The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the richest period of contact. Trade between England and the Low Countries was largely controlled by the Dutch, and the thriving English fish markets depended on catches made by Dutch fishermen. In the last three decades of the sixteenth century, the move towards Dutch independence from Spanish rule propelled intellectual and economic freedom. Dutch and English seamen jostled for primacy in the East Indies. Nearer to home, the argot of the fishermen who worked the Thames contained a smattering of Dutch and titbits of Latin and French.27 There was movement in both directions. Workmen from Middelburg helped improve English glassmaking; Dutch drainage experts worked the fens of Cambridgeshire and Essex, and Dutchmen laboured in the Cornish mines; English actors took touring shows to Amsterdam and Groningen; and a stream of Englishmen went to study at the university in Leiden. Dutch iron ice skates are mentioned by Pepys, as are Dutch chimney tiles and bricks, and both he and John Evelyn could not resist the temptation to go and see a 6 foot 10 inch Dutchwoman when she was paraded in London for public amusement.
An area of especially snug contact between the languages of Britain and the Low Countries has been Scotland. Beginning in the fifteenth century, and for a period of perhaps 300 years, incentives were offered to craftsmen from the Netherlands to settle there. These incomers worked in the Lanarkshire silver mines, set up presses at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, made pottery, and practised as weavers or sugar-refiners. At the same time, Scots traded freely with the Netherlands and Flanders, exporting fish, hides and cloth, while persecuted Presbyterians and Scottish Catholics took refuge there. One of the consequences was an influx of Dutch words into Scots; these were mainly associated with trade, farming and shipping, but included mutchkin, a word for three quarters of a pint, and, more remarkably, golf (from kolven, the Dutch name for a game played with clubs). More recently, contacts between Dutch fishermen and inhabitants of Shetland mean that there are Dutch terms in Shetland speech, such as dulhoit, meaning ‘lethargy’, and krook, a word for a storage jar.28
Colloquially, the Dutchman was known as a ‘butterbox’ – at least as early as 1600 – because he tended to spread everywhere. In the seventeenth century he was to be found in the East Indies and Sri Lanka, in Guyana and Surinam, in Cape Town, off the coast of Nagasaki, and on the Hudson River. Coleslaw derives from the Dutch kool-salade, ‘cabbage salad’, and is first mentioned in a piece in the Massachusetts Spy in 1794. The borrowing of boss, waffle and cookie also resulted from contact with the Dutch in North America, and so did the derisive Yankee. (A now obsolete sense of boss, as a conduit for water, was introduced by Dutch engineers who travelled to England to lay important pipework in the sixteenth century.) The American connection also produced cruller (a twisted doughnut), the verb snoop, and pit, the name for a pip or stone in fruit. But the relationship goes back almost as far as the historian’s eye can see. There were Flemish mercenaries in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Henry I found it necessary to deport parties of Flemings from the area around the Tweed to Pembrokeshire. Families of traders and weavers from the Low Countries had settled in England for commercial gain before the Norman Conquest, while there were pre-Conquest clerical links with the busy intellectual centres of Utrecht and Liège.29 Words borrowed from Dutch in the fifteenth century, such as excise, suggest the commercial link between the two countries. Older ones include mangle, malmsey, mesh, the verbs to prate and to mingle, and possibly also to pamper and poke (a bag).
