry was distinguished by alliteration, and the abundant use of
figurative and metaphorical expressions, of bold compounds and archaic
words never found in prose. Thus in the following lines from Beowulf
(ed. Thorpe, l. 645, Zupitza 320):--
Straet waes stan-fah, stig wisode
Gumum aetgaedere. gudh-byrne scan
Heard hond-locen. hring-iren scir
Song in searwum, tha hie to sele furdhum
In hyra gry're geatwum gangan cwomon.
Trans.:--
The street was stone-variegated, the path guided
(The) men together; the war-mailcoat shone,
Hard hand-locked. Ring-iron sheer (bright ring-mail)
Sang in (their) cunning-trappings, as they to hall forth
In their horror-accoutrements going came.
The Old English was a homogeneous language, having very few foreign
elements in it, and forming its compounds and derivatives entirely from
its own resources. A few Latin appellatives learned from the Romans in
the German wars had been adopted into the common West Germanic tongue,
and are found in English as in the allied dialects. Such were _straete_
(street, _via strata_), _camp_ (battle), _casere_ (Caesar), _mil_ (mile),
_pin_ (punishment), _mynet_ (money), _pund_ (pound), _win_ (wine);
probably also _cyrice_ (church), _biscop_ (bishop), _laeden_ (Latin
language), _cese_ (cheese), _butor_ (butter), _pipor_ (pepper), _olfend_
(camel, elephantus), _ynce_ (inch, uncia), and a few others. The
relations of the first invaders to the Britons were to a great extent
those of destroyers; and with the exception of the proper names of
places and prominent natural features, which as is usual were retained
by the new population, few British words found their way into the Old
English. Among these are named _broc_ (a badger), _brec_ (breeches),
_clut_ (clout), _pul_ (pool), and a few words relating to the employment
of field or household menials. Still fewer words seem to have been
adopted from the provincial Latin, almost the only certain ones being
castra, applied to the Roman towns, which appeared in English as
_caestre_, _ceaster_, now found in composition as -_caster_, -_chester_,
-_cester_, and _culina_ (kitchen), which gave _cylen_ (kiln). The
introduction and gradual adoption of Christianity, brought a new series
of Latin words connected with the offices of the church, the
accompaniments of higher civilization, the foreign productions either
actually made known, or mentioned in the Scriptures and devotional
books. Such were _mynster_ (monasterium), _munuc_ (monk), _nunne_ (nun),
_maesse_ (mass), _schol_ (school), _oelmesse_ (eleemosyna), _candel_
(candela), _turtle_ (turtur), _fic_ (ficus), _cedar_ (cedrus). These
words, whose number increased from the 7th to the 10th century, are
commonly called _Latin of the second period_, the Latin of the first
period including the Latin words brought by the English from the
continent, as well as those picked up in Britain either from the Roman
provincials or the Welsh. The Danish invasions of the 8th and 10th
centuries resulted in the establishment of extensive Danish and
Norwegian populations, about the basin of the Humber and its
tributaries, and above Morecambe Bay. Although these Scandinavian
settlers must have greatly affected the language of their own
localities, but few traces of their influence are to be found in the
literature of the Old English period. As with the greater part of the
words adopted from the Celtic, it was not until after the dominion of
the Norman had overlaid all preceding conquests, and the new English
began to emerge from the ruins of the old, that Danish words in any
number made their appearance in books, as equally "native" with the
Anglo-Saxon.
The earliest specimens we have of English date to the end of the 7th
century, and belong to the Anglian dialect, and particularly to
Northumbrian, which, under the political eminence of the early
Northumbrian kings from Edwin to Ecgfridh, aided perhaps by the learning
of the scholars of Ireland and Iona, first attained to literary
distinction. Of this literature in its original form mere fragments
exist, one of the most interesting of which consists of the verses
uttered by Bede on his deathbed, and preserved in a nearly contemporary
MS.:--
Fore there neid faerae . naenig uuiurthit
thonc snotturra . than him tharf sie,
to ymb-hycggannae . aer his hin-iongae,
huaet his gastae . godaes aeththa yflaes,
aefter deoth-daege . doemid uueorthae.
Trans.:--
Before the inevitable journey becomes not any
Thought more wise than (that) it is needful for him,
To consider, ere his hence-going,
What, to his ghost, of good or ill,
After death-day, doomed may be.
But our chief acquaintance with Old English is in its West-Saxon form,
the earliest literary remains of which date to the 9th century, when
under the political supremacy of Wessex and the scholarship of King
Alfred it became the literary language of the English nation, the
classical "Anglo-Saxon." If our materials were more extensive, it would
probably be necessary to divide the Old English into several periods; as
it is, considerable differences have been shown to exist between the
"early West-Saxon" of King Alfred and the later language of the 11th
century, the earlier language having numerous phonetic and inflectional
distinctions which are "levelled" in the later, the inflectional changes
showing that the tendency to pass from the synthetical to the analytical
stage existed quite independently of the Norman Conquest. The northern
dialect, whose literary career had been cut short in the 8th century by
the Danish invasions, reappears in the 10th in the form of glosses to
the Latin gospels and a service-book, often called the _Ritual of
Durham_, where we find that, owing to the confusion which had so long
reigned in the north, and to special Northumbrian tendencies, e.g. the
dropping of the inflectional n in both verbs and nouns, this dialect had
advanced in the process of inflection-levelling far beyond the sister
dialects of Mercian and the south, so as already to anticipate the forms
of Early Middle English.
Among the literary remains of the Old English may be mentioned the epic
poem of Beowulf, the original nucleus of which has been supposed to date
to heathen and even continental times, though we now possess it only in
a later form; the poetical works of Cynewulf; those formerly ascribed to
Caedmon; several works of Alfred, two of which, his translation of
Orosius and of _The Pastoral Care_ of St Gregory, are contemporary
specimens of his language; the Old English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the
theological works of Aelfric (including translations of the Pentateuch
and the gospels) and of Wulfstan; and many works both in prose and
verse, of which the authors are unknown.
The earliest specimens, the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle
crosses, are in a Runic character; but the letters used in the
manuscripts generally are a British variety of the Roman alphabet which
the Anglo-Saxons found in the island, and which was also used by the
Welsh and Irish.[7] Several of the Roman letters had in Britain
developed forms, and retained or acquired values, unlike those used on
the continent, in particular [glyphs] (d f g r s t). The letters _q_
and _z_ were not used, _q_ being represented by _cw_, and _k_ was a rare
alternative to _c_; _u_ or _v_ was only a vowel, the consonantal power
of _v_ being represented as in Welsh by _f_. The Runes called _thorn_
and _wen_, having the consonantal values now expressed by _th_ and _w_,
for which the Roman alphabet had no character, were at first expressed
by _th_, dh (a contraction for [g][g] or [g]h), and _v_ or _u_; but at a
later period the characters th and [p] were revived from the old Runic
alphabet. Contrary to Continental usage, the letters _c_ and [g] (_g_)
had originally only their hard or guttural powers, as in the
neighbouring Celtic languages; so that words which, when the Continental
Roman alphabet came to be used for Germanic languages, had to be written
with _k_, were in Old English written with _c_, as _cene_ = keen,
_cynd_ = kind.[8] The key to the values of the letters, and thus to the
pronunciation of Old English, is also to be found in the Celtic tongues
whence the letters were taken.
The Old English period is usually considered as terminating 1120, with
the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest. The Conquest
established in England a foreign court, a foreign aristocracy and a
foreign hierarchy.[9] The French language, in its Norman dialect, became
the only polite medium of intercourse. The native tongue, despised not
only as unknown but as the language of a subject race, was left to the
use of boors and serfs, and except in a few stray cases ceased to be
written at all. The natural results followed.[10] When the educated
generation that saw the arrival of the Norman died out, the language,
ceasing to be read and written, lost all its literary words. The words
of ordinary life whose preservation is independent of books lived on as
vigorously as ever, but the literary terms, those that related to
science, art and higher culture, the bold artistic compounds, the
figurative terms of poetry, were speedily forgotten. The practical
vocabulary shrank to a fraction of its former extent. And when,
generations later, English began to be used for general literature, the
only terms at hand to express ideas above those of every-day life were
to be found in the French of the privileged classes, of whom alone art,
science, law and theology had been for generations the inheritance.
Hence each successive literary effort of the reviving English tongue
showed a larger adoption of French words to supply the place of the
forgotten native ones, till by the days of Chaucer they constituted a
notable part of the vocabulary. Nor was it for the time being only that
the French words affected the English vocabulary. The Norman French
words introduced by the Conquest, as well as the Central or Parisian
French words which followed under the early Plantagenets, were mainly
Latin words which had lived on among the people of Gaul, and, modified
in the mouths of succeeding generations, had reached forms more or less
remote from their originals. In being now adopted as English, they
supplied precedents in accordance with which other Latin words might be
converted into English ones, whenever required; and long before the
Renascence of classical learning, though in much greater numbers after
that epoch, these precedents were freely followed.
While the eventual though distant result of the Norman Conquest was thus
a large reconstruction of the English vocabulary, the grammar of the
language was not directly affected by it. There was no reason why it
should--we might almost add, no way by which it could. While the English
used their own _words_, they could not forget their own _way_ of using
them, the inflections and constructions by which alone the words
expressed ideas--in other words, their grammar; when one by one French
words were introduced into the sentence they became English by the very
act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the duties and
liabilities of English words in the same position. This is of course
precisely what happens at the present day: _telegraph_ and _telegram_
make participle _telegraphing_ and plural _telegrams_, and _naive_ the
adverb _naively_, precisely as if they had been in the language for
ages.
But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In languages in
the inflected or synthetic stage the terminations must be pronounced
with marked distinctness, as these contain the correlation of ideas; it
is all-important to hear whether a word is _bonus_ or _bonis_ or _bonas_
or _bonos_. This implies a measured and distinct pronunciation, against
which the effort for ease and rapidity of utterance is continually
struggling, while indolence and carelessness continually compromise it.
In the Germanic languages, as a whole, the main stress-accent falls on
the radical syllable, or on the prefix of a nominal compound, and thus
at or near the beginning of the word; and the result of this in English
has been a growing tendency to suffer the concluding syllables to fall
into obscurity. We are familiar with the cockney _winder_, _sofer_,
_holler_, _Sarer_, _Sunder_, _would yer_, for wind_ow_, sof_a_, holl_a_,
Sar_ah_, Sund_ay_, would y_ou_, the various final vowels sinking into an
obscure neutral one now conventionally spelt _er_, but formerly
represented by final _e_. Already before the Conquest, forms originally
_hatu_, _sello_, _tunga_, appeared as _hate_, _selle_, _tunge_, with the
terminations levelled to obscure e; but during the illiterate period of
the language after the Conquest this careless obscuring of terminal
vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final syllable
(except _i_) sinking into e. During the 12th century, while this change
was going on, we see a great confusion of grammatical forms, the full
inflections of Old English standing side by side in the same sentence
with the levelled ones of Middle English. It is to this state of the
language that the names _Transition_ and _Period of Confusion_ (Dr
Abbott's appellation) point; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon
broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the suggestive if
not logical appellation of Semi-Saxon.
Although the written remains of the transition stage are few, sufficient
exist to enable us to trace the course of linguistic change in some of
the dialects. Within three generations after the Conquest, faithful pens
were at work transliterating the old homilies of Aelfric, and other
lights of the Anglo-Saxon Church, into the current idiom of their
posterity.[11] Twice during the period, in the reigns of Stephen and
Henry II., Aelfric's gospels were similarly modernized so as to be
"understanded of the people."[12] Homilies and other religious works of
the end of the 12th century[13] show us the change still further
advanced, and the language passing into Early Middle English in its
southern form. While these southern remains carry on in unbroken
sequence the history of the Old English of Alfred and Aelfric, the
history of the northern English is an entire blank from the 11th to the
13th century. The stubborn resistance of the north, and the terrible
retaliation inflicted by William, apparently effaced northern English
culture for centuries. If anything was written in the vernacular in the
kingdom of Scotland during the same period, it probably perished during
the calamities to which that country was subjected during the
half-century of struggle for independence. In reality, however, the
northern English had entered upon its transition stage two centuries
earlier; the glosses of the 10th century show that the Danish inroads
had there anticipated the results hastened by the Norman Conquest in the
south.
Meanwhile a dialect was making its appearance in another quarter of
England, destined to overshadow the old literary dialects of north and
south alike, and become the English of the future. The Mercian kingdom,
which, as its name imports, lay along the _marches_ of the earlier
states, and was really a congeries of the outlying members of many
tribes, must have presented from the beginning a linguistic mixture and
transition; and it is evident that more than one intermediate form of
speech arose within its confines, between Lancashire and the Thames. The
specimens of early Mercian now in existence consist mainly of glosses,
in a mixed Mercian and southern dialect, dating from the 8th century;
but, in a 9th-century gloss, the so-called Vespasian Psalter,
representing what is generally held to be pure Mercian. Towards the
close of the Old English period we find some portions of a gloss to the
Rushworth Gospels, namely St Matthew and a few verses of St John xviii.,
to be in Mercian. These glosses, with a few charters and one or two
small fragments, represent a form of Anglian which in many respects
stands midway between Northumbrian and Kentish, approaching the one or
the other more nearly as we have to do with North Mercian or South
Mercian. And soon after the Conquest we find an undoubted midland
dialect in the transition stage from Old to Middle English, in the
eastern part of ancient Mercia, in a district bounded on the south and
south-east by the Saxon Middlesex and Essex, and on the east and north
by the East Anglian Norfolk and Suffolk and the Danish settlements on
the Trent and Humber. In this district, and in the monastery of
Peterborough, one of the copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
transcribed about 1120, was continued by two succeeding hands to the
death of Stephen in 1154. The section from 1122 to 1131, probably
written in the latter year, shows a notable confusion between Old
English forms and those of a Middle English, impatient to rid itself of
the inflectional trammels which were still, though in weakened forms, so
faithfully retained south of the Thames. And in the concluding section,
containing the annals from 1132 to 1154, and written somewhere about the
latter year, we find Middle English fairly started on its career. A
specimen of this new tongue will best show the change that had taken
place:
1140 A.D.--_And_[14] te eorl of Angaeu waerd ded, and his sune Henri
toc to the rice. And te cuen of France to-daelde fra the king, and
scae co_m_ to the iunge eorl Henri. _and_ he toc hire to wiue, _and_
al Peitou mid hire. tha ferde he mid micel faerd into Engleland _and_
wan castles--_and_ te king ferde agenes hi_m_ mid micel mare ferd.
thothwaethere fuhtten hi noht. oc ferden the aerceb_iscop and_ te wise
men betwux heo_m_, and makede _that_ sahte _that_ te king sculde ben
lauerd _and_ king wile he liuede. _and_ aeft_er_ his daei ware Henri
king. _and_ he helde hi_m_ for fader, _and_ he hi_m_ for sune, _and_
sib and saehte sculde ben betwyx heo_m_, and on al Engleland.[15]
With this may be contrasted a specimen of southern English, from 10 to
20 years later (Hatton Gospels, Luke i. 46[16]):
Da cwaedh Maria: Min saule mersed drihten, and min gast geblissode on
gode minen haelende. For tham the he geseah his thinene eadmodnysse.
Sodhlice henen-fordh me eadige seggedh alle cneornesse; for tham the
me mychele thing dyde se the mihtyg ys; _and_ his name is halig. _And_
his mildheortnysse of cneornisse on cneornesse hine ondraedende. He
worhte maegne on hys earme; he to-daelde tha ofermode, on moda heora
heortan. He warp tha rice of setlle, and tha eadmode he up-an-hof.
Hyngriende he mid gode ge-felde, _and_ tha ofermode ydele for-let. He
afeng israel his cniht, and gemynde his mildheortnysse; Swa he spraec
to ure faederen, Abrahame _and_ his saede on a weorlde.
To a still later date, apparently close upon 1200, belongs the versified
chronicle of Layamon or Laweman, a priest of Ernely on the Severn, who,
using as his basis the French _Brut_ of Wace, expanded it by additions
from other sources to more than twice the extent: his work of 32,250
lines is a mine of illustration for the language of his time and
locality. The latter was intermediate between midland and southern, and
the language, though forty years later than the specimen from the
Chronicle, is much more archaic in structure, and can scarcely be
considered even as Early Middle English. The following is a specimen
(lines 9064-9079):
On Kinbelines daeie ... the king wes inne Bruttene, com a thissen
middel aerde ... anes maidenes sune, iboren wes in Bethleem ... of
bezste alre burden. He is ihaten Jesu Crist ... thurh thene halie
gost, alre worulde wunne ... walden englenne; faeder he is on heuenen
... froure moncunnes; sune he is on eordhen ... of sele thon maeidene,
& thene halie gost ... haldedh mid him seoluen.
The MIDDLE ENGLISH was pre-eminently the _Dialectal_ period of the
language. It was not till after the middle of the 14th century that
English obtained official recognition. For three centuries, therefore,
there was no standard form of speech which claimed any pre-eminence over
the others. The writers of each district wrote in the dialect familiar
to them; and between extreme forms the difference was so great as to
amount to unintelligibility; works written for southern Englishmen had
to be translated for the benefit of the men of the north:--
"In sotherin Inglis was it drawin,
And turnid ic haue it till ur awin
Langage of the northin lede
That can na nothir Inglis rede."
_Cursor Mundi_, 20,064.
Three main dialects were distinguished by contemporary writers, as in
the often-quoted passage from Trevisa's translation of Higden's
_Polychronicon_ completed in 1387:--
"Also Englysche men ... hadde fram the bygynnynge thre maner speche,
Southeron, Northeron _and_ Myddel speche (in the myddel of the lond)
as hy come of thre maner people of Germania.... Also of the forseyde
Saxon tonge, that ys deled a thre, and ys abyde scarslyche with feaw
uplondysche men _and_ ys gret wondur, for men of the est with men of
the west, as hyt were under the same part of heyvene, acordeth more in
sounynge of stheche than men of the north with men of the south;
therfore hyt ys that Mercii, that buth men of myddel Engelond, as hyt
were parteners of the endes, undurstondeth betre the syde longages
Northeron and Southeron, than Northern _and_ Southern undurstondeth
oyther other."
The modern study of these Middle English dialects, initiated by the
elder Richard Garnett, scientifically pursued by Dr Richard Morris, and
elaborated by many later scholars, both English and German, has shown
that they were readily distinguished by the conjugation of the present
tense of the verb, which in typical specimens was as follows:---
_Southern._
Ich singe. We singeth.
Thou singest. [Gh]e singeth.
He singeth. Hy singeth.
_Midland._
Ich, I, singe. We singen.
Thou singest. [Gh]e singen.
He singeth. Hy, thei, singen.
_Northern._
Ic. I, sing(e) (I that singes). We sing(e). We that synges.
Thu singes. [Gh]e sing(e), [Gh]e foules synges.
He singes. Thay sing(e). Men synges.
Of these the southern is simply the old West-Saxon, with the vowels
levelled to _e_. The northern second person in _-es_ preserves an older
form than the southern and West-Saxon _-est_; but the _-es_ of the third
person and plural is derived from an older _-eth_, the change of _-th_
into _-s_ being found in progress in the Durham glosses of the 10th
century. In the plural, when accompanied by the pronoun subject, the
verb had already dropped the inflections entirely as in Modern English.
The origin of the _-en_ plural in the midland dialect, unknown to Old
English, is probably an instance of _form-levelling_, the inflection of
the present indicative being assimilated to that of the past, and the
present and past subjunctive, in all of which _-en_ was the plural
termination. In the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, the
northern dialect had attained before the end of the 13th century to the
simplicity of Modern English, while the southern dialect still retained
a large number of inflections, and the midland a considerable number.
The dialects differed also in phonology, for while the northern
generally retained the hard or guttural values of _k_, _g_, _sc_, these
were in the two other dialects palatalized before front vowels into
_ch_, _j_ and _sh_. _Kirk_, _chirche_ or _church_, _bryg_, _bridge_;
_scryke_, _shriek_, are examples. Old English _hw_ was written in the
north _qu_(h), but elsewhere _wh_, often sinking into _w_. The original
long _a_ in _stan_, _mar_, preserved in the northern _stane_, _mare_,
became _o_ elsewhere, as in _stone_, _more_. So that the north presented
a general aspect of conservation of old sounds with the most
thorough-going dissolution of old inflections; the south, a tenacious
retention of the inflections, with an extensive evolution in the sounds.
In one important respect, however, phonetic decay was far ahead in the
north: the final e to which all the old vowels had been levelled during
the transition stage, and which is a distinguishing feature of Middle
English in the midland and southern dialects, became mute, _i.e._,
disappeared, in the northern dialect before that dialect emerged from
its three centuries of obscuration, shortly before 1300. So thoroughly
modern had its form consequently become that we might almost call it
Modern English, and say that the Middle English stage of the northern
dialect is lost. For comparison with the other dialects, however, the
same nomenclature may be used, and we may class as Middle English the
extensive literature which northern England produced during the 14th
century. The earliest specimen is probably the Metrical Psalter in the
Cotton Library,[17] copied during the reign of Edward II. from an
original of the previous century. The gigantic versified paraphrase of
Scripture history called the _Cursor Mundi_,[18] is held also to have
been composed before 1300. The dates of the numerous alliterative
romances in this dialect have not been determined with exactness, as all
survive in later copies, but it is probable that some of them were
written before 1300. In the 14th century appeared the theological and
devotional works of Richard Rolle the anchorite of Hampole, Dan Jon
Gaytrigg, William of Nassington, and other writers whose names are
unknown; and towards the close of the century, specimens of the language
also appear from Scotland both in official documents and in the poetical
works of John Barbour, whose language, barring minute points of
orthography, is identical with that of the contemporary northern English
writers. From 1400 onward, the distinction between northern English and
Lowland Scottish becomes clearly marked.
In the southern dialect one version of the work called the _Ancren
Riwle_ or "Rule of Nuns," adapted about 1225 for a small sisterhood at
Tarrant-Kaines, in Dorsetshire, exhibits a dialectal characteristic
which had probably long prevailed in the south, though concealed by the
spelling, in the use of _v_ for _f_, as _valle_ fall, _vordonne_ fordo,
_vorto_ for to, _veder_ father, _vrom_ from. Not till later do we find a
recognition of the parallel use of _z_ for _s_. Among the writings which
succeed, _The Owl and the Nightingale_ of Nicholas de Guildford, of
Portesham in Dorsetshire, before 1250, the _Chronicle_ of Robert of
Gloucester, 1298, and Trevisa's translation of Higden, 1387, are of
special importance in illustrating the history of southern English. The
earliest form of Langland's _Piers Ploughman_, 1362, as preserved in the
Vernon MS., appears to be in an intermediate dialect between southern
and midland.[19] The Kentish form of southern English seems to have
retained specially archaic features; five short sermons in it of the
middle of the 13th century were edited by Dr Morris (1866); but the
great work illustrating it is the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_ (Remorse of
Conscience), 1340,[20] a translation from the French by Dan Michel of
Northgate, Kent, who tells us--
"Thet this boc is y-write mid engliss of Kent;
This boc is y-mad uor lewede men,
Vor uader, and uor moder, and uor other ken,
Ham uor to ber[gh]e uram alle manyere zen,
Thet ine hare inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen."
In its use of _v_ (_u_) and _z_ for [s] and _s_, and its grammatical
inflections, it presents an extreme type of southern speech, with
peculiarities specially Kentish; and in comparison with contemporary
Midland English works, it looks like a fossil of two centuries earlier.
Turning from the dialectal extremes of the Middle English to the midland
speech, which we left at the closing leaves of the Peterborough
_Chronicle_ of 1154, we find a rapid development of this dialect, which
was before long to become the national literary language. In this, the
first great work is the _Ormulum_, or metrical Scripture paraphrase of
Orm or Ormin, written about 1200, somewhere near the northern frontier
of the midland area. The dialect has a decided smack of the north, and
shows for the first time in English literature a large percentage of
Scandinavian words, derived from the Danish settlers, who, in adopting
English, had preserved a vast number of their ancestral forms of speech,
which were in time to pass into the common language, of which they now
constitute some of the most familiar words. _Blunt_, _bull_, _die_,
_dwell_, _ill_, _kid_, _raise_, _same_, _thrive_, _wand_, _wing_, are
words from this source, which appear first in the work of Orm, of which
the following lines may be quoted:--
"The Judewisshe folkess boc
hemm se[gh][gh]de, thatt hemm birrde
Twa bukkes samenn to the preost
att kirrke-dure brinngenn;
_And_ te[gh][gh] tha didenn blitheli[gh],
swa summ the boc hemm tahhte,
And brohhtenn twe[gh][gh]enn bukkess thaer
Drihhtin thaerwithth to lakenn.
And att[21] te kirrke-dure toc
the preost ta twe[gh][gh]enn bukkess,
_And_ o thatt an he le[gh][gh]de thaer
all the[gh][gh]re sake _and_ sinne,
_And_ let itt eornenn for thwithth all
ut inntill wilde wesste;
_And_ toc _and_ snath thatt otherr bucc
Drihhtin thaerwithth to lakenn.
All thiss wass don forr here ned,
_and_ ec forr ure nede;
For hemm itt hallp biforenn Godd
to clennssenn hemm of sinne;
_And_ all swa ma[gh][gh] itt hellpenn the
[gh]iff thatt tu willt [itt] foll[gh]henn.
[Gh]iff thatt tu willt full innwarrdli[gh]
withth fulle trowwthe lefenn
All thatt tatt wass bitacnedd taer,
to lefenn _and_ to trowwenn."
_Ormulum_, ed. White, l. 1324.
The author of the _Ormulum_ was a phonetist, and employed a special
spelling of his own to represent not only the quality but the
_quantities_ of vowels and consonants--a circumstance which gives his
work a peculiar value to the investigator. He is generally assumed to
have been a native of Lincolnshire or Notts, but the point is a disputed
one, and there is somewhat to be said for the neighbourhood of Ormskirk
in Lancashire.
It is customary to differentiate between east and west midland, and to
subdivide these again into north and south. As was natural in a tract of
country which stretched from Lancaster to Essex, a very considerable
variety is found in the documents which agree in presenting the leading
midland features, those of Lancashire and Lincolnshire approaching the
northern dialect both in vocabulary, phonetic character and greater
neglect of inflections. But this diversity diminishes as we advance.
Thirty years after the _Ormulum_, the east midland rhymed _Story of
Genesis and Exodus_[22] shows us the dialect in a more southern form,
with the vowels of modern English, and from about the same date, with
rather more northern characteristics, we have an east midland
_Bestiary_.
Different tests and different dates have been proposed for subdividing
the Middle English period, but the most important is that of Henry
Nicol, based on the observation that in the early 13th century, as in
Ormin, the Old English short vowels in an open syllable still retained
their short quantity, as _nama_, _over_, _mete_; but by 1250 or 1260
they had been lengthened to _na-me_, _o-ver_, _me-te_, a change which
has also taken place at a particular period in all the Germanic, and
even the Romanic languages, as in _buo-no_ for _bo-num_, _pa-dre_ for
_pa-trem_, &c. The lengthening of the penult left the final syllable by
contrast shortened or weakened, and paved the way for the disappearance
of final e in the century following, through the stages _na-me_,
_na-me_, _na-m'_, _nam_, the one long syllable in _nam(e)_ being the
quantitative equivalent of the two short syllables in _na-me_; hence the
notion that mute _e_ makes a preceding vowel long, the truth being that
the lengthening of the vowel led to the e becoming mute.
After 1250 we have the _Lay of Havelok_, and about 1300 the writings of
Robert of Brunne in South Lincolnshire. In the 14th century we find a
number of texts belonging to the western part of the district.
South-west midland is hardly to be distinguished from southern in its
south-western form, and hence texts like _Piers Plowman_ elude any
satisfactory classification, but several metrical romances exhibit what
are generally considered to be west midland characteristics, and a
little group of poems, _Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knighte_, the _Pearl_,
_Cleanness_ and _Patience_, thought to be the work of a north-west
midland writer of the 14th century, bear a striking resemblance to the
modern Lancashire dialect. The end of the century witnessed the prose of
Wycliff and Mandeville, and the poetry of Chaucer, with whom Middle
English may be said to have culminated, and in whose writings its main
characteristics as distinct from Old and Modern English may be studied.
Thus, we find final e in full use representing numerous original vowels
and terminations as
Him thoughte that his herte wolde breke,
in Old English--
Him thuhte thaet his heorte wolde brecan,
which may be compared with the modern German--
Ihm dauchte dass sein Herze wollte brechen.
In nouns the -_es_ of the plural and genitive case is still syllabic--
Reede as the berstl-es of a sow-es eer-es.
Several old genitives and plural forms continued to exist, and the
dative or prepositional case has usually a final _e_. Adjectives retain
so much of the old declension as to have -_e_ in the definite form and
in the plural--
The tend-re cropp-es and the yong-e sonne.
And smal-e fowl-es maken melodie.
Numerous old forms of comparison were in use, which have not come down
to Modern English, as _herre_, _ferre_, _lenger_, _hext_ = higher,
farther, longer, highest. In the pronouns, _ich_ lingered alongside of
_I_; _ye_ was only nominative, and _you_ objective; the northern _thei_
had dispossessed the southern _hy_, but _her_ and _hem_ (the modern
'_em_) stood their ground against _their_ and _them_. The verb is _I
lov-e_, _thou lov-est_, _he lov-eth_; but, in the plural, _lov-en_ is
interchanged with _lov-e_, as rhyme or euphony requires. So in the
plural of the past _we love-den_ or _love-de_. The infinitive also ends
in _en_, often _e_, always syllabic. The present participle, in Old
English -_ende_, passing through -_inde_, has been confounded with the
verbal noun in -_ynge_, -_yng_, as in Modern English. The past
participle largely retains the prefix _y_- or _i_-, representing the Old
English _ge_-, as in _i-ronne_, _y-don_, Old English _zerunnen_,
_zedon_, run, done. Many old verb forms still continued in existence.
The adoption of French words, not only those of Norman introduction, but
those subsequently introduced under the Angevin kings, to supply
obsolete and obsolescent English ones, which had kept pace with the
growth of literature since the beginning of the Middle English period,
had now reached its climax; later times added many more, but they also
dropped some that were in regular use with Chaucer and his
contemporaries.
Chaucer's great contemporary, William Langland, in his _Vision of
William concerning Piers the Ploughman_, and his imitator the author of
_Pierce the Ploughman's Crede_ (about 1400) used the Old English
alliterative versification for the last time in the south. Rhyme had
made its appearance in the language shortly after the Conquest--if not
already known before; and in the south and midlands it became decidedly
more popular than alliteration; the latter retained its hold much longer
in the north, where it was written even after 1500: many of the northern
romances are either simply alliterative, or have both alliteration and
rhyme. To these characteristics of northern and southern verse
respectively Chaucer alludes in the prologue of the "Persone," who, when
called upon for his tale said:--
"But trusteth wel; I am a sotherne man,
I cannot geste _rom_, _ram_, _ruf_, by my letter.
And, God wote, rime hold I but litel better:
And therefore, if you list, I wol not glose,
I wol you tell a litel tale in prose."
The changes from Old to Middle English may be summed up thus: Loss of a
large part of the native vocabulary, and adoption of French words to
fill their place; not infrequent adoption of French words as synonyms of
existing native ones; modernization of the English words preserved, by
vowel change in a definite direction from back to front, and from open
to close, _[=a,]_ becoming _[=o,]_, original _e_, _o_ tending to _ee_,
_oo_, monophthongization of the old diphthongs _eo_, _ea_, and
development of new diphthongs in connexion with _g_, _h_, and _w_;
adoption of French orthographic symbols, e.g. _ou_ for _u_, _qu_, _v_,
_ch_, and gradual loss of the symbols [j], th, dh, Th; obscuration of
vowels after the accent, and especially of final _a_, _o_, _u_ to _e_;
consequent confusion and loss of old inflections, and their replacement
by prepositions, auxiliary verbs and rules of position; abandonment of
alliteration for rhyme; and great development of dialects, in
consequence of there being no standard or recognized type of English.
But the recognition came at length. Already in 1258 was issued the
celebrated English proclamation of Henry III., or rather of Simon de
Montfort in his name, which, as the only public recognition of the
native tongue between William the Conqueror and Edward III., has
sometimes been spoken of as the first specimen of English. It runs:--
"Henr_i_ thur[gh] godes fultume king on Engleneloande Lhoauerd on
Yrloand_e_. Duk on Norm_andie_ on Aquitaine and eorl on Aniow. Send
igretinge to alle hise holde ilaerde and ileawede on
Huntendoneschir_e_. thaet witen [gh]e wel alle thaet _we_ willen and
vnne_n_ thaet thaet vre raedesmen alle other the moare dael of heom
thaet beoth ichosen thur[gh] us and thur[gh] thaet loandes folk on vre
kuneriche. habbeth idon and schullen don in the worthnesse of gode and
on vre treowthe. for the freme of the loande. thur[gh] the besi[gh]te
of than to-foren-iseide redesmen. beo stedefaest and ilestinde in alle
thinge a buten aende. And we hoaten alle vre treowe in the treowthe
thaet heo vs o[gh]en. thaet heo stedefaestliche healden and swerien to
healden and to werien tho isetnesses thaet ben imakede and beon to
makien thur[gh] than to-foren iseide raedesmen. other thur[gh] the
moare dael of heom alswo alse hit is biforen iseid. And thaet aehc
other helpe thaet for to done bi than ilche othe a[gh]enes alle men.
Ri[gh]t for to done and to foangen. And noan ne nime of loande ne of
e[gh]te. wherthur[gh] this besi[gh]te mu[gh]e beon ilet other iwersed
on onie wise.' And [gh]if oni other onie cumen her on[gh]enes; we
willen and hoaten thaet alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan.
And for thaet we willen thaet this beo stedefaest and lestinde; we
senden [gh]ew this writ open iseined with vre seel. to halden amanges
[gh]ew ine hord. Witnesse vs seluen aet Lunden_e_. thane E[gh]tetenthe
day. on the Monthe of Octobr_e_ In the Two-and-fowerti[gh]the [gh]eare
of vre cruninge. And this wes idon aetforen vre isworene redesmen....
"And al on tho ilche worden is isend in to aeurihce othre shcire ouer
al thaere kuneriche on Engleneloande. and ek in tel Irelonde."
