Looking at such words as _cancel_, _improve_, _realize_, and _size_, we can feel the force of Professor Maitland’s remark that in the Middle Ages “Law was the point where life and logic met”. It served another purpose besides that of establishing a secure polity; for through it some of the new Latin words which were gradually being created by its own, or translated from Greek, thought by the abstruse scholastic philosophy of the day found their way into the vocabulary of the people. Even the old word _cause_ seems to have reached us by way of the law courts. They were thus the pipe through which a little of that hard thinking by the few, which underpins every great civilization, could flow into the common consciousness of the many, and in their terminology we can see most clearly an example of that never-pausing process by which the speculative metaphysics of yesterday are transformed into the “common sense” of to-day. CHAPTER IV MODERN ENGLAND _Sport._ _Caddie._ _Cannibal._ _Tory._ _Finance._ The English language has been facetiously described as “French badly pronounced”. At the death of Chaucer, and for nearly a hundred years afterwards, this description would have been very nearly a true one. Apart from the adoption of a few Latin words, changes seem to have been few and insignificant during the fifteenth century, and we may assume that, for the first half of it at any rate, the Hundred Years’ War was occupying too many of our energies to leave much time for cultural growth. Nevertheless, from developments such as those which have been pointed out in some of our legal terminology we can feel something of the way in which the genius of the English language was steadily, if slowly, reasserting itself and claiming its right to a separate personality. At the Reformation, when England finally shook herself free from the dangerous embraces of the Holy Roman Empire, the period of excessive French influence came to an end. The general effect of Protestantism on our language, subtle and profound as it has been, will be dealt with later, but the Reformation cannot be passed over here without recording one instance in which a word—perhaps a misunderstood word—has had extraordinarily lasting results. It is the confusion of the English _Sunday_ with the Jewish _Sabbath_[16] and the consequent fastening upon that day of rest of many of the sombre inhibitions entailed by Sabbatic Law.