Four generations (he writes) had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat.... At court and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleading and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victor and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe. This is a history-lesson. A conflict of forces, a set of tendencies is described in what might be a chapter straight from a history-book. Scott is showing the position that the English language occupied at a given period, and is making the sort of generalisation that it is the historian’s business to make. We are not being treated to an essay by Dryasdust; there is imagination in the depiction that is given; but this is the historian’s way of treating historical facts; it is essentially the past being described to later ages, it is not the past telling its own tale, giving itself away; and it is a chart to the age rather than a picture. Even in a further sense than this the historian speaks in his peculiar idiom; for he not only describes the world as it was at some time past, but he hauls this world into relationship with the whole of subsequent development and puts it in its place in the whole cinematograph-film that is History. In the concluding sentence he gives the significance of that conflict of languages which he has been describing, and sees it as a link in the whole story of our language. And because of this the reader does not lose himself in the past; he stands aside to compare it with the present. This part of the chapter gives in reality the stage-directions of the novel, and it reminds the reader that he is not in the past, and so breaks the spell.