The Adventure of English (7 page)

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 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:

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:

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 the 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.

Yet English was deluged with French words. It was the great flood and there seemed no ark in sight. How did English survive and re-emerge?

It took wars, it took patriotic resilience and it took one of the greatest natural disasters anyone had ever seen.

T
rade loosened the bonds between the Norman French and the natives. In the middle of the thirteenth century, the wool trade made parts of England rich. Great churches were built even in modest villages. Towns grew in size, sometimes French boroughs and English settlements together, as at Norwich and Nottingham. London's population was to double in the course of the century, drawing in English speakers from the countryside. It seemed all but impossible for English to storm the castles: the cities might provide a better opportunity. There were French-speaking court officials, administrators, lawyers and great merchants, but surely English could get a foot on the language ladder further down.

Even here it seems it was difficult. The French also brought over craftsmen who gave us the French names for the tools of the trade: “measure” for example, “mallet,” “chisel,” “pulley,” “bucket,” “trowel.” Again, the deal seemed one way only. The name of Petty France in London is evidence that it originally housed a community of French immigrants which then became a business-trading centre (there were areas like this in many English towns). English and French speakers mingled but it was French which controlled the market. “Merchant” (marchant), “money” (monai), “price” (pris), “bargain” (bargaine), “contract” (contract), “partner” (parcener), “embezzle” (enbesilier) — all French.

It still appeared that wherever it turned, English met yet another phalanx of French. They even took its names away. The Old English names began to die out: out went Ethelbert, Aelfric, Athelstan, Dunstan, Wulfstan, Wulfric; in came Richard, Robert, Simon, Stephen, John, and most popular and sycophantic (or was it politic?) of all, William.

Despite the great numerical superiority of its followers, English was a mass without leaders or a strategy, its words sung in the fields and flickering into manuscripts but no match at all for the French. It was helpless, it seemed, before an inevitable pressing down, a percolation which would eventually eat away at it and so reduce its powers that more and more of its speakers would feel compelled to put it aside. It was not a language of advancement, a language of power, a language of hard commerce or even of educated conversation.

A defeat on the field of battle and in France itself in 1204 was the first truly encouraging sign that all might not be lost. John, King of Normandy, Aquitaine and England, lost his Norman lands in a war with the much smaller kingdom of France. The Norman dukedoms, ancestral lands of William the Conqueror, his cultural and linguistic homelands, were part of another empire now. The Norman barons of England had to choose where their allegiance lay: Philip II of France would tolerate no split loyalties. Choices were made. Simon de Montfort, for example, took over all his brother's English holdings and gave him his own land in Normandy in return.

Most importantly of all, the French began to be thought of as foreigners. That can scarcely be overestimated. When, later in the thirteenth century, Henry III did the natural French-speaking Norman thing and considerably strengthened the French representation at his court, there was strong anti-French feeling and complaints that London was full of foreigners. One defeat had threatened English; one hundred twenty-eight years later, another defeat gave it hope. The Normans in England had to begin to consider themselves as anti-Norman.

This was the first step on a very long journey. England was now home because many had little choice, but the adoption of English did not follow. When the barons rebelled against King John and presented their demands in the most famous document in our history, Magna Carta, they had it drawn up in Latin. Latin was the language of God, the language of deep tradition, the common language of the western civilised world, a sacred language. Even when there was another rebellion, this time against Henry III in 1258, the barons again wrote to the king in Latin. But they also sent a letter around the shires to tell the people what they wanted, and that was written in English. Royalty however was not to be addressed in the basic language of the land over which it ruled, and indeed it was the fight to seduce and force the kings of England publicly to acknowledge English which was to be the first of many major and necessary victories before the language regained the position it had held under Alfred the Great and Harold Godwineson.

There was, however, a fifth column: English women. The evidence for intermarriage is early and strong and although the English women would marry into households dominated by French and may well have learned and been obliged to learn French, they could scarcely have left their English outside the back door. It penetrated those unassailable castles in ways no English band of insurgents could hope to do. And they would bring their own servants, their own wet nurses. It has been said many times that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and in some households children may have grown up bilingual, as easily able to switch languages or codes as many children can today from their dialects, their patois, their inherited home-talk, to the standard speech demanded by the school or the state.

We have some lyrics of the period. This one may have been sung as a lullaby to many an infant Norman lordling:

It would have been sung in Old English:

And yet, even after the middle of the thirteenth century, the record shows that French words continue to stream into English. The worrying thing, when you do the sums, is that far more words came in after 1250 than before. Even though England was setting itself up against France, French words, having found a breach, poured across the Channel unstoppably in their thousands. Here are a few of them: “abbey” (abbaïe), “attire” (atirer), “censer” (censier), “defend” (defendre), “leper” (lepre), “malady” (maladie), “music” (musik), “parson” (persone), “plead” (plaidier), “sacrifice” (sacrifice), “scarlet” (escarlate), “spy” (espier), “stable” (stable), “virtue” (vertue), “park” (parc), “reign” (regne), “beauty” (bealte), “clergy” (clergie), “cloak” (cloke), “country” (cuntrée), “fool” (fol).

