The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  The most commonly used words in English today are relics of Old English: they include the and that, of and from, in and by, to and with, and of course and. One of the most commonly used nouns is word – a telling indication of the amount of energy we expend discussing language. The dozen most common lexical verbs are say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, take, want, give and mean. Ten of these were part of the native stock of Old English – the exceptions are the Norse loanwords want and take.28 Other words of great age include town, earl, thief and theft, yoke, wood, throat and church. The names of many animals – for instance, mouse, wolf, hare and cow – are similarly venerable. The terms we use for natural features, such as hill and stream, are mostly Anglo-Saxon too.

  The literature of the period is reticent, laconic and metaphorical. Sentiment is often kept at bay, while candour is paramount. Puns exploit words’ several layers of meaning, and heavily alliterative structures are favoured. Our impressions are incomplete, however, as only 30,000 lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry have survived; the 3,182 lines of Beowulf, preserved in a single fire-damaged manuscript, represent by far the most substantial example and have a distinctly Scandinavian aroma. Clearly, a poem will make use of a rich selection of vocabulary, so this most accessible of Anglo-Saxon texts is not necessarily a reliable guide to the modes of everyday speech. All the same, the poetry sings to us of an age preoccupied with courage and honour, as well as with the alien presences lurking at the margin of society; Beowulf makes a point of talking up his physical strength and his skills in fighting giants and water-monsters, yet he would sooner be peaceable than violent. There is plenty in Beowulf that we can recognize – the monster Grendel inhabits the ‘moras’ and the ‘fen’, for instance – but besides numerous strange-looking words there are bewildering features such as a minute distinction between different types of man: ceorl and wer, beorn and rinc, gome and, not entirely reassuringly, man.

  Alongside this creative writing about heroic champions and journeys grew a new culture of scholarship. In the later part of the tenth century the monasteries underwent dramatic reform, becoming major centres of literary endeavour. At Ramsey in the Fens, for instance, the direction of Oswald, archbishop of York, ensured close contact with France; Oswald had imbibed the spirit of reform while a monk at Fleury-sur-Loire, the capital of Benedictine scholarship. At the heart of the reform movement was a focus on assembling and reproducing seminal texts: the teaching of mathematics, history, ancient literature and Bible study was much improved. The revival of monastic learning – encapsulated in the new prominence of the word school – helped boost both the preservation of Latin texts and the status of Old English as a language in which to craft works of literature. Its fruits were delicious. In all, it resulted in about 450 Latin words finding their way into English texts before the end of the Old English period, and three-quarters of these were taken into general use.29

  Meanwhile, shifts in political power were gestating. At the beginning of the eleventh century Ethelred, known to posterity as ‘the Unready’, was on the throne. It was claimed that he soiled the font during his baptism, and that this was a portent of the English monarchy’s demise. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but, despite the efforts of his more inspiring son Edmund Ironside, the fortunes of his house collapsed: in 1016 the throne passed to Cnut, who married Ethelred’s Norman widow, Emma, the following year. Cnut jointly ruled in England and Denmark, and was King of Norway for the final seven years of his life. England was his main focus; his nineteen-year rule was skilfully oppressive, notable for heavy taxes and the artful piety he exhibited in order to placate influential churchmen. However, all his children died without issue, and in 1042 the Danish line fizzled out, allowing Emma’s son by Ethelred, Edward, to become king.

  The more genuinely pious Edward the Confessor, having grown up in Normandy, insinuated new influences. His court attracted Norman visitors, and he appointed a Frenchman to the bishopric of London and then to Canterbury. Since his Norman confidants spoke French, ambitious English noblemen made stuttering efforts to ingratiate themselves by doing so too. This Norman presence is evident in the splashes of French found in Old English. Prut, meaning ‘proud’, came from the French word prud and spawned prutness and prutlic and the damning oferprut. The first recorded use of the French word cancheler (which would morph into chancellor) is in a pre-Conquest charter, and documents of this kind increasingly showed the influence of French handwriting.

  The royal succession was to be tangled, for half-Norman Edward lacked a true heir. Of his relatives, the most immediate candidate was Edmund Ironside’s son Edward, but he was exiled in Hungary, which hardly made him a credible successor, and after this Edward’s death the role devolved on his young son, Edgar the Atheling. Edgar’s claims were ignored, and it was Harold, son of the powerful Earl Godwine of Wessex, who was crowned at Westminster when the Confessor died in the first week of 1066. William of Normandy, who believed he had been promised the throne, challenged Harold’s election by the English magnates, and began a determined campaign of diplomacy and propaganda.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for that year records that William sailed to Pevensey, and that ‘this became known to King Harold and he gathered a great raiding-army, and came against him at the grey apple tree.’ There was ‘great slaughter’ on both sides, but eventually ‘the French had possession of the place of slaughter, just as God granted them because of the people’s sins.’30 The remark about English sins can be interpreted as a criticism of the supposedly decadent English Church or as a reference to the story that before Hastings the English feasted drunkenly while the Normans prayed. What is certain, though, is that the Normans believed that God awarded victory to those of whom he approved. Their success in battle licensed a self-righteous confidence, and began a period of French political and cultural dominance that lasted for 300 years.

