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Updated: July 28, 2025
The third period, extending from 1509 to 1884, includes the literature of the age of the Reformation, that of the age of Spenser, Shakspeare, Bacon, and Milton, of the Restoration and Revolution, and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. THE LANGUAGE. The English language is directly descended from the Anglo-Saxon, but derives much from the Norman-French, and from the Latin.
To give these satires a wider circulation, the Norman-French came to be frequently used, but at the close of the period the English dialect was almost the only organ of this satirical minstrelsy. The Latin tongue also became the means of preserving and transmitting an immense stock of tales, by which the later poetry of Europe profited largely.
At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the same tongue.
Between the Saxon contingent of King Richard's army and the French soldiers there could indeed be no quarrel, for the Saxons understood no word of their language; but with the Normans the case was different, for the Norman-French, which was spoken by all the nobles and their retainers in Britain, was as nearly as possible the same as that in use in France.
While the English monarchy was assuming its geographical form, peculiar national institutions were taking root in the country, and the English language, as a combination of earlier Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, was being evolved.
Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions.
Now at last he could master the strings, but both his ear and his voice were not of the best, so that it was well perhaps that there was so small and so unprejudiced an audience to the Norman-French chanson, which he sang in a high reedy voice with great earnestness of feeling, but with many a slip and quaver, waving his yellow head in cadence to the music: A sword! A sword! Ah, give me a sword!
Men were coming and going; looking towards the rock and then running to fetch other men. After a while a party came down to the beach, launched a boat and rowed towards the wreck. How thankful were the hungry, shivering castaways to get into the boat and be rowed ashore by these sturdy Norman-French fishermen!
The Saxons were never very glib at Norman-French, and there was no standardized spelling of family names at that period." "It would be interesting to know how the name of Simon came to be bestowed upon the Simon Turrald who fled to Cornwall after Bosworth. The name is Biblical not Norman.
'War itself is a Norman-French word, and among the other French words belonging to the same department which became English before the end of the thirteenth century' are armour, assault, banner, battle, fortress, lance, siege, standard, and tower all of them made citizens of our vocabulary, after having renounced their allegiance to their native land. Another quotation from Dr.
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