The dialect of this document is more southern than anything else, with a
slight midland admixture. It is much more archaic inflectionally than
the _Genesis and Exodus_ or _Ormulum_; but it closely resembles the old
Kentish sermons and _Proverbs of Alfred_ in the southern dialect of
1250. It represents no doubt the London speech of the day. London being
in a Saxon county, and contiguous to Kent and Surrey, had certainly at
first a southern dialect; but its position as the capital, as well as
its proximity to the midland district, made its dialect more and more
midland. Contemporary London documents show that Chaucer's language,
which is distinctly more southern than standard English eventually
became, is behind the London dialect of the day in this respect, and is
at once more archaic and consequently more southern.
During the next hundred years English gained ground steadily, and by the
reign of Edward III. French was so little known in England, even in the
families of the great, that about 1350 "John Cornwal, a maystere of
gramere, chaungede the lore (= teaching) in gramere scole _and_
construccion of [i.e. _from_] Freynsch into Englysch";[23] and in
1362-1363 English by statute took the place of French in the pleadings
in courts of law. Every reason conspired that this "English" should be
the midland dialect. It was the intermediate dialect, intelligible, as
Trevisa has told us, to both extremes, even when these failed to be
intelligible to each other; in its south-eastern form, it was the
language of London, where the supreme law courts were, the centre of
political and commercial life; it was the language in which the
Wycliffite versions had given the Holy Scriptures to the people; the
language in which Chaucer had raised English poetry to a height of
excellence admired and imitated by contemporaries and followers. And
accordingly after the end of the 14th century, all Englishmen who
thought they had anything to say to their countrymen generally said it
in the midland speech. Trevisa's own work was almost the last literary
effort of the southern dialect; henceforth it was but a rustic patois,
which the dramatist might use to give local colouring to his creations,
as Shakespeare uses it to complete Edgar's peasant disguise in _Lear_,
or which 19th century research might disinter to illustrate obscure
chapters in the history of language. And though the northern English
proved a little more stubborn, it disappeared also from literature in
England; but in Scotland, which had now become politically and socially
estranged from England, it continued its course as the national language
of the country, attaining in the 15th and 16th centuries a distinct
development and high literary culture, for the details of which readers
are referred to the article on SCOTTISH LANGUAGE.
The 15th century of English history, with its bloody French war abroad
and Wars of the Roses at home, was a barren period in literature, and a
transition one in language, witnessing the decay and disappearance of
the final _e_, and most of the syllabic inflections of Middle English.
Already by 1420, in Chaucer's disciple Hoccleve, final _e_ was quite
uncertain; in Lydgate it was practically gone. In 1450 the writings of
Pecock against the Wycliffites show the verbal inflections in _-en_ in a
state of obsolescence; he has still the southern pronouns _her_ and
_hem_ for the northern _their_, _them_:--
"And here-a[gh]ens holi scripture wole that men schulden lacke the
coueryng which wommen schulden haue, & thei schulden so lacke bi that
the heeris of her heedis schulden be schorne, & schulde not growe in
lengthe doun as wommanys heer schulde growe....
"Also here-withal into the open si[gh]t of ymagis in open chirchis,
alle peple, men & wommen & children mowe come whanne euere thei wolen
in ech tyme of the day, but so mowe thei not come in-to the vce of
bokis to be delyuered to hem neither to be red bifore hem; & therfore,
as for to soone & ofte come into remembraunce of a long mater bi ech
oon persoon, and also as forto make that the mo persoones come into
remembraunce of a mater, ymagis & picturis serven in a specialer maner
than bokis doon, thou[gh] in an other maner ful substanciali bokis
seruen better into remembrauncing of tho same materis than ymagis &
picturis doon; & therfore, thou[gh] writing is seruen weel into
remembrauncing upon the bifore seid thingis, [gh]it not at the ful:
Forwhi the bokis han not the avail of remembrauncing now seid whiche
ymagis han."[24]
The change of the language during the second period of Transition, as
well as the extent of dialectal differences, is quaintly expressed a
generation later by Caxton, who in the prologue to one of the last of
his works, his translation of Virgil's _Eneydos_ (1490), speaks of the
difficulty he had in pleasing all readers:--
"I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen, whiche late
blamed me, sayeng, y^t in my translacyons I had ouer curyous termes,
whiche coud not be vnderstande of comyn peple, and desired me to vse
olde and homely termes in my translacyons. And fayn wolde I satysfy
euery man; and so to doo, toke an olde boke and redde therein; and
certaynly the englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele
vnderstande it. And also my lorde abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to
me late certayn euydences wryton in olde englysshe for to reduce it in
to our englysshe now vsid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse
that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe; I coude not reduce ne
brynge it to be vnderstonden. And certaynly, our langage now vsed
varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne.
For we englysshemen ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone, whiche
is neuer stedfaste, but euer wauerynge, wexynge one season, and waneth
and dycreaseth another season. And that comyn englysshe that is spoken
in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so much that in my days
happened that certayn marchauntes were in a ship_e_ in tamyse, for to
haue sayled ouer the sea into zelande, and for lacke of wynde thei
taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one
of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for
mete, and specyally he axyd after eggys, And the goode wyf answerde,
that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he
also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges; and she
vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde
haue eyren; then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel. Loo!
what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? certaynly,
it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of
langage. For in these dayes, euery man that is in ony reputacyon in
his countre wyll vtter his comynycacyon and maters in suche maners &
termes that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym. And som honest and grete
clerkes haue ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous
termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude and curyous, I
stande abasshed; but in my Iudgemente, the comyn termes that be dayli
vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent
englysshe."
In the productions of Caxton's press we see the passage from Middle to
Early Modern English completed. The earlier of these have still an
occasional verbal plural in _-n_, especially in the word _they ben_; the
southern _her_ and _hem_ of Middle English vary with the northern and
Modern English _their_, _them_. In the late works, the older forms have
been practically ousted, and the year 1485, which witnessed the
establishment of the Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that
which closed the Middle English transition, and introduced Modern
English. Both in the completion of this result, and in its comparative
permanence, the printing press had an important share. By its exclusive
patronage of the midland speech, it raised it still higher above the
sister dialects, and secured its abiding victory. As books were
multiplied and found their way into every corner of the land, and the
art of reading became a more common acquirement, the man of
Northumberland or of Somersetshire had forced upon his attention the
book-English in which alone these were printed. This became in turn the
model for his own writings, and by-and-by, if he made any pretensions to
education, of his own speech. The written _form_ of the language also
tended to uniformity. In previous periods the scribe made his own
spelling with a primary aim at expressing his own speech, according to
the particular values attached by himself or his contemporaries to the
letters and combinations of the alphabet, though liable to disturbance
in the most common words and combinations by his ocular recollections of
the spelling of others. But after the introduction of printing, this
ocular recognition of words became ever more and more an aim; the book
addressed the mind directly through the eye, instead of circuitously
through eye and ear; and thus there was a continuous tendency for
written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form, and
that the most usual, or through some accident the best known, but not
necessarily that which would have been chosen had the _ear_ been called
in as umpire. Modern English spelling, with its rigid uniformity as to
individual results and whimsical caprice as to principles, is the
creation of the printing-office, the victory which, after a century and
a half of struggle, mechanical convenience won over natural habits.
Besides eventually creating a uniformity in writing, the introduction of
printing made or at least ratified some important changes. The British
and Old English form of the Roman alphabet has already been referred to.
This at the Norman Conquest was superseded by an alphabet with the
French forms and values of the letters. Thus _k_ took the place of the
older _c_ before _e_ and _i_; _qu_ replaced _cw_; the Norman _w_ took
the place of the _wen_ (Th), &c.; and hence it has often been said that
Middle English stands nearer to Old English in pronunciation, but to
Modern English in spelling. But there were certain sounds in English for
which Norman writing had no provision; and for these, in writing
English, the native characters were retained. Thus the Old English g
([g]), beside the sound in _go_, had a guttural sound as in German
ta_g_, Irish ma_gh_, and in certain positions a palatalized form of this
approaching _y_ as in _y_ou (if pronounced with aspiration _hy_ou or
_gh_you). These sounds continued to be written with the native form of
the letter as _bur[gh]_, _[gh]our_, while the French form was used for
the sounds in _go_, _age_,--one original letter being thus represented
by two. So for the sounds of _th_, especially the sound in _th_at, the
Old English _thorn_ (th) continued to be used. But as these characters
were not used for French and Latin, their use even in English became
disturbed towards the 15th century, and when printing was introduced,
the founts, cast for continental languages, had no characters for them,
so that they were dropped entirely, being replaced, [gh] by _gh_, _yh_,
_y_, and _th_ by _th_. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In
the north it is curious that the printers tried to express the _forms_
rather than the powers of these letters, and consequently [gh] was
represented by _z_, the black letter form of which was confounded with
it, while the th was expressed by _y_, which its MS. form had come to
approach or in some cases simulate. So in early Scotch books we find
_zellow_, _ze_, _yat_, _yem_ = _yellow_, _ye_, _that_, _them_; and in
Modern Scottish, such names as _Menzies_, _Dalziel_, _Cockenzie_, and
the word _gaberlunzie_, in which the _z_ stands for _y_.
MODERN ENGLISH thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length
reached the all but flectionless state which it now presents. A single
older verbal form, the southern _-eth_ of the third person singular,
continued to be the literary prose form throughout the 16th century, but
the northern form in _-s_ was intermixed with it in poetry (where it
saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare, have
taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller _an_, _none_, _mine_,
_thine_, in the early part of the 16th century at least, were used in
positions where their shortened forms _a_, _no_, _my_, _thy_ are now
found (_none other_, _mine own_ = _no other_, _my own_). But with such
minute exceptions, the accidence of the 16th century was the accidence
of the 19th. While, however, the older inflections had disappeared,
there was as yet no general agreement as to the mode of their
replacement. Hence the 16th century shows a syntactic licence and
freedom which distinguishes it strikingly from that of later times. The
language seems to be in a plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as
it were, experiment with it, bending it to constructions which now seem
indefensible. Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from
noun and verb, without custom having yet decided what prepositions or
auxiliary verbs shall most fittingly convey their meaning. The laxity of
word-order which was permitted in older states of the language by the
_formal_ expression of relations was often continued though the
inflections which expressed the relations had disappeared. Partial
analogy was followed in allowing forms to be identified in one case,
because, in another, such identification was accidentally produced, as
for instance the past participles of _write_ and _take_ were often made
_wrote_ and _took_, because the contracted participles of _bind_ and
_break_ were _bound_ and _broke_. Finally, because, in dropping
inflections, the former distinctions even between parts of speech had
disappeared, so that _iron_, e.g., was at once noun, adjective and verb,
_clean_, adjective, verb and adverb, it appeared as if any word whatever
might be used in any grammatical relation, where it conveyed the idea of
the speaker. Thus, as has been pointed out by Dr Abbott, "you can
_happy_ your friend, _malice_ or _foot_ your enemy, or _fall_ an axe on
his neck. You can speak and act _easy_, _free_, _excellent_, you can
talk of _fair_ instead of beauty (fairness), and a _pale_ instead of a
_paleness_. A _he_ is used for a man, and a lady is described by a
gentleman as 'the fairest _she_ he has yet beheld.' An adverb can be
used as a verb, as 'they _askance_ their eyes'; as a noun, 'the
_backward_ and abyss of time'; or as an adjective, a '_seldom_
pleasure.'"[25] For, as he also says, "clearness was preferred to
grammatical correctness, and brevity both to correctness and clearness.
Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came
uppermost in the mind without much regard to syntax, and the result was
a forcible and perfectly unambiguous but ungrammatical sentence, such as
The prince that feeds great natures they will slay him.
_Ben Jonson._
or, as instances of brevity,
Be guilty of my death since of my crime.
_Shakespeare._
It cost more to get than to lose in a day.
_Ben Jonson._"
These characteristics, together with the presence of words now obsolete
or archaic, and the use of existing words in senses different from our
own, as general for specific, literal for metaphorical, and vice versa,
which are so apparent to every reader of the 16th-century literature,
make it useful to separate _Early Modern_ or _Tudor_ English from the
subsequent and still existing stage, since the consensus of usage has
declared in favour of individual senses and constructions which are
alone admissible in ordinary language.
The beginning of the Tudor period was contemporaneous with the
Renaissance in art and literature, and the dawn of modern discoveries in
geography and science. The revival of the study of the classical writers
of Greece and Rome, and the translation of their works into the
vernacular, led to the introduction of an immense number of new words
derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and objects or
to indicate new distinctions in or grouping of old ideas. Often also it
seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with the form as well as the
spirit of the old, that it came more natural to them to express
themselves in words borrowed from the old than in their native tongue,
and thus words of Latin origin were introduced even when English already
possessed perfectly good equivalents. As has already been stated, the
French words of Norman and Angevin introduction, being principally Latin
words in an altered form, when used as English supplied models whereby
other Latin words could be converted into English ones, and it is after
these models that the Latin words introduced during and since the 16th
century have been fashioned. There is nothing in the _form_ of the words
_procession_ and _progression_ to show that the one was used in England
in the 11th, the other not till the 16th century. Moreover, as the
formation of new words from Latin had gone on in French as well as in
English since the Renaissance, we often cannot tell whether such words,
e.g. as _persuade_ and _persuasion_, were borrowed from their French
equivalents or formed from Latin in England independently. With some
words indeed it is impossible to say whether they were formed in England
directly from Latin, borrowed from contemporary late French, or had been
in England since the Norman period, even _photograph_, _geology_ and
_telephone_ have the form that they would have had if they had been
living words in the mouths of Greeks, Latins, French and English from
the beginning, instead of formations of the 19th century.[26] While
every writer was thus introducing new words according to his notion of
their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not
accepted by contemporaries or posterity; a long list might be formed of
these mintages of the 16th and 17th centuries, which either never became
current coin, or circulated only as it were for a moment. The revived
study of Latin and Greek also led to modifications in the spelling of
some words which had entered Middle English in the French form. So
Middle English _doute_, _dette_, were changed to _doubt_, _debt_, to
show a more immediate connexion with Latin _dubitum_, _debitum_; the
actual derivation from the French being ignored. Similarly, words
containing a Latin and French _t_, which might be traced back to an
original Greek [theta], were remodelled upon the Greek, e.g. _theme_,
_throne_, for Middle English _teme_, _trone_, and, by false association
with Greek, _anthem_, Old English _antefne_, Latin _antiphona_;
_Anthony_, Latin _Antonius_; _Thames_, Latin _Tamesis_, apparently after
_Thomas_.
The voyages of English navigators in the latter part of the 16th century
introduced a considerable number of Spanish words, and American words in
Spanish forms, of which _negro_, _potato_, _tobacco_, _cargo_,
_armadillo_, _alligator_, _galleon_ may serve as examples.
The date of 1611, which nearly coincides with the end of Shakespeare's
literary work, and marks the appearance of the Authorized Version of the
Bible (a compilation from the various 16th-century versions), may be
taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was
thenceforth Modern in structure, style and expression, although the
spelling did not settle down to present usage till about the revolution
of 1688. The latter date also marks the disappearance from literature of
a large number of words, chiefly of such as were derived from Latin
during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that survived
1688 are still in use; but a long list might be made out of those that
appear for the last time before that date. This sifting of the literary
vocabulary and gradual fixing of the literary spelling, which went on
between 1611, when the language became modern in structure, and 1689,
when it became modern also in form, suggests for this period the name of
Seventeenth-Century Transition. The distinctive features of Modern
English have already been anticipated by way of contrast with preceding
stages of the language. It is only necessary to refer to the fact that
the vocabulary is now much more composite than at any previous period.
The immense development of the physical sciences has called for a
corresponding extension of terminology which has been supplied from
Latin and especially Greek; and although these terms are in the first
instance _technical_, yet, with the spread of education and general
diffusion of the rudiments and appliances of science, the boundary line
between _technical_ and _general_, indefinite at the best, tends more
and more to melt away--this in addition to the fact that words still
technical become general in figurative or metonymic senses. _Ache_,
_diamond_, _stomach_, _comet_, _organ_, _tone_, _ball_, _carte_, are
none the less familiar because once technical words. Commercial, social,
artistic or literary contact has also led to the adoption of numerous
words from modern European languages, especially French, Italian,
Portuguese, Dutch (these two at a less recent period): thus from French
_soiree_, _seance_, _depot_, _debris_, _programme_, _prestige_; from
Italian _bust_, _canto_, _folio_, _cartoon_, _concert_, _regatta_,
_ruffian_; from Portuguese _caste_, _palaver_; from Dutch _yacht_,
_skipper_, _schooner_, _sloop_. Commercial intercourse and colonization
have extended far beyond Europe, and given us words more or fewer from
Hindostani, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, and from American,
Australian, Polynesian and African languages.[27] More important even
than these, perhaps, are the dialect words that from time to time obtain
literary recognition, restoring to us obsolete Old English forms, and
not seldom words of Celtic or Danish origin, which have been preserved
in local dialects, and thus at length find their way into the standard
language.
