1070 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
Saxons lost many of its inflections before the Conquest, and the 
succession of verbal changes was so gradual and constant that at 
no period can anything except an arbitrary line be drawn. Hallam, 
in his review of the literature of Europe, says :—‘“ When we 
compare the earliest English of the thirteenth century with the 
Anglo-Saxon of the twelfth, it seems hard to pronounce why it 
should pass for a separate language, rather than a modification or 
simplification of the former.” 
These changes were hastened by the Norman Conquest, and 
proceeded at an accelerated rate throuth the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries ; but they were brought to a climax in John’s reign. 
The loss of Normandy, and the adjacent northern provinces of 
France, put an end to the intimate connection between England 
and the Continent, deprived the Norman nobles of their fiefs 
across the Channel, and prevented them from making those 
frequent visits to Normandy which had been common under the 
sovereigns from William to Richard. 
In this period of rapid change the borderland of Celt and Saxon 
is again the home of the greatest literary activity. Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, Gerald de Barri, and Walter Map, were Welsh on 
one or both sides ; Orderic hailed from Shrewsbury, and Layamon 
lived at Ernley, to the west of the Severn. These writers dealt 
mainly with history or historical legends ; and to four of them we 
owe the rescue from oblivion of the Arthurian stories, which, having 
been told in Latin and French, were first given in English of the 
transition period by Layamon. 
Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have proved a 
perfect mine of wealth to the poets of the last ten centuries in all 
European nations ; and Tennyson has shown in our own times 
that the store is not yet exhausted. 
The paucity of English writers in the two centuries before the 
appearance of Chaucer is no matter for surprise. The language of 
a country during a period of rapid change is neither exact enough, 
nor polished sufficiently, to act as a channel of communication 
between the master minds of the age and their many silent con- 
temporaries. In his philological and grammatical observations, M. 
Reynouard embodies this principle in the following dictum: 
“There has never been composed any considerable work in any 
language till it has acquired determinate forms of expressing the 
modifications of ideas according to time, number, and person,” or, 
in other words, the fixed elements of grammar. 
Until the middle of the fourteenth century the literary require- 
ments of the English court, and of the English nobility, were 
mainly supplied by French writers. The first literature in any 
native language derived from the Latin was that of the Provencal 
Troubadours, mainly in praise of love, which soon extended to the 
northern provinces speaking the Langue d’oéil, or old French. 
