judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French
was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice,
while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned
to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other. Still,
however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil,
and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was
cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect,
compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they
could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and
from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present
English language, in which the speech of the victors and the
vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has
since been so richly improved by importations from the classical
languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of
Europe.

This state of things I have thought it necessary to premise for
the information of the general reader, who might be apt to
forget, that, although no great historical events, such as war or
insurrection, mark the existence of the Anglo-Saxons as a
separate people subsequent to the reign of William the Second;
yet the great national distinctions betwixt them and their
conquerors, the recollection of what they had formerly been, and
to what they were now reduced, continued down to the reign of
Edward the Third, to keep open the wounds which the Conquest had
inflicted, and to maintain a line of separation betwixt the
descendants of the victor Normans and the vanquished Saxons.

The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that
forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter.