In 1516 Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had made several visits to England in the previous two decades, called for new versions of the scriptures that would make them as accessible to a ploughboy as to a bishop. William Tyndale’s New Testament (1525) answered this call. Tyndale failed to find support at home for this project of empowering ordinary people, and his lucid version of the Gospels had to be published in Germany. His vigorous insistence on Church reform led eventually to his being thrown in jail; in October 1536 he was strangled and then burnt at the stake. Nevertheless, Tyndale’s legacy is clear. His style was beautifully simple, direct yet deep, its cadences a lasting influence on English religious diction. He coined the words atonement and scapegoat, among others, and came up with many enduring phrases – ‘my brother’s keeper’, ‘a law unto themselves’, ‘the salt of the earth’. Tyndale found fresh uses for many words that already existed; one example is beautiful, which had previously been used only of the human face or form, but which he applied to painted tombs (the white sepulchres attractive only on the outside). His was the Bible that opened the floodgates for a whole generation of Bibles that made English the language of English religion. His work was supplemented by Miles Coverdale, who added some more ceremonial touches and dropped some of Tyndale’s more radical interpretation.
The increasingly sturdy image of English that we see in Tyndale’s prose went hand in hand with an increasingly confident sense of what it meant to be English. Sir John Fortescue’s treatise De Laudibus Legum Angliae (completed in 1471) exemplifies this: its title boasts – in Latin, admittedly – of the excellence of English law. One of the principles Fortescue admires is trial by jury. This was a cornerstone of national identity. In due course Fortescue managed to analyse the problems of his country’s government in English, providing early sightings of larceny, feasible, endowment and advertisement.
At this time a standard version of English was crystallizing, which privileged eastern and central spellings. London’s political and judicial administration and the vernacular Bible were its pillars. A form of English suited to ‘official writing’ was developed early in the fifteenth century by the scribes who worked in the offices of the Court of Chancery, Parliament, the Signet and the Privy Seal. They laboured to avoid the obscurity that had smutted the prose of their predecessors. Yet we should be wary of overvaluing the influence of the Chancery style. Most likely the Chancery scriveners were approving a form in wider use: they endorsed an English already prevalent among teachers, churchmen, lawyers and merchants.
The emergence of what we call Modern English (or sometimes Early Modern English) is conventionally dated to somewhere between 1450 and 1500, with Caxton’s introduction of print technology serving as a convenient cut-off halfway between the two. Straddling the border between the old and the new is the poet John Skelton, who was born around 1460 and died in 1529. This ambitious Yorkshire maverick is the first notable English author to have been active wholly in the age of print, and, while his works have more than a touch of medievalism, his vocabulary is modern in its range. When he describes someone clumsy as a knuckylbonyard or calls a fool a hoddypoll he sounds simple and rustic, yet he is the first author to write of contraband , idiocy and declamation – and to mention a shuttlecock or have a character cry boohoo. Much of Skelton’s work consisted of Englishing important Latin texts, and he continually found himself negotiating between the elegance of novel ornament and the simple force of older language. As a poet, he was also, he believed, a kind of historian; the words he chose would have mnemonic intensity – and needed to if they were to be heard above the din of other men’s lies and mistakes. He was forever reworking his writings, and his determination to show his control over his output is evidence of a sneaking sense of his audience’s greater role in constructing its meanings. Skelton wanted his language to display the rhetorical balance of classical literature. To this end, in a single translation published in 1485 he could deploy more than 800 original borrowings from Latin.22
Such a glut of Latinism draws attention to another area of increasing anxiety. The durability of Latin literature seemed to say something about the force of Latin itself, but appropriating Latin terms was a dangerously recondite way of bolstering one’s own authority. What was Skelton thinking? Concerns on this front were set to increase. The language of the sixteenth century’s intellectual renewal would be passionately contested, and in the century that followed English would engage with many other tongues. It is into that period that we now venture, by three routes: exploring the broadening geographical horizons of English, its domestic flux, and then, more closely, its passage into America.
