Even the nobles had not been able to completely escape the consequences of a perpetual contact with the _rurales_. Had these latter been utterly ignorant of French, the language of the master would have been kept purer, but they spoke the French idiom after a fashion, and their manner of speaking it had a contagious influence on that of the great. In the best families, the children being in constant communication with native servants and young peasants, spoke the idiom of France less and less correctly. From the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, they confuse French words that bear a resemblance to each other, and then also commences for them that annoyance to which so many English children have been subjected, from generation to generation down to our time: the difficulty of knowing when to say _mon_ and _ma_--"kaunt dewunt dire moun et ma"--that is how to distinguish the genders. They have to be taught by manuals, and the popularity of one written by Walter de Biblesworth,[389] in the fourteenth century, shows how greatly such treatises were needed. "Dear sister," writes Walter to the Lady Dionyse de Montchensy, "I have composed this work so that your children can know the properties of the things they see, and also when to say _mon_ and _ma_, _son_ and _sa_, _le_ and _la_, _moi_ and _je_." And he goes on showing at the same time the maze and the way out of it: "You have _la levre_ and _le lievre_; and _la livre_ and _le livre_. The _levre_ closes the teeth in; _le lievre_ the woods inhabits; _la livre_ is used in trade; _le livre_ is used at church."[390] Inextricable difficulties! And all the harder to unravel that Anglo-Saxon too had genders, equally arbitrary, which did not agree with the French ones. It is easy to conceive that among the various compromises effected between the two idioms, from which English was finally to emerge, the principal should be the suppression of this cumbersome distinction of genders. What happened in the manor happened also in the courts of justice. There French was likewise spoken, it being the rule, and the trials were apparently not lacking in liveliness, witness this judge whom we see paraphrasing the usual formula: "Allez a Dieu," or "Adieu," and wishing the defendant, none other than the bishop of Chester, to "go to the great devil"--"Allez au grant deable."[391]--("'What,' said Ponocrates, 'brother John, do you swear?' 'It is only,' said the monk, 'to adorn my speech. These are colours of Ciceronian rhetoric.'")--But from most of the speeches registered in French in the "Year-books," it is easily gathered that advocates, _serjeants_ as they were called, did not express themselves without difficulty, and that they delivered in French what they had thought in English.