The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature.  The Old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections.  For three hundred years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king’s court and the courts of law, from Parliament, school, and university.  During all this time there were two languages spoken in England.  Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower.  When the latter got the better of the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred.  It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its inflections.  It had lost half of its old words, and had filled their places with French equivalents.  The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers words of dress and courtesy.  The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase.  The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason.  The art of cooking was French.  The naming of the living animals, ox, swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman master.  The four orders of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became intermediaries between the high and the low.  They went about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English.  In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their medicine, botany, and astronomy displaced the old nomenclature of leechdom, wort-cunning and star-craft. And, finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme.  But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so that voice drove out steven, poor drove out earm, and color, use, and place made good their footing beside hue, wont, and stead.  A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new.  Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former’s than from the latter’s.  To Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us.