The Adventure of English (8 page)

A prose translation would read: “I believe that no one can speak Latin except those who have taken it at school, and some who are accustomed to the court and live there know French and no Latin.” It goes on: “And some whose grasp of French is shaky know a bit of Latin. And some understand English well who know neither Latin nor French. But educated and uneducated, old and young, they all understand the English tongue.”

That last sentence signals a thaw. English, for so long frozen, underground, so many of its words withered by the icy blast from Normandy, had begun to come through, above ground once more, still far from its old commanding position but ready to move upward. Songs in the French troubadour style now had English words. In some places, the Old English religious homilies had continued to be copied and circulated and this began to affect other aspects of Christian teaching.

The Bestiary, in which birds and animals were portrayed and their behaviour made the basis of lessons in Christian morality, was a particular medieval form. It was believed that the animal and plant worlds were symbolic of religious truths and that “the creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God.” They were usually written in Latin, but a late-thirteenth-century example gave the text not in Latin but in English. In Modern English it reads: “The deer has two properties. He draws out the adder from the stone with his nose and swallows it. The venom causes the deer to burn. Then he rushes to the water and drinks . . . The whale is the largest of all fish. He looks like an island when he is afloat. When he is hungry he gapes and out comes a sweet scent.”

The description of the lion can be used to show more clearly how the Bestiary worked. By penetrating this homely but intellectually imaginative Latin form, English demonstrated its hunger for growth, its willingness to tackle subjects which in the post-Conquest world would have been thought above its station.

A few lines of Middle English:

A literal translation of the lion's nature and qualities reads: “The lion stands on a hill, and when he hears a man hunting or through his sense of smell scents that he is approaching, by whatever way he will go down to the valley.”

And the symbolic meaning in terms of Christ, the devil, good and evil, reads:

It would be a lengthy, bloody, martyr-strewn and bitter fight that English would have to claim its proper place in the Church. This infiltration was an omen. It came in quietly and stealthily through the beasts.

As did the greatest of all recorded plagues. In 1348
Rattus rattus,
the Latin-named black rodent, was the devil in the bestiary. These black rats deserted a ship from the continent which had docked near Weymouth. They carried a deadly cargo, a term that modern science calls
Pasteurella pestis,
that the fourteenth century named the Great Pestilence and that we know as the Black Death.

The worst plague arrived in these islands, and much, including the language, would be changed radically.

The infected rats scaled out east and then north. They sought out human habitations, building nests in the floors, climbing the wattle and daub walls, shedding the infected fleas that fed on their blood and transmitted bubonic plague. It has been estimated that up to one-third of England's population of four million died. Many others were debilitated for life. In some places entire communities were wiped out. In Ashwell in Hertfordshire, for instance, in the bell tower of the church, some despairing soul, perhaps the parish priest, scratched a short poignant chronicle on the wall in poor Latin. “The first pestilence was in 1350 minus one . . . 1350 was pitiless, wild, violent, only the dregs of the people live to tell the tale.”

The dregs are where our story of English moves on. These dregs were the English peasantry who had survived. Though the Black Death was a catastrophe, it set in train a series of social upheavals which would speed the English language along the road to full restoration as the recognised language of the natives. The dregs carried English through the openings made by the Black Death.

The Black Death killed a disproportionate number of the clergy, thus reducing the grip of Latin all over the land. Where people lived communally as the clergy did in monasteries and other religious orders, the incidence of infection and death could be devastatingly high. At a local level, a number of parish priests caught the plague from tending their parishioners; a number ran away. As a result the Latin-speaking clergy was much reduced, in some parts of the country by almost a half. Many of their replacements were laymen, sometimes barely literate, whose only language was English.

More importantly, the Black Death changed society at its roots — the very place where English was most tenacious, where it was still evolving, where it roosted.

In many parts of the country there was hardly anyone left to work the land or tend the livestock. The acute shortage of labour meant that for the first time those who did the basic work had a lever, had some power to break from their feudal past and demand better conditions and higher wages. The administration put out lengthy and severe notices forbidding labourers to try for wage increases, attempting to force them to keep to pre-plague wages and demands, determined to stifle these uneasy, unruly rumblings. They failed. Wages rose. The price of property fell. Many peasants, artisans, or what might be called workingclass people discovered plague-emptied farms and superior houses, which they occupied.

