Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FROM THE CONQUEST TO GEOFFREY CHAUCER. TTOR more than a century after the Norman Conquest, English -- Literature was utterly inert. That event, so fatal to the native aristocracy, seemed at first to have swept away in common ruin the laws, language, and arts of the English people, and to have blotted out England from the muster-roll of the nations. A foreign king and aristocracy, an alien language and literature, ruled in thr land; the old speech was no longer heard in the halls of the great s native genius no longer strove to utter itself in the native tongue; and the voice of the English nation se"emed stilled forever. But it was not the stillness of death; in a few generations signs of returning life began to show themselves; and the English nation emerged from the fiery trial, with its equipment of language, laws and literature, materially altered indeed, and perhaps improved, but still bearing the ineffaceable Teutonic stamp. The national life was not annihilated at Senlac; it was but suspend for a time. In the old English, as in other Teutonic languages, there was a tendency to shake off the complicated inflections that fettered free utterance. This tendency existed before the Norman Conquest. That great political revolution but gave it an additional impulse. The vernacular speech was driven from literature for a time, and found its refuge in the cottages of ignorant people. No longer fixed by use in literature, and exposed to many disturbing influences, it fell into disorder. The processes of change were thereby accelerated, and when, at the middle of the twelfth century, this speech rose to the surface once more, it had traveled much farther on its prescribed course, than it would have done had it been leftto itself. Still it was the old tongue. In th...