All who were eager to court their new lords were brought to dissemble their native rusticity. They polled their crowns, they cut short their flowing hair, and throwing aside the loose Saxon gown, they assumed the close vest of the more agile Norman. "Mail of iron and coats of steel would have better become them," cried an indignant Saxon. We have seen what a martial Saxon abbot declared to the Conqueror, while he mourned over his pacific countrymen. This was the time when it was held a shame among Englishmen to appear English. It became proverbial to describe a Saxon who ambitioned some distinguished rank, that "he would be a gentleman if he could but talk French." Fertile in novelties as was this amazing revolution, the most peculiar was the change of the language. The style of power and authority was Norman; it interpreted the laws, and it was even to torment the rising generation of England; children learned the strange idiom by construing their Latin into French, and thus, by learning two foreign languages together, wholly unlearned their own. Not only were they taught to speak French, but the French character was adopted in place of their own alphabet. It was a flagrant instance of the Conqueror's design to annihilate the national language, that finding a College at Oxford with an establishment founded by Alfred to maintain divines who were "to instruct the people in their own vulgar tongue," William decreed that "the annual expense should never after be allowed out of the King's exchequer."[5] The Norman prince on his first arrival could have entertained no scheme of changing the language, for he attempted to acquire it. The secretary of the Conqueror has recorded that when the monarch seemed inclined to adopt the customs of his new subjects, which his moderate measures at first indicated, the Norman prince had tried his patience and his ear to babble the obdurate idiom, till he abhorred the sound of the Saxon tongue. If because the Conqueror could not learn the Saxon language he decided wholly to abolish it, this would seem nothing more than a fantastic tyranny; but in truth, the language of the conquered is usually held in contempt by the conquerors for other reasons besides offending the delicacy of the ear. The Normans could not endure the Saxon's untunable consonants, as it had occurred even to the unlettered Saxons themselves; for barbarians as their hordes were when they first became the masters of Britain, they had declared that the British tongue was utterly barbarous.[6]