Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  The nightingale has always been widely celebrated for its song, by poets, writers and musicians going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and reaching its zenith in the works of the nineteenth-century Romantic Poets such as John Keats.

  Two very different poets – John Clare and T. S. Eliot – even attempted to reproduce the specific sounds made by the bird. In ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, Clare deploys a series of ever more bizarre and eccentric phrases:

  ‘Chew-chew chew-chew,’ and higher still:

  ‘Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer,’ more loud and shrill

  ‘Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up,’ and dropt

  Low: ‘tweet tweet jug jug jug,’ and stopt

  One moment just to drink the sound

  Her music made, and then a round

  Of stranger witching notes was heard:

  ‘Wew-wew wew-wew, chur-chur chur-chur,

  Woo-it woo-it’: could this be her?xxx

  In T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land, the poet also uses onomatopoeia to convey the nightingale’s song:

  …yet there the nightingale

  Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

  And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

  ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.

  In some ways, though, our long and fervent admiration of the nightingale’s song strikes me as rather odd. For when people hear one singing for the very first time, they are sometimes shocked. The nightingale’s curious outpouring of grunts, tweets and whistles can take a while to get used to – especially if you are used to the more tuneful, sedate, and above all predictable songs of the song thrush, blackbird and robin.

  Especially on first hearing, listening to a nightingale is a bit like trying to appreciate modern jazz: you have to relax, forget your preconceptions and allow the sound to wash over you, rather than trying to follow individual melodies. After a while you get used to the bird’s improvisational technique, and can at last begin to enjoy what you are hearing.xxxi Then, as has happened ever since human beings first listened to this small, brown and rather unprepossessing-looking bird, you can simply admire one of the most extraordinary of all the world’s natural sounds.

  *

  Both the nightingale and the cuckoo, the bird with whose sound we began our story, are long-distance migrants: travelling back and forth each spring and autumn between their African winter quarters and their breeding grounds in Britain and Europe.

  In the past few years, many of the mysteries surrounding these incredible global journeys have been solved. One major breakthrough is that scientists are now able to place tiny, ultra-lightweight transmitters on the birds before they leave our shores, which have allowed us to track their movements in forensic detail.xxxii

  When the British Trust for Ornithology decided to promote their cuckoo-tracking scheme by giving names to the individual birds being followed, they named one bird after the lead character in a children’s book by John Miles. This literary cuckoo was called ‘Gowk’, after the folk name for the species that goes all the way back to Old English.

  Sadly, after a promising start, in which Gowk safely crossed the Channel in mid-July, the tag transmitted only a few low-quality signals, which then disappeared. The conclusion was inescapable: that this particular cuckoo had failed to make it to Africa, and died en route. But his name lives on; and in doing so reflects the extraordinary persistence of bird names in our language – especially those derived from the sound the bird makes.

  For me, it also shows why we should continue to cherish these ancient names: both those that are still in everyday use, like cuckoo, and those, like gowk, that survive only as folk names in certain parts of the country. The wonderful variety of names we give to birds is a reflection of the crucial importance of nature, in both our language and in our lives.

  When we delve into the origins of a bird’s name, and discover how it first came into being, we discover something vital about ourselves, about our history, and most of all about our relationship with the natural world. At a time when so many species of birds are under threat, we should cherish that deep and lasting connection: not only for what it tells us about our past, but also how it can inform our future, allowing us to better appreciate our interdependence with global biodiversity.

  Which brings me back to the cuckoo – or, as I should perhaps say, the gowk. For had it not been for one cataclysmic event, almost a thousand years ago, this is the name we would still be using for this annual harbinger of spring. That event, which took place on a fine autumn day in the year 1066, would forever alter the course of our nation’s history and culture. It would also change the very language we speak – including, of course, many of the names we give to birds.

  In the next chapter, I shall explore the profound consequences of the final and most momentous invasion of our island nation: the Norman Conquest.