  The Normans, it should be emphasized, were not exactly French. They were, in fact, of largely Scandinavian origin, and their name points to their Norse antecedents. They had migrated to France only in the ninth century, and had been granted a pocket of land around Rouen by King Charles the Simple. This concession in time expanded to include Evreux, Bessin and the Cotentin peninsula. The Norsemen embraced Christianity and the French language, as well as French habits and manners. Flexible and enterprising, they looked abroad for further gains.

  William turned their aspirations into reality. He obtained a papal blessing and drummed up an army of invaders. Some of them were recruited beyond Normandy – many were short of useful employment and therefore on the lookout for any opportunity that smelt of money. Yet they were men of war, even if not necessarily men of standing. They brought their horses with them, and their expertise on horseback and superior ballistics proved decisive at Hastings: mounted troops shocked the Saxon infantry. They also, inevitably, brought their language, a dialect of what was later recognized as the langue d’oïl. It did not flood across Britain, but its effects were soon obvious.

  Rather than overwhelming the entire Saxon nation, the invaders simply pushed aside its aristocracy. Forest and fields were carved up. The Domesday Book would show, twenty years after the Conquest, that less than a tenth of the land remained in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon noblemen. The very fact of this document’s creation signalled the humiliation of the native people; ‘Domesday’ meant ‘day of judgement’, and a record of this kind was, in the words of the historian Michael Clanchy, ‘a product of distrust rather than social progress’.31 The Domesday Book, though written in Latin, was symbolic of the new regime’s particular brand of thoroughness. Its name, which was rooted in Old English, represented the attitude not of those who created it, but of those whose holdings it so decisively adjudged. In the years following its compilation, it was not often used, but the process of making it intimidated the people. Furthermore, it linked written records with the exercise of royal power. After Domesday, documents came to be seen as vital administrative tools: records were kept of court
sessions, land transfers and enclosures, apprenticeships, conscription and taxes.32 Most of them were written in the French dialect that has come to be known as Anglo-Norman.

  Seen from the vantage point of the present, the Domesday Book highlights the way land was reapportioned after the Conquest. It even introduces a new term of land measurement, the carucate, an area of 120 acres (as much land as could be ploughed in one year with a team of eight oxen), and we can trace the phrase no man’s land to the same massive text.

  The glut of administrative writing that followed shows that political changes were rapidly effected, but it took time for the change of regime to stamp its presence on the language. It is likely that in William’s England there were fewer native French-speakers than there had been Norse-speakers during the reign of Cnut: French could not supplant English as the language of those beyond William’s court. Moreover, fundamental differences between English and French meant that it was not easy to become bilingual. The individuals who did so tended to be at the higher end of the social scale. Yet within three generations of the Conquest most noblemen were comfortable in either language. One recent account states that after the Conquest ‘those who normally fought used French, those who worked, English, and those who prayed, Latin.’33 Another, older, account suggestively posits that ‘The overlords spoke Norman French, as the white settlers of Kenya speak modern English.’34 The three languages mingled and interpenetrated in complex ways. By the end of the twelfth century the status of French was close to that of Latin – a language of administration, culture and learning, but not of common daily speech. In the wake of conquest, even as French becomes the language of power, ‘Old English phrases, syntax, and idioms remain the expressive baseline of the land.’35

  As Richard Bailey has pointed out, in the period following the Conquest new words sprang up for ‘those who mediated across the boundaries which language could create’. One example was latimer, a corruption of latiner, and another was translator, a term imported from French. A further word of this type was drugeman – plainly the same as dragoman, a word we shall meet in due course, but modelled in this early form on the Old French drugemen. Later, ‘the bilingual facilitator’ came to be called a truchman or linguister.36 Especially important were clerks and scribes, capable polyglots who wrote up documents – prototypes of the modern bureaucrat. But they were not the only ones who had to reach across the boundary for professional reasons. A merchant or a household servant would have needed a working knowledge of both languages, and so would a wet nurse. As they switched between the two, French words slipped into English usage, and, undoubtedly, words from English and other British languages were absorbed, in Gallicized forms, by Anglo-Norman. Individuals would not have used words in this way self-consciously, and their sense of the boundaries of ‘their’ language would have been quite fluid. In time, the languages merged.

  When you achieve power, in any situation, you create not only new laws, but also a new language of rule and new words for those you rule. It is something of a cliché that ‘language is power’; it is more useful to see that power is in part a feat of language. Forms of language are used to protect a society’s dominant group. The Normans introduced new job titles, such as assizer and alnager (a quality controller in the wool trade), and the king’s exchequer took its name from the counting table, draped with a squared cloth that resembled a chessboard, where revenues were piled and totted up. They introduced the concept of tenserie, which was protection money. They used local labour to build castles, which they then staffed with their own men. The word castle can be found in Anglo-Saxon translations of the Gospels before the Conquest, but there it signifies a village; only after the Conquest does the word take on a more forbidding aspect.

