[A.D. 1065 blood of those whom we call Normans and Saxons as between fellow-Englishmen now living in Yorkshire and in Hampshire. But the energetic Normans had been drawing, for the subsequent advantage of the world, their own separate lessons from the school of life. They had dropped in France their own language, their sons learnt speech of the mothers found in the new country, and when they first came over here as rulers, gave us kings who spoke only French; ecclesiastics whom their kings could trust, French-speaking abbots at the head of the monasteries, which were the only conservators of knowledge and centres of education; and French-speaking knights in their castles, as centres of influence among the native rural population.

French was the language of the ruling class in Church and State. Latin was used in books habitually, as the common language of the educated throughout Europe; the only language in which a scholar might hope to address not merely the few among a single people, but the whole Republic of Letters. English remained the language of the people, and its predomi

nance was sure.

But there was no longer in the monasteries a cultivated class maintaining a standard of the language. The common people were not strict in care of genders and inflexions. Those newcomers who sought to make themselves understood in English helped also to bring old niceties of inflexion to decay. At the same time old words were modified, and some were dropped, when their places were completely taken by convenient new words that formed part of the large vocabulary wherewith our language was now being enriched. In large towns change was continuous and somewhat rapid; in country districts it was slow. Thus, while the provincial distinctions all remained, local conditions, here advancing there retarding the new movement, caused increase of difference between the forms of speech current in England at one time.

The books written in English during this transition period of the language are usually said to be in Early English. The Early English Text Society, by including Anglo-Saxon, or First English, among its publications, has wisely recognised the fact that English before the Conquest has as much right to be called Early as the English after it. We will take the name, then, as a good general term for the English of all books written before our language had in most respects attained its present form. If we give this sense to the current term of EARLY ENGLISH, there

TO A.D. 1100.]

REIGNS OF WILLIAM I. AND II.

41 will be a natural division of the Early English period into its two parts; and as we have spoken of FIRST ENGLISH (or AngloSaxon) Literature, we come now to speak of the literature of TRANSITION ENGLISH. Various suggestions have been made for the subdivision of this period. Sir Frederick Madden has called our language Semi-Saxon from 1100 to 1230, Early English only from 1230 to 1330, and Middle English from 1330 to 1500. It is better to shun vagueness. Having a piece of Transition English to place in its proper subdivision, we will therefore simply say that it is Transition, English of the former or the latter half of such a century, or of a given date, if date can be more nearly given; and that it is Northern, Midland, or Southern, or of a given county or town, if we can tell more nearly where its author wrote.

2. In the years next following the Conquest the chief authors were ecclesiastics, and their language Latin. The books were usually Chronicles and Lives of Saints; but there was representation also of the love of travel, and already a faint indication of the new spirit of free inquiry that was to break the bonds of ancient science.

To the reign of William the Conqueror (1066--1087) belongs the History by Marianus Scotus, who was born in 1028, went to Germany in 1052, became a monk at Cologne, and died at Mayence in 1086. He compiled a History from the Creation to the year 1083. In the same reign a translation of Lives of Native Saints from First English into Latin was made by Osbern of Canterbury, who tells that he saw Canterbury Cathedral burnt in the year 1070; and a work was produced on the Computus, or Calculation of Easter, by Gerland, our earliest mathematician, who observed an eclipse of the sun in the year 1086.

During the reign of William II. (1087-1100), Turgot, who had assisted in the rebuilding of the ruined monastery of Jarrow, became prior of the greater monastery of Durham, to which Bede's twin monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth then became cells. Turgot's History of the Monastery of Durham, in four books, begins with its foundation, and passes into a vivid sketch of what he had himself seen of its history within the stir of his own time. It ends with the year 1096, and has been wrongly ascribed to Simeon of Durham.

3. In the reign of Henry I. (1100-1135), Sewulf, a merchant, the first English traveller who followed in the track of

the Crusaders, went to the East, escaped by accident from a great storm at Joppa, which destroyed a thousand persons, and lived to produce a lively record of all that he saw in Palestine during the years 1102 and 1103. When he came home, Sawulf withdrew from the world, and became a monk of Malmesbury, where the best of the chroniclers after Bede was then librarian.

Our Monastic Chronicles were at their best in Henry I.'s reign. Then were produced the Chronicles of Ordericus Vitalis and of William of Malmesbury. To record the deeds of the history makers, sing the glories of their warrior chiefs, had been a foremost occupation of the Celtic and First English bards and gleemen. The history-making Normans gave from the first much occupation for the pen of the good monk in his Scriptorium. In that room he copied the desirable things that were not bought for the monastic library: works of the Fathers, writings in defence of orthodox belief; a good book on the right computation of Easter; a treatise on each of the seven steps of knowledge which led up to Theology, namely, Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic, forming the Trivium of Ethics, with Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy, the Quadrivium of Physics. There would be need also of a fresher history than Orosius could furnish. The framer of such a history might begin with Adam, and cause any short sketch of the History of the World from the Creation to be copied, or a larger history to be reduced in scale. As he proceeded towards his own time, he would give out now this now that accepted history of a particular period, to be copied literally or condensed. But when he came down to a time within his own memory, or that of men about him, he began to tell his story for himself, and spoke from living knowledge; from this point, therefore, his chronicle became for after-times an independent record of great value. In days when the strong sought conquest, and lands often changed masters, the monasteries, with wide-spread possessions, had reason to keep themselves well informed in the history-making of the great lords of the soil. The Chronicle, which faithfully preserved a record of events in the surrounding world during the years last. past, would be one of the best read and most useful books in the monastic library. Monasteries were many, and the number also of the chroniclers was great. In England they were usually men whose hearts were with the people to which they belonged. Not brilliant, like those chroniclers of France who gave their souls up to outside enjoyment of court glitter and the pomp of war; but

