The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  At the same time, French terms suggested the changing contours of day-to-day morality. There were new ideals of behaviour. The language of status became the language of moral excellence, while low status was equated with low moral standards. The etymologies of chivalry and courtesy show up their aristocratic temper, embedding the values of horsemanship and the royal court. By contrast, the Anglo-Saxon churl and knave, formerly markers only of inferior status, became terms of condemnation.41 Other new words included courage and virtue. I shall say more about the former in a later chapter; as far as virtue is concerned, the key thing to spot is that it is ultimately connected to the Latin vir, ‘man’, and to be virtuous was originally to be strong, to show a capacity for action. Later, the same type of distinction was made between urban polish and rude rusticity. We see something of the new moral colour in the Ancren Riwle, a manual for aspiring female hermits dating from around 1230, which introduces a host of new words: apocalypse, comfort, discipline, guile, purgatory, virtue and hypocrite, plus an early, isolated, sighting of scandal. It also features some novel calques of French expressions: to make moan, to make profession, to cry mercy and beforehand. (Other such calques tended to be modelled on expressions that used the verbs avoir and faire. For example, to have mercy and to make peace.) At the other end of the spectrum there were new and distinctive Anglo-Norman terms of abuse, notably bugger and bastard.42 Bugger, it should be pointed out, was a word for a heretic – literally, a Bulgarian.

  While many of the new words related to the lives and concerns of the aristocracy, others had to do with the most ordinary matters. A comprehensive list would be overwhelming, but examples include fruit and vegetable, place and number, pleasure and pain. Although the Normans introduced new concepts, to a greater degree, as these novelties suggest, they brought fresh ways of expressing existing ones. Some were freighted with moral significance; for instance, kynde frequently gave way to nature, a word with more obviously religious overtones, which suggested a link between a thing’s attributes or character and certain deeper, God-given, principles. Cattle became the standard word for personal property, and, because livestock tended to make up the chief part of a person’s movable goods, it came to be used almost exclusively of domesticated animals – not just cows, but also pigs, goats, sheep and even bees. Parts of the body generally kept their Anglo-Saxon names, but the French face managed to displace onsene in casual speech.

  The Norman influence pierced even the heart of family life: nephew, niece, cousin, aunt and uncle displaced existing terms, although the Saxon words for the most intimate relationships – mother, father, sister, brother – remained. Nephew superseded the compound mouthfuls brothorsunu and sweostorsunu, and, downplaying the ties of kinship so obvious in the Old English, perhaps implied among other things a recalibration of the nurturing uncle-nephew relationship – one to which the Anglo-Saxons had attached special significance. Moreover, while mother-in-law, sister-in-law and their like were made up of English words, they were actually calques, recreating the shape of terms used in French.

  Norman settlers soon began to intermarry with the natives. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis, born in 1075, was the child of such a marriage, though he habitually referred to himself as ‘Vitalis the Englishman’. Nothing more urgently accelerates the need for successful communication than the heat of sexual desire. For many Normans, the Englishwomen were sleeping dictionaries. The children that resulted from these unions picked up elements of both languages, and switched, like latimers and linguisters, between the two. As they did so, some of the French words they used ceased to be thought of as French, while others acquired subtly new senses.

  For a picture of the influence of French, we may usefully look at two different versions of Brut, a poem which offers an account of British history and was the work of a Worcestershire cleric known to posterity as Layamon. Whereas in a version dating from around 1200 we find the words marmon-stane, munuccliff, milce and boc-runen, an updated text produced half a century later replaces them with terms we will recognize much more readily: marbre (marble), abbey, grace and letter.

  Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes.

