"Anglo-Norman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its poetry of the langue d'oil, the poetry of northern France and of the tongue which is now the French language. In the twelfth century the bloom of this romance-poetry was earlier and stronger in England, at the court of our Anglo-Norman kings, than in France itself. But it was a bloom of French poetry; and as our native poetry formed itself, it formed itself out of this. The romance-poems which took possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... was doing for the dean was interesting. He was making drawings to illustrate a history of Anglo-Norman times which the dean was writing. He drew well and with great facility; but these drawings, many of which were architectural, required special care and accuracy, with the closest attention to detail, which made the work fatiguing, particularly as ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... tomb will be seen engraved in Sandford's Genealogical History,[43] p. 314; which plate, in fact, is the identical one used by Ducarel; who had the singularly good fortune to decorate his Anglo-Norman Antiquities without any expense ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... mists invading men. Who love not more the night of June Than dull December's gloomy noon? The moonlight than the fog of frost? And can we say which cheats the most? But who shall teach my harp to gain A sound of the romantic strain, Whose Anglo-Norman tones whilere Could win the royal Henry's ear, Famed Beauclerc called, for that he loved The minstrel, and his lay approved? Who shall these lingering notes redeem, Decaying on Oblivion's stream; Such notes ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... to book-collecting. Like Dr. Dee, he saw the value of Ireland as a hunting-ground, and employed his emissaries to procure painted service-books, the records of native princes, and the archives of the Anglo-Norman nobility. Among his most precious acquisitions was an Irish MS. containing the Psalter of Cashel, Cormac's still unpublished Glossary, and some of the poems ascribed to St. Patrick and St. Columba. On the Continent the armies of Gustavus Adolphus were ravaging the cities of Germany; and Laud's ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... ABATE, TO. An old Anglo-Norman word from abattre, to beat down or destroy; as, to abate a castle or fort, is to beat it down; and a gale is said to abate when it decreases. The term is ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of the time before the Conquest, and the exact nature even of all Anglo-Norman institutions is perhaps dubious: at least, in nearly all cases there have been many controversies. Political zeal, whether Whig or Tory, has wanted to find a model in the past; and the whole state of society being confused, the precedents altering with the caprice of men and the chance of events, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... institutions, as modified by the Norman rulers, was fulfilled. David, before Alexander's death, was Earl of the most English part of Lothian, the country held by Scottish kings, and Cumbria; and resided much at the court of his brother-in-law, Henry I. He associated, when Earl, with nobles of Anglo-Norman race and language, such as Moreville, Umfraville, Somerville, Gospatric, Bruce, Balliol, and others; men with a stake in both countries, England and Scotland. On coming to the throne, David endowed these men with charters of lands in Scotland. With him came a ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... as steward to a rich man in the Fens, whose sons and young retainers, after the lawless fashion of those Anglo-Norman times, rode out into the country round to steal the peasants' sheep and cattle, skin them on the spot, and pass them off to the master of the house as venison taken in hunting. They ate and drank, roystered and ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... perceptible; while the United States have expanded from a few obscure colonies into a nation second only to Great Britain in the value and extent of their commercial relations, second to none in intelligence and successful enterprise. The Anglo-Norman inhabitants of the "Old Thirteen" provinces have made the valley of the Mississippi, and the prairies beyond it, which little more than half a century ago were mere wastes, the thronged abodes of a vigorous and wealthy European population. They have done this without ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... on opposite sides, open heaths in the wood, covered with heather and sparsely peopled; Mayfield to the north, once the abode of the great Saint Dunstan, and the scene of his conflicts with Satan; Hothly to the south, where, at the date of our tale, lived the Hodleghs, an Anglo-Norman brood. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... the English tongue along the coast, and bringing an infusion of English blood into the towns.[9] In the reign of David I, the son of Malcolm Canmore and St. Margaret, these purely Saxon influences were succeeded by the Anglo-Norman tendencies of the king's favourites. Grants of land[10] to English and Norman courtiers account for the occurrence of English and Norman family and place-names. The men who lived in immediate dependence upon a lord, giving ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... effective the artist's tasteful, characteristic, and very able drawings. The volume is, as it were, a casket, in which are enshrined all the gems which could be dug out of the rich mines of English poetry; and when we say that the first division treats of Carols from the Anglo-Norman period to the time of the Reformation; that these are followed by Christmas Poems of the Elizabethan period, by Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, and their great cotemporaries; that to these succeed Herrick's Poems, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... peculiarities reappear in the Anglo-Norman law, and from that day to this all kinds of bailees have been treated as having possession in a legal sense, as I ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... of Court) of the kingdom. How far, on these occasions, their opinion or their equity controlled the power of the crown, cannot be ascertained. But the form of inserting their names in the 'Testing Clause' was retained under the Anglo-Norman reigns; and the sovereign, who submitted his Charter to the judgment of the Proceres, professed to be guided by the opinion which they gave. As the 'Pares' of the empire, the Witenagemot decided' the disputes between the great vassals of the crown. ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... Chaucer and Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself "in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every one of them." One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says, his attention to foreign languages,—French, Spanish, German, especially in their ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Anglo-Norman, who visited Ireland towards the close of the twelfth century, has been convicted out of his own mouth when he states that Ireland was a barbarous nation when his people came there. He forgot that a people who could illuminate the Book of Kells and build Cormac's Chapel could not be called ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... it be true, however, that proneness to the commission of unwonted and atrocious crime is to be held a token of extraordinary vigor—vigor of nerve, of temperament, of passion, of physical development—in a race of men, then surely must the Anglo-Norman breed, under all circumstances of time, place, and climate, be singularly destitute of all these qualities—nay, singularly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... Voltaire, who certainly did learn it from him. But it is, with that slight indebtedness to Saint-Evremond noticed above, essentially new and original. It is a mixture of English-Irish (that is to say, Anglo-Norman) humour with French wit, almost unattainable at that day except by a man who, in addition to his natural gifts, had the mixed advantages and disadvantages of his ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... conquered. Nor did the king always escape these abuses, for the office, like that of the Carolingian count, to which it was in many ways similar, contained a possibility of use for private and personal advantage which could be corrected, even by so strong a sovereign as the Anglo-Norman, only by violent ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... writers on British history in verse, of very early date. Geffroy Gaimar wrote his Anglo-Norman chronicle before 1146. It is a history in verse of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Robert Wace wrote the Brut d'Angleterre [i.e., Chronicle of England] in eight-syllable verse, and presented his work to Henry II. It was begun in 1160 and finished ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... not only of what he thinks their real origin, but of every kind of early ecclesiastical structure in Ireland. The third part will contain a historical and descriptive account of every ecclesiastical building in Ireland of a date prior to the Anglo-Norman invasion of which remains now exist. The work is crowded with illustrations drawn with wonderful accuracy, and engraved in a style which proves that Mr. O'Hanlon, the engraver, has become so proficient as hardly to have a ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... M. Michel published in Paris, in 1834, a collection of poems and ballads concerning Hugh of Lincoln, which were all very popular at home and abroad in the Middle Ages. One of these, preserved in an Anglo-Norman MS. in the Bibliotheque Royale at Paris, was evidently constructed to be sung by the people soon after the event, which is stated to have happened in the reign of our Henry III.; but there are many ballads comparatively modern which show how carefully the story was kept before the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Pocklington Chapel, Rev. Oldham Slocum—in brick, with arched windows and a wooden belfry: sober, dingy, and hideous. In the centre of Pocklington Gardens rises St. Waltheof's, the Rev. Cyril Thuryfer and assistants—a splendid Anglo-Norman edifice, vast, rich, elaborate, bran new, and intensely old. Down Avemary Lane you may hear the clink of the little Romish chapel bell. And hard by is a large broad-shouldered Ebenezer (Rev. Jonas Gronow), out of the windows of which the hymns come ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the royal minever, and the lions of England stamped in silver upon his harness, none could fail to recognize the noble Edward, most warlike and powerful of all the long line of fighting monarchs who had ruled the Anglo-Norman race. Alleyne doffed hat and bowed head at the sight of him, but the serf folded his hands and leaned them upon his cudgel, looking with little love at the knot of nobles and knights-in-waiting who rode behind ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the vocabulary or word-list, due to the fact that this Proclamation is older than the reigns of the first three Edwards, which was the period when so many words of Anglo-Norman origin entered our language, displacing many words of native origin that thus became obsolete; though some were exchanged for other native words. We may notice, for example, fultume, "assistance"; holde, "faithful"; il{ae}rde and ileawede, "learned and unlearned"; unnen, "grant"; ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat |
