sm from the table-talk of his
Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the
Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became
intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching
to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English.
In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their
_medicine, botany_, and _astronomy_ displaced the old nomenclature of
_leechdom, wort-cunning_ and _star-craft._ And, finally, the translators
of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily
than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied
them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest
words in every-day use, so that _voice_ drove out _steven, poor_ drove
out _earm_, and _color, use_, and _place_ made good their footing beside
_hue, wont_, and _stead_. A great part of the English words that were
left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically
new. Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred
Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than
from the latter's. To Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language
as it is to us.

The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken
and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had
displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's
English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard
English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk,
Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had
been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its
inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language,
after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient
forms, sank into the position of a local dialect; while the East
Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary
English in which Chaucer wrote.

The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of
literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England
with the Continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman
archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type
quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic
philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed
discipline