  Notes

  1 From The Exeter Book, an Anthology of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Israel Gollancz (ed.) (London, 1893).

  2 From translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Enitharmon Press, 2008).

  3 From W. S. Mackie (ed.), The Exeter Book, Part II: Poems IX-XXXII (London, 1934).

  4 James Fisher, The Shell Bird Book (London, 1966).

  5 See David Crystal, ‘English as a Classical Language, https://archive.org/stream/Omnibus42/09%20Crystal%20English%20as%20a%20Classical%20Language_djvu.txt

  6 David Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language (Princeton, 2007)

  7 A. F. Harrold, Of Birds & Bees (Reading, 2008).

  i Throughout this chapter, I have used the word ‘call’ to describe the spring sound of birds such as the cuckoo, hoopoe and crows, which are not usually thought of as ‘songbirds’. However, as the wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample has pointed out (in litt.), these ‘calls’ have exactly the same function as song: to defend a territory against rival males, while at the same time attracting females.

  ii Summer is coming in

  The cuckoo sings loudly!

  iii As he points out, this is tautological, as ‘gowk’ is also a dialect word meaning a foolish person.

  iv In The Shell Bird Book (1966), in my view the most readable yet scholarly history of Britain’s birds ever written. The other 15 species are: robin, crane, (white-tailed) sea eagle, crow, wood pigeon, nightingale, swallow, chaffinch, raven, whooper swan, gannet, whimbrel, kittiwake, tern and quail. All would have been named by the year AD 700.

  v Donated to Exeter Cathedral some time during the mid-eleventh century by its first bishop, Leofric, it remains there to this day, protected by his ominous warning: ‘If anyone should take it away from thence, let him lie under eternal malediction’.

  vi Earlier versions in these languages include the Welsh ‘gwˆ ylan’, Cornish ‘guilan’ and Breton ‘goelann’. ‘Puffin’ may also be of Cornish origin.

  vii Although it is no longer in general use, ‘erne’ regularly features as a crossword clue – the answer usually being ‘sea eagle’, but occasionally just ‘eagle’ or ‘seabird’.

  viii In many cultures, the date of the autumn arrival of geese would be used to predict the weather for the season to come – the belief was that an early arrival date meant a hard winter, and a late arrival a mild one. In reality the arrival date of migratory wildfowl has no link with the weather in the coming winter, and is purely a result of immediate weather conditions at the time of travel.

  ix Their equivalents in modern Scandinavian languages are svan/svane and svala/svale – again, clearly related to our modern English names.

  x As to the actual meaning of these ancient names, Lockwood suggests that swallow derives from a word meaning ‘cleft stick’– a reference to the bird’s long, forked tail; while ‘swan’ may come from a word meaning ‘noise’, which he speculates may refer to the sound made by the mute swan’s wings as they fly overhead. I must say I am not entirely convinced.

  xi The idea that these people were a single, homogenous group known as ‘Celts’ is an eighteenth-ce
ntury invention; in reality they were a motley group of different tribes with little in common with one another.

  xii See, for example, Philip Ball, The Music Instinct (2010), and also the relatively new science of ‘Biomusicology’, a term coined by the veteran Swedish musicologist Nils L. Wallin in 1991, which looks at the connections between the sounds made by birds and other wild creatures and the music made by humans.

  xiii The syrinx has recently been found to have evolved far earlier than we thought: evidence of its existence has been found in the fossilised skeleton of a duck-like bird, Vegavis iaai, that lived more than 66 million years ago, in the age of the non-avian dinosaurs.

  xiv The wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson once allowed me to listen through headphones to a blackbird singing. Using a parabolic reflector to magnify the sound enabled me to hear a whole series of normally inaudible high-pitched notes, uttered simultaneously with the deeper ones that we usually hear.

  xv The OED suggests a different etymology, linking ‘dove’ with a now lost Old English word meaning ‘to dive’ or ‘to dip’; I have to say I side with Lockwood here.

