aching and instructing in the language of the countryside. When serious new composition occurs, Layaman's Brut , the Owl and the Nightingale , Ancrene Riwle and Ancrene Wisse , it is in the language of the countryside, the Home Counties, Dorset, the west Midlands. Why should this be, and should we attribute the loss of the ordered universal written language of Anglo-Saxon England to the Normans?
We recognise increasingly the 100 years from 1050-1150 as one of the great turning points in western European history. The shift in method of thought that took place, sometimes characterised as a move from epic to romance, is best studied in areas recognised as most important to the age: theology, religious doctrine, Christology, biblical study. But here in our local specialised worId of language under the unique and bizarre impact of a French conquest of Germanic England we meet another reminder of the central problem. The Romance becomes the Romance of the twelfth-century Renaissance: central administration, ordered urban religion, cathedral schools, universities, all counter- pointed by the ordered Cistercian withdrawal to desert places. And literary activity, not the stiff formal theological activity alone, but the whole gamut from the scholar John of Salisbury to the Goliardic poets became universal, European and Latin. In theology, Anselm; in literature, Geoffrey of Monmouth; in history, William of Malmesbury; in learning, John of Salisbury: these giants straddle the first century after the Norman Conquest in England. English apprenticeship in Angle-Saxon blossomed into Anglo-Norman achievement in Latin. There was a break from the precocious ordered prose of Anglo-Saxon England. France and Germany and Scandinavia, the high noon of saga literature, had their great literary surge forward between 1150 and 1250. England had nothing to put by the side of Chretien of Troyes, the Minnesanger or Snorre Sturlusson. English or Anglo-Norman genius diverted to central Latin paths. In this respect we look before and after, from Aelfric to Chaucer, and the east Midland and London dialect of Chaucer emphasises the break from the West Saxon past.
We praise the Norman for order and universality, for the concentration of wealth in the economy, for mottes and baileys, for preservation of internal peace, and protection from outside foes. They plundered their subjects, but they did indeed protect them from others. We must not forget the loss. And one consequence of the plundering was the stifling of the precocious vitality of the standardised Old English literary culture.
ealdorman: a man of noble rank in charge of an important office under the king, normally in the reign of Alfred, a single shire. Later in the tenth century his sphere of authority could extend to several shires;
frith and grith: terms for personal peace;
hundred: a subdivision of a shire. In parts of the Danelaw the corresponding division was known as a wapentake;
motte and bailey: a fortified mount with attached enclosure, the commonest form of fortification in the century after the Norman Conquest;
reeve: a superior servant in charge of an estate (Anglo-Saxon gerafa);
sake and soke: rights of jurisdiction (literally cause and suit);
thegn: originally a term meaning servant, but by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period a nobleman with a special wergeld (q.v.);
wergeld: blood-price, the sum paid in compensation for the death of a man. This was normally reckoned at 200s for a simple freeman, and 1,200s for a nobleman.