has been usually conceded.  Indeed, the Danish chapter in English history has not yet been fairly written.  They were men of a singularly bold and adventurous spirit, as is evinced by their voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and thence to the Atlantic coast of North America, as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries.  It is more directly to our purpose to observe their character as it is displayed in their conquest of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, in their facile reception and ready assimilation of the Roman language and arts which they found in Gaul, and in their forcible occupancy, under William the Conqueror, of Saxon England, in 1066.

V. THE NORMAN CONQUEST.—­The vigor of the Normans had been trained, but not weakened by their culture in Normandy.  They maintained their supremacy in arms against the efforts of the kings of France.  They had long cultivated intimate relations with England, and their dukes had long hankered for its possession.  William, the natural son of Duke Robert—­known to history and musical romance as Robert le Diable—­was a man of strong mind, tenacious purpose, and powerful hand.  He had obtained, by promise of Edward the Confessor, the reversion of the crown upon the death of that monarch; and when the issue came, he availed himself of that reversion and the Pope’s sanction, and also of the disputed succession between Harold, the son of Godwin, and the true Saxon heir, Edgar Atheling, to make good his claim by force of arms.

Under him the Normans were united, while divisions existed in the Saxon ranks.  Tostig, the brother of Harold, and Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway, combined against Harold, and, just before the landing of Duke William at Pevensey, on the coast of Sussex, Harold was obliged to march rapidly northward to Stanford bridge, to defeat Tostig and the Norwegians, and then to return with a tired army of uncertain morale, to encounter the invading Normans.  Thus it appears that William conquered the land, which would have been invincible had the leaders and the people been united in its defence.

As the Saxons, Danes, and Normans were of the same great Teutonic family, however modified by the different circumstances of movement and residence, there was no new ethnic element introduced; and, paradoxical as it may seem, the fusion of these peoples was of great benefit, in the end, to England.  Though the Saxons at first suffered from Norman oppression, the kingdom was brought into large inter-European relations, and a far better literary culture was introduced, more varied in subject, more developed in point of language, and more artistic.

Thus much, in a brief historical summary, is necessary as an introduction to our subject.  From all these contests and conquests there were wrought in the language of the country important changes, which are to be studied in the standard works of its literature.

CHANGES IN LANGUAGE.—­The changes and transformations of language may be thus briefly stated:—­In the Celtic period, before the arrival of the Romans, the people spoke different dialects of the Celtic and Gadhelic languages, all cognate and radically similar.