5. Bravado
An ostentatious display of courage or boldness; boastful or threatening behaviour
From the Spanish noun bravada, meaning ‘swagger’, ‘boasting’ or ‘bravery’
First, then, the broadening geographical horizons. In 1603 the poet Samuel Daniel, a minor courtier who had travelled to France and Italy on state business in the 1580s, produced an essay entitled A Defence of Ryme.There he argued that the English were too smitten with Greek and Latin learning and should trust their own artistic discretion. He characterized the desire to emulate the Ancients as ‘a winde, but of the worst effect’: much of what passed for eloquence was really just flatulence. Daniel had long sensed that the uses of English were restricted, yet he had also been coolly aware of new opportunities for his language. In the dedication of his play Cleopatra (1594) he had written, ‘O that the Ocean did not bound our style / Within these strict and narrow limites so’, and had expressed the hope that in the future someone would ‘Unlocke these limites, open our confines’ to ‘inlarge our spirits, and publish our designes’. More arrestingly, in his poem Musophilus, published in 1599, he returned to this theme, wondering prophetically,
And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent
T’enrich unknowing Nations with our stores?
When Daniel penned these lines, English had already been imposed on migrant families in Ireland, on Welshmen seeking office, and on Cornish-speakers. But soon it would be thrust much further afield, and in the process it would absorb a host of unfamiliar new words. The bold creativity of poets like Daniel, who revelled in dreaming up fictional landscapes, can be understood as a rehearsal for the real business of claiming and peopling new worlds.
In Shakespeare’s Richard II the Duke of Norfolk, faced with the prospect of exile, reflects sadly that ‘My native English, now I must forego,’ and follows this with thirteen lines expanding on the theme. ‘My tongue’s use is to me no more,’ he despairs; the worst of his fate is that it ‘robs my tongue from breathing native breath’. At the time Shakespeare wrote this – some 200 years after the real-life Norfolk’s expulsion – there were still no English-speaking communities abroad.1 But within 100 years such communities had developed in the Caribbean, Ulster, India, on the Gold Coast of West Africa, and in America; within 200 years in Canada, Australia and Malta; and within 300 years in South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand and Uganda, to name a few. Those communities were seedbeds for new vocabulary.
In the sixteenth century, the size of Europe’s known world doubled. The large-scale exploring carried out in the Renaissance was a form of experiment, and those who played a part in it were acutely conscious of being involved in a grand new enterprise and a rich historical moment. The chief reward of discovering new territory was financial. Fantasies of lost worlds and unknown pleasures (El Dorado, the Seven Cities, Atlantis, Avalon, the milk and honey of Cockaigne) were – and are – grounded in the lust for power and riches. The example of Italy was captivating: the blossoming of Italian art in the fourteenth century had coincided with the growth of trade and travel, and Italian manufacturers, having learnt to imitate the designs of imported oriental luxuries, had become first competitors and then leaders in the international market for expensive g
oods.2 They are up there still, as a walk down Bond Street, Rodeo Drive or Shanghai’s Nanjing Road will confirm.
In the early part of the sixteenth century, English trade grew, with the Levant a significant new focus. Cyprus, Crete and Beirut were all popular destinations for traders who sailed out of London, Bristol and Southampton, looking to source timber, copper and luxuries. Turpentine from the Aegean island of Chios was sought after; the island’s wine was also prized, and so, later, was its mastika, a spirit or liqueur flavoured with the resin of the mastic tree. Yet by the middle of the century English ships were a rare sight in the Mediterranean, forced out by Portuguese, Turkish and Armenian rivals. While the lack of political cohesion in Germany presented one alternative opportunity, others were urgently needed. England felt isolated, especially after Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in early 1570; English merchants were debarred by papal bull from trading in Catholic Europe, and were thus obliged to seek out markets further east.
