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tribute them to Franks and Saxons,' and when on eastern France to Saxons and Lombards in conjunction. The tribes between the Rhine and the Elbe-Franks, Saxons, Angles, Sueves, Lombards, and Burgundians-were probably united by a much closer connection-ethnological, geographical, and political, than is commonly supposed. Indeed, there is strong reason for believing that the names of Frank, Saxon, or Lombard are not true ethnic names, but that they were only the designations of temporary confederations for military purposes, and that these names were derived from their usual armament, the franca, seax, or the lang-barta?

Guided by this geographical nomenclature the reader, on scanning the map of England, will be able to form an idea of the many nationalities which, under the general names of Celts, Saxons, and Danes, were to be found in England at the end of the tenth century. He will find the Celts as a body in possession of Ireland, the western coast of England, almost all of Scotland, and the remainder dispersed among the Saxons and the Danes. The Saxons he will find distributed over the rest of England, with the exception, however, of the eastern and northern shires, where the Danish conquest has left its deepest impress, and where even at this day the popular language would be strictly intelligible to a Dane or a Norwegian, were it not for the French words which the Norman conquest subsequently introduced in great numbers. This difference of dialect is, moreover, invariably accompanied by a difference in customs and manners, and certain local traditions which, disappearing but slowly before the industries of modern civilization, still point to those times when fear and distrust kept each family in its own town, each individual in his own family; when the cultivator went armed to the field, and shut himself up at night in his walled town, his borough; when the inhabitants of neighboring villages looked upon each other as enemies, considering every journey dangerous, every business risky, and never marrying but among themselves. Their dialects differed often so much as in many instances to be unintelligible to people living in each other's immediate vicinity.

1 Eutropius, Julian, and Ammianus Marcellinus, associate the Franks and Saxons in this manner.

2 A long pole terminating in a battle-axe, and overtopped by a spear-head;

a halbert.

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It was impossible that in such circumstances the national character should not have become deteriorated, and that the country should not have lagged behind in the career of wealth, of the arts, of literature, and of every other line of public prosperity and greatness. Accordingly, at the era of the Norman invasion, England was still a country of no account on the political map of Europe. Some foreign commerce was springing up under Edward the Confessor; but still its intercourse, either commercial or of any other description, except with Normandy, was apparently very limited. A certain degree of excellence, indeed, seems to have been attained by its artists in some kinds of ornamental work, in the fabrication of trinkets and other articles of luxury, as is shown by the immense spoils of William, of which he sent a large part to the churches and monasteries in Normandy, and a taste for which probably prevailed among the wealthier inhabitants of England; and on a first view we might be disposed to conjecture that other and more necessary kinds of industry must needs have also flourished where there was room and encouragement for the exercise of this species of refined and expensive ingenuity. But nothing can be more unsafe and fallacious than such a mode of inference, by which some particular feature is taken to indicate in one age, or country, or state of society, the same thing which it would indicate in another. It would be quite unwarrantable to assume the existence of any general wealth or refinement among the English of the eleventh century merely from their passions of show and glitter, which, in its lower manifestations, is an instinct of the rudest savages; and, even when directed with very considerable taste, may co-exist both with the most imperfect civilization and with much general poverty and squalor, as we see it doing in eastern countries at the present day. No other species of art or manufacture, except the ordinary trades required for the supply of their most common necessities, appears to have been practiced among them. But the backward and declining condition of the country was most expressively evinced by the lamentable decay of all liberal knowledge among all classes

'The production of such jewels has been ascribed to monks, who, according to Malmesbury, were the most skilled artists of that period in England, so much so that curious reliquaries, finely worked and set with precious stones, were called throughout Europe opera Anglica.-J. A. Weisse, Origin, Progress, and Destiny of the English Language and Literature, p. 131.

of people. The oldest historians are unanimous in their attestations to the general ignorance and illiteracy that. prevailed among the English of the age. Ordericus Vitalis, a contemporary writer, and himself a native of England, describes his countrymen as a rustic and illiterate people. Malmesbury, another Englishman, writing sixty or seventy years later, and, as he informs us himself, as much a Saxon as a Norman by descent, assures us that when the Normans first came over, the greater number of the English clergy could hardly read the church service, and that, as for anything like learning, they were nearly to a man destitute of it; if any of them understood grammar, he was admired and wondered at by the rest as a prodigy. The English monks are described by him as stupid and barbarous, and even the archbishop and bishops, in Edward's time, as having been illiterate men. The rest of his account represents the upper classes in general as sunk in sloth and self-indulgence, and addicted to the coarsest vices. Many of the nobility, he says, had given up attending divine service in church altogether, and, as a class, were universally given to gluttonous feeding and drunkenness, continuing over their cups for whole days and nights, and spending all their incomes in riotous feasts, at which they ate and drank to excess, without any display either of refinement or of magnificence. The dress, the houses, and all the domestic accommodations of the people of all ranks are stated to have been mean and wretched in the extreme.1

2

Even long before the Norman conquest, the native language of England had commenced to fall into contempt among the upper classes, and French to be substituted in its stead. As early as the year 952, it was a common practice among the English nobles to send their sons to France for education, and not only the language but the manners of the French were esteemed the most polite of accomplishments. In the reign of Edward the Confessor, the resort of Normans to the English coast was so great that the affectation of imitating the French customs became almost universal, and even the lower classes of

1 Willelm Malmesbury, de gest. rer. Angl., lib. iii, pag. 101, etc. Ob usum armorum, et ad linguæ native barbariem tolendam. (Du Chesne, vol. iii, pag. 307.)-Warton, History of English Poetry, L. 3.

3 Coepit ergo, tota terra sub Rege et sub aliis Normannis introductis Anglicos ritus dimittere, et Francorum mores in multis imitari. (Ingulf., Hist Croyland, pag. 895.)

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