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Prose

Notes right explanation or not, it is certainly true that in its first efforts English prose is uncertain and
faltering, that it often engages our sympathies more by what it attempts to do than by what it
actually accomplishes.
The study of the origins of English prose is consequently concerned not only with the growth of
the English mind, but, in the broadest sense, with the development of the English language.
Since literary prose is very largely the speech of every-day discourse applied to special purposes,
it is in a way true that the origins of English prose are to be sought in the origins of English speech.
No student of the speech would be content to pause short of the earliest English records in the four
centuries which preceded the Norman Conquest. From the days of the first Teutonic conquerors of
Celtic Britain, the English speech has continued in an un-broken oral tradition to the present time.
But obviously English literary prose in its various stages has not been merely the written form, the
echo, of this colloquial speech.
The bonds which unite the two are close, but their courses are not parallel. English literary prose
has had no such continuous history as the language, and there are sufficient reasons for regarding
the prose of Alfred and his few contemporaries and successors as a chapter in the life of the
English people which begins and ends with itself. For its antiquity and for its importance in
preserving so abundantly the early records of the language, Old English prose is to be respected;
but it was never highly developed as an art, nor was its vitality great enough to withstand the
shock of the several conquests which brought about a general confusion of English ideals and
traditions in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is consequently in no sense the source from which
modern English prose has sprung. It has a separate story, and when writers of the early modern
period again turned to prose, they did so in utter disregard and ignorance of the fact that Alfred
and Elfric had preceded them by several centuries in the use of English for purposes of prose
expression. Nor did the later writers unwittingly benefit by the inheritance of a previous discipline
of the language in the writing of prose. In the general political and social cataclysm of the eleventh
century, the literary speech of the Old English period went down forever, leaving for succeeding
generations nothing but the popular speech upon which to build anew the foundations of a
literary culture.
After the Conquest came the slow process of establishing social order. Laws must first be formulated,
Normans, Scandinavians, and Saxons must learn to live in harmony with one another, above all
must learn to communicate with one another in a commonly accepted speech, before literature
could again lift its head. During all this period of the making of the new England, verse remained
the standard form for literary expression. Such prose as was written was mainly of a documentary
character, wills, deeds of transfer and gift, rules for the government of religious houses, and
similar writings of limited appeal. In the lack of a standard vernacular idiom, more serious efforts,
such as histories and theological treatises, were composed in Latin, and to a less extent, in French.
It was not until towards the middle of the fourteenth century that the various elements of English
life were fused into what came to be felt more and more as a national unity. A wave of popular
patriotism swept over the country at this time, clearing away the encumbering foreign traditions
by which the English had permitted themselves to become burdened. This new national feeling
showed itself in various ways, in a renewed interest in English history, in the special respect now
shown to English saints, and above all in the rejection of French and in the cultivation of the
English language as the proper expression of the English people. At the same time men of riper
and broader culture made their appearance in the intellectual life of the people. An age which
produced three such personalities as those of Chaucer, Langland, and Wiclif cannot be regarded
as anticipatory and uncertain of itself. Economic conditions also forced upon the humbler classes
of people the necessity of thinking for themselves and of setting forth and defending their interests.
In the larger world of international affairs the dissensions and corruptions of the church, culminating
in the great schism of the last quarter of the century, compelled account to be taken of that whole

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