kings in the thirteenth century, a loss which transformed England from a
province of the Norman Continental empire and of a foreign nobility into an
independent country, and further by the wars ('The Hundred Years' War')
which England-Norman nobility and Saxon yeomen fighting together--carried
on in France in the fourteenth century.

In language and literature the most general immediate result of the
Conquest was to make of England a trilingual country, where Latin, French,
and Anglo-Saxon were spoken separately side by side. With Latin, the tongue
of the Church and of scholars, the Norman clergy were much more thoroughly
familiar than the Saxon priests had been; and the introduction of the
richer Latin culture resulted, in the latter half of the twelfth century,
at the court of Henry II, in a brilliant outburst of Latin literature. In
England, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, Latin long continued to
be the language of religious and learned writing--down to the sixteenth
century or even later. French, that dialect of it which was spoken by the
Normans--Anglo-French (English-French) it has naturally come to be
called--was of course introduced by the Conquest as the language of the
governing and upper social class, and in it also during the next three or
four centuries a considerable body of literature was produced. Anglo-Saxon,
which we may now term English, remained inevitably as the language of the
subject race, but their literature was at first crushed down into
insignificance. Ballads celebrating the resistance of scattered Saxons to
their oppressors no doubt circulated widely on the lips of the people, but
English writing of the more formal sorts, almost absolutely ceased for more
than a century, to make a new beginning about the year 1200. In the
interval the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' is the only important document, and
even this, continued at the monastery of Peterboro, comes to an end in
1154, in the midst of the terrible anarchy of Stephen's reign.