Confessor in theory, of Cnut in practice. But when half a century after the Conquest a creative local lawyer wanted to put the laws and customs of the courts (the so-called 'Laws of Henry I') in the Winchester area into shape, he did his work in Latin - of a sort - with a vast number of good English words, wergeld, bot, frith and grith, sake and soke, given proper Latin forms and endings to make them respectable. There was to be no new legislation in English, there were to be no new writs in English: the native language well had run dry as a language of record, though not as a language of use.
On the religious side affairs were more complicated. The Normans acted with strict propriety. They had no need to act illegally. They could get all they wanted, and still stay well within the law. At the top level this was easy. No Englishman was appointed to high office in the Conqueror's reign. And the new bishops and abbots, French-speaking to a man, brought with them their clerks, their households, their chosen followers who did military service for their new estates. French became the language of the inner group, but not of course still of the mass of the clergy and laity. The result was more complicated than is often realised. Many of the best manuscripts in Anglo- Saxon have been preserved for us in these generations immediately succeeding the Conquest. First-class scribes copied, used, and preserved Anglo-Saxon work in great Norman houses at Canterbury, at Rochester, and at Bury St. Edmunds, as well as in the West Country fastnesses of Worcester and Exeter. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be kept at some centres, certainly at Peterborough, with visible change of language to early Middle English, as late as 1155. The continuity of English Prose was assured. The Schriftssprache , standard Old English, remained intelligible, but after 1120 was no longer a reasonable vehicle for new composition; and your upland priest would interpret it as a country parson still interprets the Authorized Version for his flock, teaching 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 