Between 1556 and 1581 audacious efforts were made to galvanize eastward trade by establishing a trading connection across the Caspian Sea. The Muscovy Company was granted a charter in 1555; eleven years later it changed its name to the Russia Company, reflecting the increasingly broad compass of its interests. Words borrowed as a result of this connection included rouble, czar, kvass, beluga, horde (really a Turkish word), knez (a ‘duke’ or ‘prince’) and verst – the last of these a Russian measure of distance, equal to two-thirds of a mile, and, like the other borrowings from Russian at this time, indicative of exclusively Russian concerns. Meanwhile, for those prepared to navigate the Baltic, in spite of this route’s daunting reputation, there was the guarantee of lucrative markets for cloth, lead, coal, tin and rabbit skins.3 In 1577 John Hawkins, having already shipped currants from Cephalonia, proposed a potentially rewarding entry into the Ottoman market for such commodities. Others exported munitions. The trouble was that in doing so they were muscling in on opportunities that had traditionally been exploited by the Venetians and the Genoese. Throughout the 1570s, when surging demand for lead and tin promised to revitalize English shipping in the Mediterranean, the efforts of English merchants were endlessly hampered and undermined by aggressive, established competitors.
Nevertheless, there were successes. The Levant Company was granted a royal charter in the early autumn of 1581, and its profits bloomed. As Fernand Braudel explains, this was due to ‘the excellence of the ships, the low price of their cloth, and the quality of their organization’. In addition, its sailors made use of an ‘ingenious’ convoy system (from 1591) and enjoyed a greater reputation for honesty than French or Venetian merchants.4 At the same time, English privateers made a point of savaging Venetian and Genoese merchantmen. They set upon exhausted Portuguese returning from the East Indies. They tangled with Barbary corsairs off the coast of North Africa: while captured Englishmen were shut up in jails or sold at slave markets, defeated ‘Turks’ and ‘Moors’ (words that were used with casual abandon) found themselves hauled to English jails.5 The noun pirate, derived from French, achieved real currency at this time, and expanded to include pirate ships as well as those who manned them; the word was first used as a verb late in the sixteenth century.
All the while, grander designs were afoot. By the 1570s the English were beginning to imagine for themselves an overseas presence to compete with Spain’s – a Protestant empire. Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication had led to an upsurge in patriotism. In the years that followed she became an almost mythical figure – her mystique and power captured in a succession of portraits which show her fabulously attired and decked with jewels. The astrologer and royal adviser John Dee, who was the first person to refer explicitly to an English ‘empire’, took a leading role in defining the imagery of these portraits. From 1579 onward they contain what Roy Strong has justly called ‘a heavy symbolic overlay in terms of imperial pretensions stemming from maritime power and from a reassertion of dominion based both on the imperial descent of the Tudors from Brutus and on the conquests of Arthur’.6 It seems material that it was during Elizabeth’s reign that Shakespeare wrote his history plays, which construct an unambiguously regal image of England. The word patriot was imported from French; one of its earliest recorded appearances is in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605), where talk of patriots is deemed sufficiently strange that the word requires a gloss – ‘sound lovers of their country’. It was soon common, yet in French its use fell away, and in the middle of the eighteenth century, when French authors readopted the term, it was considered a nasty Anglicism.7
The belief that there was a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, affording an alternative sea route to the Orient, had inspired previous generations and now impelled a succession of journeys westward. While the magical prize that was America would become the focus of English ambitions, initially the intended goals were India and Cathay (as China then was known). John Cabot left Bristol with eighteen men in 1497 and, having discovered Newfoundland, returned with claims of having located the kingdom of the Great Khan and reports of excellent cod, timber and silks. His son Sebastian was commissioned by Henry VIII to visit the Malay Archipelago, but irked his sponsors by instead channelling his energies into searching the River Plate for silver. (Neither Henry nor Sebastian Cabot would have spoken of an archipelago. The noun derives from Italian, though clearly modelled on Greek. It can be found in a Venetian legal document dating from 1268, but was adopted into English only in 1600, by Richard Hakluyt.) More famously, between 1577 and 1580 Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe, impudently snatching Spanish treasure whenever he could. (Again, the key word is an anachronism; the verb to circumnavigate was not adopted until fifty years later.) Drake made several important discoveries along the way: it became apparent that Tierra del Fuego, which had previously been thought to be the tip of a remote continent, was an archipelago, and Java turned out not to mark the edge of a southern continent, but to be a large island.
