Saxons, and the Jutes, and these divisions were the foundations of the great classes of the modern dialects of England. The Jutes, represented chiefly by the kingdom of Kent, were the least numerous of the three Teutonic peoples of Britain, and, although, probably from their position, they had at an early period attained to a great degree of commercial prosperity, riches, and power, they exercised no permanent influence, either political or much less literary, on the great Anglo-Saxon confederacy. It was the Angles, who were numerically by far the most powerful of the Teutonic settlers, who first took the lead in intelligence and in literature. The earliest literary productions of the Anglo-Saxons, and the oldest Anglo-Saxon traditions known, appear to belong chiefly to the family of the Angles, and their influence over the rest was so great, that not only did these accept from them the general title of Englisc, but even the nations of the continent who had preserved the Roman language, generally agreed in giving to the Teutonic population of Britain the name of Angli. Thus we derive from this one branch of the triple composition of our race the national name of which we are proud, that of Englishmen, and it is from them that our language was called ENGLISH. Nevertheless, the Anglian division of the race fell in the course of the eighth century under the superior influence of the Saxons, and Wessex, or the kingdom of the West-Saxons, not only gave us finally our line of kings, but furnished us. with the model of our language and literature. The written English language of the present day is founded upon that dialect in which King Alfred wrote, and which held in Saxon England somewhat the same position as the Attic dialect in ancient Greece. With this change in the predominance of race, the term Saxon came into more frequent use to designate the Teutonic population of this island, and, as there continued to be Saxons on the Continent as well as in England, it has become the practise to call our own ancestors, by way of distinction and not as indicating an amalgamation of race, the ANGLO-SAXONS, that is, the Saxons of England. Yet so permanent are early ethnological principles, that though the Saxon dynasty, the Saxon dialect, and the Saxon laws, became those of the whole Anglo-Saxon people, the older and particular designation has outlived all changes in the names we now possess of Englishmen, the English language, and England.

The Anglo-Saxon language-under which appellation we now include the language of the Teutonic settlers in Britain in its three great divisions

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was one hardly less complicated in its grammatical forms and inflections, when first introduced into this island, than that of ancient Greece. But, at the earliest period at which we know it, the Anglo-Saxon language was already undergoing a degradation from its primitive forms and all the other changes to which languages in general are subject. At the end of the Saxon period much of the language had already become obsolete. In the first place, it was very copious in words, and one word to express a particular idea was continually going out of fashion to give place to another. In the second place, a very important portion of the language in the earlier stage of its history, that of poetry, had become obsolete in the mass. The language of poetry in Anglo-Saxon was originally distinguished, not only by its peculiar phraseology, but by the use of a class of words which were rarely met with in the ordinary language of life, and which evidently belonged to the minstrel class, and to what we may call the heroic age. The writers of poetry at a later period seem to have lost the command of this language, and their verses, though still possessing the metrical forms, had become in other respects, of course with some exceptions, remarkably prosaic. I doubt whether people in general, at the close of the AngloSaxon period, understood the older language of poetry, and very few of its words were carried forward into semi-Saxon or preserved in later English.

I am one of those who do not believe in the existence of a Celtic element in the English language.* I have no doubt that the Anglo-Saxons found in this island a people talking Latin, and if any portion of the popu lation really continued to use the Celtic tongue, it must have been a small and unimportant class, who are not likely to have exercised any influence

It must not be forgotten that the Teutonic and Celtic languages, are, after all, only two branches from the same original stock, and we very naturally expect to find a great number of roots common to both, and similar forms of words presenting themselves with similar meanings, without any reason for supposing that the one language borrowed them from the other. Moreover, I am perfectly satisfied that the Welsh language, as we know it, contains a considerable number of words which have been taken directly, not only from Anglo-Saxon, or English, but from Anglo-Norman also, and the former perhaps, only came into the Welsh language since the Norman Conquest. These two circumstances seem to me quite sufficient to account for the verbal coincidences pointed out in a paper by the Rev. J. Davies, recently published by the Philological Society, as far as those coincidences are real. We are not unacquainted with the history of the Anglo-Saxons in this country, and I believe that that bistory is quite contrary to the notion that at the time of the Norman Conquest there was any such mixture of the Celtic race with the Teutonic population as could have exercised any influence either on the language or on the character of the people.

on the language of the new conquerors.

The evidences of this are numerous, and, to me at least, very satisfactory, but they do not form a part of our subject upon which I can dwell at present. The German race had a term for those who were of a different race from themselves, which was represented in Anglo-Saxon by the noun wealh, a foreigner, and by the adjective walisc or wylisc, foreign, but which, as the Romans were the only race quite different from their own with which they had much acquaintance, they applied especially and almost solely to people speaking the Latin tongue. During the middle ages, the term Welsh, in the German languages of the Continent, meant especially French, but was applied also to other neo-Latin dialects; in German of the present day the same word (wälsch) is applied peculiarly to the language and people of Italy. It was no doubt for the same reason, namely, that they were a people speaking Latin, that the Anglo-Saxons applied this word to the population they found in Britain, and it probably became extended to what we now call Wales and the Welsh, merely because, when they subsequently became acquainted with them, the Anglo-Saxons confounded the inhabitants of that district with the other old inhabitants of South Britain. You must bear in mind, in considering this question, that our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language is after all imperfect, for our nomenclature is made up from written documents of a partial description, and there no doubt existed a great number of words in the Anglo-Saxon language which are now entirely lost. No doubt many words now found in the English language, and especially in the provincial dialects, of which the origin is now unknown, had their equivalents in pure Anglo-Saxon.

