CHAPTER V

THE LATIN LANGUAGE

IN the twelfth century the common language of Western Europe was Latin. The vernacular
idioms were only in process of formation for literary purposes out of the various dialects; while
French was spoken in England, and somewhat in Italy, its European vogue, as the “language most
delectable and common to all,” dates from the following century. To say that Latin was the
international language is, however, to give a very inadequate impression; it was not only the
language of international intercourse, but for many purposes the language of several peoples at
home. AS the speech of the universal church it was the vehicle of communication between the
clergy of distant regions, but it was also the language of ecclesiastical and religious life. Men
prayed in Latin, sang in Latin, preached in Latin in every part of Western Christendom. It was the
language of learning and education everywhere: the textbooks were in Latin, and boys were
taught everything through the Latin, and taught to speak Latin in school, so that it became the
speech of educated men even in their lighter and more popular writings. It was the language of
law or at least of all treatises in law, not only of the Roman law and the canons of the church,
but of Glanvill and the Norman customal, of the Lombard Libri feudorum and the Usages of
Barcelona, of the assizes of Henry of England and Roger of Sicily; the language, too, of
administrative and business records, as represented by the rolls of the Anglo-Nrman exchequer,
the registers of Italian notaries, and the enormous body of accounts and charters and legal
instruments throughout Europe. The merchant and the lawyer, the bailiff´s clerk and the
physician, needed their Latin as well as the scholar and the priest.

With so wide and extension in space and so wide a variety of application, no language cold be
uniform and unchanging, and we are quite prepared to find that the Latin of the Middle Ages
differs according to place and subject, developing new usages to express new meanings and
shades of meaning, and adopting many local terms and even the order of words and habit of
thought from the vernacular. Thus the Latin of Magna Carta has taken over words like vicecomes
(sheriff) and sergenteria (serjeanty) form the Norman-French of the period, and its style and
sequence are those of Anglo-Norman law, not those of Cicero or a contemporary papal bull.