be found in the Sir Tristrem. Several of the French words used in cookery may be read in the Lay of Havelok, who himself served for some time as a swiller of dishes: we here find pastees, wastels, veneysun, and many other terms of the craft; our common roast, boil, fry, broil, toast, grease, brawn, larder bear witness as to which race it was that had the control of the kitchen.
We have spoken of the Lady and the Knight; we now come to the Lawyer.[1] The whole of the Government was long in the hands of the French-speaking-class. Henry II., the great organiser of English law, was a thorough Frenchman, who lived in our island as little as he could; the tribunals were in his time reformed; and the law-terms, with which Blackstone abounds (peine forte et dure, for instance), are the bequest of this age. The Roman law had been studied at Oxford even before Henry began to reign. The Legend of St. Thomas, drawn up about 1300, swarms with French words when the Constitutions of Clarendon are described; and a charter of King Athelstane's, turned into the English spoken about 1250, shows how many of our own old law terms had by that time been supplanted by foreign ware.[2] Our barristers still keep the old French pronunciation of their technical word recórd; the oyez of our courts is well known.
- ↑ Those who administered the law were either churchmen or knights.
- ↑ Kemble, Cod. Dip., v. 235. We here find grantye, confirmye, and custumes. We are therefore not surprised to learn, that few or none in 1745 could explain the old English law terms in the Baron of Bradwardine's charter of 1140, ‘saca et soca, et thol et theam, et infangthief et outfangthief, sive hand-habend, sive bak-barand.’
