In the ninth and tenth centuries these Northmen, the Scandinavian Teutons, whom our ancestors called Danes, established an ascendancy over a large part of England. They seem to have mingled easily with the English, and we can trace back to their dialect some of the very commonest features of our language. Thus, the Scandinavian pronouns, _they_, _them_, _their_, _she_, gradually replaced less convenient Anglo-Saxon forms, and it is to the Northmen that we owe that extremely useful grammatical achievement which has enabled us to form both the genitive and the plural of nearly _all_ nouns by merely adding the letter “s”. Other Scandinavian words are _call_, _get_, _hit_, _husband_, _knife_, _leg_, _odd_, _same_, _skin_, _take_, _want_, _wrong_; and there are many more hardly less common. The mighty word _law_, together with _outlaw_, _hustings_, _wapentake_, _moot_, and _riding_ (division of Yorkshire) serve to remind us that the Danish ascendancy was no hugger-mugger affair, but a firm political organization. The old Anglo-Saxon words which these Northern intruders replaced, such as _niman_, ‘to take’, and _Rood_ (the Cross) have mostly fallen out of use; but in some cases the two words survive side by side. Thus, our useful distinction between _law_ and _right_ was once geographical rather than semantic, the two words covering roughly the eastern and the western halves of England. And now there followed an event which has had more influence on the character of the English language than any other before or since. The conquest of England by the Norman[12] invaders brought about an influx of French words which went on increasing in volume for more than three centuries. At first it was little more than a trickle. For a long time the Norman conquerors did not mix much with their Saxon subjects. There are plenty of indications of this; for the languages, too, moved side by side in parallel channels. The custom of having one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another for the same beast, when it is killed and cooked, is often supposed to be due to our English squeamishness and hypocrisy. Whether or no the survival of this custom through ten centuries is due to the national characteristics in question it would be hard to say, but they have certainly nothing to do with its origin. That is a much more blameless affair. For the Saxon neatherd who had spent a hard day tending his _oxen_, _sheep_, _calves_, and _swine_, probably saw little enough of the _beef_, _mutton_, _veal_, _pork_, and _bacon_, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters. There is something a little pathetic, too, in the thought that the homely old word, _stool_, could be used to express any kind of seat, however magnificent, until it was, so to speak, hustled into the kitchen by the smart French _chair_. Even the polite, however, continued to use the old word in the idiom “to fall between two stools.” _Master_,