Chaucer’s writing reveals a language in flux. A literary magpie, he borrows from Latin, French and Italian to enhance his poetic diction and his audience’s awareness of his erudition. From Latin he takes technical terms or sophisticated ones: magnificence. His French borrowings hint at the contemporary concern with curteisie – and his own concern with making his verse congenial to the educated figures who, like him, were to be found at the periphery of court life. He took from French a vocabulary of the abstract, comprising nouns like argument, disposition, impression, liberty, resemblance and solitude , along with adjectives such as outrageous. Though not always the first to use such words, he encountered them in French texts rather than English ones. He can gloss the puzzling new French-derived mansuetude with the more familiar French word debonairetee – and can pun on debonair’s etymology in writing of a ‘deboneire wynde’ (that is, one containing ‘good air’). 12 He is the first to write of either tragedie or comedie, to refer to poetrie by that name, and to use, in a rather more technical sense than we are used to, the noun consequence .13 His works also contain our first sightings of calques from French such as on pain of, to do one’s business and to have recourse, which together hint at a legalistic world of constraint, commerce and complaint. In Troilus and Criseyde he renders the French words jeu parti, ‘a divided game’, as ‘Iupartye’, and this becomes the familiar jeopardy.
It was not just writers with court connections who deployed sophisticated French vocabulary. William Langland was an obscure figure, a minor cleric from the west Midlands, possibly a hermit or dissident, and certainly unbeneficed – a slipshod outsider. Yet Piers Plowman, the long allegorical poem of which he is generally reckoned the author, is difficult and energetic. Its language reflects the poet’s desire to develop an English vocabulary suitable for dealing with thorny theological issues, and is densely populated with French and Latin verbiage as well as with literary and scriptural allusions.
Back to Chaucer, though. At the end of his romance Troilus and Criseyde, which he modelled on a work by Boccaccio, he makes reference to the ‘gret diversite / In Englissch and in writyng of oure tonge’. He offers his book to the entire nation, conceiving of himself as a national poet rather than a regional one or a specialist, and he exploits this ‘gret diversite’ to achieve literary effects. The Host in The Canterbury Tales intervenes in one tale to upbraid its narrator for using ‘drasty speche’ – perhaps this is coarse-sounding English, where some sort of alliterative finery would have been expected and preferred, or perhaps it is an excess of flatulent Frenchness. Either way, the Host’s judgement is stinging: ‘Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord.’ Drasty means ‘trashy’ or ‘dreggy’, and seems to have been used mainly in the context of brewing, so it is an appropriate word to come twice out of the mouth of the Host, who is after all an innkeeper. For its part toord is pungently self-explanatory. Chaucer makes a point of setting trash alongside jewels.
Right through the poet’s oeuvre there is this mix of registers. There are technical words aplenty, as in his translation of Boethius’s high-minded The Consolation of Philosophy, or in a reference in Troilus and Criseyde to ambages (a Latin word for circumlocutions), yet in his earthier works readers do not have to look far to come across the words pisse and ferte, and Alison in The Miller’s Tale giggles ‘teehee’ after contriving to have dainty Absolon kiss her erse. The Parson refers eleven times to misericorde, a weightily religious alternative to the everyday pitee. The Knight, who has visited Egypt, Prussia, Lithuania and Moorish Spain, seems to be a relic of a bygone age, and his language is archaic. The Pardoner, who passes off pig’s bones as holy relics, drops in Latin words to ‘saffron’ his sermons.
