something the first condition was to learn French. This condition
remained so long a necessary one, it was even impossible to foresee that
it should ever cease to exist; and the wisest, during that period, were
of opinion that only works written in French were assured of longevity.
Gerald de Barry, who had written in Latin, regretted at the end of his
life that he had not employed the French language, "gallicum," which
would have secured to his works, he thought, a greater and more lasting
fame.[154]

Besides the force lent to it by the Conquest, the diffusion of the
French tongue was also facilitated by the marvellous renown it then
enjoyed throughout Europe. Never had it a greater; men of various races
wrote it, and the Italian Brunetto Latini, who used it, gave among other
reasons for so doing, "that this speech is more delightful and more
common to all people."[155] Such being the case, it spread quickly in
England, where it was, for a long time, the language used in laws and
deeds, in the courts of justice, in Parliamentary debates,[156] the
language used by the most refined poets of the period.

And thus it happened that next to authors, French by race and language,
subjects of the kings of England, were found others employing the same
idiom, though of English blood. They strove, to the best of their
possibility, to imitate the style in favour with the rulers of the land,
they wrote chronicles in French, as did, in the twelfth and fourteenth
centuries, Jordan Fantosme[157] and Peter de Langtoft; religious poems,
as Robert of Greteham, Robert Grosseteste, William of Wadington did in
the thirteenth; romances in verse, like those of Hue of Rotelande
(twelfth century); moralised tales in prose, like those of Nicole Bozon;
lyric poems,[158] or _fabliaux_,[159] like those composed by various
anonymous writers; ballads such as those we owe, quite at the end of the
period, in the second half of the fourteenth century, to Chaucer's
friend, John Gower.

At this distance from the Conquest, French still played an important,
though greatly diminished, part; it remained, as will be seen, the
language of the Court; the accounts of the sittings of Parliament
continued to be written in French; a London citizen registered in French
on his note-book all that he knew concerning the history of his
town.[160] As Robert of Gloucester had said, the case was an
unparalleled one. This French literature, the work of Englishmen,
consisted