by Melvyn Bragg
Dr. Katie Lowe has pointed out that when the Danes and the Wessexled English began to trade across the Danelaw in the tenth century, the rub between the two not dissimilar languages led to changes which profoundly affected the way they talked then and we talk now. She took the sentence “The King gave horses to his men,” and used that as an example. In English that would be “Se cyning geaf blancan his gumum.”
There is no preposition, no “to” in that sentence: it’s all done by the endings of the words. The “um” at the end of “gumum” tells you that the noun (“guma” — man) is plural and that it’s the indirect object of the sentence: as such in this sentence “um” equals “to.” Now the plural for horse is formed by putting an “an” on it, so “blancan” means horses. The problem was that the “ums” and “ans” became less distinct as these languages attempted to meld together. So instead of “gumum” (to his men), we could get “guman” (men, identical with the simple plural). Instead of “his blancan” (horses) we could get “his blancum” (to his horses). Even this straightforward sentence, therefore, could end up as “The King gave men [guman] to his horses [blancum].” And of course the more complicated the sense, the more scope for misunderstanding. The word “to” solved that and many more prepositions came into play around that time.
It is significant that this is still going on in the twelfth century. Especially in the north, this seeking for clarification had not ceased. In Old English, plurals could be signalled in a variety of ways. About this time it is noticeable that more plurals were being formed by adding an “s” — as many Old English nouns did. “Naman,” for example, the Old English plural of “names,” became “nam-es,” which became “names.” Prepositions like “to,” “by” and “from” were performing more of the functions of the old word endings and word order itself was becoming more fixed. “The” becomes used instead of the Old English bewildering range of different words used for the definite article.
So despite being the officially ignored language, despite being driven out of much of its written inheritance, English continued to change, to endure, both resisting and absorbing the invader’s language, selecting, nursing itself like an exiled and wounded animal, hoping for the opportunity to re-emerge.
In 1154, it did not seem remotely possible. That fateful Peterborough Chronicle of 1154 also recorded that in that year the people of England acquired a new king, Count Henry of Anjou, grandson of William the Conqueror and the first of the Plantagenets. He was a lover of learning who spoke fluent Latin as well as French: but no English. His queen was Eleanor of Aquitaine, the daughter of William X of Aquitaine.
Henry II was crowned in Westminster in a lavish ceremony which announced and displayed a new force of Frenchness on the English scene. The clergy wore silk vestments more costly than anything ever seen before in England. The king and queen and the greater barons wore silk and brocade robes — such luxury was fitting, it was thought, for an occasion that solemnised the bringing together of so much land and wealth. So much, indeed, that in its own way, it threatened English every bit as much as the heavy horsemen who had benefited so greedily from the victory in 1066.
Henry II brought his inheritance of William the Conqueror’s land in England and northern France. Eleanor, the greatest heiress in the western world, brought with her a great swathe of what is now France, from the Loire to the Pyrenees, from the Rhône to the Atlantic. This was a huge kingdom, the greater part of it made up of French-speaking lands across the Channel. As it grew, the English lands and the English language became an ever less significant part of it. French and Latin were even more firmly entrenched as the language of government, of the court, of the new culture.
Yet even on this great occasion, when England seemed to be reduced even further, there was still life and even hope in the language. As Henry and Eleanor processed up the Strand in London, it is reported that the people shouted “Wes hal!” and “Vivat Rex” — wishing them long life in Old English and in Latin. The language was alive on the streets.
Henry and Eleanor brought yet more new words. In the first century after the Conquest, most imported words came from Normandy and Picardy. But in Henry II’s reign (1154–89), other dialects, especially Central French or Francien, contributed to the speech of the country. So “catch,” “real,” “reward,” “wage,” “warden” and “warrant” from Norman French sat alongside “chase,” “royal,” “regard,” “gauge,” “guardian” and “guarantee” from Francien (all given Modern English spelling).
Perhaps more important than the vocabulary were the ideas which winged in beside them. This is a clear example of what happened time and again: new words seeded new ideas. In the palace, new ideas from across the Channel were now in the air. The new words that expressed them included “courtesy” (cortesie), “honour” (honor), “damsels” (damesieles), “tournament” (torneiement). The vocabulary of “romance” and “chivalry” brought the biggest culture shock to England since Alfred set out to re-educate the people: but where Alfred did this for God and for unity, the court of Henry and Eleanor did it for culture and pleasure. Eleanor was considered the most cultured woman in Europe. She attempted to change the sensibility of this doom-struck, crushed, occupied outpost of an island and it was she more than anyone else who patronised poets and troubadours whose verses and songs created the Romantic image of the Middle Ages as the Age of Chivalry — a glorious vision, little, if at all, realised outside the beautifully illustrated and ornamented pages of medieval literature.
But the new ideas came in and they bedded themselves in England and worked their way through the culture for at least seven centuries to come, as the gentle knight became the gentleman. Before Eleanor arrived in England the word “chevalerie,” formed around the word for horse, had simply meant cavalry. It was the fierceness of the mounted warriors that had carried the day at Hastings and since then many of the English knew the Norman chevalerie as little more than mounted thugs and bullies.