The diversity of Chaucer’s language reflects the breadth of the society he depicts. Characters speak in clearly identifiable voices, indicative of their varied origins and enthusiasms. His close experience of London life and the city’s many forms of English fed into this diversity of colours and flavours. In ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ he pokes fun at the northern speech of two Cambridge students, John and Aleyn; the humour comes at the expense of their regional pronunciations, rather than their social class. What is more, the language used to describe characters says something of their values and aspirations. We are told that Madame Eglentine the Prioress speaks French fastidiously yet with an unmistakable east-London accent; appropriately, the language used of her is clotted with pretentious French diction. By contrast, Robyn the ribald, thieving Miller, who breaks down doors with his head, is sketched with a series of blunt, mainly Saxon, monosyllables – ‘ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones’. Chaucer’s pilgrims are characterized by what they do, and the same is frequently true of the figures who appear in the pilgrims’ tales. Professional jargon, often thick with terms drawn from French, helps define them. (It is no coincidence that jargon was adopted from French in the age of Chaucer, to denote the twittering of birds and other forms of unintelligible chatter.) Where once the sophisticates simply spoke the French language, now they needed to steep their English in fancy Gallicisms. Chevysaunce is a good example – a specialist legal term used by the Shipman to suggest the opaque dealings of the merchant class.
Chaucer demonstrated the vitality of English, then, and its range. This was not universally popular. To many of his peers, English could never have the refinement of Latin and was no more than an ‘upstart language’, with neither the elegance nor the resources of other tongues.14 Later commentators were scathing about his innovations. Stephen Skinner, a noted linguist of the seventeenth century, voiced the not unusual view that, by bringing ‘whole cartloads’ of foreign words over from the Continent, Chaucer had damaged English, ‘smearing rouge over its natural colours and putting a mask over its true face’.15
Where Chaucer revelled in the variety of Middle English, religious writers worried that it compromised the integrity of their work. John Wyclif pressed for the scriptures to be available to people who knew no Latin, and the manuscript translations of the Bible that he instigated are characterized by a conflict between slavish adherence to the strictures of the Vulgate’s Latin word order and an earnest striving after appropriate idioms. The language of the period seemed at times too volatile to convey the necessary authority, but Wyclif’s translations reached a larger audience than any previous work in English.They contain some delightfully graphic terms, such as arse-ropes (intestines), and Wyclif is the earliest recorded user of many alien items, among them behemoth, chimera, puberty, civility, zeal and alleluia. He also brings in character – minus the h – on the model of Latin, although it derived ultimately from the Greek term for a branding iron. Initially it meant simply a ‘brand’ or ‘distinguishing mark’, and it came to signify the sum of an individual’s qualities only in the seventeenth century.
Latin was vital to the endeavours of one of Chaucer’s keenest contemporary admirers, John Lydgate, who devoted much of his energy to turning classical prose into English verse. He developed for the purpose an aureate, sugary style which made generous use of terms borrowed from Latin, characterized by the critic Seth Lerer as ‘shimmering high-concept words’.16 Condemned by the nineteenth-century critic Joseph Ritson as ‘a voluminous, prosaick, and drivelling monk’, Lydgate was undeniably overproductive, but his writing was at its best grandly dramatic, and his style, rather than being tediously habitual, was pointed or moderated according to the nature of his material. Some of his coinages – momentaneous, palaestral – stray too far in the direction of obscurity, but there are others – opportune, melodious, mutability – that prove eminently useful today.
Lydgate’s euphonious elaborateness influenced a group active in the late fifteenth century known as the Scottish Makars, chief among them William Dunbar and Robert Henryson. Dunbar is a virile poet, but among the many voices of which he is capable the most striking is an enamelled, ceremonial one, audible in ‘The Golden Targe’, where dawn’s ‘perly droppis schake in silvir schouris’ and the sky is ‘The cristall air, the saph
er firmament … redolent, / With purpur, azure, gold’, bright with the ‘armony’ of birdsong and sunbeams ‘birnyng as ruby sperkis’. Latin flourishes of the kind favoured by Lydgate and his inheritors were calculated to appeal to a public well versed in the language. The emergence of grammar schools and the strengthening of the universities in the fifteenth century ensured there was a sizeable audience attuned to this kind of rhetoric.
