Mrs Moreau's Warbler

by Stephen Moss

  The clearest indication of this is the language spoken by kings. Many ‘English’ monarchs of this period not only spoke French, but also spent most of their time on the other side of the Channel, where they still controlled vast areas of land. Henry II was away from England for almost two-thirds of his reign, while his son Richard the Lionheart (more accurately known as Richard Coeur de Lion) never actually learned to speak the language of his new realm of England.

  The fact that royalty – and by extension, the nobility – spoke French, while the labourers continued to speak English, is reflected in the very different words we still use today for farm animals and for the meat they produce. If you walked into a restaurant and ordered a ‘cow steak’ you would get some pretty funny looks; as you would if you asked for a pig pie, sheep shank or deer casserole.

  This is because, while we use names derived from Old English for the creatures themselves – cow, pig, sheep and deer – we call their meat by French names: beef, pork, mutton and venison. This is a direct consequence of the relative social status of two groups of people in the post-conquest world: the English peasants, who tended the animals, and the French nobles, who ate their meat.

  *

  Not surprisingly the new arrivals – and their new and unfamiliar language – also influenced bird names. In Old English, the bird we know as the kingfisher was called an isen or isern, from a word meaning iron-coloured – i.e. blue – which survives in several modern European names for the species, including the German Eisvogel and Dutch ijsvogel.

  From roughly the year 1000 the name ‘fisher’ first appears (as fiscere) in Old English. Sometime in the fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries the compound name ‘king’s fisher’ emerged, probably as a direct translation of the French roi pêcheur. This in turn may be linked to the Fisher King, the mythical figure of the Grail legend, the last in the long line of those charged with safeguarding the holy relic. The new name soon gained dominance over any older ones.

  Occasionally, instead of the old Anglo-Saxon name giving way to the new Norman one, they both survived. We still use the names ‘dove’ and ‘pigeon’: ‘dove’ mainly for smaller members of the family Columbidae, and ‘pigeon’ for the larger ones. But their origins are very different. As we have seen, dove probably derives from an Old English word based on the bird’s sound, while pigeon comes from the Old French word pijon,ii and does not appear in English until the late fourteenth century.

  Not surprisingly, given the influence of the conquerors, several other bird names we still use today derive directly from Norman French. These include mallard and wigeon, pheasant and partridge, kestrel and merlin, eagle and peregrine.iii At first sight these names – and indeed the birds themselves – do not appear to have much in common with one another; so we might easily assume that their common French origin is simply a linguistic accident.

  But take a closer look. All these species are either wildfowl or gamebirds, which would have been pursued for food and sport; or raptors, used for falconry and hunting. In exactly the same way that beef, pork and venison have French names because they were too expensive for the commoners to eat, so the invading Norman aristocracy gave names to all these birds, as these were the ones they encountered most often in their day-to-day lives. The new names rapidly displaced the Old English ones that had been used until then, which have long since fallen into disuse.

  So even at this early stage in our society, the differences between the elite nobility and the labouring classes that would come to define English society were already beginning to show.

  You might reasonably assume that as Old English gradually merged with Norman French to create Middle, and later Modern, English, then the now mostly incomprehensible Anglo-Saxon names would vanish too, to be replaced by those with a Latin origin. But as we shall see, the opposite proved to be the case. A surprisingly large proportion of the names we still use today – including redstart, yellowhammer, fieldfare, lapwing and wheatear – have their origins in the pre-Conquest tongue.

  Yet if you assume you know what these names actually mean, you may need to think again. For in that change from Old to Middle, and later to Modern English, something very strange happened – something that reveals that names, and other proper nouns, behave in a significantly different way from other words in our language.