  The whole character of the invaders’ military efforts was impressive. Their expertise is implicit in the copious new language of warfare that they introduced. This comprised such words as fortress, conflict, siege, assault and armour, along with the punitive prison and tax. War itself is a Norman word – the Germanic tribes had had no single word that conveniently conveyed its meaning, while the Latin bellum had always been awkward, given its proximity to several words meaning ‘beautiful’. Unsurprisingly, the entire vocabulary of castle-building was Norman, and, although the basic parts of a man’s armour kept their Anglo-Saxon names (shield, for instance), the Normans’ more sophisticated equipment enriched the lexis of combat with a host of fantastic items like the ventail, a piece of armour for protecting the neck, and the rere-brace, which protected the triceps.

  Few manuscripts survive as testimony to the cultural and linguistic traumas of the period. This shortage of documentation means that the earliest citations we can find for some French loanwords are not until several hundred years after the Conquest, although we can infer that many were adopted much earlier. Of course, few borrowings were immediate: it needed at least two generations of bilingualism to break down the essential English mistrust of French words. As one historian argues, ‘The true fusion of French and native elements seemingly took place only after English had risen again from the thraldom to which William’s Conquest had consigned it.’ As a ‘slave tongue’ it ‘sullenly kept to itself ’, but as ‘the free tongue of independent men’ it was both resurgent and absorbent.37 By 1150 Old English was in effect obsolete, although Old English texts continued to be copied in the thirteenth century. It was superseded by what we call Middle English, into which a wealth of Anglo-Norman was absorbed – not as ornament, but organically. Middle English is, as its name suggests, the transitional phase between the strongly inflected Old English and its very modestly inflected Modern successor. Grammar was changing, and so was pronunciation. Word order now clearly governed the meaning of sentences, and the role of prepositions became greater. Vowel sounds lengthened. These were not direct consequences of the Norman Conquest, but the French administration recorded the changes.

  The augmentation of English vocabulary was an integral part of this change. Many of the French words that entered English were imposed rather than assimilated. Respect was institutionalized, and there developed a whole new language of master-servant relations, manifest in the advent of French words like allegiance, fealty and homage. Indeed, master itself, though assimilated from Latin before the Conquest, was reinforced by the Norman term maistre, and servant is Norman too. The Old English cniht (knight) held out against the comparatively awkward word chevalier, but there were plenty of new titles, ranging right across the social spectrum from marquess and viscount to page and serf.

  The opulence and hierarchical nature of the Anglo-Norman household are suggested in the newly imported words banquet, butler and page, and other novelties in this field included cellar, dinner, goblet and chimney. Do these words feel French? Not at this remove. But then neither does the French of French-mediated names that came in at the same time, like William, Robert, Alice, Richard, Henry, Hugh and Matilda.38 The practice of using surnames was also a Norman phenomenon, and increased significantly in the twelfth century; by 1300, only 1 per cent of the population lacked a surname.39 Meanwhile, the names the Normans gave places, such as Beaulieu and Richmond, contained unmistakable judgements about the allure of their new estates. The words fell like snow, covering what was there before. (The image is George Orwell’s, not my own.) For instance, the French loan riche overlaid Old English rice, which had the meaning ‘powerful’ and conveyed a sense of nobility; initially the French loan reinforced the existing term, but then the older connotations melted away, and rich increasingly had to do with material possessions, not personal qualities.

  The word-stock registered as well the gamut of Norman leisure activities and accoutrements. In the Middle English period, when acquisitions from French were abundant, new terms sprang up in literature and music, in fashion and architecture – and these channels have stayed open ever since. Gown was one such import; others were cloak, garter, satin and ermine. Fashion itself was French, as was style. This channel of influence has never c
losed, and it is to French that we owe altogether more recent loans like blouse, gauze and moustache. The sixteenth-century traveller Fynes Moryson touched as neatly as anyone has done on the advent of French style:

  The wise Romans as they inlarged theire Conquests, so they did spreade theire language, with their lawes, and the divine service all in the lattene tongue, and by rewardes and preferments invited men to speake it, as also the Normans in England brought in the use of the French tounge, in our Common lawe, and all wordes of art in hawking, hunting, and like pastymes.40

  Hawking and hunting had been popular before the Conquest, but their vocabulary was now overhauled. The falconer’s vocabulary for different types of bird is thus heavily French – peregrine, gyrfalcon, saker, lanner, merlin, hobby – although goshawk is Old English and is found in an early eleventh-century glossary of Latin. The expressions to turn tail and pride of place also derive from the Norman practices and doctrines of hawking. The adjective haggard is related to the French name for a wild bird captured as an adult, while also influenced by the Teutonic hag, a wild-looking woman. Heraldic devices, which proved helpful in identifying men who were clad in otherwise anonymous armour, took their names from French, as we can see from the names of their ‘tinctures’ (vert, azure, argent) and partitions (the chevron, for example, and the bordure).