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550 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
learning, scholarship, then as now, was a world apart, and, if
possible, even more remote. The 'educated Englishman* ofthe
twelfth
century was, in fact, nearly a Frenchman who enjoyed
listening to romances, like the Song of Roland, and took his
English history from French translations of the romantic
Geoffrey of Monmouth. On the other hand, he was
more or less bilingual, which few of us are today, and if
he happened to be a clergyman and knew Latin, trilingual.
But the number of those, whether native or foreign, who
spoke French can never have been more than some thousands
in a population approaching two millions; and although
the aristocratic structure of society preserved the vogue of
French for centuries, it was English which inevitably prevailed
as the spoken tongue. Nor did the written tradition fail, a fact
attested by the survival into the late middle ages of the letters
peculiar to the Old English script. Before the final resurgence
of the mother tongue, enriched and transformed by foreign
influences, French gave way altogether, while Latin steadily
weakened. Already in the early fifteenth century Henry V was
sending home English dispatches from Agincourt (1415),
though the final victory of English was only achieved in the
sixteenth century.
These developments, however, were still undreamed ofin the
tenth century, when the new minuscule from Tours was spread/
ing all over the west. The European dominance ofthe Caroline
minuscule for nearly four centuries is a potent reminder ofthe
unity of civilization and culture in this period. One must not
however think of it as either uniform or stationary. Within
the general pattern there were endless local variations, and all the
time, writing, like other forms of art, was changing, though
with glacier/like slowness. For these reasons the modern
scholar can generally tell where his manuscripts were written
and within half a century or less fix their date simply by
looking at them. At last, about the end ofthe twelfth century,
and just when Romanesque architecture developed into 'Early
English', the rounded minuscule gave way, quite suddenly, to
a difficult and angular script which for lack of a better name