The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  The period’s spirit of inventiveness was evident in feats of architecture and engineering, such as those learnt from Islamic Spain: the harnessing of water power, improved techniques of mining and quarrying, the building of bridges. Innovations in medicine were frequent, too. In the early medieval period they went hand in hand with improvements in the practice of surgery, and they started to take place on a new stage: the hospital. The word originally denoted a lodging for a pilgrim en route to Rome, Jerusalem or the shrine at Santiago de Compostela, or a place of entertainment for other travellers such as crusaders. It derived, via French, from the Latin hospes, which could denote either a host or a guest. Bound up with this, of course, are the words hotel, hostel and hospitality. Early in the fifteenth century a hospital became an asylum for needy individuals – the old, the sick, the poverty-stricken – and also, around the same time, the name of an institution where medical treatment was available. This last concept was learnt during the Crusades from the example of Persian and possibly also Iraqi treatment centres, but we can trace the phenomenon further back, to Rome and the valetudinarium, where injured legionaries were nursed. Evidently, between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries there was a fundamental change in the nature of hospitals and the services they offered: ‘the emphasis shifted away from merely preparing the soul of the patient for death.’2 This culture of caring for the sick was increasingly material: medicine involved a more sophisticated range of tools and closer documentation.

  In step with this greater emphasis on physical intervention, there was a sharper sense of the complexities of the mind. One of the most popular works in Middle English was The Pricke of Conscience (c.1350), a long poem widely and wrongly attributed to the prolific Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle. Its author was not the first to speak of conscience, our internal witness – the word was introduced from Latin, via French, in the thirteenth century. But this didactic text, which exists in well over 100 manuscripts, boosted the profile of conscience, which displaced the lovely early Middle English term inwit. And whereas in Latin conscientia had conveyed something abstract, not far removed from knowledge, in English it signified an attribute of the mind, the moral faculty. The first place it appears in this sense is the Ancren Riwle. By the time of The Pricke of Conscience, a century later, its new meaning was entrenched. It was symptomatic of a whole new dimension of English, articulate about the inner world of thoughts and feelings.

  The author of The Pricke of Conscience is alive to the limits of his audience’s understanding, stating that he wrote for ‘lewed men’. A note of explanation: to call a man ‘lewed’ or ‘lewid’ had long been the equivalent of saying he was, in today’s English, a layman. The word was also used to pinpoint a person’s origins: the lewed were the English, not their Norman overlords. But the word was just starting to be a pejorative term – as it would increasingly become after the Reformation. (We can be sure, incidentally, that the author was sensitive to his audience, for writing remained a skill monopolized by men.) So, The Pricke of Conscience, which was read more widely in the fourteenth century than any other spiritual treatise, displayed a self-consciousness about its readers and – a bigger group – those who were to listen to it being read. To many people the vocabulary it used would have seemed quirky, possessing as it did traits unique to Northumbria, even when copied and modified by scribes as far away as Suffolk and Devon.

  Throughout the Middle English period the differences between English’s dialects are dramatically visible in written texts. For instance, the famous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight displays the dialect characteristic of the north-west Midlands (in fact Cheshire or southern Lancashire), and thus shows clearly the influence of Norse, notably in its grammar, which preserves few Old English inflexions. A seminal work of a slightly earlier date, known as The Ormulum, is a series of verse homilies composed by a Lincolnshire monk. It parades the palpably different dialect of the east Midlands, which nonetheless has its own special tincture of Norse words like scone (meaning ‘beautiful’) and flit. In the Cursor Mundi, a religious epic produced in Durham around 1300, we can discern the north-east dialect – and we find the first surviving reference to ivory, which was then sourced from walruses. A copy produced in the south of England in the fourteenth century differs from it noticeably, containing fewer Norse words and more Anglo-Norman ones. John Barbour’s patriotic poem The Bruce (1376) is in the Norseflecked dialect of south-western Scotland; its language contrasts with that of the scholarly writings of John Trevisa, which were written in Cornwall and manifest the dialect of England’s south-west, which even in the 1380s had yet to embrace the Norse pronouns they and their. Trevisa makes reference to the ‘scharp, slyttyng and frotyng’ speech of northerners, which he attributes to their proximity to ‘strange men and aliens’ and distance from the centres of royal power.3 We certainly don’t need to know the exact meaning of his words to capture their biting gist. ‘Frotyng’ is especially alarming.

  Culture at this time remained chiefly oral. However, we rely on written texts for a sense of what this oral culture was like. One thing that is abundantly clear is that, although it was rare for writing in dialect to be stigmatized, contemporary commentators fretted about the seeming disunity of England and about the state of its language. Those using English often found it necessary to explain why they were doing so.