  Nouns have always been the part of speech absorbed in greatest number; verbs and adjectives are the only other groups where loans are at all common. The adoption from other languages of parts of speech other than nouns is evidence of a deep connection – an engagement with concepts, rather than just with ‘stuff’ – but nouns, though they may give less pleasure than adjectives and adverbs, mark the space we inhabit and the objects that earth our perceptions. Here they reinforce our understanding of what the Normans introduced to Britain: castles and cavalry, feudalism, new systems of land tenure and government, new styles of church and name, writs, courts and prisons, as well as rabbits and cider-making. These last two novelties merit a brief digression. Today, after all, the French name for a rabbit is lapin. But a connection with our word rabbit is suggested in rabouillère, the burrow where the female rabbit brings forth her young. As for the cider-making, the Norman terms could not displace the old words apple and orchard, but cider itself was Norman, and so was its pear-based cousin, perry.

  The public profile of English had diminished. It was still used in private, but its character was changing; noticeably, for instance, the old clusters of consonants were being broken down. Of the areas to escape French influence, two of the most important were seafaring and farming, both of which were long-established components of English identity into which the Normans could introduce no significant innovations.

  The French language that came to Britain with the Conquest comprised the forms spoken in Normandy, Brittany and Picardy. The Normans made up the largest contingent of the invading army, and for a couple of generations, it seems, the French spoken in England was not very different from that spoken in Normandy. (Histories of English have tended to be dogmatic on the point, which seems dangerous, since there are, perhaps needless to say, no audio recordings of the Norman knights travelling through the south of England, and the evidence we do possess is the work of scribes, an anonymous and mobile class.)44 In 1154 the accession of Henry II relocated the Crown’s political base to Anjou, and this conferred new prestige on the dialect of central France, which was also spoken in Paris. Henry could speak little or no English, though he could understand it; his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had no grasp whatsoever of the language. Many found themselves inconvenienced by this shift. One of its likely effects was a decrease in the status of Norman French, which came to be regarded as rather rustic and uncouth by those who spoke the Parisian form – a group that included an increasingly large number of England’s courtiers. A well-known French poem of the period denigrated the ‘faus franceis … d’Angleterre’ – proof of the divergence. 45 Increasingly, Norman French was marginalized: people bilingual in English and Norman French found the latter less useful, while Parisian French, though exalted, seemed alien.

  Yet, as Norman French was losing its vernacular currency under Henry, it was becoming the language of the law, displacing Latin. While some of the law’s old mechanisms remained, the terminology was refined, largely so as to disempower English-speakers. The Norse word law survived, but a new jargon engulfed every dimension of its practice and enforcement. Much of this endures: jury, justice, plea, plaintiff, lease, larceny and crime are all from French. So are real estate and the curious word order of court martial. Furthermore, specialist terms such as suit, impeachment, assault and battery and rape were specifically Anglo-Norman, their forms different from those found in the French used on the Continent.46 As English law became more sophisticated, so the gulf between the artificial Law French and the spoken language widened, and the
legal uses of French grew increasingly specialized. Geoffrey Hughes observes that ‘the old direct and familiar native terms were replaced by new opaque equivalents.’ This cultivation of a less than transparent language of administration would over time establish itself as ‘a general model in the development of professional language in English’.47

  Behind the everyday appearance of council, county and custom lies a recognizable substrate of otiose bureaucracy. All are French imports, along with such financial terms as price, receipt, revenue and budget. The last of these derives from the French diminutive bougette, which can be traced back to the Latin bulga, ‘a leather bag’. The word tort, still used to signify any breach of a legally imposed responsibility, was current in French in the eleventh century and retained its Latin connotations of twisting (not just of wronging, but also of wringing), while the first uses of the French-derived heir and appeal were in legal contexts. Surprisingly, hotchpotch derives from hochepot, a French legal term for the gathering of properties to make it possible to divide them equally; out of this came its use for a dish comprising a jumble of ingredients, and by the sixteenth century it could signify a medley or farrago of any kind.

