by David Wolman
Inspecting the aged stone walls, Crystal nodded. “We’re standing inside the cloister where a more standardized English was almost going to be.” The English of Alfred the Great and his followers was on the road to stardom. The Abbey with the most influence in the political sense in turn had the most influence on orthography because there were no dictionaries, grammar guides, language pundits or spelling books to consult as lexicographical authorities. Were we to somehow cancel out the major historical and linguistic events on the near horizon of the first millennium, we would have today a language significantly easier to write. Back then, most spellings represented—not perfectly but closely—the way a word sounded when read aloud.
Keep in mind, though, that even this far back in the history of English the name of the game is melting pot. The West Saxon dialect was mixing with dialects from farther north, as well as incorporating Danish and Old French words. The stewlike nature of the language would intensify in the centuries to come; think of a bungalow-dwelling sushi, avocado, and opossum connoisseur (or any group of words with origins in India, England, Japan, Mexico, Virginia, and France). But admixing was already well under way in Wessex.
Although the Old English of Alfred’s time was mostly phonetic and standardized, there’s no evidence that a notion of misspelling existed. Who was to say what was correct, and by what authority? The dialect of West Saxon thrived because Alfred’s kingdom thrived. His power meant his preferred language—and the prolific writing produced by monks at Hyde and other abbeys around Winchester—traveled far and wide. Then again, in the minds of the people, many of whom were illiterate anyway, the particulars of this emerging orthography went unnoticed. A notion of more formal Standard English was still centuries away.
Yet there were clues that an ethic of correctness in writing was taking shape, one that would influence future ideas about propriety generally and proper spelling specifically. One of the most important surviving texts of the Old English period, known as the Colloquy and written by an abbot named Æ
´ lfric (pronounced “alfritch”) around the year 1000, shows an intense concern for scribal accuracy, but in reference to content and words, not spelling per se. The Colloquy imagines a role-playing exercise in which students pose questions to their teacher, and the teacher thunders back with instruction. It sounds like “great fun,” said Crystal, something along the lines of: Q: “Oh teacher, what shall we do?” A: “Study your grammar.” Q: “And if we don’t?” A: “I shall beat you.” In one section, ? lfric writes:
He does great evil who writes carelessly, unless he correct it.
It is as though he turn true doctrine into false error.
Therefore everyone should make straight that which he before bent crooked, if he will be guiltless at God’s doom.14
Even though I have a rocky relationship with spelling, now is as good a time as any to mention that I’m not an orthography anarchist. Standards matter; how are we going to understand one another without a commonly understood code of written communication? Likewise, correctness matters. Correct spelling in the sense of adhering to commonly agreed upon conventions makes for efficient exchange of written information and ideas. But there’s nuance here.
Consider the unit of length known as the meter. Once defined as the length of a rod equal to 1/10,000,000 the distance between the equator and the poles, the modern definition is 1/299,792,458 the distance light travels in one second. Such gorgeous specificity! The meter was first developed in France and the International Prototype Metre bar is located in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. The razor-sharp definition and jargony institutional backing provide a standard accepted by everyone.
For English words, we have nothing of the sort. Yet Æ
´ lfric’s linking of carelessness in writing with “great evil” foreshadows two ideas that thread through much of the story of English spelling. The first is the perceived relationship between accuracy in writing and what it means to be a virtuous human being. The second is the distinction between standard and correct English. “Standard English” is the language that hovers around the most widely accepted norms. “Correct English” is language, spoken or written, deemed acceptable by select people.
In Alfred’s Wessex, the standard for English was one of orthographic liberalism, guided by scribes’ good-faith efforts to make their words intelligible by matching spelling to sound. In Winchester, I could see more clearly the Old English roots of today’s words, and the road down which English was heading at the end of the last millennium. But I also saw that I had a long way to go before reaching modern spelling and our attitudes about it. Æ
´ lfric was a stickler for accurate content but not spelling, and outside the scriptorium and elite circles close to the king, people probably didn’t notice or care about orthography. Can you imagine it: A society in which attitudes toward spelling were more Haight-Ashbury than harsh judgment? No grade-school humiliation courtesy of the remedial spelling books. No more chiding my sister, who once spelled the word opportunity with one p in the first sentence of a college application. No damn bees.
As we left the ruins of Hyde Abbey, Crystal, aware of my spelling woes, offered this sobering synopsis: “You were born about one thousand years too late.” Had the linguistic push by King Alfred and the monks of Hyde Abbey continued unabated, it’s reasonable to imagine that the 1.4 billion people who speak, read, and write English today would be speaking, reading, and writing in the Old English dialect of Alfred’s West Saxon, or some derivative of it, with a less troublesome spelling system to boot.
But that’s not how it happened. The French came.
THREE
REGIME CHANGE
Christ and his apostles taught the people in that tongue that was most known to the people. Why should not men do now so?
