in England, using Latin in permanent records, but Norman French in councils, courts of justice, and baronial courts of all kinds.[1] Even the Merchant Guilds, which sprang up in England under the influence of foreign settlers, drew up their statutes and conducted their proceedings in a language which differed little from that used at Westminster or in contemporary literature.[2] In the eleventh century the Normans had lost nothing of the adventurous spirit of their Scandinavian ancestors. As pilgrims, merchants, or soldiers, or a combination of all three, they found their way into many parts of France and Spain, and visited every Mediterranean port. While their Duke was securing his hold over England, other bands of Normans established a powerful kingdom in the south of Italy. But the high-water mark of Norman power was reached in the twelfth century, when the dominions of Henry II extended from Scotland to the Pyrenees, and the clever diplomacy of the monarch seemed on the point of bringing all western Europe under his sway. Henry was Angevin by birth, but, as Haskins has forcibly urged in his recent history of the Normans, it was as Duke of Normandy that he rose to power, and it was thanks to Norman organization and statesmanship that he was able to consolidate his vast dominions. 'No Angevin influence is traceable in the field of finance, and none seems probable in the administration of justice.'[3] His subjects belonged to many races and
- ↑ The publications of Maitland furnish the proof that even when the court was presided over by an ecclesiastical lord, the pleading was done in French, although the enrolment of it was in Latin. Court Baron (Selden Soc.), p. 15.
- ↑ Many of the Guilds, those of London, Ipswich, Winchester, Southampton, &c., were doubtless in existence in the twelfth century, but their Laws have generally reached us in thirteenth- or even in fourteenth-century versions. Cf. C. Gross, The Gild Merchant, Oxford, 1890.
- ↑ Haskins, op. cit., p. 100.