  2: Red Tails and White Arses

  What is the commonest surname in Britain, and indeed throughout much of the English-speaking world? It is, of course, Smith. More than half a million people in the United Kingdom, and over two million in the United States, are called Smith, which is also the commonest surname in Australia and the second commonest in Canada.iv

  The name Smith means ‘one who works with metal’ – and dates all the way back to Anglo-Saxon times, when men were often named after the job they did. It is not the only profession-based surname still in widespread use today: others include Cooper (meaning barrel-maker), Mason (as in stonemason), Miller (of grain), Turner (of wood) and Taylor (of clothes), all of which feature in the list of the top hundred commonest surnames in England and Wales.

  Given that none of these professions is widely practised today (though some of us like to think of ourselves as ‘wordsmiths’), their survival is clearly down to the longstanding custom of giving children the same surname as their father, however irrelevant the original meaning of that name may now be; a practice that began far back in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  Many common place names in Britain also contain elements that reveal their pre-Norman origins. So we still use the suffix ‘-by’, an Old Norse word meaning ‘settlement’, as in Selby and Whitby, ‘-ham’, the Old English for farm or homestead, and the ubiquitous ‘-chester’, which originally came into our language from Latin, indicating a Roman fort. As with surnames, once a name of a particular place has become established in common use, it proves remarkably resistant to change.

  You might not be surprised to learn that the names we use for birds are no exception to this rule. But to discover their original meaning requires a degree of linguistic detective work, because they are effectively ‘in disguise’. Over the centuries many have changed into a completely different word, by means of a process that linguists call ‘folk [or false] etymology’.

  Take two well-known British birds: the redstart, a close relative of the robin, and the yellowhammer, a canary-coloured member of the bunting family. We use these names so frequently that we no longer even notice just how peculiar they are. Yet if we think about them, they make absolutely no sense at all: redstarts are not especially jumpy, and nor do yellowhammers have a particularly percussive call.

  These names, along with many others, including fieldfare, lapwing and wheatear, are classic examples of the peculiar propensity for archaic words to survive in names far longer than they would in other aspects of our language. But as their original meaning became less and less clear, the Anglo-Saxon names were eventually transformed into more familiar words. These usually have little or no connection with the original meaning, and so can mislead the unwary.

  Thus the Old English word steort, meaning tail, transmuted into ‘start’ (hence redstart, and its scarcer cousin, the black redstart). Likewise, the ‘hammer’ in the name of our most colourful bunting is nothing to do with tools, but is a corruption of Ammer, the word still used for bunting in German today.v

  Yet even by the late eighteenth century, the name yellowhammer, while widely used as a folk name, was still not fully established as the official name for this species. The naturalist Thomas Pennant preferred the alternative ‘yellow bunting’, in a tidy-minded attempt to bring the yellowhammer in line with its cousins the reed, corn and snow buntings. But less than a century later, the Victorian ornithologist William Yarrell changed the name back again, adding a helpful explanation of its origin for his readers: ‘I have ventured to restore to this bird what I believe to have been its first English name, Yellow Ammer. The word Ammer is a well-known German term for Bunting.’
<
br />   Other familiar birds provide further examples of how folk etymology can mislead us. Around my Somerset home, the first sign that winter is on its way comes with the arrival each autumn of large flocks of redwings, fieldfares and lapwings, refugees from the north. These birds travel here to enjoy the benefits of our relatively mild winter climate and the plentiful food this brings.

  Their names, at least at first glance, appear to make perfect sense. The redwing is a small, dark thrush from Iceland, sporting a rufous patch on its flanks. The fieldfare, its larger, more colourful cousin, arrives each November from its breeding grounds in Scandinavia and northern Russia, greedily feasting on berries in hedgerows and probing for worms as it ‘fares over’ muddy fields. And the lapwing, also known as the peewit from its distinctive piping call, has a very distinctive flight action; as flocks pass overhead on a fine winter’s day, the alternating flashes of dark upperwing and white underwing appear to ‘lap’ through the sky like swimmers in a calm blue sea.