John Wycliffe
MY TRAIN SLOWED THROUGH the Bo Peep Tunnel before stopping at the tiny station in the southern England hamlet of Battle. I followed signs up the hill toward the village center, past the Chequers Inn Restaurant and Ye Olde Café. Looming straight ahead were the walls of Battle Abbey. Soon after the epic Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror ordered the construction of this abbey to honor the dead—penance for all that killing.
A trail loops around the famous battlefield, alongside patches of thistle, ever-encroaching blackberries, and a few oak and birch trees. My handheld audio guide played a soundtrack of clashing metal and groans of injured men, and described the wartime scene down to the personalities, strategies, and armaments of the day, “clubs, scythes, slings, and spears.” On this bucolic hillside almost one thousand years ago, William the Conqueror won the kingdom of England. In one day, an army of less than ten thousand men gained for their leader a territorial prize inhabited by some 1.5 million people, beginning a centuries-long period of French rule that would change English culture and language forever.* The fight was by no means a blowout. At first, the English held their ground with an advantageous hilltop position. Locking arms and shields, they were relatively unaffected by the enemy arrows and charging cavalry. Things were looking up for King Harold, the Englishmen, and the more standardized orthography of Old English. Harold must have felt a rush of confidence. Just weeks earlier, Vikings had attacked in the north, and Harold and his army had defeated them soundly.
But there was no time for celebration. Harold received word that the Normans had crossed the Channel and were sacking villages in the southeast. In less than two weeks, he marched his men some 250 miles from Yorkshire south to this spot on Senlac Hill, stopping only briefly in London before pressing ahead.
In contrast to Harold’s men, who must’ve been exhausted, William’s men were fresh and well armed. They also had a supernatural edge. Before launching the invasion, William received the Pope’s blessing for his campaign; God was apparently on his side. To the Normans, takeover of Britain was not an invasion, but a reclaiming of God-given property.†
Inspired by papal approval a
nd their powerful leader, the Normans repeatedly attacked the English shield wall despite minimal results. William needed a new tactic, so he instructed his cavalry to perform a fake retreat. Just as the English defenses relaxed, the Normans pounced from the side and broke through the wall. Gradually, the Normans pushed their way up the hill and by evening the battle was over. The French, with their language, had begun their takeover.
Some historians speculate that Harold was overconfident after beating back the Vikings. A fierce patriot, Harold may have allowed fury to trump prudence, rushing to engage the Normans when he should have taken a little more time to let his troops recuperate. Rebuilding a few pillaged villages is a lot easier than winning back a kingdom, and a couple of days of rest may have boosted his army’s chance for success. Whether a London layover would have altered the battle outcome is anyone’s guess. But the fact that Harold’s armor still carried the dried blood of the Vikings adds to the recurring impression that the fate of the English language had been swayed by forces as minute as one man’s decision on one afternoon nearly one thousand years ago.
When people talk about wars, a common refrain is that if it weren’t for the heroes who sacrificed so much, we’d all be speaking (language X) now. Following the Norman invasion, French usurped an estimated 85 percent of the Old English vocabulary. Old English words like wisen (attire), munuccliff (abbey), milce (grace), and so many others were fossilized. For a while there, it looked like we were all going to be speaking French.1 Why didn’t that happen?
William and his successors owned England and subjugated the English people, but they didn’t go out of their way to eliminate the local tongue. In the centuries following the Norman invasion, England was essentially trilingual, with other dialects sprinkled around the countryside. French was the language of government, law, military, and all things upper crust. Latin was the language of the Church. And English was the language of the farm, street, and tavern. Through the period known as Middle English, which begins with the Battle of Hastings and ends around 1500, the language slowly shifted from Old English to a chic newer version, infused with words of French derivation.
By some estimates ten thousand words were introduced into English from French, perhaps thousands more. This lexical deluge can be seen right on the battlefield. Words like soldier (from soudier), court (from curt), peasant (from paisant), and guard (from garde).* There’s traitor (traitre), govern (governer), authority (authorité), prison (prisun), and chancellor (canceler). The incoming vocabulary mirrored the spheres of French dominance. Law, military, courts, cuisine, fashion, social classes—these were the sectors of society into which the word infusion was most pervasive. Over time, the speakers of English took the new words and made them their own. Arrest (arrêter) and judge (juge); throne (trone) and nobility (nobilité); lemons (limons) and grapes (grappes).2
If the French weren’t to blame for enough orthographic turmoil already, we can also thank them for “the very notion of spelling.” Linguist Seth Lerer writes:
[It] comes not from Old English but Old French—for the word spellian in Old English meant to talk or tell a story or to move with speech (it is the root of the Old English word god-spell, the good talk, and thus our Modern English “gospel”). The Old French word espelir, by contrast, meant to set out by letters, and it is only late in Middle English that this word converges with spellian to produce a verb, spellen, that could mean both speak and spell…[as in] “to form by letters.”3
The arrival of French institutions, vocabulary, and culture both subverted and enriched the English language, while adding a layer of confusion onto spelling that would only worsen over time.
