During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman
French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the
lower. When the latter got the better of the struggle, and became, about
the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it
was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a
grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its inflections. It had
lost half of its old words, and had filled their places with French
equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies
and courtiers words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the
vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman
castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the
architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of
the living animals, _ox, swine, sheep, deer_, was left to the Saxon
churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, _beef, pork,
mutton, venison_, received their baptism from the table-talk of his
Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the
Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became
intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching
to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English.
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