of summer amidst the gloom of a
long, dark, and stormy, winter. Before the Norman conquest the
Anglo-Saxon tongue fell into disrepute; and French teachers and French
manners were affected by the high-born.

During the reign of Edward, the Confessor, it ceased to be cultivated;
and after the Conqueror, it became more barbarous and vulgar, as it was
then the sign of servility, and the badge of an enslaved race.

As early as the year 652, the Anglo-Saxons were accustomed to send their
youth to French monasteries to be educated. In succeeding centuries the
court and nobility were intimately allied to the magnates of France; and
the adoption of French manners was deemed an accomplishment. The
conquerors commanded the laws to be administered in French. Children at
school were forbidden to read their native language, and the English
name became a term of reproach. An old writer in the eleventh century
says: "Children in scole, agenst the usage and manir of all other
nations, beeth compelled for to leve hire own langage, and for to
construe his lessons and thynges in Frenche, and so they haveth sethe
Normans came first into England." The Saxon was spoken by the peasants,
in the country, yet not without an intermixture of French; the courtly
language was French with some vestiges of the vernacular Saxon.

The Conqueror's army was composed of the flower of the Norman nobility.
They brought with them the taste, the arts, and the refinements, they
had acquired in France. European schools and scholars had been greatly
benefitted by studying Latin versions of Greek philosophers from the
Arabic. Many learned men of the laity also became teachers, and the
Church no longer enjoyed a monopoly of letters. They travelled into
Spain to attend the Arabic schools.

It is a remarkable fact that Greek learning should have travelled
through Bagdad to reach Europe.

The Arabs were as fond of letters as of war. In the eighth century, when
they overran the Asiatic provinces, they found many Greek books which
they read with eagerness. They translated such as best pleased them into
Arabic. Greek poetry they rejected because it was polytheistic. Of Greek
history they made no use, because it recorded events prior to the advent
of their prophet. The politics of Greece and its eloquence were not
congenial to their despotic notions, and so they passed them by. Grecian
ethics were suspended by the Koran, hence Plato was overlooked.
Mathematics, metap