The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred’s capital, Winchester.  When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a “king’s English” or any literary standard.  The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires.  Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest.  The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sank into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.

The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature.  They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the Continent.  Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons.  They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys.  They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans.  English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks.  Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French.  English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant.  After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works.  The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.

The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative.  It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating.

    Reste hine tha rum-heort; reced hlifade
    Geap and gold-fah, gaest inne swaef.

  Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered
  Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.

This rude, energetic verse the Saxon scop had sung to his harp or glee-beam, dwelling on the emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others, which were of undetermined number and position in the line.  It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung.  The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century.  But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was doomed to give way.  Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian.  Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule.