Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the
bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English,
we at once ask the reason, and we learn the special historic cause. In
a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken
which differ alike from English and from French, but which are strongly
akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of a group
of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the settlement of
other nations, the introduction and the growth of other tongues, have
brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find islands which
both speech and geographical position seem to mark as French, but which
are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the English crown. We
soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems so strange. Those
islands are the remains of a State and a people which adopted the
French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did not become a part
of the French State. That people brought England by force of arms
under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part of that
people were afterward conquered by France, and gradually became French
in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave to their
connection with the land which their forefathers had conquered, and
that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never became French in
feeling. This last case, that of the Norman islands, is a specially
instructive one. Normandy and England were politically connected,
while language and geography pointed rather to a union between Normandy
and France. In the case of continental Normandy, where the
geographical tie was strongest, language and geography together could
carry the day, and the continental Norman became a Frenchman. In the
islands, where the geographical tie was less strong, political
traditions and manifest interest carried the day against language and a
weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not become a
Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone remained
Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached to the
English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage. Between
States of the relative size of England and the Norman islands, the
relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of the
smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our
forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman
islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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