  Nonetheless, English was in the ascendant. There was an increasing confidence about what sort of ideas could be successfully conveyed in it. The language was gaining ecclesiastical support: it was the ideal vehicle for giving basic religious instruction. In 1385 Trevisa could comment that the pupils at grammar schools were ceasing to learn French, and could trumpet the quality of his own English by emphasizing its difference from ‘old and ancient’ versions. English was the ‘cradle tongue’: to know the French of Paris was an accomplishment, and by the end of the fourteenth century even ‘gentlemen’ were ceasing actively to encourage their children to learn it. Significantly, Trevisa’s finest work was his translation into English of the Polychronicon, a ‘universal history’ by Ranulph Higden, and he planned as well an English version of the Bible. Trevisa had travelled far beyond the confined world of his Cornish youth – as a student to Oxford, and later much further (he is able, for instance, to speak from experience about the quality of the hot baths at Aachen in Germany and at Aix-en-Savoie). Yet English was by no means universally spoken in Cornwall at the time, and it was important to him that the people of his native region should participate in the new world of opportunities whose rise was explicit in the rise of vernacular English.4 Moreover, while the victories against France at Crécy in 1346 and at Poitiers in 1356 amplified nationalist feeling, and a new merchant class was getting rich from servicing the needs of England’s armies, famine and pestilence – notably the Black Death – were eating away the fabric of the feudal system. The masses were increasingly vocal, and they spoke English.

  It was thus a polemical statement, rather than merely a statement of fact, for the author of the Northern Homilies to state that he writes ‘On Ingelis tong that alle may / Understand quat I wil say’.5 When Richard II met with Wat Tyler and his followers at Smithfield during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, he showed his political nous and instinctive pacifism by addressing the crowd in plain English. The crowd, after all, were as resentful of the prissy language of officialdom as we are of its twenty-first-century counterpart. Just as striking was the decision of his successor, Henry IV, to use English for his coronation speech – and for his will. The language makes its first appearance in parliamentary records in 1388.

  Parliament is by this time an established word. It comes from the eleventh-century French word parlement, and appears in Anglo-Latin jargon as early as 1216. From the late thirteenth century its meanings in English and French diverge: in the former it is a legislature, whereas in the latter it signifies a judicial body. Its development is a symptom of the period’s changes, for while the chief source of new words in Middle English was
borrowing, the borrowed words took on new characters and new dimensions. About a quarter of the total vocabulary of Middle English was imported, and of the 10,000 or so words adopted from French during this period around three-quarters have survived to the present day. The meanings of some have shifted a great deal, and others have fallen out of use, but French, as we have already seen, provided a vocabulary of refinement and regulation. Modelled on French, diminutive words ending in – let, such as gauntlet and hamlet, gained currency at this time, and paved the way for others, much later, quaintly based on their model – ringlet, leaflet, booklet, starlet.

  The copious borrowings from French meant that words from other languages, notably Latin, could be quite readily accepted: borrowing was rarely felt to give cause for concern. Words adopted straight from Latin include et cetera and index, limbo and incubus, malefactor and inferior. Writers of the period were keen on Latin prefixes – ob-, contra-, super-, and so on – which they grafted on to the front of favourite verbs. John Trevisa took over many Latin words, as did other educated English-speakers of this time, to fill gaps in the technical, philosophical and theological vocabulary of the vernacular: a brief selection of examples found in Trevisa’s writings could include complement, denomination, expedient, occasional and plural.

  Commercial activity was on the increase. English merchants found new opportunities to sell their wares into Prussia, Poland and western Russia, into Norway, and, later, into Iceland. Their activity was increasingly systematic, and they developed mechanisms for preventing fraud. Thus in 1312 a convention of pepperers, ironmongers and apothecaries established the avoirdupois system of weight measurements, which would be used for dyes, metals, drugs and spices.6 As merchants became increasingly specialized in their crafts, they organized themselves into guilds and alliances. The specialists acquired Anglo-Norman names: the mercer dealt in fabrics, the haberdasher in small articles of dress, the chandler in candles, the currier in dressing the hides prepared by a tanner. (We may note in passing the large number of ‘occupational’ surnames in English: not just Mercer and Chandler, but also, for instance, Smith, Turner, Taylor, Beadle, Ostler, Butcher, Mason and Weaver. Another is Chaucer, derived from the French chaussier, a shoemaker.) Their professional alliances were continually being rearranged, and the different groups frequently collaborated; a fishmonger and a salter might work together in trading fruit, while a mercer might import hats, mirrors and wax.7 One of the effects of this was that, at the same time as the different groups of merchants were developing increasingly specialized vocabularies, these vocabularies were intermingling. Urban communities outside London were growing, mainly around natural harbours – as in Bristol and Southampton – and were frequently visited by foreign merchants. From Castile came fruit and salt, saffron, iron and leatherwork; from Portugal, cork, wax and sugar grown in Madeira. After the Black Death caused a shortage of retail goods, Edward III liberalized trade, and the right of foreign merchants to traffic in goods such as fruit and furs (the latter’s name related to a French word for a sheath) was reinforced by royal proclamation under Richard II in 1378.

  Wine was one of the most enthusiastically consumed imports – next to no wine was produced in Britain – and it is fitting that the central literary figure of the period, Chaucer, was the son of a London vintner. Chaucer’s father would have associated with men from Gascony, Italy and perhaps also Germany, and from an early age his son was exposed to foreign languages. Indeed, his first courtly poems may have been composed in French. Chaucer used the east-Midland dialect common among the merchant class of London, a city that was even then a linguistic hotbed, resounding with street talk, the cries of merchants and dissidents, slogans, modish put-downs, and the chatter of short-term visitors and immigrants. It was to Chaucer’s London that Dick Whittington travelled to sell his precious silks and velvets.