It was in the final decades of the sixteenth century, while Englishmen were eyeing the Americas and bickering over inky polysyllables, that the Dutch became an imposing force in the Mediterranean. Dutch crews were known for their discipline; even aboard their pirate ships, prayers and psalm-singing were compulsory twice a day.30 They had, in addition, an extensive jargon of seamanship, which impressed other sailors they met. People who spend their working lives at sea have, on the whole, a less acute sense of national identity than their counterparts on land, and the international companionship of sailors resulted in many of the Dutch terms of seamanship gaining wider currency. Examples include the nouns skipper, boom, deck, sloop, reef and hull, as well as the less commonly used terms avast, bowsprit and orlop. Dock was borrowed at the very start of the sixteenth century: it signified a bed where a ship could lie dry at low water, and was the word used of the dry wooden mooring yard constructed on the orders of Henry VII at Portsmouth in 1495.31 Landlubber is Dutch, as are schooner, decoy and keelhaul. On loof, literally ‘on rudder’, was a Dutch phrase spoken by the captain of a vessel when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. It became aloof, a word that extended this idea of avoidance and evasion. In the same sphere are cruise, iceberg, halibut and to smuggle, while filibuster is a corruption of vrijbuiter. Yacht rendered the Dutch jaghte, short for jaghtschip, which was literally a ‘chase ship’, a swift craft for flushing out enemy vessels. Forlorn hope was originally a technical naval term applied to a detachment of men chosen to commence an attack. It arose from the Dutch verloren hoop, which literally meant ‘lost troop’. The term was commonly used of combatants who demonstrated frankly reckless levels of bravery, but only much later did it come to imply such things as a desperate venture, a faint possibility or a lost cause. Terms more generally connected with warfare that are derived from Dutch include – besides onslaught – beleaguer and blunderbuss. We should note the quite large number of verbs taken from Dutch: besides a few already mentioned, we have shamble, snort, split, hanker and hustle. Where we have borrowed verbs, we can be sure the relationship has been intense.
In the seventeenth century, this relationship was soured by a war that took on global proportions. It may be hard today to think of there being any animosity between the British and the Dutch, but disputes over lucrative sea routes sparked a series of conflicts. In the early part of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was a commercial utopia. Writing around 1635, Descartes remarked that ‘In this city there is nobody who does not trade in something.’32 Traders from Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Spain gathered under the hawklike gaze of Dutch merchant regents, and the city’s Exchange Bank lubricated their deals. In the 1640s the Dutch became key players in the distribution of Spain’s colonial plunder, and their maritime strength was embarrassingly obvious to the English, as Dutch craft brought great cargoes of fish, wine and textiles into England. Yet Dutch dominance of the world economy was not supported by great military power or a strong land base, and the republic was politically divided. Avarice and lethargy ate away at its foundations. The extrovert Dutch merchant elite, which had existed barely fifty years, was quite easily depressed. The Anglo-Dutch wars began in the fevered twinges of commercial jealousy.
The first of the wars ran from 1652 to 1654, the second from 1664 to 1667, and the third from 1672 to 1674. In June 1667 a Dutch fleet under Michiel de Ruyter even stole up the Medway as far as Upnor Castle, burning the defences and towing away the English flagship. There was a glut of anti-Dutch propaganda: pamphlets of the period pictured the Dutch as a nation of cheesemongers and herring-picklers, muddy and greedy. The soldier Sir Roger Williams – no relation of the founder of Providence, Rhode Island – had set the tone in his The Actions of the Lowe Countries (posthumously published in 1618), characterizing the Dutch as ‘unreasonable prowde with the least victorie … and deadly fearefull with the least overthrow’.33 In 1653 Andrew Marvell issued a poem on ‘The Character of Holland’, which described the country as ‘this indigested vomit of the sea’, and in the same year an English pamphlet helpfully revealed the Dutchmen’s pedigree – ‘Showing how They Were First Bred and Descended from a Horse-Turd’.34 We can trace to this period of antipathy a number of denigratory stereotypes that are still in use. A Dutch widow is a prostitute, and other expressions – going Dutch, a Dutch uncle, a Dutch auction, Dutch courage – will be familiar to most. The adjective plump was first used by Caxton, and the word was habitually applied to the Dutch, who were reckoned to be well fed,
prosperous and dull. The stock Dutchman was short and squat – quite unlike today. It was with this in mind that the word bumpkin – deriving either from bommekijn, ‘little barrel’, or from boomken, ‘little tree’ – was used dismissively by Englishmen of their Dutch counterparts. The comparable nitwit comes from the Dutch niet weet, meaning ‘I don’t know.’