Ceremonial Latin touches were evident, too, in official letters. The English used by Henry V in his correspondence contains studied repetitions and is busy with Latin borrowings. 17 Still, Henry’s decision to use English is symbolic: this was the language of a nation quite independent from France. English was a means of binding together the country’s disparate social groups when they were faced by a foreign enemy. In Shakespeare’s play about Henry, this spirit of nationalism is both highly visible and repeatedly undercut, and the drama highlights the sheer range of people Henry rules. Yet Henry draws them together, forging a community spirit in his celebrated St Crispin’s Day speech with its rallying talk of a ‘band of brothers’. It is to Henry’s reign that we can trace the notion of the ‘King’s English’ – a telling realization of state patronage, albeit not expressed in these exact words until, ironically, the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
While figures such as the Scottish Makars experimented with the language’s resources, technology accelerated the spread of English. It quickened national consciousness of the language, disseminated texts more widely while also creating new kinds of text, and played a crucial role in standardization and in preventing the inevitable distortions of oral and manuscript transmission. It also led to richer cultural cross-pollination, greater opportunities for comparing texts, better organization and cataloguing of scholarship, and a keener awareness (and criticism) of literary style. Of course I am thinking here about the impact of print. For right across Europe an epochal development in the moulding of languages was the development of printing using movable type. This began – some 400 years after it was first developed in China – with Johannes Gutenberg in 1447.
In truth, the print revolution could not have happened without the growth of papermaking. In the twelfth century, merchants who traded with Arabs introduced paper to Italy. It was cheaper than vellum or parchment, and, because it could not be reused, whatever was written on it was destined to last as long as the paper itself, rather than just until a scribe needed to scrape it clean to make way for something new. Soon its manufacture flourished in Ancona, Genoa and the area around Lake Garda, and Italian papermakers spread the skills of their trade into France, where the main centres were Paris and Troyes. The first German paper mill began production in 1391; the first in England apparently in 1495. At the same time, the copying of texts was more and more being done not by monks, but by secular scribes who were working for commercial gain.
Before the invention of printing, new words were trafficked by people, in person or by means of treasured manuscripts: after it, they were conveyed by books. Printing opened up the English lexicon, by allowing readers access to a wealth of new works that were studded with appealing, useful, novel words. As the historian Lisa Jardine has observed, ‘Printed books permanently altered the way information was distributed around Europe.’ After all, while ‘men of dangerous or dissident ideas could be kept out of areas whose authorities did not approve of them … their books, it quickly became clear, could not’.18 Furthermore, printed books possessed ‘cachet and desirability’, and their ‘distinct existence’ had the effect of making a written work a ‘defined entity, with a clear beginning and end’.19 Although at first most printed works dealt with religious subjects, the range of printed material soon increased, and the new technology made writers feel powerful. Printing diffused knowledge and stimulated the development of national literatures. It also enabled individuals to build private libraries – their contents determined by personal taste rather than by the dogma of institutions.
In England the first press was set up in 1476, by Caxton. While this is widely known, it is worth pointing out that by 1480 there were more than a hundred printing presses across Europe. Almost half of these were in Italy, and about a third were in Germany, but printing had also reached Poland, Bohemia, France and Spain, among others, and there were presses at Krakow and Lyons before there was one in London.
Caxton was not one of history’s trailblazing geniuses; rather, he was an ambitious and astute opportunist cashing in on a gap in the domestic market. Having made money as a mercer, he decided to invest in a press. He learnt the techniques of the craft at Cologne, at a time when in England printing was still thought of as a noble mystery. Having witnessed at first hand the lucrative trade in fine manuscripts, he saw ample opportunity for profit. His own reading, which was conservative, influenced what he printed; he enjoyed French works of chivalry, but knew little of Italian literature. Yet he also played on the snob appeal of Continental works: whatever was fashionable in Flanders and Burgundy was likely to go down well with English readers who aspired to sophistication. In 1474 he set up a press at Bruges and printed The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a long and popular courtly romance which he had translated from the French while living in Cologne. Two years later he returned to London with his press and set up shop at the sign of the Red Pale near Westminster Abbey, close to the offices of government. Over the remaining years of his life he produced a total of 103 printed works, including two editions of The Canterbury Tales and one of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur – the latter a work heavily indebted to French sources, which happens to contain our first sightings of the French loanwords summit and infidel.
