Book account

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.


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