A very different perspective was offered by the progressive teacher Bathsua Makin, who wrote that ‘One great Reason why our Neighbours the Dutch have thriven to admiration, is the great care they take in the Education of their Women, from whence they are to be accounted … more useful than any Women in the World.’35 As the historian Jonathan Israel points out, ‘No aspect of Dutch freedom in the Golden Age struck contemporaries, especially foreigners, more than that enjoyed by women – of all classes and types.’ It was noticeable that ‘Dutch women, even young, unmarried women, were free to come and go, unaccompanied and unchaperoned, to work, conduct business, and engage in conversation almost like men.’ Moreover, ‘in Dutch society, wives were less subservient to their husbands than elsewhere.’36
But by the end of the seventeenth century, and as the following century wore on, the Dutch began to falter. Their overseas trade networks fell apart. Cattle virus wiped out many of their farms. Their urban economy shrivelled – a decline that speeded up from around 1720. Brewing, often an index of economic vitality, was hit hard; instead there was an appetite for the more swiftly intoxicating brandewijn (‘burnt wine’) and genever – from which we get the words brandy and gin. Gone, too, was the intellectual excellence of figures like Christiaan Huygens and Antony van Leeuwenhoek. As this happened, the Dutch influence on English began to dwindle. Yet its importance is clear. Certain words absorbed from Dutch suggest a state of mind – a Low Countries understanding and mastery of the sea, for instance – but there is also, plainly, a debt to Dutch technology, in the use of wind power and drainage techniques (exemplified by our borrowing of pump), in textile manufacture (spool), in ceramics (delft), as well as in the building and handling of ships.
Furthermore, in England the ultimate beneficiary of the seventeenth century’s political tumult was a Dutchman. William of Orange was the Protestant nephew of Charles II and James II. As the Dutch stadtholder, he had long been threatened by the ambitions of Louis XIV. Replacing the autocratic James II offered the possibility of a grand alliance that could stand up to the French. He landed at Torbay in November 1688, and entered London in triumph on 18 December. Support for him was huge. William’s Declaration of Reasons for Appearing in Arms in England, written by his political adviser Caspar Fagel and translated into English by Gilbert Burnet, was an extraordinary piece of propaganda, designed to please people of all parties, and was distributed widely. His efficient presence promised to avert the threat of civil war. The following April, he and his wife, Mary, were crowned, and immediately he moved to limit French expansion.
William’s rule kept French influence at bay, promoted religious tolerance, and repaired the relationship between Parliament and Crown, creating a constitutional monarchy and reversing the absolutism of the two previous monarchs. It also marked the beginning of a new chapter in the British experience overseas. Confrontations ceased between English and Dutch traders, much to the advantage of the English. While the Dutch busied themselves with other rivalries, the English strengthened their position. A new, commercially driven, East India Company was set up, and copied the Dutch policy of using as its trading bases a string of fortified military positions. Its merger with the old corporation, resulting in the creation of the United East India Company in 1709, produced an organization that combined naval power with sound banking resources and strategic expertise, as we shall soon see.
10. Connoisseur
A person well versed in one of the fine arts and competent to pass judgement on it; a judge in matters of taste
From the French, and ultimately from the Latin verb cognoscere, meaning ‘to examine’, ‘to recognize’, ‘to know’
First, though, another story: about a period in which British pride, and incitements to such pride, grew impressively. And where better to begin than with that word British, which took on new significance at this time? The Act of Settlement, passed during William’s reign, paved the way for the Act of Union under Queen Anne, and this second act, in 1707, created ‘Great Britain’. British had once meant ‘pertaining to the ancient Britons’ or had referred to the Brittonic languages. In the works of Richard Carew it had denoted the people and culture of Brittany. Now it meant something else. While the word was in use as an adjective before 1707, the Act of Union gave it a status in law, and references to ‘the British’ increased from this time. Additionally, it began to be exploited in compounds like British-built, British-born and British-owned. Constitutional stability created confidence in the nation’s identity, and this was boosted by what seemed the almost perpetual war with France: Protestant Britishness was defined through its antagonism to the Catholic enemy.1
The Act of Union was a watershed between the internal turmoil of the previous century and a new age of prosperity. As the century progressed, patriotic feeling grew, under Hanoverian rule, and it became one of the resources of government. The two seminal songs that embody it, ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’, date from the 1740s. (Britannia herself is a hangover from the days of Roman occupation, but it is in the eighteenth century that she acquires her familiar trident, enabling her to ‘rule the waves’.) As this suggests, the period’s patriotism was a kind of performance; the singing of ‘Rule, Britannia’, which had been written by the Scottish poet James Thomson, acted out loyalty and a myth of British resilience. This resilience was symbolized in the form of the ‘native oak’, whose roots apparently grew deeper in time of war. Indigenous art was essential to this myth. Figures such as William Hogarth – who was notably troubled by the popularity of the expression je ne sais quoi – stressed the need for a quick divorce from the cultural examples of Italy and France. But this divorce was never likely to be settled: the appetite for French fashion and culture ran deep, even against a backdrop of continual war and aggressive anti-Catholicism.