  xvi Incidentally, the name ‘turtle dove’ comes from the bird’s soft, repetitive call, usually written as ‘tur-tur-tur’.

  xvii The use of the prefix ‘Jack’ may of course simply be a nickname, as in Robin redbreast or Jenny wren. ‘Jack’ often signifies male birds, but given that, according to the OED, this is particularly used for birds of prey, in which the males are significantly smaller than the females, it may also imply smallness (as in ‘jack curlew’ for whimbrel, or jack snipe). In the case of the jackdaw, it could be all three at once: signifying a nickname, the bird’s smaller size and its onomatopoeic call!

  xviii As hraefn, hroc and crawe respectively. The modern Icelandic word for the raven, hrafn (which is also used as a Christian name) is almost identical to the one our Anglo-Saxon ancestors would have used. Incidentally, in both Old English and Old Norse the ‘f’ sound would have been pronounced as a ‘v’, making hraefn sound even more similar to the modern ‘raven’.

  xix Surprisingly there is no link to the Gaelic word ‘loch’ – ‘lough’ in fact comes from Middle English.

  xx The linguist David Crystal (in litt) confirms this, pointing out that such transitions between the ‘ow’ and ‘uff’ sounds are reasonably frequent in English.

  xxi The nineteenth-century poet John Clare wrote one of his most evocative sonnets, entitled ‘The Fern Owl’s Nest’, on the nightjar – see Chapter 4.

  xxii A much better diet-based name, invented by the ornithologist and sometime poet Mike Toms, is ‘moth-gobbler’.

  xxiii The Dutch have an even greater liking for coining names based on bird sounds than we do. Their name for the hoopoe – hop – is commendably succinct, as is oehoe for the eagle owl, an incongruously short name for such a huge and impressive bird. The Germans go one better in the brevity stakes: their name for the eagle owl is simply uhu, while the French prefer the non-onomatopoeic (and rather pretentious) grand-duc d’Europe.

  xxiv Oddly, despite the ubiquity of the chiffchaff’s song, some languages have chosen names entirely unrelated to its sound. The Scandinavian languages all use the habitat-based name gransanger, which translates as ‘spruce warbler’; the French choose a motion-based name, pouillot véloce, or ‘speedy warbler’; and the Spanish plump for the species’ ubiquity, mosquitero común.

  xxv The exceptions to this are those species named after people (see Chapter 5).

  xxvi This last name is still widely used in Scandinavia, and would have been brought here by the Viking invaders, over one thousand years ago. In Britain, Spink is a locally common surname, especially in Yorkshire and Norfolk, where the Vikings would have first landed, and is thought to have originated as a nickname for someone who chattered like a finch.

  xxvii Worldwide, there are almost 400 different warbler species, including willow, sedge and reed warblers in Europe, and yellow, blackpoll and magnolia warblers in North America.

  xxviii The grasshopper warbler belongs to the genus Locustella, named from the species’ sonic similarity to a grasshopper or cricket.

  xxix The melodious warbler’s scientific name, Hippolais polyglotta, is a further nod to its vocal talents.

  xxx Oddly, Clare – who as an expert field-naturalist would surely have known that only the male bird sings – followed poetic convention by depicting the bird as a female in his sonnet ‘The Nightingale’.

  xxxi Unlike, it must be said, modern jazz.

  xxxii For both the nightingale and the cuckoo, this new information cannot come a moment too soon. Both species are suffering steep declines in numbers, and both are in serious danger of disappearing from large swathes of their former haunts during the next decade or so.

  2

  INVASION AND CHANGE

  The Beginnings of English

  We need words to name and designate things. But we only have a static language with which to express ourselves.

  Piet Mondrian

  1: The Ravens’ Lament

  Sunday, 15 October 1066 dawned bright, clear and cold across the rolling Sussex landscape. Soon after sunrise, the autumn mists began to melt away, revealing a scene of utter devastation. Six thousand men – two-thirds of them English, the rest Norman – lay dead.

