This period opens with a victorious French army in England, followed by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech at home and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English armies on French soil, resulting in the rapture of Calais, which remained for more than two hundred years in the possession of England. At the close of this period we find Wycliffe, "the morning star of the Reformation," and Chaucer, the first great singer of the welded Anglo-Norman race. His wide interest in human beings and his knowledge of the new Italian literature prefigure the coming to England of the Revival of Learning in the next age. It will now be necessary to study the changes in the language, which were so pronounced between 1066 and Chaucer's death. THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ENGLISH Three Languages used in England--For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, three languages were widely used in England. The Normans introduced French, which was the language of the court and the aristocracy. William the Conqueror brought over many Norman priests, who used Latin almost exclusively in their service. The influence of this book Latin is generally underestimated by those who do not appreciate the power of the church. The Domesday survey shows that in 1085 the church and her dependents held more than one third of some counties. In addition to the Latin and the French (which was itself principally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower classes of the English stubbornly adhered. The Loss of Inflections.--Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing endings, like modern German. If a Saxon wished to say, "good gifts," he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and his expression was _g=ode giefa_. For "the good gifts," he said _ð=a g=odan giefa_, inflecting "the" and at the same time changing the case ending of "good." The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has never entirely lost. We, however, no longer decline articles or ordinary adjectives. Instead of having our attention taken up with thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. Although our pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like _ox, oxen_, or _mouse, mice_, is the addition of _'s, s,_ or _es_ for the possessive and the plural. Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings. How did English have the good fortune to lose them?