king of Wessex, defeated and made tributary all the other Saxon kings. The most distinguished of the West Saxon kings was Alfred, who, to remarkable prowess in war, united a taste for letters. He not only drew learned men from other parts of Europe into England, but by his own literary efforts, especially in translating Bede's History, and Boethius on the Consolations of Philosophy, and Orosius's History of the World, he gave so much prominence to the West Saxon language as to constitute it the cultivated language of the Anglo-Saxons.

Thus we can understand how it is that the Anglo-Saxon enters so largely into the English; that it is less an element than it is the mother-tongue, upon which a few words have been ingrafted from other languages. To this point we shall return.

It is remarkable that the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, and a fourth emigrating tribe, namely, the Frisians, lay between the two great branches of the Gothic, the Scandinavian on the north, and the Teutonic on the south. The Jutes were the most Danish, and the Frisians were the most Dutch. That they understood each other's language there can be no doubt. Probably, however, they differed so much that the provincial differences now existing in England may be owing to original difference of dialect in these tribes. The Frisians, now residing in Friesland, speak a language strongly resembling the Anglo-Saxon. Probably but few of their tribe came to England with the other tribes, while so many of the Angles came as to leave their country unpeopled.

OBJECTIONS

TO THE TERM ANGLO-SAXON.

§ 67. Objections have been made to the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as applicable to the language, on the ground that the Angles, emigrating in much greater numbers, and occupying a much larger part of Britain than the other tribes, have a claim to give their own name to the language, as they did to the country, to wit, Angleland=England. An additional ground of objection may be found in the fact that the term "Englise," as applied to the language, and the term "Anglorum lingua," were for centuries in use before the term Anglo-Saxon obtained currency.

"Our national name of Angle is derived by Bede from the

nook, "angulus," in which our forefathers lived on the Continent. Angle, in Anglo-Saxon, means a hook, and in the Gothic language seems to have meant any thing that ended in a point. The Angli of Tacitus, it is well known, lived at the point where the coast of the Baltic bends suddenly northward."-GUEST, London Phil. Soc.

THE LANGUAGE BEFORE THE COMING OF THE

NORMAN S.

§ 68. As to the language spoken before the coming of the Normans, Camden remarks: "Great, verily, was the glory of the English tongue (An.-Sax.) before the Norman Conquest, in this, that the Old English could express most aptly all the conceits of the mind in their own tongue, without borrowing from any. For example, the holy service of God, which the Latins. call religio, because it knitteth the minds of men together, they call ean fastness, as the one only assurance anchor-hold of our soul's health. The certain inward knowledge of that which is in our own mind, be it good or bad, which with the Latin word we call conscience, they call inwit; as that which doth inwardly wit, that is, doth know certainly. That which in a river is called channel, was called stream race. That which we call grandfather, they called eald fader. That which we called great-grandfather, they called third fader. The alteration in our tongue hath been brought about by the entrance of strangers, as Danes, Normans, and others which have swarmed hither; by traffic, for new words as well as new wares have always come in; by the tyrant Time, which altereth all things under heaven; by use, which swayeth most and hath an absolute command in words; and by pregnant wits it hath been beautified and enriched out of other good tongues, partly by refining and mollifying old words, and partly by implanting new words with artificial composition, so that our tongue was as copious as any other in Europe."

Such is the parentage of the English language. As compared with the Anglo-Saxon, with what emphasis, then, can we say of the present English, in the words of Horace,

"O matre pulchra filia pulchrior!"

INTRODUCTION OF THE DANISH ELEMENT.

§ 69. As early as A.D. 787, the Northmen, including Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes, commenced their aggressions upon England, and for at least three centuries were the terror of the Anglo-Saxons. Of these three Scandinavian nations the Swedes took the least share, the Norwegians the greatest, in these invasions. "They generally anchored their ships at the mouths of rivers, or lay under the islands on the coasts. Thence they would sail up the rivers to the interior of the country, where they frequently mounted on horseback, and conveyed themselves with incredible speed from one place to another. Their frightful sabre-cuts resounded every where. The terrified inhabitants imagined they beheld a judgment of God in the devastations of the Vikings, which had been foretold in ancient prophecy." Having taken possession of the country, they placed on the throne successively three Danish kings, which they occu pied for the space of twenty-six years. They afterward yielded to the line of Saxon kings in the person of Edward the Confessor. The language of the three nations was the same, the differences being those of dialect. Many traces of this language are to be found in England, especially in the northern parts.