  The Dialogus de Scaccario, produced by Henry II’s treasurer Richard FitzNigel around 1177, is a fascinatingly lucid account of the operations of the exchequer. It also sheds light on the merging of English and Norman identities. In the guise of the ‘Master’, FitzNigel explains that in the aftermath of the Conquest ‘what were left of the conquered English lay in ambush for the suspected and hated Normans and murdered them secretly in woods and unfrequented places as opportunity offered.’ When a Norman was found killed ‘without his slayer being known or revealing his identity by flight’, the hundred (i.e. local subdivision of the county) where the crime was discovered had to pay ‘a large sum of assayed silver, £36 or £44 according to the locality of the murder and the commonness of the crime’. But at the time of his writing, the fine is exacted, ‘whoever is found slain’: after more than a hundred years of social contact and intermarriage, the ‘nations are so mixed’ that among all but the lowest orders of society ‘it can scarcely be decided … who is of English birth and who of Norman.’48

  Henry II’s youngest son, John, would see this at first hand. He inherited the kingdom from his brother Richard, who had spent no more than 5 per cent of his ten-year reign in England. John, by contrast, explored his mixed kingdom. But then he had to: having lost ground in France to his rival Arthur of Brittany, he lost more as a result of poor strategy. In 1200 John took as his second wife the 13-year-old Isabella of Angoulême. His choice was fuelled by lust, and it was rash, for Isabella had been betrothed to another man, Hugh de Lusignan. Hugh appealed to the judgement of King Philip Augustus of France, and Philip, riding roughshod over the law, pronounced John a rebellious vassal and confiscated his French lordships. Despite John’s attempts to cling on to Normandy, Philip seized it, marching triumphantly into Rouen in June 1204. Thereafter, only the Channel Islands stayed loyal to John, and although he twice tried to make inroads in Poitou he failed to gain a new foothold in France.

  The English Channel now seemed a wider gap than at any point in the previous 150 years, and the gulf increased under John’s son, Henry III. Although the Francophile Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence introduced a fresh wave of French courtiers, resistance to their influence brought about a surge of nationalist feeling. Moreover, Henry’s awareness of his country’s Anglo-Saxon past is evident in his politic decision to name his first son Edward, after the Confessor. And whereas John’s Magna Carta was written in Latin, the draft constitution to which Henry subscribed in 1258 under the Provisions of Oxford was pointedly drawn up in Latin, French and English. This was a feat of propaganda, determinedly inclusive. Copies of the English version were sent out into every county, to be promulgated by the local sheriffs.

  Henry’s son Edward was to be a passionate defender of English, and later, during the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), burgeoning English nationalism fostered an increased respect for the vernacular. Writing home during his French campaigns, Henry V chose English, and his travelling secretariat played a crucial role in the development of its standard form. In 1362 the Statute of Pleading was enacted, and, at least in principle, English became the language of Parliament and of the law. Yet ironically, even though it declared that all pleas should be couched in English and promoted the idea that using English in courts would dispel confusion, the Statute was written in French and stipulated that court records be kept in Latin. Its rhetoric was firm, but the closed ranks of the legal profession shunned much of its logic. For another 300 years lawyers would continue to do a great deal of their writing and thinking in French, and they would supplement it with generous helpings of Latin – words like affidavit and subpoena – which conveyed an air of precision and authority unavailable to English. To this day the language of the law proves prolix, repetitious, archaic and theatrical, as indeed do many of its quite mystifying processes and practitioners. Legal terminology retains quite a number of bilingual doublets, such as ‘keep and maintain’, ‘goods and chattels’ and ‘will and testament’. Lightly disguised French terms such as larceny and devise have proved remarkably durable alternatives to theft and bequeath.49 Nevertheless, by the second half of the fourteenth century the legal position of English was greatly strengthened, and by the early part of the fifteenth legal documents were more likely to be in English than in French. At this time we also see a dramatic rise in the volume of wills and letters composed in English.

