striking. Men from various parts of the British Isles have taken to the Colonies their peculiarities of speech, but they in their own lifetime, or at all events their descendants, have gradually discarded those peculiarities, and adopted the characteristic pronunciation and phraseology which enables us to tell the Australian from the Anglo-Indian, the Cape Colonist from the Canadian. In the same way as British settlers, with their Scottish, Irish, or Welsh accents, their local drawls and intonations, and their varied colloquialisms, have created in each foreign region a fairly uniform standard of speech, the Normans of the eleventh and twelfth centuries introduced into this country a language which was practically uniform. In both cases the determining factors were essentially the same, namely, the influence of literature and the existence of an official language.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries Paris did not possess the prestige it was destined to acquire during the following age. On the ruins of the Carolingian Empire the descendants of Hugh Capet were laying the foundations of the new kingdom of France, but their task was beset by many difficulties; some of their feudatories were in open rebellion; others, like the Dukes of Normandy, professed allegiance, but wielded greater power and influence than their nominal overlords. Thanks to superior statesmanship the Normans, within their own borders, mitigated the evils of feudalism and set up an efficient government. Nay more, the sons of those who ruthlessly pillaged and destroyed the monasteries to such an extent that 'in Normandy scarcely a church survives anterior to the tenth century,'[1] became the protectors of the Church, and the champions of art and learning. The schools of Bec and Caen rose to fame before those of Paris. Latin was par excellence the language of
- ↑ C. H. Haskins, The Normans in European History, London, 1916, p. 35.
