attested[AV] to need my further authenticating it with superfluous
arguments and testimonies.

Duclos, in his History of the Gallic' Romance,[AW] gives the
abovementioned oath of Lewis as the first monument of that language. The
second he mentions is the code of laws of William the Conqueror,[AX]
whom the least proficient in the English history knows to have rendered
his language almost universal in this kingdom. How little progress it
had yet made towards the modern French; and how great an affinity it
still bore with the present Romansh of the Grisons, will appear from the
annexed translation of the first paragraph of these laws into the latter
tongue.[AY]

If we may credit Du Cange,[AZ] who grounds his assertion upon various
instruments of the kings of Scotland during the twelfth century, the
Romance had also penetrated into that kingdom before that period.

The same corruption, or coalescence, which gave rise to the Gallic
Romance, and to that of the Grisons, must also have produced in Italy a
language, if not perfectly similar, at least greatly approaching to
those two idioms. Nor did it want its northern nations to contribute
what the two other branches derived from that source.[BA] But be the
origin what it will, certain it is, that a jargon very different from
either the Latin or the Italian was spoken in Italy from the time of the
irruptions of the barbarians to the successful labours of Dante and
Petrarca; that this jargon was usually called the _vulgar idiom_; but
that Speroni,[BB] the father of an Italian literature, and others,
frequently call it the _common Italian Romance_. And if Fontanini's[BC]
authorities be sufficient, it appears that even the Gallic Romance, by
the residence of the papal court at Avignon, and from other causes, made