  The Normans’ legal apparatus engendered political unity. The disparate parts of England had been drawn together in the century before the Conquest, and now under Norman rule this togetherness tightened, bringing the antipathies between the English and their Welsh and Scottish neighbours into sharper relief. But the Conquest was only slowly completed: rebellious elements in the north-west and in Wales resisted Norman rule, and it was not until 1284 that Wales was incorporated into England under the Statute of Rhuddlan, which introduced the mechanisms of English law and smoothed the way for English settlers. In Scotland, pressures exerted by the Norman administration gradually pushed Gaelic-speakers north into the Highlands. The reign of Malcolm Canmore, who had an English wife, saw an increase in ‘anglicization’, and familiar patterns of land tenure were superseded by Anglo-Norman feudalism. In the burghs – urban communities established by royal charter – English and French were in frequent use, and the Scottish Church assimilated English practices and the English calendar during the twelfth century. Later, the English-language Bible would enhance the status of English north of the border: a law passed in 1579 obliged every householder worth 300 marks to possess a Bible, and in practice this meant an English one.50

  Another significant development, in 1169, saw adventurers from Pembrokeshire – some of whom spoke English – land at the south-eastern tip of Ireland near Wexford. Although the language did not establish itself decisively in Ireland until the seventeenth century, following James I’s encouragement of Scottish settlement in Ulster and Oliver Cromwell’s military victories, English was seeded there by this twelfth-century invasion. Nearly 200 years later, in 1366, its position was enlarged by the Statute of Kilkenny, which marked a cogent attempt to quench Gaelic, insisting that the Irish people accept English names, English speech and the English way of riding horses. Thus English first jutted into the Irish consciousness during the reign of Henry II – another Norman success.

  While Latin remained the language of the Church, and held sway for a large part of the millennium as the language not just of the clergy and lawyers, but also of physicians, a good deal of ecclesiastical language was imported. Although the simple, vital concepts – God, for instance, and sin – retained their old names, the mechanics of faith and observance were explained afresh. The Normans had brought their own clergy, and their clerical vocabulary was abstract: sacrament, saint, nativity, grace, miracle, sermon, mercy. Charity displaced the appealing mi
ldheortnes . Later additions included salvation, purity and devotion. The Norman construction of cathedrals, as at Durham, Ely and Winchester, echoed this new language of piety.

  Although out of doors the French influence was imposing, it was felt with more relish in the kitchen. The Normans liked their food well seasoned. According to romantic tradition, the Saxons caught the animals (sheep, cow, pig, deer) and prepared them – by boiling, roasting or frying (all Norman terms) – for the Normans’ table, where they reappeared as mutton, beef, pork and venison. In Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott shows grunting Saxon swine being briskly transformed into pork for the Norman repast. Yet by the time the word pork came into common use, in the thirteenth century, the social model suggested by Scott was a thing of the past. Furthermore, words such as mutton and beef were used of the animals as well as of their meat hundreds of years after the Conquest, and their restriction to meat was not finally achieved until the eighteenth century.51 We can see this persistence very clearly in the case of venison, which we encountered earlier, on Samuel Sewall’s plate at breakfast. In the Douai Bible of 1609 there is a reference in the first Book of Kings to ‘venison of hartes, roes and buffles’, and in his classic of social criticism, Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau refers to a ‘poor wee’ hare as ‘wild free venison’. The meaning of deer has altered, too, which explains the reference in King Lear to ‘mice and rats and such small deer’ – and the homilist Aelfric of Eynsham’s using this word for an ylp (short for ylpend, ‘elephant’). But even if the distinction in language between the living creature and the meat for which it was killed is not so nicely a Norman achievement as is often argued, it is clear that the vocabulary of the kitchen was massively augmented by luxurious Norman appetites. In the period following the Conquest, novelties included liquorice, claret, gravy and mustard. As one commentator says poetically, ‘The English laboured, the French feasted.’52 Moreover, the Normans retained troupes of professional entertainers to enliven their feasts. Their various designations – goliard, for instance, and troubadour and jongleur – are now imperfectly understood, but the names recall an age when French was becoming the European language of art, music and entertainment.