radiction to the
sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest
acknowledgement of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon
race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true,
but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He
had great things in store for the people which should occupy this
English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At
the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with any
large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably
later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French
words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of
language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two
nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither
forgetting the fact.

Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while
shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his
home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme
depression which had ensued on his defeat, became every day a more
important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming
from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his
elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no
longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet
sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language,
required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the
needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of
high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures,
which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no
utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the
French.

We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the
incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the
Norman nobility were exchanging their own language for the English; and
I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much
exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to
one man's influence, namely to Chaucer's{38}. Doubtless he did much; he
fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to
suppose that the majority of French vocables which he employed in his
poems had never been employed before, had been