The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, compiled about 1300, abounds in the words of law and government borrowed from France, words that still keep their hold upon us. The Sir Tristrem, translated in the North about thirty years earlier than Robert's work, is most interesting as giving us more than 200 French terms of war, hunting, law, leechcraft, religion, and lady's dress.
The mischief was now done; we must not be hard on Colonel Hamley, or on Blackstone, or on the compilers of the Anglican Prayer Book, or on the describer of a fashionable wedding in the Morning Post, or on the chronicler of the Lord Mayor's feast, or on the Editors of the Lancet and the Builder, for dealing in shoals of foreign terms; nearly six hundred years ago it was settled that the technical diction of their respective crafts must to a great extent be couched in French or Latin.[1] There were about 150 Romance words in our tongue before 1066, being mostly the names of Church furniture, foreign plants, and strange animals. About 100 more Romance words got the right of English citizenship before the year 1200. Lastly, 800 other Romance words had become common with our writers by the year 1300; and before these came in, many hundreds of good old English words had been put out of the way. Fearful was the havock done in the Thirteenth Century; sore is our loss: but those of us
- ↑ It was once my lot to treat of a code of law; I find, on looking over my book, that at least one half of my substantives, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs dealing with this subject, are of Latin birth; so impossible is it for the most earnest Teuton to shake off the trammels laid on England in the Thirteenth Century.