1. Thus, Grimsby (the town of Grim); Whitby (the white town); Deorby, contracted to Derby (town of deer); Dalby (village in the dale); (Millthorpe) Dan. Möldrup, (mill village); Codale (cow dale). It appears that there are 1373 names of places of Danish origin.

2. The Danish element enters largely into provincial dialects of the north of England, namely, Northumberland, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire.-WORSAE's Danes and Norwegians, p. 85.

3. On a monument in Aldburgh Church, Holdernesse, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, referred to the age of Edward the Confessor, is found the following inscription:

Ulf het araeran cyrice for hanum and for Gunthara saula.

Ulf did rear the church for him and for the soul of Gunthar.

Now in this inscription, Ulf, in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon Wulf, is a Norse form; while hanum is a Norse dative, and by no means an Anglo-Saxon one. Old Norse, hanum; Swedish, honom.

4. The use of at for to, as the sign of the infinitive mode, is Norse, not Saxon; as, at think, at do, instead of to think, to do. It is the regular prefix in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Feroic. It is also found in the northern dialects of the Old English, and in the particular dialect of Westmoreland at the present day.

5. Formerly sum was used for as; e. g., swa sum, we forgive oure detturs (Dan. som). War is now used for was (Dan.

var).

6. This list of words, which might be increased, are found in Northumberland and Yorkshire, and elsewhere:

The Danish or Norse element of the Anglo-Norman, as in the proper names Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, constitutes the Indirect Scandinavian element of the English.-Rev. RICHARD GARNETT, Phil. Soc., vol. i., p. 79.

INTRODUCTION OF THE

ANGLO-NORMAN ELEMENT.

§ 70. The Norman French was spoken in the northern parts of France, from the Loire to the confines of Flanders. It is composed of three elements, the Celtic, the Latin, and the Scandinavian. The latter element was introduced by Rollo, a Norwegian chieftain, and the Northmen who settled in Normandy, and gave it its name. Norman-French was called Langue d'oil. Its position can be understood from the following statement: The Latin language of the classical stock, at first confined to Central Italy, was afterward spoken more or less through the Roman empire. Out of the union of the Latin with the several other languages spoken in that empire grew six principal dialects which deserve to be called languages; two eastern, the

Italian and Wallachian; two southern, the Spanish and Portuguese; and two northwestern, the Norman-French and the Provençal. This last was spoken in the south part of France.WOOLSEY on the Romanic Languages, New Englander, vol. v., p. 13. See § 405.

In the year A.D. 1066, William, duke of Normandy, having landed an army of sixty thousand men in England, at the battle of Hastings killed Harold the king, defeated his army, and thus put an end to the Anglo-Saxon dynasty. After he had ascended the throne, his followers were rewarded by the principal offices of trust in the kingdom, and by the estates of the nobility.

NORMAN-FRENCH SPOKEN BY THE HIGHER CLASSES.

§ 71. The Norman-French, as a consequence, was spoken by the superior classes of society in England, from the Conquest to the time of Edward the Third, 1327; between two and three hundred years. The laws of the realm, the proceedings in Parliament and in the courts of justice, were in the French language. Grammar-school-boys were made to construe their Latin into French. In the statutes of Oriel College, Oxford, there is a regulation, so late as 1328, that the students shall converse together, if not in Latin, at least in French.

As exemplifying the profound ignorance of the English kings respecting the languag of the greater portion of their subjects, we have the following anecdote: Henry II., who ascended the throne in 1154, having been addressed by a number of his subjects during a journey into Pembrokeshire, in a speech commencing with the words "Good ole Kynge!" asked of his attendants an interpretation of these words!

MIXTURE OF THE RACES.

§ 72. In the thirteenth century the mixture of the races was going on extensively and rapidly, and, of consequence, a literature sprang up between the two extremes, in which the two languages are, without any rule, more or less mixed together, and which belonged to a middle class of society, who spoke both languages.

In the fourteenth century the Anglo-Saxon principle seemed to have gained the upper hand. In 1350, John Cornwall, a