As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the language, it
is probable that original English words do not now form more than a
fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in a full English
dictionary; and it may seem strange, therefore, that we still identify
the language with that of the 9th century, and class it as a member of
the _Low German_ division. But this explains itself, when we consider
that of the total words in a dictionary only a small portion are used by
any one individual in speaking or even in writing; that this portion
includes the great majority of the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a minority
of the others. The latter are in fact almost all _names_--the vast
majority names of _things_ (nouns), a smaller number names of
_attributes_ and _actions_ (adjectives and verbs), and, from their very
nature, names of the things, attributes and actions which come less
usually or, it may be, very rarely under our notice. Thus in an ordinary
book, a novel or story, the foreign elements will amount to from 10 to
15% of the whole; as the subject becomes more recondite or technical
their number will increase; till in a work on chemistry or abstruse
mathematics the proportion may be 40%. But after all, it is not the
question whence words _may_ have been taken, but _how they are used_ in
a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform
themselves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes
absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some other
language, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are _new_
words to begin with; in either case also, if they are needed, they will
become as thoroughly native, i.e. familiar from childhood to those who
use them, as those that possess the longest native pedigree. In this
respect English is still the same language it was in the days of Alfred;
and, comparing its history with that of other Low German tongues, there
is no reason to believe that its grammar or structure would have been
very different, however different its vocabulary might have been, if the
Norman Conquest had never taken place.
A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary and of the
dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into the language, as
well as of the great change produced in it by the Norman Conquest, and
consequent influx of French and Latin elements, is given in the
accompanying chart. The transverse lines represent centuries, and it
will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by modern
English, how long the language had been in the country before the Norman
Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and without any literary
remains. Judging by what has happened during the historic period, great
changes may and indeed _must_ have taken place between the first arrival
of the Saxons and the days of King Alfred, when literature practically
begins. The chart also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of
the vocabulary, the body of primary "words of common life," which,
notwithstanding numerous losses and more numerous additions, has
preserved its corporate identity through all the periods. But the
"poetic and rhetorical," as well as the "scientific" terms of Old
English have died out, and a new vocabulary of "abstract and general
terms" has arisen from French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer
"technical, commercial and scientific" vocabulary is composed of words
not only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized
languages.
[Illustration]
The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical changes
which the language has undergone; distinct from, though intimately
connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflections was
a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic
changes which have taken place between the 8th and 19th centuries, and
which result in making modern English words very different from their
Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words
like _stone_, _mine_, _doom_, _day_, _nail_, _child_, _bridge_, _shoot_,
Anglo-Saxon _stan_, _min_, _dom_, _daeg_, _naegel_, _cild_, _brycg_,
_sceot_. The history of English sounds (see PHONETICS) has been treated
at length by Dr A.J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only necessary
here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following, (1) In an
accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained nearly
unchanged; thus the words _at_, _men_, _bill_, _God_, _dust_ are
pronounced now nearly as in Old English, though the last two were more
like the Scotch _o_ and North English _u_ respectively, and in most
words the short _a_ had a broader sound like the provincial _a_ in
_man_. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular
sound shift towards closer and more advanced positions, so that the
words _ban_, _haer_, _soece_ or _sece_, _stol_ (_bahn_ or _bawn_, _her_,
_sok_ or _saik_, _stole_) are now _bone_, _hair_, _seek_, _stool_; while
the two high vowels _u_ (= _oo_) and _i_ (_ee_) have become diphthongs,
as _hus_, _scir_, now _house_, _shire_, though the old sound of _u_
remains in the north (_hoose_), and the original _i_ in the
pronunciation _sheer_, approved by Walker, "as in mach_i_ne, and
sh_i_re, and magaz_i_ne." (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have
usually been lengthened, as in _na-ma_, _co-fa_, now _name_, _cove_; but
to this there are exceptions, especially in the case of _i_ and _u_. (4)
Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure
_e_, and then, if final, disappeared; so _oxa_, _seo_, _wudu_ became
_ox-e_, _se-e_, _wud-e_, and then _ox_, _see_, _wood_; _oxan_, _lufod_,
now _oxen_, _loved_, _lov'd_; _settan_, _setton_, later _setten_,
_sette_, _sett_, now _set_. (5) The back consonants, _c_, _g_, _sc_, in
connexion with front vowels, have often become palatalized to _ch_, _j_,
_sh_, as _circe_, _rycg_, _fisc_, now _church_, _ridge_, _fish_. A
medial or final _g_ has passed through a guttural or palatal continuant
to _w_ or _y_, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as in _boga_, _laga_,
_daeg_, _heg_, _drig_, now _bow_, _law_, _day_, _hay_, _dry_. _W_ and
_h_ have disappeared before _r_ and _l_, as in _write_, _(w)lisp_,
_(h)ring_; _h_ final (=_gh_) has become _f_, _k_, _w_ or nothing, but
has developed the glides _u_ or _i_ before itself, these combining with
the preceding vowel to form a diphthong, or merging with it into a
simple vowel-sound, as _ruh_, _hoh_, _boh_, _deah_, _heah_, _hleah_, now
_rough_, _hough_, _bough_, _dough_, _high_, _laugh=ruf_, _hok_, _bow_,
_do_, _hi_, _laf_. _R_ after a vowel has practically disappeared in
standard English, or at most become vocalized, or combined with the
vowel, as in _hear_, _bar_, _more_, _her_. These and other changes have
taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic laws;
the details as to time and mode may be studied in special works. It may
be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical _gender_ in English, and
the almost complete disappearance of _cases_, are purely phonetic
phenomena. _Gender_ (whatever its remote origin) was practically the use
of adjectives and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in
accordance with the _genus_, _genre_, _gender_ or _kind_ of nouns to
which they were attached; when these distinctive terminations were
uniformly levelled to final _e_, or other weak sounds, and thus ceased
to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinctions into genders or kinds
having no other existence disappeared. Thus when _thaet gode hors_,
_thone godan hund_, _tha godan boc_, became, by phonetic weakening, _the
gode hors_, _the gode hownd_, _the gode boke_, and later still the _good
horse_, the _good hound_, the _good book_, the words _horse_, _hound_,
_book_ were no longer grammatically different kinds of nouns;
grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The concord of adjectives has
entirely disappeared; the concord of the pronouns is now regulated by
_rationality_ and _sex_, instead of grammatical gender, which has no
existence in English. The man _who_ lost _his_ life; the bird _which_
built _its_ nest.
Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to the
standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from
that date (with the exception of the northern English in Scotland,
where it became in a social and literary sense a distinct language), we
have little history. We know, however, that they continued to exist as
local and popular forms of speech, as well from occasional specimens and
from the fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers
during the interval. Thus Puttenham in his _Arte of English Poesie_
(1589) says:--
"Our maker [i.e. poet] therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers
Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, not yet Chaucer, for their language
is now not of use with us: neither shall he take the termes of
Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble
men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a [= one] matter;
nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man
can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet
it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our _Southerne_ English is, no
more is the far Westerne mans speach: ye shall therefore take the
usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying
about London within lx myles, and not much above. I say not this but
that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that
speake but specially write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or
Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the
gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part
condescend, but herein we are already ruled by th' English
Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men."--_Arber's
Reprint_, p. 157.
In comparatively modern times there has been a revival of interest in
these forms of English, several of which following in the wake of the
revival of Lowland Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries, have produced a
considerable literature in the form of local poems, tales and
"folk-lore." In these respects Cumberland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Devon,
Somerset and Dorset, the "far north" and "far west" of Puttenham, where
the dialect was felt to be so independent of literary English as not to
be branded as a mere vulgar corruption of it, stand prominent. More
recently the dialects have been investigated philologically, a
department in which, as in other departments of English philology, the
elder Richard Garnett must be named as a pioneer. The work was carried
out zealously by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte and Dr A.J. Ellis, and
more recently by the English Dialect Society, founded by the Rev.
Professor Skeat, for the investigation of this branch of philology. The
efforts of this society resulted in the compilation and publication of
glossaries or word-books, more or less complete and trustworthy, of most
of the local dialects, and in the production of grammars dealing with
the phonology and grammatical features of a few of these, among which
that of the Windhill dialect in Yorkshire, by Professor Joseph Wright,
and that of West Somerset, by the late F.T. Elworthy, deserve special
mention. From the whole of the glossaries of the Dialect Society, and
from all the earlier dialect works of the 18th and 19th centuries,
amplified and illustrated by the contributions of local collaborators in
nearly every part of the British Isles, Professor Joseph Wright has
constructed his _English Dialect Dictionary_, recording the local words
and senses, with indication of their geographical range, their
pronunciation, and in most cases with illustrative quotations or
phrases. To this he has added an _English Dialect Grammar_, dealing very
fully with the phonology of the dialects, showing the various sounds
which now represent each Old English sound, and endeavouring to define
the area over which each modern form extends; the accidence is treated
more summarily, without going minutely into that of each dialect-group,
for which special dialect grammars must be consulted. The work has also
a very full and valuable index of every word and form treated.
The researches of Prince L.L. Bonaparte and Dr Ellis were directed
specially to the classification and mapping of the existing
dialects,[28] and the relation of these to the dialects of Old and
Middle English. They recognized a _Northern_ dialect lying north of a
line drawn from Morecambe Bay to the Humber, which, with the kindred
Scottish dialects (already investigated and classed),[29] is the direct
descendant of early northern English, and a _South-western_ dialect
occupying Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Gloucester and western Hampshire,
which, with the _Devonian_ dialect beyond it, are the descendants of
early southern English and the still older West-Saxon of Alfred. This
dialect must in the 14th Century have been spoken everywhere south of
Thames; but the influence of London caused its extinction in Surrey,
Sussex and Kent, so that already in Puttenham it had become "far
western." An _East Midland_ dialect, extending from south Lincolnshire
to London, occupies the cradle-land of the standard English speech, and
still shows least variation from it. Between and around these typical
dialects are ten others, representing the old Midland proper, or
dialects between it and the others already mentioned. Thus "north of
Trent" the _North-western_ dialect of south Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby
and Stafford, with that of Shropshire, represents the early West Midland
English, of which several specimens remain; while the _North-eastern_ of
Nottingham and north Lincolnshire represents the dialect of the _Lay of
Havelok_. With the _North Midland_ dialect of south-west Yorkshire,
these represent forms of speech which to the modern Londoner, as to
Puttenham, are still decidedly northern, though actually intermediate
between northern proper and midland, and preserving interesting traces
of the midland pronouns and verbal inflections. There is an _Eastern_
dialect in the East Anglian counties; a _Midland_ in Leicester and
Warwick shires; a _Western_ in Hereford, Worcester and north
Gloucestershire, intermediate between south-western and north-western,
and representing the dialect of _Piers Plowman_. Finally, between the
east midland and south-western, in the counties of Buckingham, Oxford,
Berks, Hants, Surrey and Sussex, there is a dialect which must have once
been south-western, but of which the most salient characters have been
rubbed off by proximity to London and the East Midland speech. In east
Sussex and Kent this _South-eastern_ dialect attains to a more
distinctive character. The _Kentish_ form of early Southern English
evidently maintained its existence more toughly than that of the
counties immediately south of London. It was very distinct in the days
of Sir Thomas More; and even, as we see from the dialect attributed to
Edgar in _Lear_, was still strongly marked in the days of Shakespeare.
In the south-eastern corner of Ireland, in the baronies of Forth and
Bargy, in county Wexford, a very archaic form of English, of which
specimens have been preserved,[30] was still spoken in the 18th century.
In all probability it dated from the first English invasion. In many
parts of Ulster forms of Lowland Scotch dating to the settlement under
James I. are still spoken; but the English of Ireland generally seems to
represent 16th and 17th century English, as in the pronunciation of
_tea_, _wheat_ (_tay_, _whait_), largely affected, of course, by the
native Celtic. The subsequent work of the English Dialect Society, and
the facts set forth in the _English Dialect Dictionary_, confirm in a
general way the classification of Bonaparte and Ellis; but they bring
out strongly the fact that only in a few cases can the boundary between
dialects now be determined by precise lines. For every dialect there is
a central region, larger or smaller, in which its characteristics are at
a maximum; but towards the edges of the area these become mixed and
blended with the features of the contiguous dialects, so that it is
often impossible to define the point at which the one dialect ends and
the other begins. The fact is that the various features of a dialect,
whether its distinctive words, characteristic pronunciations or special
grammatical features, though they may have the same centre, have not all
the same circumference. Some of them extend to a certain distance round
the centre; others to a much greater distance. The only approximately
accurate way to map the area of any dialect, whether in England, France,
Germany or elsewhere, is to take a well-chosen set of its characteristic
features--words, senses, sounds or grammatical peculiarities, and draw a
line round the area over which each of these extends; between the
innermost and outermost of these there will often be a large border
district. If the same process be followed with the contiguous dialects,
it will be found that some of the lines of each intersect some of the
lines of the other, and that the passing of one dialect into another is
not effected by the formation of intermediate or blended forms of any
one characteristic, but by the overlapping or intersecting of more or
fewer of the features of each. Thus a definite border village or
district may use 10 of the 20 features of dialect A and 10 of those of
B, while a village on the one side has 12 of those of A with 8 of those
of B, and one on the other side has 7 of those of A with 13 of those of
B. Hence a dialect boundary line can at best indicate the line within
which the dialect has, on the whole, more of the features of A than of B
or C; and usually no single line can be drawn as a dialect boundary, but
that without it there are some features of the same dialect, and within
it some features of the contiguous dialects.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE PERIODS AND DIALECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
CHRONOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE.
Divisions. Subdivisions. Dates
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
OLD ENGLISH
(Full Inflections.) EARLY OLD ENGLISH. 500-850
TYPICAL OLD ENGLISH, 850-1000
or ANGLO-SAXON.
LATE OLD ENGLISH 1000-1150
and OLD ENGLISH
TRANSITION.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MIDDLE ENGLISH.
(Levelled Inflections.)
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. 1150-1250
MIDDLE ENGLISH (typical). 1250-1400
LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH
and MIDDLE ENGLISH
TRANSITION. 1400-1485
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MODERN ENGLISH.
(Lost Inflections.)
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
(Tudor English). 1450-1611
TRANSITIONAL MODERN or
17TH CENTURY ENGLISH. 1611-1689
CURRENT ENGLISH. 1689-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE LEADING DIALECTS.
Northern English. Midland English. Southern English.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anglian. Anglian. Saxon. Kentish.
------- ------- ----- -------
Caedmon, 660. (Charter Glosses), 736-800. (Charter Glosses), 692-780. (Charter Glosses), 679-770.
Beda, 734. Beowulf(?) (Laws of Ine, 700) Charters_, 805-840.
Leiden Riddle_. Mercian. Literary West-Saxon Lorica Prayer.
Cynewulf, c. 750. ------- or Anglo-Saxon. Psalm 50, c. 860.
Old Northumbrian. (Charter Glosses), 805--. Charter, 847.
---------------- Vespasian Ps., c. 825. Alfred, 885.
Durham Glosses, 950-975. Charters, 836-840. Judith, 900-910.
Lindisfarne Gospel Gloss. Lorica Glosses. Poems in O.E. Chron., 937-979.
Rushworth Gloss, St. Battle of Maldon, 993.
Matthew, ? 975-1000. Aelfric, 1000.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Peterborough Chronicle Wulfstan, 1016.
1123-31. O.E. Chron., Parker MS.
ends, 1070.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Early Northern English Early Midland. Early Southern and Middle Kentish.
and Early Scotch. ------------- S.W. English --------------
---------------------- Chronicle, 1154. ------------------ Hatton Gospels, 1170.
Ormulum, 1200. Cotton Homilies, 1160. Kentish Sermons, 1250.
Genesis & Exodus, c. 1250. Layamon, 1203.
Middle English. Ancren Riwle, 1220.
-------------- --------------------------
Cursor Mundi (?). Harrowing of Hell, 1280. Shoreham, 1320.
Hampole, 1350. Robt. of Brunne, 1303-30. Procl. of Henry III., 1258. Ayenbite, 1340.
Barbour, 1375. Pearl, Sir Gawayne. Robt. Gloucester, 1300.
Mandeville (Northern Wycliffe. Trevisa, 1387.
version) Wyntoun, 1420. Chaucer, Gower.
Townley Mysteries. Lydgate.
Henryson, 1470. Caxton, 1477-90.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Middle Sccotch. Tudor English. South-Western Dialect. Kentish Dialect.
-------------- ------------- --------------------- ---------------
Dunbar, 1500--. Tyndal, 1525. Cornishman in A. Boorde, (in Sir. T. More.)
Lyndesay. Homilies, 1547-63. 1547. (Edgar in Lear, 1605.)
Archbp. Hamilton, 1552. Shakspere, 1590-1613. Gammer Gurton, 1575. (in Ben Jonson.)
James VI., 1590. King James's Bible, 1611. Somersetsh. Man's Complaynt, Kentish Wooing Song, 1611
Montgomery, c. 1600. Milton, 1626-71. c. 1645.
Sir W. Mure, 1617-57. Dryden, 1663-1700.
Yorkshire Dialogue, 1673.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Modern Scotch and Current English. Exmoor Scolding, 1746. Nairne, Kentish Tales,
North Eng. Dial. --------------- Barnes, 1844. 1700.
----------------- Addison, 1717. Elworthy, 1875-88. Dick and Sal, 1821.
Allan Ramsay, 1717. Johnson, 1750.
Burns, 1790. Coleridge, 1805.