  And yet of this trio of winter visitors to my own corner of the West Country, only the redwing’s name actually means what it suggests: a bird with a red coloration on (or near) its wing. The other two have far more complex origins, and very different meanings from the obvious ones.

  The linguist W. B. Lockwood made short work of the OED’s more prosaic interpretation of the fieldfare’s name: ‘The name is clearly corrupt; the explanation that the meaning is somehow fieldfarer is just the obvious guess – and quite as obviously improbable … for dozens of species fare over fields.’2

  He had a point. As an alternative, Lockwood proposed that the name of what Chaucer called ‘the frosty feldefare’ comes from a long-lost Old English phrase meaning ‘grey piglet’, a reference to the bird’s colour and its harsh, grunting call. Only once Old English gave way to the more modern, French-influenced language, and this meaning had become obsolete – just like the suffixes ‘start’ and ‘ammer’ – did this ungainly thrush gain its misleading modern name.vi

  To most people, the meaning of the name ‘lapwing’ appears equally obvious. Yet, once again, Lockwood disagreed with the easy explanation. Digging down into Old English, he discovered a reference from before the Norman Conquest to the bird as the ‘hléapewince’. He believed that the name refers to the prominent tuft of feathers on top of the bird’s head, and translated it as ‘movable crest’.vii

  We can trace the gradual changes in the bird’s name through time: from ‘hléapewince’ (first noted in AD 1050), through ‘lhapwynche’ (1340), ‘lappewinke’ (1390), ‘lapwyng’ (1430) and finally the one we use today, lapwing (1591). Soon afterwards, in 1604, that name appeared in the climactic final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Horatio taunts the hurried departure of Osric by comparing him with a newly hatched chick:

  *

  This Lapwing runs away with the shell on his head.

  This casual insult reveals that Shakespeare had more ornithological expertise than we might give him credit for: he clearly knew that lapwing chicks are precocial, meaning that they are able to leave the nest almost immediately after they are born.

  The best known of what my old French teacher Mr Schrecker used to call ‘faux amis’ (false friends, because they mislead the unwary) is the name ‘wheatear’.

  Wheatears are showy members of the chat family – cousins of the robin and nightingale – with roughly two-dozen representatives, mainly found in the arid, stony deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Just one species (officially known as the northern wheatear to distinguish it from its heat-loving southern cousins) has managed to extend its range northwards into the temperate regions of Europe, including Britain.

  Wheatears are one of the earliest spring migrants to arrive back from Africa, turning up in fields of short-cropped grass from the middle of March onwards. Even though this kind of grass and wheat are not the same plant, people have tended to assume that the bird’s name must be somehow connected with our most widespread arable crop.

  But this perky little bird has nothing whatsoever to do with ears of wheat. The Anglo-Saxon name, which unfortunately has not survived in print, was probably ‘wheteres’. The final ‘s’ on this singular noun provides a crucial clue to its real meaning: ‘white-arse’. This is a reference to the wheatear’s most prominent feature, its bright white rump, which is revealed as soon as the bird takes to the wing and flits away from you. To confirm this, we need look no further than two dialect names for the species: ‘white rump’, from Northumberland, and the blunter ‘white ass’ from Cornwall.

  By the seventeenth century the origin of the wheatear’s name had already been long forgotten, as can be seen from two contemporary accounts. In Worthies of England, published posthumously in 1662, the historian Thomas Fuller pronounced with great authority that: ‘It [the wheatear] is so called, because fattest when wheat is ripe … whereon it feeds.’3

  The other comes from the English poet John Taylor who, in August 1653, set out on what he called ‘The certain travailes of an uncertain journey’, ‘for no other intent or purpose, but to pleasure himself, and to please his friends in the first place’. Taylor’s perambulations coincided with the start of the autumn bird migration season, during which he came across ‘rare Birds I never saw before’, adding in a dreadful example of doggerel:

  Th’ are called wheat-ears, less than lark or sparrow,

  Well roasted, in the mouth they taste like marrow.

