A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny of the

nobility, and the sufferings of the inferior classes, arose from

the consequences of the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Four

generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans

and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests,

two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while

the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat. The power had

been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility, by the event

of the battle of Hastings, and it had been used, as our histories assure

us, with no moderate hand.

The whole race of Saxon princes and nobles

had been extirpated or disinherited, with few or no exceptions; nor were

the numbers great who possessed land in the country of their fathers,

even as proprietors of the second, or of yet inferior classes. The royal

policy had long been to weaken, by every means, legal or illegal, the

strength of a part of the population which was justly considered as

nourishing the most inveterate antipathy to their victor.

All the monarchs of the Norman race had shown the most marked predilection for

their Norman subjects; the laws of the chase, and many others equally

unknown to the milder and more free spirit of the Saxon constitution,

had been fixed upon the necks of the subjugated inhabitants, to add

weight, as it were, to the feudal chains with which they were loaded. At

court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state

of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed;

in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the same

tongue.

In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and

even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon

was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other. Still,

however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil,

and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated,

occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt

the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves

mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by

degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the

speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended

together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations

from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern

nations of Europe.

This state of things I have thought it necessary to premise for the

information of the general reader, who might be apt to forget, that,

although no great historical events, such as war or insurrection, mark

the existence of the Anglo-Saxons as a separate people subsequent to the

reign of William the Second; yet the great national distinctions betwixt

them and their conquerors, the recollection of what they had formerly

been, and to what they were now reduced, continued down to the reign

of Edward the Third, to keep open the wounds which the Conquest had

inflicted, and to maintain a line of separation betwixt the descendants

of the victor Normans and the vanquished Saxons.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024