MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 399 destined to become the national speech ; Low German was more closely related to the Dutch and the English languages. I The medieval literature in Germany of which we shall speak I was composed in Middle High German, the period of Old High German having ended about 1 100. The modern Romance languages, French, Spanish, Portu- guese, and Italian, have developed from the colloquial Latin < spoken in the late Roman Empire and the early Romance Middle Ages. This change may be traced in the lan s ua g es .oaths taken by the kings of the West Franks and of the I East Franks at Strassburg in 842, a document which also I gives us an early specimen of German. From the eleventh I century on we find many different dialects in what is now J France, but on the whole here as in Germany a dividing I line may be drawn marking off the two tongues of north ! and south. From the northern dialects modern French has i grown; the southern tongue, usually called Provencal, was to disappear as a written language, but is still spoken by peasants in parts of southern France. These two groups of dialects in France are also often called respectively the langue oVo'il and the langue d'oc from the medieval pronunci- lation of the word for " Yes" in the two sections. Provencal jwas more closely related to the speech of northern Italy and northern Spain than to that of northern France, and Cata- lan, the language of the northeastern corner of the Spanish 'peninsula, was really a branch of Provencal. By virtue of a written literature in the vernacular during the Anglo-Saxon period, England can boast the oldest and longest continuous literary history of any coun- Anglo-Saxon try of modern Europe. Bede, though himself ligature writing in Latin, tells us of earlier Anglo-Saxon poets. Beowulf, the leading piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry, is extant only in a manuscript of about the year 1000, but is believed to have existed in its present form as early as the century before Charlemagne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Alfred's time if not earlier, is not only the chief work in Anglo-Saxon prose, but the earliest piece of original com- position in prose in any medieval popular tongue. Anglo-
