I. Old English, commonly called Anglo-Saxon 450-1100 II. Early English 1100-1250 III. Middle English 1250-1485 IV. Modern English 1485-1882 But it must not be forgotten that there is no hard and fast line between one period and another. A living language, like a living body, is always changing. It takes on new additions of new matter; it loses the old. With these new additions, its form also changes. We are rarely sensible of these changes; but they are going on all the time for all that. 11. =THE OLDEST ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON, 450-1100.=--This form of the English language contained a very large number of inflections. The definite article was inflected for gender, number, and case; nouns and adjectives were highly inflected; and the verb had a very much larger number of inflections than it has now. The words of the English vocabulary during this period were almost entirely English; a few Latin and Greek words--brought in chiefly by the church--and a few Keltic words, had found their way into the English vocabulary. The rhyme used in poetry was not end-rhyme, as at the present date, but head-rhyme or alliteration--as we find it in the well-known line from Pope: Apt alliteration’s artful aid. To this period belong the writings of the poet Cædmon and of King Alfred. 12. =EARLY ENGLISH, 1100-1250.=--The Normans had seized all power in the state and in the church, and had held it since the year 1066. During the early part of this period, English was not written, had ceased to be employed in books; and French words began to creep in even among the spoken words of the English people. The inflections of words began to drop off, or to be carelessly used, and then to be mixed up and confused with each other. One of the chief writers of this period is a priest called =Layamon=, who wrote a poem called the _Brut_ (_Brutus_), which gave some account of the beginnings of the English people, who were believed to be descended from Brutus, the fabled son of Æneas of Troy. 13. =MIDDLE ENGLISH, 1250-1485.=--Nouns and adjectives during this period lost almost all their inflections. The inflections of verbs were very much altered and greatly simplified.--In the year 1349, boys in school were allowed to cease translating their Latin into French, and began to translate it into English. In the year 1362 Edward III. passed an act of parliament ordering the use of English in the pleadings of cases in all courts of law, instead of Norman-French, which had hitherto been employed. To the first half of this period belong such works as the _Metrical Chronicle_ and the _Lives of the Saints_, supposed to have been written and translated by Robert of Gloucester; to the second half belong the works of the great poet Chaucer, of William Langland, and of the reformer Wicliffe.