But by the Middle Ages, English was slowly reasserting itself. English women married into the homes of French barons and aristocrats, and brought their first language with them. Many of their children would have been bilingual, giving English a foothold on a higher rung of the social ladder. The Black Death dealt another blow to French and Latin. In 1350, an estimated one-third of the population of England was wiped out by the disease. Especially hard-hit were densely settled areas and the monastic communities of the clergy. Many of the survivors were people on the periphery—the dregs of society, as one writer put it—and their primary language was English. By 1381, thirteen-year-old King Richard II was conducting affairs of state in English, and the language could sometimes be heard in the hallowed halls of Oxford.4
As the language started making its way back into the mainstream, once again scribes played a crucial role as agents of spelling change. During the centuries of French rule, the people in power kept detailed government records, all written in French. English began creeping back into fashion in the 1300s, but scribes, especially those working in the courts, were still very much under the influence of French linguistic traditions. As a result, they sometimes superimposed their preferred, French-style spellings over the English ones, as in the case of cwen becoming queen, cwic becoming quick, cwellan becoming quell, and scip becoming ship.5
A picture of worrisome variation begins to emerge: the e instead of the i in lemon; the ai in paisant became ea in peasant; the appearance of d in judge (to say nothing of edge, sledge, wedge, and ledge). Why? Because spelling is created by people giving written form to words in ways that are familiar to them at that time. Scribes during the Middle English period weren’t lexicographers or linguists with an eye on big-picture orthographic consistency. English spelling was the result of monks and scribes essentially winging it. In Alfred’s Wessex, words were based on phonetic interpretations of Old English. When the scribes of Norman-occupied England set to spelling out words, they had to reconcile the now-quite-French nature of the lexicon.
Another major factor affecting English’s comeback was a bestseller called The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote much more than that one book, but his tales within the tale of a London-to-Canterbury pilgrimage had an impact on the shape of English unlike any other book in history, with the possible exception of the Bible. By the time Chaucer comes on the scene in the late 1300s, English was no longer viewed as the dirty language of the poor, yet literary types still felt it lacked the grace and expressiveness of French or Italian.
Chaucer saw and heard it differently. He delighted in and devoured the sounds of English spoken on the streets of London. For Chaucer, the language was still raw, malleable. French was on the decline but not kaput, and English still had a great deal of regional variation. Within this linguistic chaos, Chaucer heard something magnificent: a language with the potential to be as colorful, enchanting, expansive, and precise as any the world had ever seen, if not more so because of its penchant for seizing foreign words and enlisting them in its ranks.
Chaucer didn’t set out to prove English’s worth or establish new spellings. Aside from people like David Crystal, most writers don’t write with linguistic evolution in mind; they simply communicate in the way most natural to them. Chaucer was no different. But his genius, or an aspect of his genius, was in capitalizing on the flexibility and breadth of the language of his time in a way no one ever had, resulting in a lexicographic rainstorm of ingenuity. He was putting the English of the people to paper, while spicing it up with French. The opening lines to The Canterbury Tales contain a handful of French borrowings:
Whán that Apríllé with hise shourés soote
The droghte of March hath percéd to the roote,
And bathéd every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour…
When April with its sweet showers
has pierced the drought of March to the root,
and bathed every vein in such liquid
from which strength the flower is engendered…
The same goes for the beginning of his geeky Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for his son as instruction for using that scientific instrument. Reading it aloud brings to mind a Steve Martin spoof of a French accent, and drives home the transitional nature of the language of Chaucer’s time: �
�I apercyve wel by certeyne evidences thyn abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proporciouns; and as wel considre I thy besy praier in special to lerne the tretys of the Astrelabie.” (“I can well see from several signs your ability to learn about the sciences to do with numbers and proportions; and I also take note of your earnest request especially to acquire knowledge about the treatise on the astrolabe.”)6 Chaucer could be blamed for certain spellings today, although not many. Huge lexicographic changes were yet to come, and spelling was still all over the map; one review of a dozen Canterbury Tales manuscripts, for instance, includes multiple spellings of the words work (werche, worke, werke, etc.) and though (thogh, thouh, etc.). They all worked, though. Many times the same manuscript included variable spellings for the same word.7 Nevertheless, as a singularly influential writer, Chaucer affected the linguistic sensibilities of orthography decision makers to come: scribes, other writers, copyists and, soon, printers.
At about the same time that Chaucer was quilling the Canterbury Tales, another “standardizing force,” as Crystal put it, was being written in a church parish about one hundred miles north of London. To examine this facet of the Middle English period and its influence on today’s Standard English, David, Hilary, and I traveled to St. Mary’s Church in the town of Lutterworth.