Writing in her journal in April 1793, the novelist Fanny Burney refers to a soirée. It is the first recorded use of the word in English, and we should not be surprised that it is Burney who employs it: she had a finely tuned ear for colloquialisms – especially for the speech of polite society and those who aspired to join it. She also enjoyed some exotic contacts: her brother James was friendly with Omai, the first Tahitian to visit Britain, and had a fine command of the Otaheite language, while her acquaintance with the well-connected Thrale family enabled her to meet the period’s dominant literary figure, Dr Johnson.As it happens, Burney attracted scathing comments from some of her contemporaries, who felt she was a little too accepting of foreign phraseology like vis à vis, manqué and zigzag, and her marriage to a penniless French general – which resulted in her becoming Madame d’Arblay – was blamed for her talk of ‘descending’ to breakfast and a distinctly Gallic use of the verb to accord.2
Elsewhere in her diaries Fanny Burney is the first recorded user of the adjectives passé – of a woman’s faded looks, rather than of an outdated fashion – and puppyish, while in her delicious novel Evelina (1778) she introduces such new words as tea-party, grumpy and shopping (these last two italicized in the first edition to suggest their novelty) and coins the unusual verb to Londonize. In Evelina she documents the Londonizing of a young lady from the provinces – the book’s subtitle is ‘The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ – and portrays the social complexities of modish London living with a shrewdly satirical touch. Vogue words like uppish and fuss are in evidence, as are racy Gallic phrases such as ma foi and mon dieu. One character, told he might have benefited from spending some time abroad, sharply retorts, ‘What, I suppose you’d have me to learn to cut capers? – and dress like a monkey? – and palaver in French gibberish?’
Conc
erns of this kind were common among Fanny Burney’s contemporaries. There was a perpetual tension between those who seized on French buzzwords and those who had no stomach for them. But even sceptics privately acknowledged the excellence of the French in the arts, and it was easy to borrow their words, since, after all, this source had been repeatedly quarried in the past.
Fashionable folk were bons vivants, exhibiting bon ton and goût. A contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1738 referred to ‘the absurd and ridiculous’ imitation of the French, which he claimed had ‘now become the Epidemical Distemper of this Kingdom … [and] has even infected those whom one should have thought much above such Weaknesses’. ‘We only ape their Imperfections,’ he argued, ‘and awkwardly copy those Parts which all reasonable Frenchmen themselves contemn.’3 Yet for every commentator whose relationship with the French and their habits was sulphurous, there were a bevy of admirers who could point to the richness of French social and intellectual life. Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu were widely, though by no means universally, admired, as were the polished, often lightweight, literary studies known as belles-lettres. There was an appreciation, too, of the sensual rewards of the fête-champêtre and the jardin de plaisir. French wine was a patrician necessity: to the eighteenth century we can trace the use in English of château, bouquet, decanter and pétillant, as well as knowledge of distinctive styles such as Sauternes, Barsac and Mâconnais. In Alexander Pope’s four-book Dunciad of 1743 we find the earliest English reference to a liqueur, and the word seems already to have acquired a patina of absurdity that primes it for satire. From French the aspirational eighteenth-century citizen learnt to speak of a connoisseur , a tête-à-tête, a jeu d’esprit and a billet-doux. An amateur, rather than being a term of disparagement, signified someone who cultivated an art or a taste – philosophy, say, or sculpture or boxing. And the French reciprocated the interest: there was a clear current of Anglomania, reflected in a taste for British clothes and even British breeds of dog.4
The Secret Life of Words Page 24