  Instead of following his father into the wine trade, Chaucer chose a political and administrative career, and he is the first author to refer to an ambassador, exchange, attention and government. He may well have served under the Black Prince in France, and we know that he travelled in Flanders and Spain, as well as making several trips to Italy, notably to Genoa to negotiate with the doge over English rights of access to the port there. In 1378 he became ‘comptroller’ of the port of London, and that same year he was sent by Richard II to Lombardy on state business. He was thus well placed to augment his personal vocabulary, and this enabled him to be unusually inventive with language.

  For as long as language has existed, particular individuals or social groups have been in the vanguard of linguistic innovation: today’s specialist term or snippet of arcana is tomorrow’s buzzword or common parlance, and we, as speakers and writers, are the conduit between the language of today and that of tomorrow. Chaucer is one of those individuals whose use of language looks, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, radical.

  Lexically rich, Chaucer’s mature writing is couched in a natural, fluent style that can mask the real extent of his technical virtuosity. His fellow poet Thomas Hoccleve characterized him as the ‘first fyndere of our faire langage’ – the first, that is, to understand and reveal its power. Whether or not Chaucer performed such a role, his veneration as a kind of founding father was vital to those who argued for English’s value. His work levying customs on exports passing out of London allowed him to observe at first hand the growing role of English in business and politics: he chose to use it as the medium in which to parade his imagination. He was keenly aware of classical literature, and his often sceptical responses to his literary precursors informed his attempt to create a literature in English that could rival the works of Ovid or Virgil. There are Latin words and phrases in his writings, along with borrowed rhetorical figures and formulae – mea culpa, amor vincit omnia, in principio. He gorged on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and turned to them for flashes of Continental erudition – lifting the word permutacioun from the Inferno, for instance, and taking his concern with gentilesse from Dante’s gentilezza in the Convivio. Yet above all he was eager, like his peers John Gower and William Langland, to promote the vernacular. 8 In so doing, he hoped to secure a place for English literature on the international stage.

  Bringing in new words was a way of empowering English. Although Gower chose to write his first substantial poem in French, he was the last major English author to write in the language, and his masterpiece Confessio Amantis was composed in English and dedicated, pointedly, first to Richard II and later to Henry of Lancaster, who was soon to become Henry IV. In championing the vernacular, as Dante had done in Florence, these authors and their writings posed a threat to the existing cultural elite – the cadre of privileged churchmen who relied for their status on being able to reveal to the masses the contents of that numinously non-vernacular work, the Bible. By contrast, the nation’s political elite began in the early part of the fifteenth century to promote vernacular writing – a vital endorsement of the national language.

  Chaucer’s poetry was intended for oral performance – he was writing not for posterity, but for a known coterie of courtly acquaintances – yet after his death in 1400 his oral works were disseminated in manuscript. Fifty-five copies of his most enduring work, The Canterbury Tales, survive from the fifteenth century. Ostensibly a record of speeches made by a large group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas à Becket, The Canterbury Tales is an opulent and frequently hilarious vision of fourteenth-century England, which ranges across the social spectrum – and across the whole spectrum of fourteenth-century language. While often manifestly traditional, Chaucer’s English also displays the language’s evolving vocabulary, and indeed, with shrewd delicacy, he presents himself as a refiner of English’s rudeness.9 In his eyes, new words of foreign origin enhanced the dignity of written English. His writing is full of ‘local’ novelties – words he uses only once – yet there are numerous occasions when his exuberance throws up a word that has since caught on. Among th
e huge number of words that first crop up in Chaucer we might pick out accident, intellect, galaxy and famous – or bribe, moral, magic and the verbs resolve and refresh. The famous opening of the general prologue to the Tales is littered with terms drawn from French, italicized in the extract below.

  Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

  And bathed every veyne in swich licour

  Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

  Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

  Inspired hath in evry holt and heath

  The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

  Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,

  And smale foweles maken melodye,

  That slepen al the nyght with open eye –

  So priketh hem nature in hir corages –

  Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

  And palmeres for to seke straunge strondes. 10

  Of these words, the noun corage especially merits a closer look. We may assume that it has a sense much the same as the modern ‘courage’, but the word has three layers of meaning, suggesting the human ‘heart’ (iconic seat of our emotions), the military resilience of ‘valour’ and the sharp pangs of ‘lust’. In the Middle Ages it suggested ‘interior intellectual and emotional states’, but in postmedieval contexts the focus shifted to ‘outward conduct, especially in combat’.11 For Chaucer, then, its meanings were thickly tangled. In later usage it was more clearly associated with physical and mental fortitude, but its medieval connotations were resuscitated in the Renaissance. When Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream agrees that he and his fellow actors should decamp to the forest in order to ‘rehearse most obscenely and courageously’, the earlier complexity of corage is audible. Perhaps this can help us understand why the word courage is almost invariably used about men.