The Adventure of English (5 page)

And English, the word “Englisc,” was here used as confidently as the word “Latin.” Alfred's power and intelligence put it on the map of languages.

He had five books of religious instruction, philosophy and history translated from Latin into English. This was a laborious and costly undertaking but consistent in its thoroughness and vision with the man who drew a line across England to keep the peace, founded a navy and built up Winchester into a royal capital city. Copies of these books were then sent out to the twelve bishops in his kingdom. Further to emphasise the importance he attached to these books, Alfred also sent the bishops a costly pointer used to underline the text.

The head of one of those pointers was discovered in 1693 in Somerset. It is crafted in crystal, enamel and gold and is now on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is inscribed “Ælfred had me made” — in English. Alfred the Great had made the English language the jewel in his crown. His Wessex dialect would become the first Standard English.

In Winchester he established what was effectively a publishing house. His sense of being English ran through everything he published. For instance, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
had existed for centuries in different versions. Alfred brought these together in an act of compilation which seems as much an act of patriotism as of scholarship.

A hundred years after Alfred, the Danes would again be on the rampage. At the Battle of Maldon in 991, the Danes defeated the English once more; the Danegeld was levied and in 1013 King Æthelred was exiled to Normandy. The Danish King Sweyn succeeded him. Authority in the land was once again decided on battlefields. But thanks to Alfred, authority in the language had been settled. The poem describing the Battle of Maldon is in Old English, full of the fury of alliteration, worked with words wisely woven. And still used today. Words like “heard” (hard), “swurd” (sword), “wealdan” (wield), “feoll” (fell), “god” (good) and, best of all, I think, “word” (word). Usually it is the victors who write the history. Here the defeated English did that service, proving that although the Danes had the land again, they could not possess the language.

For even in the worst period of the renewed Danish invasions, the monk Ælfric was working in Winchester and then in Cerne Abbas, teaching Latin in the language of English to the same peoples, “the youth of free men,” whom Alfred had originally targeted. Ælfric was prolific in English; his books on the lives of saints, for example, were dramatic and popular. His colloquies, in Latin, were a series of dialogues between a master and his pupils, and Ælfric did it through drama. He would assign his pupils a role — a ploughman, a fisherman, a baker, a shepherd, a monk — and Ælfric would ask them questions about what they did. This gave the pupils a chance to answer in their own words, be spontaneous, individual, inventive. And when, some years later, Old English was written above the Latin, these teaching aids brought that free discipline to English itself.

It is just as fascinating to look at the work of Archbishop Wulfstan, who wrote a sermon to the English when the Danes persecuted them most severely, in 1014. Called “Sermo Lupi,” it begins:

A few of the same words in the Old English in which it was originally written will indicate similarities and differences. It begins: “Leofen men, gecnawað þaet soð is: ðeos worold is on ofste and hit nealæcð þam ende.”

At that time it was widely believed that the world was about to end — a thousand years after either Christ's birth or death. Apocalyptic signs would announce that. It seems to me at least possible that Wulfstan was aligning the Danes with the Apocalypse, even the Antichrist, while not missing out on this opportunity to lecture his countrymen on their sins and terrible shortcomings. In that sense he is on both sides, serving two territorial masters, excusing the invaders by giving them Apocalyptic trappings and urging his own to repent. On a more practical level, Archbishop Wulfstan served the English king Æthelred and was equally active in designing and preparing legislation for the Danish king's court. The nationality of the rulers changed. The language and those who commanded the language remained, entrenched now in a power through words given them by Alfred.

The Danes would be overthrown and once more an Englishman would be sworn in as sovereign. As he took his oath, in English, in the middle of the eleventh century, he inherited Alfred's legacy, whose range of written vernacular history, philosophy, law and poetry had no peers anywhere in mainland Europe. Not only England but English seemed secure when Harold became king. But he would face other invaders and with them the greatest threat the English language has ever encountered.

A
victory in battle by Alfred saved the English language. Less than two hundred years later the defeat in battle of Harold threatened to destroy it. It was an event which had a greater effect on the English language than any other in the course of its history. Eighty-five percent of Old English vocabulary would eventually be lost as a result of that defeat and though some historians now regard the survival of English as inevitable, it seemed very unlikely at the time. Chroniclers three centuries on from the Conquest still feared for the language. England, and English, were overwhelmed, suppressed and beaten out of the controlling conversations of the time. The savagery and completeness of the defeat at Hastings, we are told, amazed all Europe.

