The intercourse between Britain and Gaul is known to have been of a very early date; for even in the first century we find, that the British lawyers derived the greatest part of their knowledge from those of the continent;[AT] while on the other hand, the Gallic Druids are known to have resorted to Britain for instruction in their mysterious rites. The Britons, therefore, could not be totally ignorant of the Gallic language. And hence it will appear, that Grimbald, John, and the other doctors introduced by Alfred,[AU] could find no great difficulty in propagating their native tongue in this island; which tongue, at that interval of time, could only be the true Romance, since they were contemporaries with Lewis the Germanic. That the Romance was almost universally understood in this kingdom under Edward the Confessor, it being not only used at court, but frequently at the bar, and even sometimes in the pulpit, is a fact too well known and attested[AV] to need my further authenticating it with superfluous arguments and testimonies. Duclos, in his History of the Gallic' Romance,[AW] gives the abovementioned oath of Lewis as the first monument of that language. The second he mentions is the code of laws of William the Conqueror,[AX] whom the least proficient in the English history knows to have rendered his language almost universal in this kingdom. How little progress it had yet made towards the modern French; and how great an affinity it still bore with the present Romansh of the Grisons, will appear from the annexed translation of the first paragraph of these laws into the latter tongue.[AY] If we may credit Du Cange,[AZ] who grounds his assertion upon various instruments of the kings of Scotland during the twelfth century, the Romance had also penetrated into that kingdom before that period. The same corruption, or coalescence, which gave rise to the Gallic Romance, and to that of the Grisons, must also have produced in Italy a language, if not perfectly similar, at least greatly approaching to those two idioms. Nor did it want its northern nations to contribute what the two other branches derived from that source.[BA] But be the origin what it will, certain it is, that a jargon very different from either the Latin or the Italian was spoken in Italy from the time of the irruptions of the barbarians to the successful labours of Dante and Petrarca; that this jargon was usually called the _vulgar idiom_; but that Speroni,[BB] the father of an Italian literature, and others, frequently call it the _common Italian Romance_. And if Fontanini's[BC] authorities be sufficient, it appears that even the Gallic Romance, by the residence of the papal court at Avignon, and from other causes, made its way into Italy before it was polished into the Provençal.