If I object to the notion of a Celtic element in our language, I object no less to that of a mixture with any other Teutonic dialect. Our older philologists believed in a modification of the Anglo-Saxon during a certain period which they termed Dano-Saxon, supposing that they traced in it the marks of Danish influence; but this theory has been entirely abandoned by the best of our modern scholars, and there certainly are no proofs that such an influence ever existed. The language which our forefathers spoke in the middle of the eleventh century was the same Low German dialect

* Of course I do not deny that our local dialects, in the parts occupied by them, may have derived some words from the Danes, but the pure Anglo-Saxon language was certainly not influenced by them. It has been the fashion of late years to ascribe much more to the Danes than I believe them to have any claim to. This, however, is a question the discussion of which would take us too far away from the present subject.

which they had brought with them into the island, with the mere changes which any language would undergo in itself during the transmission, under the same circumstances, through several centuries.

At the period just mentioned, a great political event, the Norman conquest, brought into our island a new language, one of those which had grown out of the language of the Roman empire, French, as it was then talked and written in Normandy; and Anglo-Norman, as this neo-Latin dialect is usually termed, continued during two centuries from that time to be exclusively the language of the aristocracy of England. There were thus two entirely distinct languages, bearing no resemblance to each other, co-existent in different classes of the same nation, for we must not suppose that, for a moment, the Anglo-Saxon, or, as we must henceforward call it, the English tongue, was abandoned or fell into disuse. It was long, indeed, an uncontradicted statement of our historians, that William the Conqueror made a deliberate attempt to suppress the use of the AngloSaxon tongue in his new kingdom, and Ingulph, or rather probably the pretender who assumed his name, asserts that it was banished from schools, and that the French or Anglo-Norman was used in its place in teaching children the rudiments of Latin grammar. The former of these statements no longer receives any credit, and the latter is disproved by an abundance of positive evidence. We cannot, indeed, doubt that the AngloSaxon grammar of the Latin language by Alfric continued to be used in the English schools until late in the twelfth century. Hicks, the AngloSaxon scholar, had in his possession a manuscript of Alfric's grammar, with an interlinear gloss of some of the Saxon words in Anglo-Norman, and from the examples he gives we may probably ascribe them to the first half of the twelfth century. This would seem to show that even a foreigner, employed as a teacher in England, had to use the Anglo-Saxon Latin grammar in his school, although his own knowledge of Anglo-Saxon was so imperfect that he was obliged to add a translation of the Anglo-Saxon words into Anglo-Norman for his own use. Further than this, Sir Thomas Phillipps found among the archives of Worcester cathedral some leaves of a copy of Alfric's grammar, written in the degraded form of the Anglo-Saxon language which prevailed in the middle and latter half of the twelfth century. The Anglo-Saxon language had at this time undergone considerable degradation from the form it presented in the eleventh century. It was rapidly losing its grammatical inflections, and in its words broad sounds were exchanged

for softer and quicker ones.

Thus the final a was constantly exchanged for e, and the prefix ge was everywhere turned into y or i. For cempa, a champion, they said kempe; for gemetung, a meeting, they said imeting; and for gerefa, a prefect, they would say ireve. With this change, however, there was no considerable introduction of Norman words. It was pure Anglo-Saxon as to the substance, but degraded in its forms. Philologists have given to the language in this state of transition the name of semiSaxon. We can trace its progress in several literary monuments of importance. The latter years of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued to 1145, exhibit the language as already breaking very fast; in the metrical chronicle of Layamon, and in the metrical harmony of the gospels called the Ormulum, which were both probably written in the closing years of the twelfth century, the Anglo-Saxon grammatical forms have undergone an entire change, which is still more complete in the semi-Saxon text of the Regula Inclusarum, or rule of nuns, in the earlier half of the thirteenth century. It is evident from the character of these, and other literary remains of less importance, that the use of the English language, during the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries, was by no means confined to the lower classes of society, but it prevailed generally among the middle and educated classes, and among the clergy and in the monastic houses, at least in those devoted to females.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, when the national spirit of the English people showed itself in the great popular struggle under Simon de Montfort, that the English language, which has now emerged from that transition state under which it has been known as semi-Saxon, at length asserted what we may call its political rights, and reappeared in the court. The political songs, and other writings, composed during the civil strife known as the barons' wars, show us not only two, but three languages, co-existing in this country at the same time. These were, the English, the Anglo-Norman, (or, as it was usually called at the time, the French), and the Latin, of which we need not take the latter into consideration, as it belonged almost exclusively to the clergy.

The long continued existence of what we call the Anglo-Norman language in this country was not a mere accident, but it was a consequence of the political condition of Europe. The feudal aristocracy was united throughout the whole extent of feudalism, by a community of interests as well as feelings, to such a degree, that the nobles of one country felt a closer re