For sixteenth-century adventurers, the best chance of getting rich lay in satisfying the contemporary mania for spices. Sebastian Cabot’s proposed journey to the five angrily volcanic islands known as the Moluccas was sponsored by the Crown because cloves were known to grow there. These aromatic red-brown buds were highly valued – as a flavouring in the kitchen, and also as a perfume and a medicine. The European appetite for such delicacies initiated a spice race, in which English merchants vied with the Dutch and the Portuguese for a share of the huge profits available.
As we have seen, the English appetite for spice can be traced back to the Crusades. But the English were not alone in craving it, and this raging desire – not just for cloves, but for a host of other spices – animated the whole business of empire-building. Some cravings seemed positively perverse. Coriander takes its name from the Greek koris, a bedbug: the unripe leaves and seeds of the plant were long claimed to smell just like a crushed bug. Still, it was an object of desire, along with chilli, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and mustard. As Jack Turner, a fine historian of the phenomenon, observes, ‘Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, the three standardbearers of the age of discovery, were spice-seekers before they became discoverers.’8 For instance, when Vasco da Gama eased into Calicut in May 1498, four months after dramatically rounding the Cape of Good Hope, it was with the intention of acquiring not only precious stones, but also Moluccan cloves and pepper from Kerala. And that was not all: to the west, there was the promise of furs – mink, otter, bear, black fox and beaver. There was also, as John Cabot had suggested, Atlantic cod, a meaty fish that swam with its mouth open and was easy to catch. The fish appealed especially to Catholics, who were forbidden from eating meat on as many as 165 days a year.
In the fifteenth century, competition between the Spanish and the Portuguese for control of the Atlantic had opened up the fertile Americas. From the moment in 1434 when Gil Eannes, a sailor in the employ of Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator, succeeded in passing south of Cape Bojador – for years known as the C
ape of Fear, ‘a psychological as well as a physical barrier to sailors’ on the Atlantic9 – a whole new arena of possibilities was open. The courtly Pedro Alvares Cabral began the settlement of Brazil, having arrived there by accident; Brazilian gold would ultimately pay for a range of English exports to Portugal, and would help cement the position of the English merchants at Lisbon. For the Spanish, the cautious yet restless Hernan Cortés subdued the Aztecs in the space of two years, and Francisco Pizarro, his imitator, conducted a steely campaign of terrorism to conquer the even richer empire of the Incas, while Venezuela – dubbed the Tierra de Gracia by Columbus – was colonized in 1522.
The resources of Central and South America were mercilessly exploited. Assisted by local allies, West African auxiliaries, and the ravages of smallpox and typhus, the conquistadors carved a passage through the continent, their steel swords literally shattering the copper-tipped axes and obsidian weapons of the native inhabitants.10 They benefited, as others had before, from bilingual facilitators. One such go-between was Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked on the Mexican coast and had spent most of a decade living in a Mayan village. Men like Aguilar could drill and regiment the natives: the rewards soon followed. The Spanish sent silver from Peru to be minted in Antwerp. Fine gold ornaments were melted down and sent home to glut the royal coffers. Bullion was humped across the Panama isthmus, and in Cartagena,Veracruz and Havana the spoils of conquest – not just gold and silver, but also skins and foodstuffs and dyes such as cochineal (first attested in 1586) – were collected in preparation for the long sea journey to Seville. Later there was vanilla, named by Willem Piso, a doctor in the service of the governor of Brazil; the Spanish made it popular in Europe, and ‘jealously guarded’ its source.11 Its name in Nahuatl, the tongue the Spanish dubbed lengua mexicana, was tlilxochitl, meaning ‘black flower’. This was difficult to say; the less beguiling Spanish alternative means ‘little sheath’.
The Secret Life of Words Page 12