TO A.D. 1142.]

CHRONICLERS. ORDERICUS VITALIS.

43

sober and accurate recorders of such matter as concerned realities of life, they saw in England the home of a people, not the playground of a king.

Florence of Worcester was a brother of the monastery in that town, where he died on the 7th of July, 1118. He wrote a Chronicle, which at first was a copy from that of Marianus Scotus, with inserted additions to enlarge the record of English events. His additions he took chiefly from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede, Lives of Saints, and Asser's "Life of Alfred.". From 1082, where Marianus Scotus ended, Florence continued the work on the same plan, noting events abroad, although chiefly concerned with English history. He brought his record down to 1117, the year before his death; and it was continued to 1141 by other brethren of his monastery.

Eadmer, one of the Benedictines of Canterbury, who says that from childhood he was in the habit of noting and remembering events, wrote, in six books, a History of his own TimeHistoria Novorum-from the Conquest to the year 1122. Eadmer wrote also a life of his friend Anselm, Archbishop or Canterbury, and other ecclesiastical biographies. He was a bright enthusiastic churchman, who refused a bishopric in Scotland because he might not subject it to the Primacy of Canterbury. Archbishop Anselm is the central figure of his History.

But the chief chroniclers who wrote in the time of Henry I., and also during the first seven years of the reign of Stephen, were Ordericus Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Orderic was by about twenty years the elder man, but as authors they were exactly contemporary, and they both ceased to writeprobably, therefore, they both died—in the same year, 1142.

4. Ordericus Vitalis, born during the reign of William the Conqueror, near Shrewsbury, at Atcham on the Severn, was the son of Odelire, a married priest from Orleans, who had come over to England with Roger de Montgomery, made Earl of Shrewsbury. Orderic was the name given to the child by the English curate who baptised him. When Orderic was ten years old he had lost his mother, and his father retired, as a monk ot the strict Benedictine rule, into a monastery which he had caused the earl to found. Half his estates Odelire gave to the abbey, and the other half as a fief to be held under the abbey by his second son, Everard, who remained outside in the world. Orderic was taken into the monastery with a father who soon found it to be too much indulgence of the flesh to have a

beloved child for his companion. Odelire sent him, therefore, a boy of eleven, to the Benedictine abbey of Ouche, buried among forests in Normandy, and known afterwards by its founder's name, as the Abbey of St. Evroult. There the child, in his twelfth year, received the tonsure on the day of the Feast of St. Maurice, and changed his lay name of Orderic for that of Vitalis, who was one of the two lieutenants of St. Maurice, named with him in the Church celebration of their martyrdom with the whole Roman legion under their command. Ordericus Vitalis spent all the rest of his life at St. Evroult, where there was a great library, as simply as the venerable Bede had spent his life at Jarrow. His work was an Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, in thirteen books. It begins with brief compilation, and becomes full from the year 1084, early in the seventh book. The first two books, written while Orderic was at work upon a later portion of his narrative, gave a compilation of Church History from the birth of Christ to the year 855; with the addition of a list of Popes from that date to the year 1142. The next four books, setting out with the foundation of monasteries in Normandy, are a history of the Abbey of St. Evroult, and of ecclesiastical affairs immediately concerning it. This was the part of the work first written. Then come the seven books (vii.-xiii.) which are now most to be valued, giving Orderic's conscientious and trustworthy, though confused record of the political events of his own time in Normandy and England. He is chronicler, not historian; shows no artistic faculty in the arrangement of his work. But it abounds in trustworthy suggestive facts, genuine copies of letters, epitaphs, and proceedings in council; shows good sense, as well as piety, in its judgments, and some skilful suggestion of character in the speeches which the author now and then attributes to his heroes. The time of Orderic's death is inferred from the date of the conclusion of his history, 1142, when he was sixty-seven years old.

5. The artistic faculty wanting in Orderic was not wanting in William of Malmesbury, who almost rose from the chronicler into the historian. He was born probably about the year 1095, and of his parents one was English and one Norman. He went as a boy into the monastery at Malmesbury, was known there as an enthusiast for books, sought, bought, and read them, and gave all the intervals between religious exercises to his active literary work. He was made librarian at Malmesbury, and would not be made abbot. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, that