shows that there was growing up a school of earnest students of English law who, though anxious, like Bracton, to bring their conclusions under the rules of Roman jurisprudence, began to treat their science with an independence which secured for English custom the opportunity of independent development.  Of more literary interest than such technicalities were the rhyming chronicles, handed on from the previous age, of which one of the best, the recently discovered history of the great William Marshal, has already been noticed.  The spontaneity of this poem proves that its language was still the natural speech of the writer, and impels its French editor to claim for it a French origin.  As the century grew older there was no difficulty in deciding whether French works were written by Englishmen or Frenchmen.  The Yorkshire French of Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle, and the jargon of the Year Books, attest how the political separation of the two lands, and the preponderance in northern France of the dialect of Paris, placed the insular French speech in strong contrast to the language of polite society beyond the Channel.  Yet barbarous as Anglo-French became, it retained the freshness of a living tongue, and gained some ground at the expense of Latin, notably in the law courts and in official documents.

English was slowly making its way upwards.  There was a public ready to read vernacular books, and not at home with French.  For their sake a great literature of translations and adaptations was made, beginning with Layamon’s English version of Wace’s Brut, which by the end of the century made the cycle of French romance accessible to the English reader.  Many works of edification and devotion were written in English; and Robert of Gloucester’s rhyming history appealed to a larger public than the Yorkshire French of Langtoft.  It is significant of the trend of events that the early fourteenth century saw Langtoft himself done into English by Robert Mannyng, of Bourne.  While as yet no continuous works of high merit were written in English, there was no lack of experiments, of novelties, and of adaptations.  Much evidence of depth of feeling, power of expression, and careful art lies hidden away in half-forgotten anonymous lyrics, satires, and romances.  The language in which these works were written was steadily becoming more like our modern English.  The dialectical differences become less acute; the inflections begin to drop away; the vocabulary gradually absorbs a larger romance element, and the prosody drops from the forms of the West Saxon period into measures and modes that reflect a living connexion with the contemporary poetry of France.  Thus, even in the literature of a not too literary age, we find abundant tokens of that strenuous national life which was manifesting itself in so many different ways.