of the Norfolk bondman, always leaned towards the common folk; it was the French Muse that was the aristocratic lady.[1] As to Edward, he was in the main a truly national King, and what we owe to him is known far and wide; but one thing was wanting to his glory — he never made English the language of his Court, sore worried though he was by Parisian wiles. Our tongue had to plod on for about forty years after his death, before it could win Royal favour. The nobles still clave to the French: the struggle for mastery between the Romance and the Teutonic lasted for about a hundred and twenty years in all. In 1258 a proclamation in English was put forth, the first Royal acknowledgment of the speech of the lowly; about 1380 the Black Prince, lately dead, was mourned in French poems compiled by Englishmen; and these elegies seem to be almost the last effort of the tongue which had been the fashion at Court for three centuries, and in which Langtoft had sung the deeds of Edward the First. Robert of Gloucester could say in 1300 that England was the only country that held not to her own speech, her ‘high men’ being foreigners.[2] This reproach was taken away fifty years later. By that time it was becoming clearer and clearer that a New Standard of English had arisen, of which Robert Manning was the patriarch; much as Cadmon had been the great light of the Northern Anglian that had fallen