Now, under the influence of Eleanor, mounted horsemen began their transformation into knights. The word “chivalry” came to mean a raft of ideas and behaviour, infused with honour and altruism. Words that prescribed how to act towards one’s liege-lord, friends, enemies and, most of all, towards fair, cruel ladies. This, the preserve of the court, took the preoccupations of the state even further away from English, which had no place in the throne room. The way the society regarded itself had been pointed in a dramatically different direction, and initially it was nothing to do with Old England or Old English. Neither was needed.
It was in Eleanor’s reign that poets brought the stories of Arthur and his Knights out of history or legend into poetry and a strengthening of the legend. There was a growing poetic tradition in this newly enriched language. The twelfth century saw the flourishing of the great Arthurian Romance poet Chrétien de Troyes and the poetess of magical fables Marie de France. Both were writing courtly verse in French; Marie by her own account was writing it in England.
Interestingly there is some evidence that both these writers plundered the riches of the locals as all colonisers do. Chrétien derived his material from England — possibly through Wace’s French translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae. Marie de France tells us that she translated some of her stories from English into French (“de l’engleis en romang”).
The language was cultivated for itself and became far richer than that of the first Norman settlers. The poets rhapsodised about Eleanor, celebrating her as the most beautiful woman in the world, pouring out the impossible longing for the perfect woman that was at the heart of courtly love. That too had and still has a tremendous influence on poetry and songs of affairs of the heart, of the joy and pain of love. It propelled forward a line in literature that ran through Shakespeare’s sonnets to Romantic love poetry, to the popular song lyrics of today. It is impossible to weigh, to quantify the effects of such ideas at the time. It is indisputable, though, that those imported, French,
courtly ideas sank deep wells into our ways of thinking how we ought to and could behave and be in and out of love.
Eleanor’s favourite troubadour was Bertrand de Born and his most famous work is “Rassa tan cries e monte e poia.” The poet sings about the physical attractions of his noble lady (body as white as hawthorn flower, breasts firm, back like a young rabbit’s — admittedly the last may have lost some of its erotic power in the last seven hundred fifty years) and ends by singing:
pois m’a pres per chastiador
prec li que tela car s’amor
et am mais un pro vavassor
qu’un comte o duc galiador,
que la tengues a dezonor.
since she has taken me for her counsellor, I pray that she holds her love dear and shows more favour to a worthy vassal than to a count or duke who would hold her in dishonour.
It is a long way from Beowulf. That sinewy alliterative epic of high poetry which showed the dreams and nightmares of Old English society was replaced by a subject and a way of thinking about life which the author(s) of Beowulf would have found totally foreign.
The first medieval biography of an English layman was of the Knight William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, a professional soldier, royal adviser, champion of tournaments and Regent of England. It is a poem of more than nineteen thousand lines, written in the early thirteenth century. It is written in French. English, well fit for the task, was not considered adequate even for the biography of an Englishman.
Yet the English written word did not entirely disappear. In the first hundred fifty years it lived on in the margins, much as the English dialects did after the triumph of eighteenth-century Enlightenment drove them outside the pale of “literature” to the lower reaches of society.
In the late twelfth century, for instance, there was a book called Ormulum written by the monk Orm (a Danish man) who lived in North Lincolnshire. He wanted to teach the faith in English and his verses were to be read aloud. Here is Orm’s description of his book:
This book is called Ormulum
Because Orm it wrought [made] . . .
I have turned into English
[the] gospel’s holy lore,
after that little wit that me
my Lord has leant [granted]
þiss boc iss nemmned Orrmulum
forrþi þat Orrm itt wrohhte . . .
Icc hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh
Goddspelles hallghe lare
Affterr þatt little witt þat me
Min Drihhtin hafeþþ lenedd
This is local, it is near the Fen lands of Hereward the Wake, one of the last Saxons to stand up to the Normans; it is in that long tradition of devoted clerics who have used local freedoms to good effect. It is touching and important but there is the feeling that it is in a bywater, not part of a countrywide push to make the gospels accessible to ordinary men, more an isolated endeavour, even the end of a line.
A poem, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” was written at almost exactly the same time, largely in a south-eastern dialect. It is attributed to Master Nicholas of Guildford:
I was in a summery valley, in a very secluded corner. I heard an owl and a nightingale holding a great debate. The argument was stubborn and violent and strong, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud.
Ich was in one sumere dale
In one suþe digele hale
Iherde Ich holde grete tale
An hule and one nihtingale
at plait was stif an starc an strong
Sumwile softe an lud among
The rhyming scheme is French or French-inspired, four-beat lines in rhyming couplets. This does not of course make it any less of a poem and, according to many scholars, a remarkable poem. It is written in English, which stands as proof of a continuing readership for written English. Yet even here, even in the heartland of written English, poetry, the French influence would not be denied. It has been suggested it is written in the style of Marie de France.
There is a song which most refreshingly indicates that English was alive in the fields if not in the court. It was found in Reading Abbey complete with musical notation and is one of the first pieces of English that is still comparatively easy to recognise today. Even the few words which can seem a bit strange — “med” (meadow), “lhouþ” (lows), “verteth” (farts) and “swik” (cease) — fall into place.