The year 1066 is such a smiling date in our history that we find it rather difficult today to load it with doom;
1066 and All That,
the jolly title of the most entertaining version of our history, only emphasises its status as a harmless old granddad of a date. “We have never been conquered,” Elizabeth I is reported, perhaps apocryphally, to have said. “Save by the Normans,” replied a bold courtier. “But they could not have done it unless they had been us,” said the Virgin Queen, and in its way it is true: English eventually absorbed the conqueror.

This is a translation of one of the versions of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 1066. The chronicle had earlier been rescued and rearranged by Alfred but not with this record in mind:

The first thing to say about this
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
is how clear and authoritative it is. It gives us an excellent historical account in what had become a language capable of exact record, rare anywhere and at any time, all but unique in the world of the eleventh century.

This passage does not refer to the background of the invasion — a background depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry: the illuminated window to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
There we see Edward the Confessor, a lover of Normandy, who named William, Duke of Normandy, as his successor. There we see the richest and most powerful of the English earls, his wife's brother, Harold Godwineson, Earl of East Anglia, pledging loyalty to William, in Normandy, on two caskets of holy relics. Was what happened next treachery? The tapestry shows Harold being crowned in Westminster Abbey on the very day that Edward was laid to rest there.

But William thought he had God on his side. The
Chronicle
concurs by writing of “the sins of the nation” — the English defeat was a just punishment. Harold's risky strategy, hurling all his best men into the front line in a make-or-break battle following a hurried march from the Battle of Stamford Bridge, deprived the land of English earls and chieftains, the very leaders and organisers who could have regrouped to fight another day against an opponent whose lines of communication were unreliable. But God had given William the fair wind to be denied both Philip II's colossal Armada and Napoleon Bonaparte's brooding mass of becalmed flotillas. Thanks to Harold's comprehensive defeat, there was no one left to oppose William post-1066 save the northern earls who believed they could deal independently with the Conqueror. They tried. They failed. The north was wasted. As the chronicler goes on to say in that same passage: “Bishop Odo and Earl William stayed behind and built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!”

The chronicler seems to have readjusted his perspective here: “evil has increased very much,” he writes, and earlier, “he ravaged all the country that he overran.” He was careful to give due to his new masters and put God on their side: he was scrupulous, too, in revealing something of the power of what became the Norman juggernaut: “England” was taken over. It had become, and would for a long time remain, the offshore appendage of a Normandy-based power who saw it as a treasure-house of land and loot. Much as the Frisians had done.

English was also in danger. The Anglo-Saxons had all but eliminated the existing Celtic language from what was to become English. The Viking Danes had come within a whisker of doing the same to English. In the first case, Old English had shown its ruthless determination to take on no other tongue. In the second, it had been assisted by a most extraordinary warrior-scholar king. It had also begun to treat with that threatening language, the Danish, to draw it in, take what it needed. But now? Leaderless, oppressed, under the Norman heel?

There is an immediate clue in the name itself. The word “Hastings” came from -ing (Old English), “the people or district of ” Hæsta, a warrior, whose name comes from “hæst,” an Old English word for violence. So into the unconscious went a place marking a defeat, but by some necessity of survival, its name was subversively inspirational: not entirely unlike that other great inspirational defeat, Dunkirk. It was English which held the naming day. And yet the actual site of the engagement was named not with an English word like “fight” but with a word from the language of the Norman victors, battle. This was the new reality.

The Normans who conquered England were Norsemen by blood and there could be reasonable expectation that the languages would mesh. But by the time their ships landed at the old Saxon shore of Pevensey — the precise spot where Frisians had landed in 491 — the language they spoke was a variety of French. The Darwinian properties had worked their evolutionary ways on the human tongue and French had swallowed up their Old Norse. Its roots now were not in the Germanic languages which had come to England, but in Latin. It is fascinating that the Norsemen's language was all but completely wiped out in France, whereas its close kin in England, in the north, put up a real fight and forced its way into Old English, even into the roots of its grammar.

But the Normans came with an alien tongue and they imposed it. On Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey. The service was conducted in English and Latin. William spoke French throughout. It is said that he attempted to learn English but gave up. French ruled. And the French language of rule, of power, of authority, of superiority, buried the English language.

William held his new realm by building a string of stone castles which at that time and for long afterwards must have seemed impregnable. He had no hesitation — in York for instance — in razing whole areas of a large town to plant his castle prominently and surrounded by open land to give it most advantage. When we see a castle such as the one at Rochester, even now, broken though it is, we see power manifest. Those walls guarded those in charge and protected them. Cathedrals too would be built to confirm and emphasise the stone power of the Norman conquerors. God is on our side, those great cathedrals — Durham, York — said. Look at the mighty works that we conquerors can make and despair of ever rising up against us. The size, structure and massiveness of those buildings in a single-storeyed or, more unusually, double-storeyed society of lowly architecture must have created an awesome effect. A new world had landed.