Scott, 1815. Macaulay, 1825.
Ian Maclaren, Barrie, Tennyson, 1830.
Crockett, etc.
The vertical lines represent the four leading forms of
English--_Northern_, _Midland_, _Southern_, and _Kentish_--and the
names occurring down the course of each are those of writers and works
in that form of English at the given date. The thickness of the line
shows the comparative literary position of this form of speech at the
time: _thick_ indicating a _literary language_; _medium_, a _literary
dialect_; _thin_, a _popular dialect_ or _patois_; a _dotted_ line
shows that this period is _unrepresented_ by specimens. The horizontal
lines divide the periods; these (after the first two) refer mainly to
the Midland English; in inflectional decay the Northern English was at
least a century in advance of the Midland, and the Southern nearly as
much behind it.
Beyond the limits of the British Isles, English is the language of
extensive regions, now or formerly colonies. In all these countries the
presence of numerous new objects and new conditions of life has led to
the supplementing of the vocabulary by the adoption of words from native
languages, and special adaptation and extension of the sense of English
words. The use of a common literature, however, prevents the overgrowth
of these local peculiarities, and also makes them more or less familiar
to Englishmen at home. It is only in the older states of the American
Union that anything like a local dialect has been produced; and even
there many of the so-called Americanisms are quite as much archaic
English forms which have been lost or have become dialectal in England
as developments of the American soil.
The steps by which English, from being the language of a few thousand
invaders along the eastern and southern seaboard of Britain, has been
diffused by conquest and colonization over its present area form a
subject too large for the limits of this article. It need only be
remarked that within the confines of Britain itself the process is not
yet complete. Representatives of earlier languages survive in Wales and
the Scottish Highlands, though in neither case can the substitution of
English be very remote. In Ireland, where English was introduced by
conquest much later, Irish is still spoken in patches all over the
country; though English is understood, and probably spoken after a
fashion, almost everywhere. At opposite extremities of Britain, the
Cornish of Cornwall and the Norse dialects of Orkney and Shetland died
out very gradually in the course of the 18th century. The Manx, or
Celtic of Man, is even now in the last stage of dissolution; and in the
Channel Isles the Norman _patois_ of Jersey and Guernsey have largely
yielded to English.
The table on p. 599 (a revision of that brought before the Philological
Society in Jan. 1876) graphically presents the chronological and
dialectal development of English. Various names have been proposed for
the different stages; it seems only necessary to add to those in the
table the descriptive names of Dr Abbott, who has proposed (_How to
Parse_, p. 298) to call the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, the
"Synthetical or Inflexional Period"; the Old English Transition (Late
Anglo-Saxon of Dr Skeat), the "Period of Confusion"; the Early Middle
English, "Analytical Period" (1250-1350); the normal Middle English,
"National Period" (1350-1500); the Tudor English, "Period of Licence";
and the Modern English, "Period of Settlement."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--As the study of English has made immense advances
within the last generation, it is only in works recently published
that the student will find the subject satisfactorily handled. Among
the earlier works treating of the whole subject or parts of it may be
mentioned--_A History of English Rhythms_, by Edwin Guest (London,
1838); the _Philological Essays_ of Richard Garnett (1835-1848),
edited by his son (London, 1859); _The English Language_, by R.G.
Latham (5th ed., London, 1862); _Origin and History of the English
Language_, by G.P. Marsh (revised 1885); _Lectures on the English
Language_, by the same (New York and London, 1863); _Historische
Grammatik der englischen Sprache_, by C.F. Koch (Weimar, 1863, &c.);
_Englische Grammatik_, by Eduard Matzner (Berlin, 1860-1865), (an
English translation by C.J. Grece, LL.B., London, 1874); _The
Philology of the English Tongue_, by John Earle, M.A. (Oxford, 1866,
5th ed. 1892); _Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language_, by
F.A. March (New York, 1870); _Historical Outlines of English
Accidence_, by the Rev. R. Morris, LL.D. (London, 1873), (new ed. by
Kellner); _Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar_, by the
same (London, 1874); _The Sources of Standard English_, by T.L.
Kington Oliphant, M.A. (London, 1873); _Modern English_, by F. Hall
(London, 1873); _A Shakespearian Grammar_, by E.A. Abbott, D.D.
(London, 1872); _How to Parse_, by the same (London, 1875); _Early
English Pronunciation_, &c., by A.J. Ellis (London, 1869); _The
History of English Sounds_, by Henry Sweet (London, 1874, 2nd ed.
1888); as well as many separate papers by various authors in the
_Transactions of the Philological Society_, and the publications of
the Early English Text Society.
Among more recent works are: M. Kaluza, _Historische Grammatik der
englischen Sprache_ (Berlin, 1890); Professor W.W. Skeat, _Principles
of English Etymology_ (Oxford, 1887-1891); Johan Storm, _Englische
Philologie_ (Leipzig, 1892-1896); L. Kellner, _Historical Outlines of
English Syntax_ (London, 1892); O.F. Emerson, _History of the English
Language_ (London and New York, 1894); Otto Jespersen, _Progress in
Language_, with special reference to English (London, 1894); Lorenz
Morsbach, _Mittelenglische Grammatik_, part i. (Halle, 1896); Paul,
"Geschichte der englischen Sprache," in _Grundriss der german.
Philologie_ (Strassburg, 1898); Eduard Sievers, _Angelsachsische
Grammatik_ (3rd ed., Halle, 1898); Eng. transl. of same (2nd ed.), by
A.S. Cook (Boston, 1887); K.D. Bulbring, _Altenglisches Elementarbuch_
(Heidelberg, 1902); Greenough and Kittredge, _Words and their Ways in
English Speech_ (London and New York, 1902); Henry Bradley, _The
Making of English_ (London, 1904). Numerous contributions to the
subject have also been made in _Englische Studien_ (ed. Kolbing, later
Hoops; Leipzig, 1877 onward); _Anglia_ (ed. Wulker, Flugel, &c.;
Halle, 1878 onward); publications of Mod. Lang. Assoc. of America
(J.W. Bright; Baltimore, 1884 onward), and A.M. Elliott, _Modern
Language Notes_ (Baltimore, 1886 onward).
(J. A. H. M.; H. M. R. M.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A careful examination of several letters of Bosworth's
Anglo-Saxon dictionary gives in 2000 words (including derivatives and
compounds, but excluding orthographic variants) 535 which still exist
as modern English words.
[2] The practical convenience of having one name for what was the
same thing in various stages of development is not affected by the
probability that (E.A. Freeman notwithstanding) _Engle_ and _Englisc_
were, at an early period, _not_ applied to the whole of the
inhabitants of Teutonic Britain, but only to a part of them. The
dialects of _Engle_ and _Seaxan_ were alike old forms of what was
afterwards English speech, and so, viewed in relation to it, _Old
English_, whatever their contemporary names might be.
[3] The works of Gildas in the original Latin were edited by Mr
Stevenson for the English Historical Society. There is an English
translation in _Six Old English Chronicles_ in Bohn's Antiquarian
library.
[4] As to the continued existence of Latin in Britain, see further in
Rhys's _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, pp. 226-227; also Dogatschar,
_Lautlehre d. gr., lat. u. roman. Lehnworte im Altengl._ (Strassburg,
1888).
[5] Aethelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter "Ongol-Saxna cyning
and Brytaenwalda eallaes thyses iglandes"; Eadred in 955 is
"Angul-seaxna cyning and casere totius Britanniae," and the name is
of frequent occurrence in documents written in Latin. These facts
ought to be remembered in the interest of the scholars of the 17th
century, who have been blamed for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as
if they had invented it. By "Anglo-Saxon" language they meant the
language of the people who _sometimes at least_ called themselves
"Anglo-Saxons." Even now the name is practically useful, when we are
dealing with the subject _per se_, as is _Old English_, on the other
hand, when we are treating it historically or in connexion with
English as a whole.
[6] _Transactions of the Philological Society_ (_1873-1874_), p. 620;
new and much enlarged edition, 1888.
[7] See on this Rhys, _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, v.
[8] During the Old English period both _c_ and [g] appear to have
acquired a palatal value in conjunction with front or palatal
vowel-sounds, except in the north where _c_, and in some cases [g],
tended to remain guttural in such positions. This value was never
distinguished in Old English writing, but may be deduced from certain
phonetic changes depending upon it, and from the use of _c_, _cc_, as
an alternative for _tj_ (as in _ort_[g]_eard_, _orceard_ = orchard,
_fetian_, _feccean_ = fetch), as well as from the normal occurrence
of _ch_ and _y_ in these positions in later stages of the language,
e.g. _cild_ = child, _taecean_ = teach, [g]_iellan_ = yell, _dae_[g]
= day, &c.
[9] For a discriminating view of the effects of the Norman Conquest
on the English Language, see Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, ch. xxv.
[10] There is no reason to suppose that any attempt was made to
proscribe or suppress the native tongue, which was indeed used in
some official documents addressed to Englishmen by the Conqueror
himself. Its social degradation seemed even on the point of coming to
an end, when it was confirmed and prolonged for two centuries more by
the accession of the Angevin dynasty, under whom everything French
received a fresh impetus.
[11] MS. Cotton Vesp. A. 22.
[12] Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, &c., ed. for Cambridge Press, by W.W.
Skeat (1871-1887), second text.
[13] _Old English Homilies of Twelfth Century_, first and second
series, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S.), (1868-1873).
[14] The article _the_ becomes _te_ after a preceding _t_ or _d_ by
assimilation.
[15] Earle, _Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel_ (1865), p. 265.
[16] Skeat, _Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Gospels_ (1874).
[17] Edited for the Surtees Society, by Rev. J. Stevenson.
[18] Edited for the Early English Text Society, by Rev. Dr Morris.
[19] _The Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman_ exists in
three different recensions, all of which have been edited for the
Early English Text Society by Rev. W.W. Skeat.
[20] Edited by Rev. Dr Morris for Early English Text Society, in
1866.
[21] Here, and in _tatt_, _tu_, _taer_, for _thatt_, _thu_, _thaet_,
after _t_, _d_, there is the same phonetic assimilation as in the
last section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle above.
[22] Edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Morris (1865).
[23] Trevisa, _Translation of Higden's Polychronicon_.
[24] Skeat, _Specimens of English Literature_, pp. 49, 54.
[25] _A Shakspearian Grammar_, by Dr E.A. Abbott. To this book we are
largely indebted for its admirable summary of the characters of Tudor
English.
[26] _Evangelist_, _astronomy_, _dialogue_, are words that have so
lived, of which their form is the result. _Photograph_, _geology_,
&c., take this form as _if_ they had the same history.
[27] See extended lists of the foreign words in English in Dr
Morris's _Historical Outlines of English Accidence_, p. 33.
[28] See description and map in _Trans. of Philol. Soc._, 1875-1876,
p. 570.
[29] _The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, its
Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations, with an Appendix on
the present limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the
Dialectal Divisions of the Lowland Tongue; and a Linguistical Map of
Scotland_, by James A.H. Murray (London, 1873).
[30] _A Glossary (with some pieces of Verse) of the Old Dialect of
the English Colony of Forth and Bargy_, collected by Jacob Poole,
edited by W. Barnes, B.D. (London, 1867).
ENGLISH LAW (_History_). In English jurisprudence "legal memory" is said
to extend as far as, but no further than the coronation of Richard I.
(Sept. 3, 1189). This is a technical doctrine concerning prescriptive
rights, but is capable of expressing an important truth. For the last
seven centuries, little more or less, the English law, which is now
overshadowing a large share of the earth, has had not only an extremely
continuous, but a matchlessly well-attested history, and, moreover, has
been the subject matter of rational exposition. Already in 1194 the
daily doings of a tribunal which was controlling and moulding the whole
system were being punctually recorded in letters yet legible, and from
that time onwards it is rather the enormous bulk than any dearth of
available materials that prevents us from tracing the transformation of
every old doctrine and the emergence and expansion of every new idea. If
we are content to look no further than the text-books--the books written
by lawyers for lawyers--we may read our way backwards to Blackstone (d.
1780), Hale (d. 1676), Coke (d. 1634), Fitzherbert (d. 1538), Littleton
(d. 1481), Bracton (d. 1268), Glanvill (d. 1190), until we are in the
reign of Henry of Anjou, and yet shall perceive that we are always
reading of one and the same body of law, though the little body has
become great, and the ideas that were few and indefinite have become
many and explicit.
Beyond these seven lucid centuries lies a darker period. Nearly six
centuries will still divide us from the dooms of Aethelberht (c. 600),
and nearly seven from the _Lex Salica_ (c. 500). We may regard the
Norman conquest of England as marking the confluence of two streams of
law. The one we may call French or Frankish. If we follow it upwards we
pass through the capitularies of Carlovingian emperors and Merovingian
kings until we see Chlodwig and his triumphant Franks invading Gaul,
submitting their Sicambrian necks to the yoke of the imperial religion,
and putting their traditional usages into written Latin. The other
rivulet we may call Anglo-Saxon. Pursuing it through the code of Canute
(d. 1035) and the ordinances of Alfred (c. 900) and his successors, we
see Ine publishing laws in the newly converted Wessex (c. 690), and,
almost a century earlier, Aethelberht doing the same in the newly
converted Kent (c. 600). This he did, says Beda, in accordance with
Roman precedents. Perhaps from the Roman missionaries he had heard
tidings of what the Roman emperor had lately been doing far off in New
Rome. We may at any rate notice with interest that in order of time
Justinian's law-books fall between the _Lex Salica_ and the earliest
Kentish dooms; also that the great pope who sent Augustine to England is
one of the very few men who between Justinian's day and the 11th century
lived in the Occident and yet can be proved to have known the Digest.
In the Occident the time for the Germanic "folk-laws" (_Leges
Barbarorum_) had come, and a Canon law, ambitious of independence, was
being constructed, when in the Orient the lord of church and state was
"enucleating" all that was to live of the classical jurisprudence of
pagan Rome. It was but a brief interval between Gothic and Lombardic
domination that enabled him to give law to Italy: Gaul and Britain were
beyond his reach.
The Anglo-Saxon laws that have come down to us (and we have no reason to
fear the loss of much beyond some dooms of the Mercian Offa) are best
studied as members of a large Teutonic family. Those that proceed from
the Kent and Wessex of the 7th century are closely related to the
continental folk-laws. Their next of kin seem to be the _Lex Saxonum_
and the laws of the Lombards. Then, though the 8th and 9th centuries are
unproductive, we have from Alfred (c. 900) and his successors a series
of edicts which strongly resemble the Frankish capitularies--so strongly
that we should see a clear case of imitation, were it not that in
Frankland the age of legislation had come to its disastrous end long
before Alfred was king. This, it may be noted, gives to English legal
history a singular continuity from Alfred's day to our own. The king of
the English was expected to publish laws at a time when hardly any one
else was attempting any such feat, and the English dooms of Canute the
Dane are probably the most comprehensive statutes that were issued in
the Europe of the 11th century. No genuine laws of the sainted Edward
have descended to us, and during his reign England seems but too likely
to follow the bad example of Frankland, and become a loose congeries of
lordships. From this fate it was saved by the Norman duke, who, like
Canute before him, subdued a land in which kings were still expected to
publish laws.
In the study of early Germanic law--a study which now for some
considerable time has been scientifically prosecuted in Germany--the
Anglo-Saxon dooms have received their due share of attention. A high
degree of racial purity may be claimed on their behalf. Celtic elements
have been sought for in them, but have never been detected. At certain
points, notably in the regulation of the blood-feud and the construction
of a tariff of atonements, the law of one rude folk will always be
somewhat like the law of another; but the existing remains of old Welsh
and old Irish law stand far remoter from the dooms of Aethelberht and Ine
than stand the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand, kings of the Lombards.
Indeed, it is very dubious whether distinctively Celtic customs play any
considerable part in the evolution of that system of rules of Anglian,
Scandinavian and Frankish origin which becomes the law of Scotland.
Within England itself, though for a while there was fighting enough
between the various Germanic folks, the tribal differences were not so
deep as to prevent the formation of a common language and a common law.
Even the strong Scandinavian strain seems to have rapidly blended with
the Anglian. It amplified the language and the law, but did not
permanently divide the country. If, for example, we can to-day
distinguish between _law_ and _right_, we are debtors to the Danes; but
very soon _law_ is not distinctive of eastern or _right_ of western
England. In the first half of the 12th century a would-be expounder of
the law of England had still to say that the country was divided between
the Wessex law, the Mercian law, and the Danes' law, but he had also to
point out that the law of the king's own court stood apart from and
above all partial systems. The local customs were those of shires and
hundreds, and shaded off into each other. We may speak of more Danish
and less Danish counties; it was a matter of degree; for rivers were
narrow and hills were low. England was meant by nature to be the land of
one law.
Then as to Roman law. In England and elsewhere Germanic law developed in
an atmosphere that was charged with traditions of the old world, and many
of these traditions had become implicit in the Christian religion. It
might be argued that all that we call progress is due to the influence
exercised by Roman civilization; that, were it not for this, Germanic law
would never have been set in writing; and that theoretically unchangeable
custom would never have been supplemented or superseded by express
legislation. All this and much more of the same sort might be said; but
the survival in Britain, or the reintroduction into England, of anything
that we should dare to call Roman jurisprudence would be a different
matter. Eyes, carefully trained, have minutely scrutinized the
Anglo-Saxon legal texts without finding the least trace of a Roman rule
outside the ecclesiastical sphere. Even within that sphere modern
research is showing that the church-property-law of the middle ages, the
law of the ecclesiastical "benefice," is permeated by Germanic ideas.