This is the first verse:
Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing, cuccu.
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ the wude nu.
Sing cuccu.
Awe bleteþ after lomb
Lhouþ after calve cu
Bulluc sterteþ , bucke verteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu
Wel singe þu cuccu
Ne swikþu naver nu.
The remarkable thing about this song is that there is not a word of French in it. Words like “summer,” “come” and “seed” go directly back to the Germanic. “Spring” and “wood” can be found in Beowulf. “Loud” and “sing” are in works authorised by Alfred the Great. There’s a pure line of Old English vocabulary and a taste for English song that comes from the land as far from the chivalric songs of Bertrand de Born as can be imagined. The French culture of Henry and Eleanor has not eliminated the common tongue.
It was always bound to be a race against time. The longer Norman French dominated all the heights of communication, the weaker English would become.
In the first hundred fifty years or so, the system of feudalism, introduced by William, defined all economic and social relations, expressed in French words like “villein” and “vassal,” “labourer” and “bailiff.” In the countryside, where ninety-five percent of the population lived in the Middle Ages, still speaking in a language oppressed or ignored, the English were essentially “serfs,” another French word, not technically slaves but tied for life to their lord’s estate, which they worked for him and, at subsistence level, for themselves.
While the English-speaking peasants lived in small, often one-roomed mud and wattle cottages, or huts, their French-speaking masters lived in high stone castles. Many aspects of our modern vocabulary reflect the distinctions between them.
English speakers tended the living cattle, for instance, which we still call by the Old English words “ox” or, more usually today, “cow.” French speakers ate prepared meat which came to the table, which we call by the French word “beef.” In the same way the English “sheep” became the French “mutton,” “calf” became “veal,” “deer” became “venison,” “pig” “pork,” English animal, French meat in every case.
The English laboured, the French feasted.
This cut-off, though, may well have worked to English’s advantage. A more extreme — though not too dissimilar — case would be that of slaves taken from their country of origin and holding on to their own language for identity, for secret communication, out of love and certainly out of stubbornness. The feudal system had cut-offs at several points, spaces between functions, between classes, gaps which were very rarely bridged. Conquered English could hunker down, brood on the iniquity of the French and the injustices of the world, cosset the English language as the one true mark of identity and dignity, bide its time, stealthily steal from the rich foreigners.
Sport unsurprisingly provides proof of that. French seemed unstoppable everywhere. Falconry, a pursuit of the aristocracy which made many demands on the underlings, provides one example over these early centuries. The word “falcon” itself comes from French, as does “leash,” which referred to the strip of material used to secure the bird, and “block,” on which the bird stood. All early and easily assimilated. Our word “codger” may come from the often elderly man who assisted the falconer by carrying the hawks on a “cadge” or cage. “Bate” described the bird beating its wings and trying to fly away; “check” meant at first refusing to come to the fist. The word “lure” comes from the leather device still used in training th
e hawk. “Quarry” was the reward given to the falcon for making a kill. When a bird moulted it was said to “mew” and from that comes the name of the buildings in which the hawks were kept, the “mews.”
Nine French words came into English from that one activity. French influence on English in terms of vocabulary was unmatched by any other language. Yet they soon became “English” in pronunciation, in their eventual common use.
The French also replaced English words — “fruit” for instance replaces Old English “wæstm.” But often enough English words stand side by side with them — Old English “æppel” used to mean any kind of fruit. It retreats to the apple itself as “fruit” takes over: it does not disappear.
Looking at these words today, words that came in during the three hundred or so years after the Conquest, we are struck by how very English they now seem. In the home: “blanket,” “bucket,” “chimney,” “couch,” “curtain,” “kennel,” “lamp,” “pantry,” “parlour,” “porch,” “scullery”; there’s an English domestic novel inside that selection. In the arts: “art” itself, “chess,” “dance,” “melody,” “music,” “noun,” “paper,” “poet,” “rhyme,” “story,” “volume” — an arts magazine could use each word for a section of “prose” (another). In law: “arrest,” “bail,” “blame,” “crime,” “fine,” “fraud,” “pardon,” “verdict”; in clothing and fashion: “boot,” “buckle,” “button,” “frock,” “fur,” “garment,” “robe,” “veil,” “wardrobe.” In science and scholarship: “calendar,” “grammar,” “noun,” “ointment,” “pain,” “plague,” “poison.” General nouns such as “adventure,” “age,” “air,” “country,” “debt,” “dozen,” “hour,” “joy,” “marriage,” “people,” “person,” “rage,” “reason,” “river,” “sound,” “spirit,” “unity,” “vision.” General adjectives: “active,” “calm,” “cruel,” “honest,” “humble,” “natural,” “poor,” “precious,” “single,” “solid,” “strange” . . . and on they go, in administration, in religion, in the army, in turns of phrase: “by heart,” “do justice,” “on the point of ” and “take leave.” These are terms from Middle English, but how, we now think, could they ever have been anything but English? The influence of French words in the Middle Ages could fill more than fifty of these pages. We now see that they have been successfully anglicised.