As with stone, so with words. Over the next two centuries, French rained heavily on the English. Words of war: “army” (from armee), “archer” (from archer), “soldier” (from soudier), and “guard” (from garde) all come from the victors. French was the language which spelled out the new language of the social order. “Crown” (from corune), “throne” (from trone), “court” (from curt), “duke” (from duc), “baron” (baron), “nobility” (from nobilité), “peasant” (from paisant), “vassal” (vassal), servant (servant). The word to “govern” comes from French (governer), as do “authority” (from autorité), “obedience” (obedience) and “traitor” (from traitre).

From that short sample a new world emerges. We know who is in charge: those who have the language. We see a system being put in place — to reinforce the invaders; the language tells us that. It renames the rules and the ruled, it manacles English to the command words of French. And it spread everywhere.

In the law, for instance, “felony” comes from felonie, “arrest” from areter, “warrant” from warant, “justice” from justice, “judge” from juge, “jury” from juree. On it goes: to “accuse” from acuser, to “acquit” from aquiter, “sentence” from sentence, to “condemn” from condemner, “prison” from prisun, “gaol” from gaiole.

It has been estimated that in the three centuries following the Conquest perhaps as many as ten thousand French words colonised English. They did not all come at once — though the words of authority and law and rule were imposed immediately — but 1066 opened up a stream for French vocabulary which raced through until the fourteenth century and has continued to course into English, on and off, ever since. “Battle,” “conquest,” “castle,” “arms,” “siege,” “lance” and “armour” came first and came to stay. Today they sound as English as “ground” or “blood” or “sword” or “son.” The new court motto: “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Evil be to him that thinks evil). The Normans seized the centre of power and it was their language which described the new order they brought to bear.

Over the next three hundred years French words, loan words which have since become “our own,” were imposed in control positions in art, architecture and building, Church and religion, entertainment, fashion, food and drink, government and administration, home life, law and legal affairs, scholarship and learning, literature, medicine, military matters, riding and hunting and social ranking.

How was English to survive this invasion, and one led by those to whom obedience was unyieldingly demanded? The only way for even moderately ambitious English men and women to breathe any air of power or culture was to learn French and leave English in the kitchen.

But even in the kitchen it was not safe. Nearly five hundred words dealing with food, eating and cooking entered English from French. In any “city” (from cité), there would be “porters” (portiers) trading in, say, fish. In “salmon” (from saumoun), in “mackerel” (from mackerel), “oysters” (from oistres), “sole” (sole); or in meat, “pork” (from porc), “sausages” (from saussiches), “bacon” (from bacon); or in fruit (from fruit), “oranges” (orenges) and “lemons” (limons), even “grapes” (grappes). Or for a “tart” (tarte), a “biscuit” (bescoit), some “sugar” (çucre) or “cream” (cresme).

If you go into a restaurant and ask for a menu (French words that came in during the nineteenth century — the invasion of terms describing and contextualising food has never stopped) you will certainly also encounter words that came in during the Middle Ages. ( We will of course sit at a table, on a chair, eating from a plate with a fork — all from French or widened into a modern meaning by French influence.) “Fry” (from frire), “vinegar” (from vyn egre), “herb” (from herbe), “olive” (olive), “mustard” (from moustarde) and, key to it all, “appetite” (from apetit).

This density of occupation affected all of the fifteen categories I listed above, and always appeared to take over the key positions. French was as ruthless and strategically shrewd as the Norman French army: the former found the means to dominate the language just as the latter found the way to dominate the land.

Domesday was a good word for it. Twenty years after the Battle of Hastings, William sent out his officers to take stock of his kingdom. The monks of Peterborough were still recording the events of history in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and they noted, disapprovingly, that not one piece of land escaped the survey, “not even an ox or a cow or a pig.” William claimed all.

There are two volumes of the Domesday Book (one called Little Domesday, the return from East Anglia) and they show how complete the Norman takeover of English land was and how widespread their influence and their language. Half the country was in the hands of just one hundred ninety men. Half of that was held by just eleven men. Here are a few of them:

Not one of these great landowners spoke English.

The Domesday Book was written in Latin. This was to emphasise its legal authority in a way English was now thought incapable of doing.

If you believe that words carry history and meaning often deeper than their daily purpose, then we see with the coming of the Normans an almighty shift of power. The words that regulated society and enforced the hierarchy, the words that made the laws, the words in which society engaged and enjoyed itself, were, at the top, and pressing down relentlessly, Norman French. Latin stood firm for sacred and high secular purposes. English was a poor third in its own country.