Caxton’s writing consisted mainly of translation. Besides rendering into English two French versions of Jacobus de Cessolis’s book about chess, he transported from Dutch the story of Reynard the Fox, notable for establishing the English spelling of ghost. He seems to have had no experience of translation before setting up his press, and he was not particularly good at it. In common with many other translators of the period, he transplanted words directly from the French or the Latin. Translations flooded the language with new terms; Caxton’s contributions were not especially numerous, but included words lightly altered from French (brutish, ample, viceroy) and a few just crudely transposed.
No great stylist, Caxton had little real learning and his cast of mind was plainly medieval. Yet, without explicitly making a case for it, he was an innovator in suggesting some of the fresh directions in which the language could evolve. He showed the different functions it could perform. In personal vocabulary we see the evidence of his time in Belgium. He likes the word spincop – from the Flemish spinnekop – as an alternative to spider, and uses a few other unusual words of Flemish origin, including okselle meaning ‘armpit’, mecop instead of poppy, unberisped to mean ‘unreproved’, visevase (‘a vain or empty matter’ – compare the modern Dutch viezevaas, ‘a prank’) and butter as a word for a cheat. One word he alone seems to have picked up from Flemish is the verb bedwynge, which he uses to mean ‘restrain’. None of these adoptions really caught on; rather, they are indicative of Caxton’s clumsy way with language.
Yet crucially, even though Caxton had doubts about English – which he considered ‘imperfect’, ‘rude’ and ‘simple’ – he chose to print books in the vernacular. He was interested in enshrining a standard form of the language. This was not out of any very noble philosophical calling, but simply because he was a businessman and wanted his products to last well and reach a large audience. He wrote promotional epilogues and prefaces for the books he published, and sought out influential patrons: he was a marketing man, intent on making money, and the forces of the market determined what got published and how it was presented. I should add that Caxton did not refer to his business as printing; rather, he called it imprinting, and the shorter word that we now use began to catch on only in the following century. Nor did he employ the verb to publish. This word, acquired from French but rooted in the Latin, was
not used of the issuing of books for sale until about half a century later.
The distribution of printed books written in English focused attention on spelling reform and grammar. It also fostered a belief in English as a legitimate medium for literature and works of reference or philosophy. This, in turn, led to what academics call ‘elaboration’: English came to be used for a greater number of different purposes, and especially for refined, prestigious ones. When Henry VII called for the Statutes of the Realm to be printed by Caxton in English, he was increasing the law’s audience and severing its old ties with French. He was also enlisting the power of print. As the uses of the vernacular grew more numerous and diverse, its vocabulary burgeoned. Moreover, the rise of printing meant that gradually, right across Europe, the literary world fragmented; rather than being unified by the intellectual culture of Latin, Europe now became a patchwork of increasingly robust vernacular languages. As Elizabeth Eisenstein reports, ‘Typography arrested linguistic drift … and paved the way for the more deliberated purification and codification of all major European languages.’20 Printed books were essential to nations’ different myths of identity. They realized among their readers a sense of national community; readers were rarely able to see the cohesion of such communities, but the written word made it possible to imagine them.
After Caxton’s death in 1492, his business passed into the hands of his foreman Wynkyn de Worde, who published more than 700 titles in a period of about forty years. He came from Alsace – in common with most printers in England, he was a foreigner using foreign equipment – and had served as an apprentice to the typefounder Johannes Veldener. Whereas Caxton had concentrated on courtly writings, Wynkyn offered printed editions of religious and devotional works, and later began to publish poetry and educational primers. He also introduced italic type to English printing. Other new typefaces made it possible to print an increasing variety of texts. In 1519 the first Greek typeface was introduced. A Hebrew face followed in 1592, and an Arabic one in 1617. Anglo-Saxon type was commissioned in 1567, and an Irish face was introduced in 1571 so that a Gaelic version of the catechism could be printed.21 Between 1500 and 1600 as many as 200 million printed volumes were produced in Europe. It was around 1530 that printing and typefounding became distinct businesses, and from this point on the names of the most successful typefounders would live on as the titles of the faces they created: among them Claude Garamond, Francesco Colonna, Giambattista Bodoni, and several generations of the Caslon family.
The Secret Life of Words Page 11