9. =THE FIRST ENGLISH BOOK AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST.=--Normandy was lost to England in the reign of King John, in the year 1204. From that date, as we have seen, there was a compulsion on the Norman-French to forget their foreign origin, and to look upon themselves as genuine Englishmen. A year after, in the year 1205, ten years before the winning of the Magna Charta, appeared the first work--it was a poem--that was written in English after the Conquest. It is a translation by a Somersetshire priest called =Layamon= or =Laweman=, from a French poem. _Brut_ is the French form of the name _Brutus_, who was said to be a son of Æneas, and to be the founder of the British nation. In those rude times, when history was quite unknown, the origin of every nation was traced up to Troy, and the persons of the _Iliad_ of Homer. The _Brut_ is a poem written chiefly in head-rhymes, and consists of about thirty thousand lines. But though it is translated from a French poem, there are not fifty French words in the whole--that is, there is not one French word in every six hundred lines. 10. =ORM’S ORMULUM, 1215.=--The _Ormulum_ was a poem written by an Augustine monk, called =Orm= or =Ormin=, and called after his own name. It is a poem of nearly twenty thousand short lines, without rhyme of any kind--but with a regular number of accents. There are not five French words in the whole poem. Orm was extremely particular about his spelling; and, when an accent struck a consonant after a _short_ vowel, he insisted on doubling the consonant. 11. =LANGLAND AND CHAUCER.=--William Langland represents the part of the nation that spoke pure English; Geoffrey Chaucer, that part which spoke English with a large admixture of Norman-French. In fact, Chaucer’s poems show the high-water mark of the French saturation of our English vocabulary. Langland--a west-countryman, a monk, a man of the people, and of intensely radical sympathies--was born in 1332; Chaucer, a Londoner, in the very centre of English society, page to the Duchess of Clarence at sixteen years of age, and afterwards for great part of his life in court employment, was born in 1340. Both died in the year 1400. Langland’s most important poem is the _Vision of (concerning) Piers Plowman_. It is written in pure English, and in head-rhyme. It is the last English poem that was written in this kind of alliterative verse. The following lines are taken from the introduction: In a somer seasun In a summer season when softe was the sonnë, when soft was the sun, I shop me into a schroud I shape me into (dressed) shrouds (clothes) a scheep as I werë, shepherd as I was, in habite of an hermite in habit as a hermit, unholy of werkes, unholy in works, wende I wydene in this world went (far and) wide in this world, wondrës to here. wonders to hear.