and then also commences for them that
annoyance to which so many English children have been subjected, from
generation to generation down to our time: the difficulty of knowing
when to say _mon_ and _ma_--"kaunt dewunt dire moun et ma"--that
is how to distinguish the genders. They have to be taught by manuals,
and the popularity of one written by Walter de Biblesworth,[389] in the
fourteenth century, shows how greatly such treatises were needed. "Dear
sister," writes Walter to the Lady Dionyse de Montchensy, "I have
composed this work so that your children can know the properties of
the things they see, and also when to say _mon_ and _ma_, _son_ and
_sa_, _le_ and _la_, _moi_ and _je_." And he goes on showing at the
same time the maze and the way out of it: "You have _la levre_ and
_le lievre_; and _la livre_ and _le livre_. The _levre_ closes the teeth
in; _le lievre_ the woods inhabits; _la livre_ is used in trade; _le
livre_ is used at church."[390]

Inextricable difficulties! And all the harder to unravel that
Anglo-Saxon too had genders, equally arbitrary, which did not agree with
the French ones. It is easy to conceive that among the various
compromises effected between the two idioms, from which English was
finally to emerge, the principal should be the suppression of this
cumbersome distinction of genders.

What happened in the manor happened also in the courts of justice. There
French was likewise spoken, it being the rule, and the trials were
apparently not lacking in liveliness, witness this judge whom we see
paraphrasing the usual formula: "Allez a Dieu," or "Adieu," and wishing
the defendant, none other than the bishop of Chester, to "go to the
great devil"--"Allez au grant deable."[391]--("'What,' said Ponocrates,
'brother John, do you swear?' 'It is only,' said the monk, 'to adorn my
speech. These are colours of Ciceronian rhetoric.'")--But from most of
the speeches registered in French in the "Year-books," it is easily
gathered that advocates, _serjeants_ as they were called, did not
express themselves without difficulty, and that they delivered in French
what they had thought in English.

Their trouble goes on increasing. In 1300 a regulation in force at
Oxford allowed people who had to speak in a suit to express themselves
in "_any_ language generally understood."[392] In the second half of the
century, the difficulties have reached such a pitch that a reform
becomes indispensable; counsel and clien