  Having never actually eaten a wheatear, well-roasted or not, I cannot attest to Taylor’s culinary tastes, but I do know that his ornithological knowledge was severely limited, as this later couplet reveals:

  The name of wheat-ears, on them is ycleap’d,

  Because they come when wheat is yearly reap’d.4

  We can only hope that the rest of his account was more accurate than this entirely false piece of speculation (and rather bad poetry).

  But what is puzzling is how the English language could have changed so radically that these contemporaries of Marvell and Milton could no long decode the names that had been coined a thousand years earlier, back in Anglo-Saxon times. When this rift in understanding happened is easy to answer – some time during the thirteenth century. How, and especially why it did so, is a little trickier. And the explanation helps to solve a puzzle that may have already occurred to you: why is a blackbird called a blackbird, when so many other birds are also black?

  3: Sex, Chaucer and Blackbirds

  The way English evolved from an obscure and rather inflexible Germanic tongue into the rich, fluid, complex language we all speak today comes down, as with so many things, to sex.

  Fortunately for the future of the English language, the initial stand-off between Normans and Saxons could not last for ever. The mutual attraction between noble French lords and comely English maidens (and perhaps also between aristocratic French ladies and muscular sons of the soil) inevitably led to social and sexual interactions between the two groups. Soon afterwards, these turned into more formal and permanent liaisons. Thus by the late twelfth century one chronicler could observe: ‘Now that the English and Normans have been dwelling together, marrying and giving in marriage, the two nations have become so mixed that it is scarcely possible today … to tell who is English, who of Norman race.’5

  Then, as the English monarchs withdrew from their possessions in France following successive military defeats, something rather odd happened. In other countries where two or more languages are habitually spoken, such as Switzerland and Belgium, they usually remain clearly separate, each used by a different community. Alternatively, as in Scotland and Ireland where English displaced Gaelic, the conquerors’ language eventually triumphs at the expense of the original one.

  But in England, the competing tongues of what had started off as Old English and Norman French underwent a kind of mutually agreed merger, creating a completely new language with features from both its parents: what we now call Middle English.

  This new language was in many way
s more complex than those it replaced, with a far more extensive vocabulary, thanks to the borrowing of ‘loan words’ from Norman French and Latin. Some of these displaced the Old English word entirely, but more often than not the old and new words co-existed alongside one another, endowing our language with a plethora of synonyms. Thus today we can choose between words of both Germanic and Romance origin, which mean more or less the same thing: for example, ‘kingly’ and ‘royal’, ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful’, or ‘wed’ and ‘marry’.

  But crucially, this new language was also more straightforward than its parent tongues, in several important ways. Technical aspects such as inflexions (sets of endings added to words to indicate grammatical case, number and gender) were either lost or greatly simplified.viii It is not unreasonable to suggest that this, along with the rich extra vocabulary provided by merging the two different languages, was one important reason for the eventual adoption of English as a global lingua franca.

  Of course, as we have seen in the previous chapter, this process had actually begun long before the Norman Conquest, with the Viking invasions of northern and eastern England, from the late eighth century until around the time of the Norman invasion, leading to many of the Scandinavian invaders settling on this side of the North Sea. Not only did Old English borrow many loan-words from Old Norse, but the shifting grammar also began at this point, with the system of grammatical inflexions being streamlined. ‘In order to facilitate communication’, notes Professor Simon Horobin from the University of Oxford, ‘the two groups of speakers must have placed less stress on the inflexional endings; as a consequence, the Old English system of inflexions began to break down.’6

  But the most revolutionary change was the almost total disappearance of grammatical gender. Old English, like modern German, had three different genders – masculine, feminine and neuter – but during the transformation into Middle English these distinctions gradually disappeared. Interestingly, this process appears to have begun in the north of England, under the influence of the Vikings; gender disappeared there some time during the twelfth century, earlier than it vanished in the south.