  The only movement came from the hordes of glossy, blue-black ravens descending on the stiffening corpses, plucking out their eyes and stabbing at their open wounds to feed on the exposed flesh. The only sound to pierce the deathly silence was the occasional deep, hoarse cry, as one raven pushed a rival away from its own gruesome plunder.

  Later that day, the victorious Normans and defeated English returned to the battlefield to claim their dead. Two monks from Waltham Abbey, which had been re-endowed and rebuilt by King Harold Godwinson just six years earlier, began the grisly task of looking for the body of their deposed ruler amongst the accumulated piles of human remains.

  Finally, after hours of searching, they came across what they believed to be his corpse. According to one contemporary source, rather than being slain by the proverbial arrow through his eye, as famously depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold had been brutally hacked to death by four Norman knights:

  The first, cleaving his breast through the shield with his point, drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood; the second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet and the third pierced the inwards of his belly with his lance; the fourth hewed off his thigh and bore away the severed limb: the ground held the body thus destroyed.i

  Harold’s body had been so badly mutilated they had to summon Harold’s first wife, Edith the Fair (known also, because of her grace and beauty, as Edith Swan-neck) to confirm his identity. Her reaction to seeing her former lover’s corpse in this terrible state is not recorded.

  His mother Gytha, stricken with grief after losing three of her sons in the battle, requested that Harold’s body be returned, allegedly offering his own weight in gold in exchange. Initially William of Normandy, leader of the invading Norman forces, refused, curtly adding: ‘Harold mounted guard on the coast while he was alive; he may continue his guard now he is dead.’

  But eventually William did relent, and Harold’s body – or what was left of it after the ravages inflicted by the Norman army and the ravens – was taken back to Waltham Abbey for a Christian burial. Meanwhile William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, rode to London to claim the English throne.

  On Christmas Day 1066, after several months of skirmishes and political wrangling, he was finally crowned in Westminster Abbey as King William I. The Norman Conquest had well and truly begun.

  *

  Historians love to dwell on what they call ‘counterfactuals’ – speculating on what might have happened had the outcome of a particular historical event been different from what actually transpired. Of all the many alternative scenarios, one of the most intriguing is to consider the history and development of the English language had Har
old, rather than William, triumphed at Hastings.

  One thing can be said for certain: English would be far less varied, in both syntax and vocabulary, than the language we speak today. Modern English benefits from ‘hybrid vigour’: the amalgamation of the Norman French spoken by the invaders, and the Old English spoken by the defeated Anglo-Saxons. As the journalist and literary critic Allan Massie points out:

  If you were to begin by asking, in Monty Python style, ‘What have the Normans ever done for us?’ you might first reply that the most enduring consequence of the Conquest is the richness of the English language, with its Anglo-Saxon base and Franco-Latin superstructure.1

  Thanks to its mongrel origins, modern English is a fabulously varied and flexible language: not hidebound by complex and unnecessary grammatical rules, and containing a wealth of alternative words for each object or concept – well over twice as many as other languages.

  But this linguistic transformation did not happen overnight. At first, just as had occurred between the Roman invaders and the Ancient Britons, the invading Normans and defeated English kept themselves to themselves. Socially – and more importantly for our story, linguistically – the two groups lived separate lives, fuelled by mutual resentment and suspicion.

  English remained purely a spoken language, ‘an uncultivated tongue’, fit only for labourers, servants and peasants. Norman French, on the other hand, enjoyed a far more elevated status. It was spoken by the nobles, but importantly it was also a written language, used in legal documents, and in the popular genre known as ‘Romance’ literature. Meanwhile, a third language, Latin (at this point still a spoken as well as a written language), was primarily used in the religious and educational spheres. The end result was a kind of linguistic and social apartheid, with English firmly at the bottom of the pecking order.