This is true of Gaul and Italy, and yet truer of an England in which
Christianity was for a while extinguished. Moreover, the laws that were
written in England were, from the first, written in the English tongue;
and this gives them a unique value in the eyes of students of Germanic
folk-law, for even the very ancient and barbarous _Lex Salica_ is a Latin
document, though many old Frankish words are enshrined in it. Also we
notice--and this is of grave importance--that in England there are no
vestiges of any "Romani" who are being suffered to live under their own
law by their Teutonic rulers. On the Continent we may see Gundobad, the
Burgundian, publishing one law-book for the Burgundians and another for
the Romani who own his sway. A book of laws, excerpted chiefly from the
Theodosian code, was issued by Alaric the Visigoth for his Roman subjects
before the days of Justinian, and this book (the so-called _Breviarium
Alarici or Lex Romana Visigothorum_) became for a long while the chief
representative of Roman law in Gaul. The Frankish king in his expansive
realm ruled over many men whose law was to be found not in the _Lex
Salica_ or _Lex Ribuaria_, but in what was called the _Lex Romana_. "A
system of personal law" prevailed: the _homo Romanus_ handed on his Roman
law to his children, while Frankish or Lombardic, Swabian or Saxon law
would run in the blood of the _homo barbarus_. Of all this we hear
nothing in England. Then on the mainland of Europe Roman and barbarian
law could not remain in juxtaposition without affecting each other. On
the one hand we see distinctively Roman rules making their way into the
law of the victorious tribes, and on the other hand we see a decay and
debasement of jurisprudence which ends in the formation of what modern
historians have called a Roman "vulgar-law" (_Vulgarrecht_). For a short
age which centres round the year 800 it seemed possible that Frankish
kings, who were becoming Roman emperors, would be able to rule by their
capitularies nearly the whole of the Christian Occident. The dream
vanished before fratricidal wars, heathen invaders, centrifugal
feudalism, and a centripetal church which found its law in the newly
concocted forgeries of the Pseudo-Isidore (c. 850). The "personal laws"
began to transmute themselves into local customs, and the Roman
vulgar-law began to look like the local custom of those districts where
the Romani were the preponderating element in the population. Meanwhile,
the Norse pirates subdued a large tract of what was to be northern
France--a land where Romani were few. Their restless and boundless vigour
these Normans retained; but they showed a wonderful power of
appropriating whatever of alien civilization came in their way. In their
language, religion and law, they had become French many years before they
subdued England. It is a plausible opinion that among them there lived
some sound traditions of the Frankish monarchy's best days, and that
Norman dukes, rather than German emperors or kings, of the French, are
the truest spiritual heirs of Charles the Great.
The Norman age.
In our own day, German historians are wont to speak of English law as a
"daughter" of French or Frankish law. This tendency derived its main
impulse from H. Brunner's proof that the germ of trial by jury, which
cannot be found in the Anglo-Saxon laws, can be found in the prerogative
procedure of the Frankish kings. We must here remember that during a
long age English lawyers wrote in French and even thought in French, and
that to this day most of the technical terms of the law, more especially
of the private law, are of French origin. Also it must be allowed that
when English law has taken shape in the 13th century it is very like one
of the _coutumes_ of northern France. Even when linguistic difficulties
have been surmounted, the Saxon Mirror of Eike von Repgow will seem far
less familiar to an Englishman than the so-called Establishments of St
Louis. This was the outcome of a slow process which fills more than a
century (1066-1189), and was in a great measure due to the reforming
energy of Henry II., the French prince who, in addition to England,
ruled a good half of France. William the Conqueror seems to have
intended to govern Englishmen by English law. After the tyranny of
Rufus, Henry I. promised a restoration of King Edward's law: that is,
the law of the Confessor's time (_Lagam Eadwardi regis vobis reddo_).
Various attempts were then made, mostly, so it would seem, by men of
French birth, to state in a modern and practicable form the _laga
Eadwardi_ which was thus restored. The result of their labours is an
intricate group of legal tracts which has been explored of late years by
Dr Liebermann. The best of these has long been known as the _Leges
Henrici Primi_, and aspires to be a comprehensive law-book. Its author,
though he had some foreign sources at his command, such as the _Lex
Ribuaria_ and an epitome of the Breviary of Alaric, took the main part
of his matter from the code of Canute and the older English dooms.
Neither the Conqueror nor either of his sons had issued many ordinances:
the invading Normans had little, if any, written law to bring with them,
and had invaded a country where kings had been lawgivers. Moreover,
there was much in the English system that the Conqueror was keenly
interested in retaining--especially an elaborate method of taxing the
land and its holders. The greatest product of Norman government, the
grandest feat of government that the world had seen for a long time
past, the compilation of _Domesday Book_, was a conservative effort, an
attempt to fix upon every landholder, French or English, the amount of
geld that was due from his predecessor in title. Himself the rebellious
vassal of the French king, the duke of the Normans, who had become king
of the English, knew much of disruptive feudalism, and had no mind to
see England that other France which it had threatened to become in the
days of his pious but incompetent cousin. The sheriffs, though called
_vice-comites_, were to be the king's officers; the shire-moots might be
called county courts, but were not to be the courts of counts. Much that
was sound and royal in English public law was to be preserved if William
could preserve it.
Royal justice.
The gulf that divides the so-called _Leges Henrici_ (c. 1115) from the
text-book ascribed to Ranulf Glanvill (c. 1188) seems at first sight
very wide. The one represents a not easily imaginable chaos and clash of
old rules and new; it represents also a stage in the development of
feudalism which in other countries is represented chiefly by a
significant silence. The other is an orderly, rational book, which
through all the subsequent centuries will be readily understood by
English lawyers. Making no attempt to tell us what goes on in the local
courts, its author, who may be Henry II.'s chief justiciar, Ranulf
Glanvill, or may be Glanvill's nephew, Hubert Walter, fixes our
attention on a novel element which is beginning to subdue all else to
its powerful operation. He speaks to us of the justice that is done by
the king's own court. Henry II. had opened the doors of his
French-speaking court to the mass of his subjects. Judges chosen for
their ability were to sit there, term after term; judges were to travel
in circuits through the land, and in many cases the procedure by way of
"an inquest of the country," which the Norman kings had used for the
ascertainment of their fiscal rights, was to be at the disposal of
ordinary litigants. All this had been done in a piecemeal, experimental
fashion by ordinances that were known as "assizes." There had not been,
and was not to be, any enunciation of a general principle inviting all
who were wronged to bring in their own words their complaints to the
king's audience. The general prevalence of feudal justice, and of the
world-old methods of supernatural probation (ordeals, battle, oaths
sworn with oath-helpers), was to be theoretically respected; but in
exceptional cases, which would soon begin to devour the rule, a royal
remedy was to be open to any one who could frame his case within the
compass of some carefully-worded and prescript formula. With allusion to
a remote stage in the history of Roman law, a stage of which Henry's
advisers can have known little or nothing, we may say that a "formulary
system" is established which will preside over English law until modern
times. Certain actions, each with a name of its own, are open to
litigants. Each has its own formula set forth in its original (or, as we
might say, originating) writ; each has its own procedure and its
appropriate mode of trial. The litigant chooses his writ, his action,
and must stand or fall by his choice. Thus a book about royal justice
tends to become, and Glanvill's book already is, a commentary on
original writs.
The precipitation of English law in so coherent a form as that which it
has assumed in Glanvill's book is not to be explained without reference
to the revival of Roman jurisprudence in Italy. Out of a school of
Lombard lawyers at Pavia had come Lanfranc the Conqueror's adviser, and
the Lombardists had already been studying Justinian's Institutes. Then
at length the Digest came by its rights. About the year 1100 Irnerius
was teaching at Bologna, and from all parts of the West men were eagerly
flocking to hear the new gospel of civilization. About the year 1149
Vacarius was teaching Roman law in England. The rest of a long life he
spent here, and faculties of Roman and Canon law took shape in the
nascent university of Oxford. Whatever might be the fate of Roman law in
England, there could be no doubt that the Canon law, which was
crystallizing in the _Decretum Gratiani_ (c. 1139) and in the decretals
of Alexander III., would be the law of the English ecclesiastical
tribunals. The great quarrel between Henry II. and Thomas of Canterbury
brought this system into collision with the temporal law of England, and
the king's ministers must have seen that they had much to learn from the
methodic enemy. Some of them were able men who became the justices of
Henry's court, and bishops to boot. The luminous _Dialogue of the
Exchequer_ (c. 1179), which expounds the English fiscal system, came
from the treasurer, Richard Fitz Nigel, who became bishop of London; and
the treatise on the laws of England came perhaps from Glanvill, perhaps
from Hubert Walter, who was to be both primate and chief justiciar.
There was healthy emulation of the work that was being done by Italian
jurists, but no meek acceptance of foreign results.
Bracton.
A great constructive era had opened, and its outcome was a large and
noble book. The author was Henry of Bratton (his name has been corrupted
into Bracton), who died in 1268 after having been for many years one of
Henry III.'s justices. The model for its form was the treatise of Azo of
Bologna ("master of all the masters of the laws," an Englishman called
him), and thence were taken many of the generalities of jurisprudence:
maxims that might be regarded as of universal and natural validity. But
the true core of the work was the practice of an English court which had
yearly been extending its operations in many directions. For half a
century past diligent record had been kept on parchment of all that this
court had done, and from its rolls Bracton cited numerous decisions. He
cited them as precedents, paying special heed to the judgments of two
judges who were already dead, Martin Pateshull and William Raleigh. For
this purpose he compiled a large Note Book, which was discovered by
Prof. Vinogradoff in the British Museum in 1884. Thus at a very early
time English "common law" shows a tendency to become what it afterwards
definitely became, namely, "case law." The term "common law" was being
taken over from the canonists by English lawyers, who used it to
distinguish the general law of the land from local customs, royal
prerogatives, and in short from all that was exceptional or special.
Since statutes and ordinances were still rarities, all expressly enacted
laws were also excluded from the English lawyers' notion of "the common
law." The Great Charter (1215) had taken the form of a grant of
"liberties and privileges," comparable to the grants that the king made
to individual men and favoured towns. None the less, it was in that age
no small body of enacted law, and, owing to its importance and
solemnity, it was in after ages regarded as the first article of a
statute book. There it was followed by the "provisions" issued at Merton
in 1236 and by those issued at Marlborough after the end of the Barons'
War. But during Henry III.'s long reign the swift development of English
law was due chiefly to new "original writs" and new "forms of action"
devised by the chancery and sanctioned by the court. Bracton knew many
writs that were unknown to Glanvill, and men were already perceiving
that limits must be set to the inventive power of the chancery unless
the king was to be an uncontrollable law-maker. Thus the common law was
losing the power of rapid growth when Bracton summed the attained
results in a book, the success of which is attested by a crowd of
manuscript copies. Bracton had introduced just enough of Roman law and
Bolognese method to save the law of England from the fate that awaited
German law in Germany. His book was printed in 1569, and Coke owed much
to Bracton.
The comparison that is suggested when Edward I. is called the English
Justinian cannot be pressed very far. Nevertheless, as is well known, it
is in his reign (1272-1307) that English institutions finally take the
forms that they are to keep through coming centuries. We already see the
parliament of the three estates, the convocations of the clergy, the
king's council, the chancery or secretarial department, the exchequer or
financial department, the king's bench, the common bench, the
commissioners of assize and gaol delivery, the small group of
professionally learned judges, and a small group of professionally
learned lawyers, whose skill is at the service of those who will employ
them. Moreover, the statutes that were passed in the first eighteen
years of the reign, though their bulk seems slight to us nowadays, bore
so fundamental a character that in subsequent ages they appeared as the
substructure of huge masses of superincumbent law. Coke commented upon
them sentence by sentence, and even now the merest smatterer in English
law must profess some knowledge of _Quia emptores_ and _De donis
conditionalibus_. If some American states have, while others have not,
accepted these statutes, that is a difference which is not unimportant
to citizens of the United States in the 20th century. Then from the
early years of Edward's reign come the first "law reports" that have
descended to us: the oldest of them have not yet been printed; the
oldest that has been printed belongs to 1292. These are the precursors
of the long series of Year Books (Edw. II.-Hen. VIII.) which runs
through the residue of the middle ages. Lawyers, we perceive, are
already making and preserving notes of the discussions that take place
in court; French notes that will be more useful to them than the formal
Latin records inscribed upon the plea rolls. From these reports we learn
that there are already, as we should say, a few "leading counsel," some
of whom will be retained in almost every important cause. Papal
decretals had been endeavouring to withdraw the clergy from secular
employment. The clerical element had been strong among the judges of
Henry III.'s reign: Bracton was an archdeacon, Pateshull a dean, Raleigh
died a bishop. Their places begin to be filled by men who are not in
orders, but who have pleaded the king's causes for him--his serjeants or
servants at law--and beside them there are young men who are
"apprentices at law," and are learning to plead. Also we begin to see
men who, as "attorneys at law," are making it their business to appear
on behalf of litigants. The history of the legal profession and its
monopoly of legal aid is intricate, and at some points still obscure;
but the influence of the canonical system is evident: the English
attorney corresponds to the canonical proctor, and the English barrister
to the canonical advocate. The main outlines were being drawn in Edward
I.'s day; the legal profession became organic, and professional opinion
became one of the main forces that moulded the law.
The study of English law fell apart from all other studies, and the
impulse that had flowed from Italian jurisprudence was ebbing. We have
two comprehensive text-books from Edward's reign: the one known to us as
_Fleta_, the other as _Britton_; both of them, however, quarry their
materials from Bracton's treatise. Also we have two little books on
procedure which are attributed to Chief-Justice Hengham, and a few other
small tracts of an intensely practical kind. Under the cover of fables
about King Alfred, the author of the _Mirror of Justices_ made a bitter
attack upon King Edward's judges, some of whom had fallen into deep
disgrace. English legal history has hardly yet been purged of the leaven
of falsehood that was introduced by this fantastic and unscrupulous
pamphleteer. His enigmatical book ends that literate age which begins
with Glanvill's treatise and the treasurer's dialogue. Between Edward
I.'s day and Edward IV.'s hardly anything that deserves the name of book
was written by an English lawyer.
14th and 15th centuries.
During that time the body of statute law was growing, but not very
rapidly. Acts of parliament intervened at a sufficient number of
important points to generate and maintain a persuasion that no limit, or
no ascertainable limit, can be set to the legislative power of king and
parliament. Very few are the signs that the judges ever permitted the
validity of a statute to be drawn into debate. Thus the way was being
prepared for the definite assertion of parliamentary "omnicompetence"
which we obtain from the Elizabethan statesman Sir Thomas Smith, and for
those theories of sovereignty which we couple with the names of Hobbes
and Austin. Nevertheless, English law was being developed rather by
debates in court than by open legislation. The most distinctively
English of English institutions in the later middle ages are the
Year-Books and the Inns of Court. Year by year, term by term, lawyers
were reporting cases in order that they and their fellows might know how
cases had been decided. The allegation of specific precedents was indeed
much rarer than it afterwards became, and no calculus of authority so
definite as that which now obtains had been established in Coke's day,
far less in Littleton's. Still it was by a perusal of reported cases
that a man would learn the law of England. A skeleton for the law was
provided, not by the Roman rubrics (such as public and private, real and
personal, possessory and proprietary, contract and delict), but by the
cycle of original writs that were inscribed in the chancery's _Registrum
Brevium_. A new form of action could not be introduced without the
authority of Parliament, and the growth of the law took the shape of an
explication of the true intent of ancient formulas. Times of inventive
liberality alternated with times of cautious and captious conservatism.
Coke could look back to Edward III.'s day as to a golden age of good
pleading. The otherwise miserable time which saw the Wars of the Roses
produced some famous lawyers, and some bold doctrines which broke new
ground. It produced also Sir Thomas Littleton's (d. 1481) treatise on
Tenures, which (though it be not, as Coke thought it, the most perfect
work that ever was written in any human science) is an excellent
statement of law in exquisitely simple language.
Legal education.