The English and English were breaking through. Wat Tyler led the Peasants' Revolt, which in its mere five days of life threatened to do for England in 1381 most of what the French revolutionaries did for France in 1790. If it can be said to have failed by one act and one man, then that man was the boy king — thirteen years old — Richard II. He stopped it by having the guile and the guts to meet Wat Tyler and his conquering army (they had taken the hitherto impregnable White Tower of London) at Smithfield, addressing him in English. At Smithfield, using English under duress, he pulled Wat Tyler into a trap in which he was murdered and immediately and daringly rode across to the rebels and addressed them, also in English. He gave promises which placated them and turned them home, promises which he soon broke, homes in which they were hunted down. But English was at the heart of it. As far as we know, Richard II is the first recorded example of a monarch using only English since the Conquest. And he reached for it when he was within a few minutes of seeing his kingdom transformed utterly.

Just as importantly, though, the revolt was fired by the preacher John Ball, whose words were already notorious and whose sermon at Greenwich the day before the rebels marched on London began: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The heft of what he said, all in English, with his gift for rhyme, was far nearer the Old English epics than the graces of the imported French troubadours.

English was the language of protest and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the highest in the land. And the highest of the land used it in 1381, to chop down the revolt of thousands of English speakers.

It was about this time that English replaced French in the schoolrooms, and for that we have the authority of the Cornishman John of Trevisa (d. 1402). In 1387, at Oxford, he translated Ranulf Higden's Latin
Polychronicon,
the chronicle of many ages from the Creation to 1352. Higden reviews the language situation before the first plague and comes to conclusions which must cause us to challenge assumptions based on the benign (for English) effects of Anglo-Norman mixed marriage and hence the bilingualism among Anglo-Norman children. In his view, English was in great peril from 1066 onwards. Higden saw a decline in English before the plague and accounted for it in this way, as John Trevisa's translation tells us: “On ys for chyldern in scole agenes þe vsage and manere of al oþer nacions, buþ compelled for to leue here oune longage . . .”

In Modern English:

Higden's view is tougher than the more easy-going view of intermarriage, that it bred English-speaking children who would carry native language with them inside the fortresses of the foreigner. No doubt there is truth in both accounts, but I like Higden's stern note, its reminder of what occupation meant and how it affected not only the progeny but the generality, not only the children in the cradle but the rustics learning French, seeking to join the ruling club.

However, Trevisa's own footnote to this part of his translation, written about fifty years after the original, says: “
is manere was moche y-vsed tofore þe furst moreyn . . .”

This was a sea change.

As education and literacy spread, so did the demand for books in English. The language was recommencing its long march.

In 1362, for the first time in almost three centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded, defended, debated and judged in English. In that same year, Parliament was opened in the hammer-beamed Great Hall in the Palace of Westminster. For the first time ever, the Chancellor addressed the assembly not in French but in English. Surprisingly, there is no record of the words spoken: what follows is a reasonable guess, based on forms of words used in other contemporary documents. “For the worship and honour of God, King Edward has summoned his Prelates, Dukes, Earls, Barons and other Lords of his realm to his Parliament, held the year of the King . . .”

But that was not the crown. It took thirty-seven more years for Norman-French royalty to bend the kingly knee to the English language. Stoked no doubt by an interminable war with France which had already lasted on and off for sixty-one years, those who sat on the throne of England felt forced to use their people's tongue.

The country had not had a monarch take the crown in English since Harold Godwineson in 1066. It is debatable whether it had a first-language English-speaking king since then. But English was about to capture the crown.

In 1399, King Richard II was deposed by Henry, Duke of Lancaster. The document deposing him and his speech of abdication are in English. Parliament was summoned to the Great Hall at Westminster. The dukes and lords, spiritual and temporal, were assembled. The royal throne, draped in cloth of gold, stood empty. Then Henry stepped forward, crowned himself, and claimed the crown. In a great symbolic moment he made his speech not in the Latin language of state business, not in the French language of the royal household, but in what the official history, tellingly, calls “His Mother Tongue.” English.