“Urin Fader thic arth in heofnas;
   Our father which art in heaven;

  sic gehalgud thin noma;
  be hallowed thy name;

  to cymeth thin ryc;
  to come thy kingdom: 

  sic thin willa sue is in heofnas & in eorthe;
  be thy will so is in heaven and in earth;

  urin hlaf ofirwistlic sel us to daig;
  our loaf super-excellent give us to day;

  and forgefe us scylda urna;
  and forgive us debts ours;

  sue we forgefan scyldgum urum;
  so we forgiven debts of ours;

and no  inlead usig in   custnung;
and not lead   us   into temptation;

ah  gefrig usich   from ifle.
but free   us each from evil.

The new Danish irruptions again arrested the progress of learning, and ignorance and misery, as is usual, followed in the train of war.  Alfred had restored learning and promoted the arts of peace.  But his successors failed to sustain the institutions he planted.  He is said to have shone with the lustre of the brightest day of summer amidst the gloom of a long, dark, and stormy, winter.  Before the Norman conquest the Anglo-Saxon tongue fell into disrepute; and French teachers and French manners were affected by the high-born.

During the reign of Edward, the Confessor, it ceased to be cultivated; and after the Conqueror, it became more barbarous and vulgar, as it was then the sign of servility, and the badge of an enslaved race.

As early as the year 652, the Anglo-Saxons were accustomed to send their youth to French monasteries to be educated.  In succeeding centuries the court and nobility were intimately allied to the magnates of France; and the adoption of French manners was deemed an accomplishment.  The conquerors commanded the laws to be administered in French.  Children at school were forbidden to read their native language, and the English name became a term of reproach.  An old writer in the eleventh century says:  “Children in scole, agenst the usage and manir of all other nations, beeth compelled for to leve hire own langage, and for to construe his lessons and thynges in Frenche, and so they haveth sethe Normans came first into England.”  The Saxon was spoken by the peasants, in the country, yet not without an intermixture of French; the courtly language was French with some vestiges of the vernacular Saxon.

The Conqueror’s army was composed of the flower of the Norman nobility.  They brought with them the taste, the arts, and the refinements, they had acquired in France.  European schools and scholars had been greatly benefitted by studying Latin versions of Greek philosophers from the Arabic.  Many learned men of the laity also became teachers, and the Church no longer enjoyed a monopoly of letters.  They travelled into Spain to attend the Arabic schools.

It is a remarkable fact that Greek learning should have travelled through Bagdad to reach Europe.