Meanwhile English law was being scholastically taught. This, if we look
at the fate of native and national law in Germany, or France, or
Scotland, appears as a fact of primary importance. From beginnings, so
small and formless that they still elude research, the Inns of Court had
grown. The lawyers, like other men, had grouped themselves in gilds, or
gild-like "fellowships." The fellowship acquired property; it was not
technically incorporate, but made use of the thoroughly English
machinery of a trust. Behind a hedge of trustees it lived an autonomous
life, unhampered by charters or statutes. There was a hall in which its
members dined in common; there was the nucleus of a library; there were
also dormitories or chambers in which during term-time lawyers lived
celibately, leaving their wives in the country. Something of the college
thus enters the constitution of these fellowships; and then something
academical. The craft gild regulated apprenticeship; it would protect
the public against incompetent artificers, and its own members against
unfair competition. So the fellowship of lawyers. In course of time a
lengthy and laborious course of education of the medieval sort had been
devised. He who had pursued it to its end received a call to the bar of
his inn. This call was in effect a degree. Like the doctor or master of
a university, the full-blown barrister was competent to teach others,
and was expected to read lectures to students. But further, in a manner
that is still very dark, these societies had succeeded in making their
degrees the only steps that led to practice in the king's courts. At the
end of the middle ages (c. 1470) Sir John Fortescue rehearsed the
praises of the laws of England in a book which is one of the earliest
efforts of comparative politics. Contrasting England with France, he
rightly connects limited monarchy, public and oral debate in the law
courts, trial by jury, and the teaching of national law in schools that
are thronged by wealthy and well-born youths. But nearly a century
earlier, the assertion that English law affords as subtle and civilizing
a discipline as any that is to be had from Roman law was made by a man
no less famous than John Wycliffe. The heresiarch naturally loathed the
Canon law; but he also spoke with reprobation of the "paynims' law," the
"heathen men's law," the study of which in the two universities was
being fostered by some of the bishops. That study, after inspiring
Bracton, had come to little in England, though the canonist was
compelled to learn something of Justinian, and there was a small demand
for learned civilians in the court of admiralty, and in what we might
call the king's diplomatic service. No medieval Englishman did anything
considerable for Roman law. Even the canonists were content to read the
books of French and Italian masters, though John Acton (c. 1340) and
William Lyndwood (1430) wrote meritorious glosses. The Angevin kings, by
appropriating to the temporal forum the whole province of ecclesiastical
patronage, had robbed the decretists of an inexhaustible source of
learning and of lucre. The work that was done by the legal faculties at
Oxford and Cambridge is slight when compared with the inestimable
services rendered to the cause of national continuity by the schools of
English law which grew within the Inns of Court.
Chancery.
A danger threatened: the danger that a prematurely osseous system of
common law would be overwhelmed by summary justice and royal equity.
Even when courts for all ordinary causes had been established, a reserve
of residuary justice remained with the king. Whatever lawyers and even
parliaments might say, it was seen to be desirable that the king in
council should with little regard for form punish offenders who could
break through the meshes of a tardy procedure and should redress wrongs
which corrupt and timid juries would leave unrighted. Papal edicts
against heretics had made familiar to all men the notion that a judge
should at times proceed _summarie et de plano et sine strepitu et figura
justitiae_. And so extraordinary justice of a penal kind was done by the
king's council upon misdemeanants, and extraordinary justice of a civil
kind was ministered by the king's chancellor (who was the specially
learned member of the council) to those who "for the love of God and in
the way of charity," craved his powerful assistance. It is now well
established that the chancellors started upon this course, not with any
desire to introduce rules of "equity" which should supplement, or
perhaps supplant, the rules of law, but for the purpose of driving the
law through those accidental impediments which sometimes unfortunately
beset its due course. The wrongs that the chancellor redressed were
often wrongs of the simplest and most brutal kind: assaults, batteries
and forcible dispossessions. However, he was warned off this field of
activity by parliament; the danger to law, to lawyers, to trial by jury,
was evident. But just when this was happening, a new field was being
opened for him by the growing practice of conveying land to trustees.
The English trust of land had ancient Germanic roots, and of late we
have been learning how in far-off centuries our Lombard cousins were in
effect giving themselves a power of testation by putting their lands in
trust. In England, when the forms of action were crystallizing, this
practice had not been common enough to obtain the protection of a writ;
but many causes conspired to make it common in the 14th century; and so,
with the general approval of lawyers and laity, the chancellors began to
enforce by summary process against the trustee the duty that lay upon
his conscience. In the next century it was clear that England had come
by a new civil tribunal. Negatively, its competence was defined by the
rule that when the common law offered a remedy, the chancellor was not
to intervene. Positively, his power was conceived as that of doing what
"good conscience" required, more especially in cases of "fraud, accident
or breach of confidence." His procedure was the summary, the
heresy-suppressing (not the ordinary and solemn) procedure of an
ecclesiastical court; but there are few signs that he borrowed any
substantive rules from legist or decretist, and many proofs that within
the new field of trust he pursued the ideas of the common law. It was
long, however, before lawyers made a habit of reporting his decisions.
He was not supposed to be tightly bound by precedent. Adaptability was
of the essence of the justice that he did.
The Tudor Age.
A time of strain and trial came with the Tudor kings. It was
questionable whether the strong "governance" for which the weary nation
yearned could work within the limits of a parliamentary system, or would
be compatible with the preservation of the common law. We see new courts
appropriating large fields of justice and proceeding _summarie et de
plano_; the star chamber, the chancery, the courts of requests, of
wards, of augmentations, the councils of the North and Wales; a little
later we see the high commission. We see also that judicial torture
which Fortescue had called the road to hell. The stream of law reports
became intermittent under Henry VIII.; few judges of his or his son's
reign left names that are to be remembered. In an age of humanism,
alphabetically arranged "abridgments" of medieval cases were the best
work of English lawyers: one comes to us from Anthony Fitzherbert (d.
1538), and another from Robert Broke (d. 1558). This was the time when
Roman law swept like a flood over Germany. The modern historian of
Germany will speak of "the Reception" (that is, the reception of Roman
law), as no less important than the Renaissance and Reformation with
which it is intimately connected. Very probably he will bestow hard
words on a movement which disintegrated the nation and consolidated the
tyranny of the princelings. Now a project that Roman law should be
"received" in England occurred to Reginald Pole (d. 1558), a humanist,
and at one time a reformer, who with good fortune might have been either
king of England or pope of Rome. English law, said the future cardinal
and archbishop, was barbarous; Roman law was the very voice of nature
pleading for "civility" and good princely governance. Pole's words were
brought to the ears of his majestic cousin, and, had the course of
events been somewhat other than it was, King Henry might well have
decreed a reception. The role of English Justinian would have perfectly
suited him, and there are distinct traces of the civilian's Byzantinism
in the doings of the Church of England's supreme head. The academic
study of the Canon law was prohibited; regius professorships of the
civil law were founded; civilians were to sit as judges in the
ecclesiastical courts. A little later, the Protector Somerset was deeply
interested in the establishment of a great school for civilians at
Cambridge. Scottish law was the own sister of English law, and yet in
Scotland we may see a reception of Roman jurisprudence which might have
been more whole-hearted than it was, but for the drift of two British
and Protestant kingdoms towards union. As it fell out, however, Henry
could get what he wanted in church and state without any decisive
supersession of English by foreign law. The omnicompetence of an act of
parliament stands out the more clearly if it settles the succession to
the throne, annuls royal marriages, forgives royal debts, defines
religious creeds, attaints guilty or innocent nobles, or prospectively
lends the force of statute to the king's proclamations. The courts of
common law were suffered to work in obscurity, for jurors feared fines,
and matter of state was reserved for council or star chamber. The Inns
of Court were spared; their moots and readings did no perceptible harm,
if little perceptible good.
Coke.
Yet it is no reception of alien jurisprudence that must be chronicled,
but a marvellous resuscitation of English medieval law. We may see it
already in the Commentaries of Edward Plowden (d. 1585) who reported
cases at length and lovingly. Bracton's great book was put in print, and
was a key to much that had been forgotten or misunderstood. Under
Parker's patronage, even the Anglo-Saxon dooms were brought to light;
they seemed to tell of a Church of England that had not yet been
enslaved by Rome. The new national pride that animated Elizabethan
England issued in boasts touching the antiquity, humanity, enlightenment
of English law. Resuming the strain of Fortescue, Sir Thomas Smith,
himself a civilian, wrote concerning the Commonwealth of England a book
that claimed the attention of foreigners for her law and her polity.
There was dignified rebuke for the French jurist who had dared to speak
lightly of Littleton. And then the common law took flesh in the person
of Edward Coke (1552-1634). With an enthusiastic love of English
tradition, for the sake of which many offences may be forgiven him, he
ranged over nearly the whole field of law, commenting, reporting,
arguing, deciding,--disorderly, pedantic, masterful, an incarnate
national dogmatism tenacious of continuous life. Imbued with this new
spirit, the lawyers fought the battle of the constitution against James
and Charles, and historical research appeared as the guardian of
national liberties. That the Stuarts united against themselves three
such men as Edward Coke, John Selden and William Prynne, is the measure
of their folly and their failure. Words that, rightly or wrongly, were
ascribed to Bracton rang in Charles's ears when he was sent to the
scaffold. For the modern student of medieval law many of the reported
cases of the Stuart time are storehouses of valuable material, since the
lawyers of the 17th century were mighty hunters after records. Prynne
(d. 1669), the fanatical Puritan, published ancient documents with
fervid zeal, and made possible a history of parliament. Selden (d. 1654)
was in all Europe among the very first to write legal history as it
should be written. His book about tithes is to this day a model and a
masterpiece. When this accomplished scholar had declared that he had
laboured to make himself worthy to be called a common lawyer, it could
no longer be said that the common lawyers were _indoctissimum genus
doctissimorum hominum_. Even pliant judges, whose tenure of office
depended on the king's will, were compelled to cite and discuss old
precedents before they could give judgment for their master; and even at
their worst moments they would not openly break with medieval tradition,
or declare in favour of that "modern police-state" which has too often
become the ideal of foreign publicists trained in Byzantine law.
Hale.
The current of legal doctrine was by this time so strong and voluminous
that such events as the Civil War, the Restoration and the Revolution
hardly deflected the course of the stream. In retrospect, Charles II.
reigns so soon as life has left his father's body, and James II. ends a
lawless career by a considerate and convenient abdication. The statute
book of the restored king was enriched by leaves excerpted from the acts
of a lord protector; and Matthew Hale (d. 1676), who was, perhaps, the
last of the great record-searching judges, sketched a map of English law
which Blackstone was to colour. Then a time of self-complacency came for
the law, which knew itself to be the perfection of wisdom, and any
proposal for drastic legislation would have worn the garb discredited by
the tyranny of the Puritan Caesar. The need for the yearly renewal of the
Mutiny Act secured an annual session of parliament. The mass of the
statute law made in the 18th century is enormous; but, even when we have
excluded from view such acts as are technically called "private," the
residuary matter bears a wonderfully empirical, partial and minutely
particularizing character. In this "age of reason," as we are wont to
think it, the British parliament seems rarely to rise to the dignity of
a general proposition, and in our own day the legal practitioner is
likely to know less about the statutes of the 18th century than he knows
about the statutes of Edward I., Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Parliament,
it should be remembered, was endeavouring directly to govern the nation.
There was little that resembled the permanent civil service of to-day.
The choice lay between direct parliamentary government and royal
"prerogative"; and lengthy statutes did much of that work of detail
which would now be done by virtue of the powers that are delegated to
ministers and governmental boards. Moreover, extreme and verbose
particularity was required in statutes, for judges were loath to admit
that the common law was capable of amendment. A vague doctrine,
inherited from Coke, taught that statutes might be so unreasonable as to
be null, and any political theory that seemed to derive from Hobbes
would have been regarded with not unjust suspicion. But the doctrine in
question never took tangible shape, and enough could be done to protect
the common law by a niggardly exposition of every legislating word. It
is to be remembered that some main features of English public law were
attracting the admiration of enlightened Europe. When Voltaire and
Montesquieu applauded, the English lawyer had cause for complacency.
The common law was by no means stagnant. Many rules which come to the
front in the 18th century are hardly to be traced farther. Especially is
this the case in the province of mercantile law, where the earl of
Mansfield's (d. 1793) long presidency over the king's bench marked an
epoch. It is too often forgotten that, until Elizabeth's reign, England
was a thoroughly rustic kingdom, and that trade with England was mainly
in the hands of foreigners. Also in medieval fairs, the assembled
merchants declared their own "law merchant," which was considered to
have a supernational validity. In the reports of the common law courts
it is late in the day before we read of some mercantile usages which can
be traced far back in the statutes of Italian cities. Even on the basis
of the excessively elaborated land law--a basis which Coke's Commentary
on Littleton seemed to have settled for ever--a lofty and ingenious
superstructure could be reared. One after another delicate devices were
invented for the accommodation of new wants within the law; but only by
the assurance that the old law could not be frankly abolished can we be
induced to admire the subtlety that was thus displayed. As to procedure,
it had become a maze of evasive fictions, to which only a few learned
men held the historical clue. By fiction the courts had stolen business
from each other, and by fiction a few comparatively speedy forms of
action were set to tasks for which they were not originally framed. Two
fictitious persons, John Doe and Richard Roe, reigned supreme. On the
other hand, that healthy and vigorous institution, the Commission of the
Peace, with a long history behind it, was giving an important share in
the administration of justice to numerous country gentlemen who were
thus compelled to learn some law. A like beneficial work was being done
among jurors, who, having ceased to be regarded as witnesses, had become
"judges of fact." No one doubted that trial by jury was the "palladium"
of English liberties, and popularity awaited those who would exalt the
office of the jurors and narrowly limit the powers of the judge.
Equity.
But during this age the chief addition to English jurisprudence was made
by the crystallization of the chancellor's equity. In the 17th century
the chancery had a narrow escape of sharing the fate that befell its
twin sister the star chamber. Its younger sister the court of requests
perished under the persistent attacks of the common lawyers. Having
outlived troubles, the chancery took to orderly habits, and administered
under the name of "equity" a growing group of rules, which in fact were
supplemental law. Stages in this process are marked by the
chancellorships of Nottingham (1673-1675) and Hardwicke (1737-1756).
Slowly a continuous series of Equity Reports began to flow, and still
more slowly an "equity bar" began to form itself. The principal outlines
of equity were drawn by men who were steeped in the common law. By way
of ornament a Roman maxim might be borrowed from a French or Dutch
expositor, or a phrase which smacked of that "nature-rightly" school
which was dominating continental Europe; but the influence exercised by
Roman law upon English equity has been the subject of gross
exaggeration. Parliament and the old courts being what they were,
perhaps it was only in a new court that the requisite new law could be
evolved. The result was not altogether satisfactory. Freed from contact
with the plain man in the jury-box, the chancellors were tempted to
forget how plain and rough good law should be, and to screw up the legal
standard of reasonable conduct to a height hardly attainable except by
those whose purses could command the constant advice of a family
solicitor. A court which started with the idea of doing summary justice
for the poor became a court which did a highly refined, but tardy
justice, suitable only to the rich.
Blackstone.
About the middle of the century William Blackstone, then a disappointed
barrister, began to give lectures on English law at Oxford (1758), and
soon afterwards he began to publish (1765) his _Commentaries_. Accurate
enough in its history and doctrine to be an invaluable guide to
professional students and a useful aid to practitioners, his book set
before the unprofessional public an artistic picture of the laws of
England such as had never been drawn of any similar system. No nation
but the English had so eminently readable a law-book, and it must be
doubtful whether any other lawyer ever did more important work than was
done by the first professor of English law. Over and over again the
_Commentaries_ were edited, sometimes by distinguished men, and it is
hardly too much to say that for nearly a century the English lawyer's
main ideas of the organization and articulation of the body of English
law were controlled by Blackstone. This was far from all. The Tory
lawyer little thought that he was giving law to colonies that were on
the eve of a great and successful rebellion. Yet so it was. Out in
America, where books were few and lawyers had a mighty task to perform,
Blackstone's facile presentment of the law of the mother country was of
inestimable value. It has been said that among American lawyers the
_Commentaries_ "stood for the law of England," and this at a time when
the American daughter of English law was rapidly growing in stature, and
was preparing herself for her destined march from the Atlantic to the
Pacific Ocean. Excising only what seemed to savour of oligarchy, those
who had defied King George retained with marvellous tenacity the law of
their forefathers. Profound discussions of English medieval law have
been heard in American courts; admirable researches into the recesses of
the Year-Books have been made in American law schools; the names of the
great American judges are familiar in an England which knows little
indeed of foreign jurists; and the debt due for the loan of Blackstone's
_Commentaries_ is being fast repaid. Lectures on the common law
delivered by Mr Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States
may even have begun to turn the scale against the old country. No
chapter in Blackstone's book nowadays seems more antiquated than that
which describes the modest territorial limits of that English law which
was soon to spread throughout Australia and New Zealand and to follow
the dominant race in India.
Bentham.
Long wars, vast economic changes and the conservatism generated by the
French Revolution piled up a monstrous arrear of work for the English
legislature. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) had laboured for the
overthrow of much that Blackstone had lauded. Bentham's largest projects
of destruction and reconstruction took but little effect. Profoundly
convinced of the fungibility and pliability of mankind, he was but too
ready to draw a code for England or Spain or Russia at the shortest
notice; and, scornful as he was of the past and its historic deposit, a
code drawn by Bentham would have been a sorry failure. On the other
hand, as a critic and derider of the system which Blackstone had
complacently expounded he did excellent service. Reform, and radical
reform, was indeed sadly needed throughout a system which was encumbered
by noxious rubbish, the useless leavings of the middle ages: trial by
battle and compurgation, deodands and benefit of clergy, John Doe and
Richard Roe. It is perhaps the main fault of "judge-made law" (to use
Bentham's phrase) that its destructive work can never be cleanly done.