Each one of those words could nourish two or three paragraphs on what was brought to England through the word. A word like “virtue,” for instance, part of the theme of chivalry now woven into the thinking, brought a secular sense of moral attainment into a land where the Church had provided all the words and thoughts for any elevated morality. The word then took off and metamorphosed into several other meanings: it allied itself with honour and with courage, for example, embellishing both; it became a boast, it became a weakness to be satirised; from rare and aristocratic it became common and earnest. It came to mean reason or merit or worth. “By virtue of the power vested in me” it began to dip below the horizon of well-used words. Soon it may be obsolete. Yet in its life, for eight hundred years, virtue alone, that one word, has illuminated and explained something of what we think we are, it has enriched our description of ourselves, uncovered yet more of the human condition which seems to crave infinite description. It is not just a word but a little history of our thought and actions. Virtue might or might not be its own reward. It was certainly ours.

Because French was at that time the international language of trade, it acted as a conduit, sometimes via Latin, for words from the markets of the East. Arabic words that it then gave to English include: “saffron” (safran), “mattress” (materas), “hazard” (hasard), “camphor” (camphre), “alchemy” (alquimie), “lute” (lut), “amber” (ambre), “syrup” (sirop). The word “checkmate” comes through the French “eschec mat” from the Arabic “Sh h m t,” meaning the king is dead. Again, as with virtue and as with hundreds of the words already mentioned, a word, at its simplest, is a window. In that case, English was perhaps as much threatened by light as by darkness, as much in danger of being blinded by these new revelations as buried under their weight.

Yet the best of English somehow managed to avoid both these fates. It retained its grammar, it held on to its basic words, it kept its nerve, but what it did most remarkably was to accept and absorb French as a layering, not as a replacement but as an enricher. It had begun to do that when Old English met Old Norse: hide/skin; craft/skill. Now it exercised all its powers before a far mightier opponent. The acceptance of the Norse had been limited in terms of vocabulary. Here English was Tom Thumb. But it worked in the same way.

So, a young English hare came to be named by the French word “leveret,” but “hare” was not displaced. Similarly with English “swan,” French “cygnet.” A small English “axe” is a French “hatchet.” “Axe” remained. There are hundreds of examples of this, of English as it were taking a punch but not giving ground.

More subtle distinctions were set in train. “Ask” — English — and “demand” — from French — were initially used for the same purpose, but even in the Middle Ages their finer meanings might have differed and now, though close, we use them for markedly different purposes. “I ask you for ten pounds”; “I demand ten pounds”: two wholly different stories. But both words remained. So do “bit'” and “morsel,” “wish” and “desire,” “room” and “chamber.” At the time the French might have expected to displace the English. It did not, and perhaps the chief reason for that is that people saw the possibilities of increasing clarity of thought, accuracy of expression, by refining meaning between two words supposed to be the same. On the surface some of these appear to be interchangeable and sometimes they are. But much more interesting are these fine differences, whose subtleties increase as time carries them first a hair's breadth apart and then widens the gap, multiplies the distinctions: just as “ask” has evolved far away from “demand.”

Not only did they drift apart but something else happened which demonstrates how deeply not only history but class is buried in language. You can take an (English) “bit” of cheese, and most people do. If you want to use a more elegant word you take a (French) “morsel” of cheese. It is undoubtedly thought to be a better class of word and yet “bit,” I think, might prove to have more stamina. You can “start” a meeting or you can “commence” a meeting. Again, “commence” carries a touch more cultural clout, though “start” has the better sound and meaning to it for my ear. But it was the embrace which was the triumph, the coupling which was never quite one.

That's the beauty of it. That was the sweet revenge which English took on French: it not only anglicised it, it used the invasion to increase its own strength; it looted the looters, plundered those who had plundered, out of weakness brought forth strength. For “answer” is not quite “respond”; now they have almost independent lives. “Liberty” isn't always “freedom.” Shades of meaning, representing shades of thought, were massively absorbed into our language and our imagination at that time. It was new lamps and old; both.

The extensive range of what I would call “almost synonyms” became one of the glories of the English language, giving it astonishing precision and flexibility, allowing its speakers and writers over the centuries to discover what seemed to be exactly the right word. Rather than replace English, French was being brought into service to help enrich and equip it for the role it was on its way to reassuming.

Even that great redoubt of French, the royal family, unbelievably slow in appreciating their good fortune in ruling the country they did with the language it was relentlessly replenishing, began to take notice.

In Westminster Abbey on the tomb of Edward I there are the words “The Hammer of the Scots” — in Latin. More important for English was Edward's relationship with his new great enemy, France. When the French King Philip IV threatened to invade England in 1295, Edward used the English language as a symbol of nationhood to galvanise support.

“If Philip is able to do all the evil he means to,” he said, “from which God protect us, he plans to wipe out our English language entirely from the earth.” Coming from a king whose first language was French, whose immediate ancestors had put England and English under the heel, he may have meant it, but it was richly ironic. But he saw it as the rallying cry for this new mongrel people. The invasion never came and Edward put aside his opportunistic loyalty to English: in all official matters Latin and French were still the controlling languages of the Church and state.

Yet Edward's desperate and inspired flash of English had been well calculated. As the thirteenth century gave way to the fourteenth, English was becoming the one language out of the three that everyone in the country could be counted on to know. In 1325, the chronicler William of Nassington could write: