APPENDIX C 6oi conversed in French, and the natives in English: but it was not much speakuig upper class and the English-speaking lower class began to disappear. A literary- language, common to all in England, did not emerge until some fifty years later. The following passage from The Great Pestilence, p. 202, by the Abb^ Gasquet, may here be quoted: " Before that time (1349), ever since the Con- quest the nobility and gentry of this country affected to converse in French: children even construed their lessons at school in that language. So, at least Higden tells us in his Polychronicon. But from the" time of the first Moreyn, as Trevisa, his translator, terms it, this ' mauner ' was ' som del ychaungide.' A schoolmaster, named Cornwall, was the first that intro- duced English into the instruction of his pupils, and this example was so eagerly followed that by the year 1385, when Trevisa wrote, it had become nearly general." Meanwhile, we are told by Maitland, " late in the twelfth or early in the thirteenth century, French was beginnino- to make Itself a language in which not only songs and stories but legal documents could be written. About the middle of the thirteenth century, ordinances and statutes that are written in French began to appear," and that " under Edward I, French, though it cannot expel Latin from the records of litigation, becomes the language in which laws are published and law books are written." This movement was not retarded by the use of English in a proclamation by Henry 111 in 1258, the royal proclamation at Worcester in 1299, or the grant of privileges to the City of London, in 1327, nor was it at first checked even by the patriotic Statute of 1362, which enacted that all pleas in whatsoever court should be pleaded and answered verbally in English. With regard to Ireland too, the Statute of Kilkenny, in 1367, ordaining the use of "la langue Engleis,"(^) whatever precisely that tongue may have been, was quite inoperative. The Editor cannot say whether Norman French was still generally spoken in Ireland at this date; it certainly survived there longer than here. English seems to have been quite established in Ireland in the reign of Henry IV, as the proceedings in Parliament were then conducted in that language. In spite of official encouragement, English was slow to assert itself in legal documents, for it would seem that the earliest known wills in the language are dated twenty years later, at least the first in Furnival's Fifty Earliest English Wills is that of Robert Corn, citizen of London, dated 1387, English wills, and in Scotland no legal documents in the vernacular exist earlier than 1370-80, and no original French charters at all, so that in that part of the changes. But they are no more surprising than the changes wrought in Latin words. Without the aid of philology one would never recognise that sarcelk is the regular French descendant of Latin querquedula, to take a single example." (^) "Item ordine est et etablie que chescun Engleys use la lang Engleis et soit nome par nom Engleys enterlessant oulterment la manere de nomere use par Irrois." 76
