The real life of the nation was little affected by the shock of the Conquest.

English institutions, the local, judicial, and administrative forms of the country were the same as of old.

Like the English tongue they remained practically unaltered.

For a century after the Conquest only a few new words crept in from the language of the conquerors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the nation at large remain unchanged that William himself tried to learn it that he might administer justice to his subjects.

Even English literature, banished as it was from the court of the stranger and exposed to the fashionable rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in religious works, in poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in the great monument of our prose, the English Chronicle.