of faith as the English Church of his time accepted them. It was made public by the authority of Sigeric, then Archbishop of Canterbury. The other set tells of the saints whom the church then revered. Elfric also began a translation, in abridgment, of the Bible into English, and completed in this way the whole Pentateuch, as well as the Book of Job. Thus Elfric is to be remembered as the first man who translated into English prose any considerable portion of the Bible. 7. It has already been mentioned that the great national record of English history, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was established in King Alfred's time, and continued to be written, year by year, until almost a century after the Norman Conquest. With this work, representing both prose and poetry, the story of First English literature, therefore, comes to an end. CHAPTER I. WRITINGS OF ENGLISHMEN IN LATIN AND IN FRENCH. 1. The English Language before and after the Norman Conquest.-2. Writings in Latin and in French.-3. Chronicles. -4. William of Malmesbury.-5. Geof frey of Monmouth.- -6. Wace.-7. A Group of Minor Chroniclers.-8. Ralph Higden.-9. Romances; Walter Map.-10. Other Romance-Writers. — 11. Sawulf.-12. Hilarius.—13. Miracle-Plays and Mysteries.-14. Writers on Science; Athelard of Bath.-15. Alexander Neckham.-16. Roger Bacon.17. Writers on Law; Ralph Glanville; Henry of Bracton.-18. Religious Discussion; English Debate concerning Authority.-19. Nigel Wireker.20. Robert Grosseteste.-21. Richard de Bury. 1. DURING the four centuries from Cædmon to the Conquest the language of books written in English may be said to have been fixed. Among the First English themselves, mixtures of race and tribe from the Continent varied in different parts of the country, and in each place the constituents and the proportions of the mixture were shown by the form of speech. Provincial dialects were thus established. Then, as now, the spoken language of the country had its local differences, only more strongly marked than they now are; and the untaught multitude was careless about grammar; while the cultivated class, which produced books, maintained in them a standard of the language, being careful to preserve accuracy in use of inflection, discrimination of gender, and upon all other such points. Even the vocabulary of First English literature remained for those four centuries very uniform; so that, with a few traces of provincialism which may point towards the birthplace of a writer, and perhaps some looseness of grammar towards the close of the period, during the four centuries of First English literature, all English thought written in English may be said to have come down to us in one language as fixed as that which we now speak. But, during the three centuries from the Conquest to the time of Chaucer, there was continuous change. The language then was in transition to the later form, in which, again, it became fixed. In race the Normans were another combination of the English elements. Even the part of France on which they had established themselves was Teutonized before they came to it; for it was that which had in Cæsar's time a population traceable to a Teutonic immigration, and to which there had come in the fifth century the Franks, - Teutons again. As far as concerned race only, there was quite as much of original kindred in the blood of those whom we call Normans and Saxons as between fellow-Englishmen now living in Yorkshire and in Hampshire. But the energetic Normans had been drawing, for the subsequent advantage of the world, their own separate lessons from the school of life. They had dropped in France their own language; their sons learnt speech of the mothers found in the new country, and, when they first came over to England as rulers, gave kings who spoke only French, ecclesiastics whom their kings could trust, French-speaking abbots at the head of the monasteries (which were the only conservators of knowledge and centres of education), and French-speaking knights in their castles, as centres of influence among the native rural population. French was the language of the ruling class in Church and State. Latin was used in books habitually as the common language of the educated throughout Europe, the only language in which a scholar might hope to address, not merely the few among a single people, but the whole republic of letters. English remained the language of the people, and its predomi nance was sure. But there was no longer in the monasteries a cultivated class maintaining a standard of the language. The common people were not strict in care of genders and inflections. Those newcomers who sought to make themselves understood in English helped also to bring old niceties of inflection to decay. At the same time old words were modified, and some were dropped, when their places were completely taken by convenient new words that formed part of the large vocabulary wherewith our language was now being enriched. In large towns change was continuous and somewhat rapid; in country districts it was slow. Thus, while the provincial distinctions all remained, local |