the glosses was to explain difficult Latin words; this was done at first, whenever possible, by easier Latin words; apparently, only when none such were known, was the explanation given in the vernacular, in Old English.  In the Epinal Glossary the English words are thus relatively few.  In the first page they number thirty out of 117, and in some pages they do not amount to half that number.  In the Corpus Glossary they have become proportionally more numerous; and in the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations are more and more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until the vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whether arranged alphabetically or under classified headings, are truly Latin-English:  every Latin word given is explained by an English one; and we see clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself; the object was no longer to explain difficult Latin words, but to give the English equivalents of as many words as possible, and thus practically to provide a Latin Dictionary for the use of Englishmen[3].

Learning and literature, science and art, had attained to fair proportions in England, and in the Old English tongue, when their progress was arrested by the Norman Conquest.  The Norman Conquest brought to England law and organization, and welded the country into a political unity; but it overthrew Old English learning and literary culture.  In literary culture the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece; and it was not till some two generations after the Conquest, that learning and literature regained in England somewhat of the position which they had occupied two centuries earlier.  And this new literary culture was naturally confined to the French dialect of the conquerors, which had become the language of court and castle, of church and law, of chivalry and the chase; while the rich and cultured tongue of Alfred and AElfric was left for generations without literary employment, during which time it lost nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic vocabulary, retaining only the words of common life and everyday use[4].  And for more than 300 years after the Conquest English lexicography stood still.  Between 1066 and 1400, Wright-Wuelcker shows only two meagre vocabularies, occupying some twenty-four columns of his volume.  One of these, of the twelfth century, is only an echo of the earlier literary age, a copy of a pre-Conquest glossary, which some scribe who could still read the classical tongue of the old West Saxon Court, transliterated into the corrupted forms of his own generation.  The other is a short vocabulary of the Latin and vernacular names of plants, a species of class-vocabulary of which there exist several of rather early date.