Of all vitality, and therefore of all patent harmfulness, the old rule
can be deprived, but the moribund husk must remain in the system doing
latent mischief. English law was full of decaying husks when Bentham
attacked it, and his persistent demand for reasons could not be
answered. At length a general interest in "law reform" was excited;
Romilly and Brougham were inspired by Bentham, and the great changes in
constitutional law which cluster round the Reform Act of 1832 were
accompanied by many measures which purged the private, procedural and
criminal law of much, though hardly enough, of the medieval dross. Some
credit for rousing an interest in law, in definitions of legal terms,
and in schemes of codification, is due to John Austin (d. 1859) who was
regarded as the jurist of the reforming and utilitarian group. But,
though he was at times an acute dissector of confused thought, he was
too ignorant of the English, the Roman and every other system of law to
make any considerable addition to the sum of knowledge; and when
Savigny, the herald of evolution, was already in the field, the day for
a "Nature-Right"--and Austin's projected "general jurisprudence" would
have been a Nature-Right--was past beyond recall. The obsolescence of
the map of law which Blackstone had inherited from Hale, and in which
many outlines were drawn by medieval formulas, left intelligent English
lawyers without a guide, and they were willing to listen for a while to
what in their insularity they thought to be the voice of cosmopolitan
science. Little came of it all. The revived study of Germanic law in
Germany, which was just beginning in Austin's day, seems to be showing
that the scheme of Roman jurisprudence is not the scheme into which
English law will run without distortion.
Recent changes.
In the latter half of the 19th century some great and wise changes were
made by the legislature. Notably in 1875 the old courts were merged in a
new Supreme Court of Judicature, and a concurrent administration of law
and equity was introduced. Successful endeavours have been made also to
reduce the bulk of old statute law, and to improve the form of acts of
parliament; but the emergence of new forces whose nature may be
suggested by some such names as "socialism" and "imperialism" has
distracted the attention of the British parliament from the commonplace
law of the land, and the development of obstructive tactics has caused
the issue of too many statutes whose brevity was purchased by
disgraceful obscurity. By way of "partial codification" some branches of
the common law (bills of exchange, sale of goods, partnership) have been
skilfully stated in statutes, but a draft criminal code, upon which much
expert labour was expended, lies pigeon-holed and almost forgotten.
British India has been the scene of some large legislative exploits, and
in America a few big experiments have been made in the way of
code-making, but have given little satisfaction to the bulk of those who
are competent to appreciate their results. In England there are large
portions of the law which, in their present condition, no one would
think of codifying: notably the law of real property, in which may still
be found numerous hurtful relics of bygone centuries. So omnipresent are
statutes throughout the whole field of jurisprudence that the
opportunity of doing any great feat in the development of law can come
but seldom to a modern court. More and more, therefore, the fate of
English law depends on the will of parliament, or rather of the
ministry. The quality of legal text-books has steadily improved; some of
them are models of clear statement and good arrangement; but no one has
with any success aspired to be the Blackstone of a new age.
Law reporting.
The Council of Law Reporting was formed in the year 1863. The council
now consists of three _ex-officio_ members--the attorney-general, the
solicitor-general and the president of the Incorporated Law Society, and
ten members appointed by the three Inns of Court, the Incorporated Law
Society and the council itself on the nomination of the general council
of the bar. The practitioner and the student now get for a subscription
of four guineas a year the reports in all the superior courts and the
House of Lords, and the judicial committee of the privy council issued
in monthly parts a king's printer's copy of the statutes, and weekly
notes, containing short notes of current decisions and announcements of
all new rules made under the Judicature Acts and other acts of
parliament, and other legal information. In addition the subscriber
receives the chronological index of the statutes published from time to
time by the Stationery Office, and last, but not least, the Digests of
decided cases published by the council from time to time. In 1892 a
Digest was published containing the cases and statutes for twenty-five
years, from 1865 to 1890, and this was supplemented by one for the
succeeding ten years, from 1891 to 1900. The digesting is now carried on
continuously by means of "Current Indexes," which are published monthly
and annually, and consolidated into a digest at stated intervals (say)
of five years. The Indian appeals series, which is not required by the
general practitioner, is supplied separately at one guinea a year.
Legal education.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the corporate life of the Inns of Court in
London became less and less active. The general decay of the organization
of crafts and gilds showed itself among lawyers as among other craftsmen.
Successful barristers, sharing in the general prosperity of the country,
became less and less able and willing to devote their time to the welfare
of their profession as a whole. The Inns of Chancery, though some of
their buildings still remain--picturesque survivals in their
"suburbs"--ceased to be used as places for the education of students. The
benchers of the Inns of Court, until the revival towards the middle of
the 19th century, had wholly ceased to concern themselves with the
systematic teaching of law. The modern system of legal education may be
said to date from the establishment, in 1852, of the council of legal
education, a body of twenty judges and barristers appointed by the four
Inns of Court to control the legal education of students preparing to be
called to the bar. The most important feature is the examination which a
student must pass before he can be called. The examination (which by
degrees has been made "stiffer") serves the double purpose of fixing the
compulsory standard which all must reach, and of guiding the reading of
students who may desire, sooner or later, to carry their studies beyond
this standard. The subjects in which the examination is held are divided
into Roman law; Constitutional law and legal history; Evidence, Procedure
and Criminal law; Real and Personal Property; Equity; and Common law. The
council of legal education also appoint a body of readers and assistant
readers, practising barristers, who deliver lectures and hold classes.
Meanwhile the custom remains by which a student reads for a year or more
as a pupil in the chambers of some practising barrister. In the 18th
century it first became usual for students to read with a solicitor or
attorney, and after a short time the modern practice grew up of reading
in the chambers of a conveyancer, equity draftsman or special pleader,
or, in more recent times, in the chambers of a junior barrister. Before
the modern examination system, a student required to have a certificate
from the barrister in whose chambers he had been a pupil before he could
be "called," but the only relic of the old system now is the necessity
of "eating dinners," six (three for university men) in each of the four
terms for three years, at one of the Inns of Court.
The education of solicitors suffered from the absence of any
professional organization until the Incorporated Law Society was
established in 1825 and the following years. So far as any professional
education is provided for solicitors or required from them, this is due
to the efforts of the Law Society. As early as 1729 it was required by
statute that any person applying for admission as attorney or solicitor
should submit to examination by one of the judges, who was to test his
fitness and capacity in consideration of a fee of one shilling. At the
same time regular preliminary service under articles was required, that
is to say, under a contract by which the clerk was bound to serve for
five years. The examination soon became, perhaps always was, an empty
form. The Law Society, however, soon showed zeal for the education of
future solicitors. In 1833 lectures were instituted. In 1836 the first
regular examinations were established, and in 1860 the present system of
examinations--preliminary, intermediate and final--came into effect. Of
these only the last two are devoted to law, and both are of a strictly
professional character. The final examination is a fairly severe test of
practical acquaintance with all branches of modern English law. The Law
Society makes some provision for the teaching of students, but this
teaching is designed solely to assist in preparation for the
examinations.
At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge there has, since 1850, been
an attempt to promote the study of law. The curriculum of legal subjects
in which lectures are given and examinations held is calculated to give
a student a sound fundamental knowledge of general principles, as well
as an elementary acquaintance with the rules of modern English law.
Jurisprudence, Roman law, Constitutional law and International law are
taught, as well as the law of Real and Personal Property, the Law of
Contract and Tort, Criminal law, Procedure and Evidence. But the law
tripos and the law schools suffer from remoteness from the law courts,
and from the exclusively academical character of the teaching. Law is
also taught, though not on a very large scale, at Manchester and at
Liverpool. London University has encouraged the study of law by its
examinations for law degrees, at which a comparatively high standard of
knowledge is required; and at University College, London, and King's
College, London, teaching is given in law and jurisprudence.
AUTHORITIES.--F. Liebermann, _Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen_ (1898);
K.E. Digby, _History of the Law of Real Property_; Sir W. Dugdale,
_Origines juridicales_ (1671); O.W. Holmes, _The Common Law_ (Boston,
1881); H. Hallam, _Constitutional History_; W.S. Holdsworth, _History
of English Law_, 3 vols. (1903-9); J. Reeves, _History of English
Law_, ed. W.F. Finlason (1869); T. Madox, _History and Antiquities of
the Exchequer_ (1769); C. de Franqueville, _Le Systeme judiciaire de
la Grande-Bretagne_ (Paris, 1893); Sir F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland,
_History of English Law_ (2 vols., 1898); H. Brunner, _The Sources of
the Law of England_, trans. by W. Hastie (1888); Sir R.K. Wilson,
_History of Modern English Law_ (1875); A.V. Dicey, _Law and Public
Opinion in England_ (1905); Sir J.F. Stephen, _History of the Criminal
Law of England_ (3 vols., 1883); W. Stubbs, _Select Charters,
Constitutional History_; the Publications of the Selden Society and
the Year Books in the Rolls Series. (F. W. M.)
ENGLISH LITERATURE. The following discussion of the evolution of English
literature, i.e. of the contribution to literature made in the course of
ages by the writers of England, is planned so as to give a comprehensive
view, the details as to particular authors and their work, and special
consideration of the greater writers, being given in the separate
articles devoted to them. It is divided into the following sections: (1)
Earliest times to Chaucer; (2) Chaucer to the end of the middle ages;
(3) Elizabethan times; (4) the Restoration period; (5) the Eighteenth
century; (6) the Nineteenth century. The object of these sections is to
form connecting links among the successive literary ages, leaving the
separate articles on individual great writers to deal with their special
interest; attention being paid in the main to the gradually developing
characteristics of the product, qua literary. The precise delimitation
of what may narrowly be called "English" literature, i.e. in the English
language, is perhaps impossible, and separate articles are devoted to
American literature (q.v.), and to the vernacular literatures of
Scotland (see SCOTLAND; and CELT: _Literature_), Ireland (see CELT:
_Literature_), and Wales (see CELT: _Literature_); see also CANADA:
_Literature_. Reference may also be made to such general articles on
particular forms as NOVEL; ROMANCE; VERSE, &c.
I. EARLIEST TIMES TO CHAUCER
English literature, in the etymological sense of the word, had, so far
as we know, no existence until Christian times. There is no evidence
either that the heathen English had adopted the Roman alphabet, or that
they had learned to employ their native monumental script (the runes) on
materials suitable for the writing of continuous compositions of
considerable length.
It is, however, certain that in the pre-literary period at least one
species of poetic art had attained a high degree of development, and
that an extensive body of poetry was handed down--not, indeed, with
absolute fixity of form or substance--from generation to generation.
This unwritten poetry was the work of minstrels who found their
audiences in the halls of kings and nobles. Its themes were the exploits
of heroes belonging to the royal houses of Germanic Europe, with which
its listeners claimed kinship. Its metre was the alliterative long line,
the lax rhythm of which shows that it was intended, not to be sung to
regular melodies, but to be recited--probably with some kind of
instrumental accompaniment. Of its beauty and power we may judge from
the best passages in _Beowulf_ (q.v.); for there can be little doubt
that this poem gained nothing and lost much in the process of literary
redaction.
The conversion of the people to Christianity necessarily involved the
decline of the minstrelsy that celebrated the glories of heathen times.
Yet the descendants of Woden, even when they were devout Christians,
would not easily lose all interest in the achievements of their kindred
of former days. Chaucer's knowledge of "the song of Wade" is one proof
among others that even so late as the 14th century the deeds of Germanic
heroes had not ceased to be recited in minstrel verse. The paucity of
the extant remains of Old English heroic poetry is no argument to the
contrary. The wonder is that any of it has survived at all. We may well
believe that the professional reciter would, as a rule, be jealous of
any attempt to commit to writing the poems which he had received by
tradition or had himself composed. The clergy, to whom we owe the
writing and the preservation of the Old English MSS., would only in rare
instances be keenly interested in secular poetry. We possess, in fact,
portions of four narrative poems, treating of heroic legend--_Beowulf_,
_Widsith_, _Finnesburh_ and _Waldere_. The second of these has no
poetical merit, but great archaeological interest. It is an enumeration
of the famous kings known to German tradition, put into the mouth of a
minstrel (named Widsith, "far-travelled"), who claims to have been at
many of their courts and to have been rewarded by them for his song. The
list includes historical persons such as Ermanaric and Alboin, who
really lived centuries apart, but (with the usual chronological
vagueness of tradition) are treated as contemporaries. The extant
fragment of _Finnesburh_ (50 lines) is a brilliant battle piece,
belonging to a story of which another part is introduced episodically in
_Beowulf_. _Waldere_, of which we have two fragments (together 68 lines)
is concerned with Frankish and Burgundian traditions based on events of
the 5th century; the hero is the "Waltharius" of Ekkehart's famous Latin
epic. The English poem may possibly be rather a literary composition
than a genuine example of minstrel poetry, but the portions that have
survived are hardly inferior to the best passages of _Beowulf_.
It may reasonably be assumed that the same minstrels who entertained the
English kings and nobles with the recital of ancient heroic traditions
would also celebrate in verse the martial deeds of their own patrons and
their immediate ancestors. Probably there may have existed an abundance
of poetry commemorative of events in the conquest of Britain and the
struggle with the Danes. Two examples only have survived, both belonging
to the 10th century: The _Battle of Brunanburh_, which has been greatly
over-praised by critics who were unaware that its striking phrases and
compounds are mere traditional echoes; and the _Battle of Maldon_, the
work of a truly great poet, of which unhappily only a fragment has been
preserved.
One of the marvels of history is the rapidity and thoroughness with
which Christian civilization was adopted by the English. Augustine
landed in 597; forty years later was born an Englishman, Aldhelm, who in
the judgment of his contemporaries throughout the Christian world was
the most accomplished scholar and the finest Latin writer of his time.
In the next generation England produced in Bede (Baeda) a man who in
solidity and variety of knowledge, and in literary power, had for
centuries no rival in Europe. Aldhelm and Bede are known to us only from
their Latin writings, though the former is recorded to have written
vernacular poetry of great merit. The extant Old English literature is
almost entirely Christian, for the poems that belong to an earlier
period have been expurgated and interpolated in a Christian sense. From
the writings that have survived, it would seem as if men strove to
forget that England had ever been heathen. The four deities whose names
are attached to the days of the week are hardly mentioned at all. The
names Thunor and Tiw are sometimes used to translate the Latin Jupiter
and Mars; Woden has his place (but not as a god) in the genealogies of
the kings, and his name occurs once in a magical poem, but that is all.
Bede, as a historian, is obliged to tell the story of the conversion;
but the only native divinities he mentions are the goddesses Hreth and
Eostre, and all we learn about them is that they gave their names to
Hrethemonath (March) and Easter. That superstitious practices of heathen
origin long survived among the people is shown by the acts of church
councils and by a few poems of a magical nature that have been
preserved; but, so far as can be discovered, the definite worship of the
ancient gods quickly died out. English heathenism perished without
leaving a record.
The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without
exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible
and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful _Dream
of the Rood_, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though
much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we
should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived
from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic
poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by
Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two
poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich
rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old
English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long
line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of
alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in
the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure
of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns
of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used
as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only,
and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is
employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to
sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in
metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained
faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly
those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the
saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of
Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any
considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria
during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of _Judith_,
however, is certainly much later; and the _Exodus_, though early, seems
to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English
sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on CAeDMON and
CYNEWULF, to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except
those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.
The Riddles (q.v.) of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in
being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the
impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the
most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter
Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying
proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is
Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they
contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very
curious _Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn_ may be regarded as belonging to
the same class.
The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary
poetry is the group of dramatic monologues--_The Banished Wife's
Complaint_, _The Husband's Message_, _The Wanderer_, _The Seafarer_,
_Deor_ and _Wulf and Eadwacer_. The date of these compositions is
uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they
cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period
is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone
of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear
idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable
that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with
which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This,
however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short
pieces--_Deor_ and _Wulf and Eadwacer_--which have something of a lyric
character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure
and the use of the refrain. _Wulf and Eadwacer_, indeed, exhibits a
still further development in the same direction, the monotony of the
long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by
the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art
displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the
existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its
extent and variety.
While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English
prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of
Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was
written much earlier. The English laws of Aethelberht of Kent, though it
is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly
supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died A.D. 604), or even in that
of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the
12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and
elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of
Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the
native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the
gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (q.v.) is probably founded partly on prose annals of
pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written
between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may
have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the
appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English
clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of
Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would
probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not
indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he
was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual
guides.
Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, _St
Gregory's Pastoral Care_ and his _Dialogues_ (the latter rendered by
Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other
translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all
(not excepting the secular _History of Orosius_) essentially religious
in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the _Pastoral
Care_, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted
in the _Orosius_, and in the free rendering and amplification of the
_Consolation_ of Boethius and of the _Soliloquies_ of Augustine, Alfred
appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws
(preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine
of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old
English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the
Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be
regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see ANGLO-SAXON
CHRONICLE), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from
Latin and of homilies and saints' lives, the substance of which is
derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it
has therefore for us little importance except from the philological
point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the
writings of Aelfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to
his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the
native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels,
though executed in Aelfric's time (about 1000), is by other hands. The
sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by
earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical
value.
From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic
manual of the science of the time--chronology, astronomy, arithmetic,
metre, rhetoric and ethics--by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of
Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The
numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are
in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they
are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than
that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or
two formulas of incantations in Irish.
Two famous works of fiction, the romance of _Apollonius of Tyre_ and the
_Letter of Alexander_, which in their Latin form had much influence on
the later literature
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