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Unit 1: The Anglo-Saxon Literature and the Norman French Period

‘They filled the land full of castles. They compelled the wretched men of the land to build their Notes
castles and wore them out with hard labor. When the castles were made they filled them with
devils and evil men. Then they took all those whom they thought to have any property, both by
night and by day, both men and women, and put them in prison for gold and silver, and tormented
them with tortures that cannot be told; for never were any martyrs so tormented as these were.’

The Union of the Races and Languages—Latin, French, and English
That their own race and identity were destined to be absorbed in those of the Anglo-Saxons could
never have occurred to any of the Normans who stood with William at Hastings, and scarcely to
any of their children. Yet this result was predetermined by the stubborn tenacity and numerical
superiority of the conquered people and by the easy adaptability of the Norman temperament.
Racially, and to a less extent socially, intermarriage did its work, and that within a very few
generations. Little by little, also, Norman contempt and Saxon hatred were softened into tolerance,
and at last even into a sentiment of national unity. This sentiment was finally to be confirmed by
the loss of Normandy and other French possessions of the Norman-English kings in the thirteenth
century, a loss which transformed England from a province of the Norman Continental empire
and of a foreign nobility into an independent country, and further by the wars (‘The Hundred
Years’ War’) which England-Norman nobility and Saxon yeomen fighting together—carried on in
France in the fourteenth century.
In language and literature the most general immediate result of the Conquest was to make of
England a trilingual country, where Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon were spoken separately side
by side. With Latin, the tongue of the Church and of scholars, the Norman clergy were much more
thoroughly familiar than the Saxon priests had been; and the introduction of the richer Latin
culture resulted, in the latter half of the twelfth century, at the court of Henry II, in a brilliant
outburst of Latin literature. In England, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, Latin long
continued to be the language of religious and learned writing—down to the sixteenth century or
even later. French, that dialect of it which was spoken by the Normans—Anglo-French (English-
French) it has naturally come to be called—was of course introduced by the Conquest as the
language of the governing and upper social class, and in it also during the next three or four
centuries a considerable body of literature was produced. Anglo-Saxon, which we may now term
English, remained inevitably as the language of the subject race, but their literature was at first
crushed down into insignificance. Ballads celebrating the resistance of scattered Saxons to their
oppressors no doubt circulated widely on the lips of the people, but English writing of the more
formal sorts, almost absolutely ceased for more than a century, to make a new beginning about the
year 1200.

Notes In the interval the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ is the only important document, and
even this, continued at the monastery of Peterboro, comes to an end in 1154, in the
midst of the terrible anarchy of Stephen’s reign.

1.4.2 The Result for Poetry
For poetry the fusion meant even more than for prose. The metrical system, which begins to
appear in the thirteenth century and comes to perfection a century and a half later in Chaucer’s
poems, combined what may fairly be called the better features of both the systems from which it
was compounded. We have seen that Anglo-Saxon verse depended on regular stress of a definite
number of quantitatively long syllables in each line and on alliteration; that it allowed much
variation in the number of unstressed syllables; and that it was without rime. French verse, on the
other hand, had rime (or assonance) and carefully preserved identity in the total number of

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