The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  It is not necessarily simpler than an inflected language, but it did give English a shove towards modernity. It is also easier for secondlanguage users to make themselves understood, easier to get the words wrong and still make sense when the word order has so much meaning hard-wired into it. The grammar change made it capable of greater flexibility.

  This had in some degree already begun to happen before the Vikings arrived. It was a gradual, even a hesitant, process not fully settled for centuries. But it was accelerated along the line of the Danelaw and it became another strength.

  Perhaps my interest in English began when I was speaking at least two versions of it in my childhood. And within these two were, I suspect, something like the jumbled, shifting sound and sense of much earlier centuries of English.

  I spoke a heavily accented dialect in Cumbria until I was about sixteen. There was also a considerable purely local vocabulary. Then the influence of school and BBC English began to erode that accent. The local dialect words were discarded once I began to travel out of the county, simply because no one understood them. But for years I could revert to that accent and remembered those words. Friends back home still employ some of them. They, like me, could switch into the more mainstream English when necessary. The vocabularies intermeshed, sometimes a new word rubbed out an old, it was a jumble, not at all difficult to manage, subject to teasing, snubbing, and as the old yielded more to the new, some regret.

  I thought that my experience on a local and much smaller scale might bear some resemblance to the spoken English in the ninth century. To test that, I went through a Cumbrian dialect glossary to look at some of the words I used most commonly.

  First, though, the accent. In the 1940s and 1950s, Wigtonians, like so many others everywhere else in small towns and villages, were still largely immobilised in one small area save when wars took off the men or emigration lured away desperate or daring families. It was still heavily influenced by agriculture and agricultural terms which had been just as common more than a hundred, even two or three hundred years before. Its accent was broad. To refined speakers it could appear coarse. Class climbers could even pretend it was unintelligible and subhuman. Yet it carried the deep history of our language and perhaps it had carried it intact for centuries in sound as well as in vocabulary.

  The word “I” would always be pronounced “Aah.” The definite article “the” would often be clipped to “t” — “the bike” to “t bike,” “the horse” to “t horse.” “R” would be given justice, as in “rrreet,” for right, and even the last “r” on “remember” would be hit.

  People were acutely aware of differences so nuanced that to an outsider the shadings would be as impenetrable as those between Darwin’s first gradations of finches. Wigton’s dialect would be different from that of Aspatria eight miles away and that of Carlisle eleven miles away and hugely different from that of Newcastle sixty miles away. It could still be called more a tribal collection of mutually intelligible dialects rather than a canopy of English under which were several divisions. In short it flourished from the ground up, much, I think, as it did in the ninth century and in many cases for another thousand years.

  We thee’d and thou’d each other as if we had just got off the Mayflower. The King James Bible gave us not only cadences and rhythms but metaphors and references. There were a lot of Romany words around because of the gypsy encampments long established in the Wigton area, and horse dealing brought in new words. The Romany word for horse was “grey,” and a “good grey” was a good horse. Or it could have been a “baary grey,” “baary” also meaning good. “Togs” for “clothes,” “cady” for “hat,” “chaver” for “boy,” “mort” for “girl,” “paggered” for “winded,” were all words from the gypsies whose women used to make swill baskets from reeds and sell them along with clothes pegs door to door for “lure,” money, to us “gadjis,” men. “Cower” was a thing, any thing, and “mang nix” was say nothing. There were also hundreds of local pronunciations of non-dialect words — a book was a “byeuk,” water was “watter” (as in Wordsworth) and up was “oop,” down was “doon,” words like play and say would sound like “plaay” and “saay,” us would be “uz,” face would be “feace,” finger would be “fing-er.” “Siste” came from seest thou — nowadays we would say “do you see.” No doubt we also mixed in words from Latin, French, Italian and Spanish and Indian, but the burr of it and the look of it when put on a page is nearer to Old English than Modern English. It was a Tower of Babel underpinned by English.

  “Deke’s you gadji ower yonder wid’t dukal an’t baary mort gaan t’beck.” (Look at that man over there with the dog and the sexy girl going down to the river.) All us under-twelves in the 1940s spoke like that. We loved to sound just “uz.”

  When we said “blud” for “blood” and “grun” for “ground,” we were way nearer Old than BBC English. No one told us that in the 1940s and 1950s. Had they done so, we might have been proud that our way of speaking was in direct descent from the great warrior founding tribes of our language one and a half millennia ago. It might have done us good. Instead, whenever we strayed from our Cumbrian patch, especially when we left the boundaries of the ancient Northumbrian kingdom and heaved up in what we felt were more polished locations, we felt like rude mechanicals. We were encouraged to wipe that dialect off our lips.

  The passage of history had reduced the once fierce language of power and rule into local speech, if not of the oppressed then certainly of those outside the pale of a tongue which calculated its civilisation partly by its distance from what had become a dialect. The transformed tongue was still built on the rock of Old English, the common words, the keys to the language, the grammar, the forceful expression of feelings. That, it seems, will survive any attempt to change. But the accent and context which had bred and nurtured it was lost to the new powers and it was pushed to the margins, as Celtic had been.

  But in my youth it flourished still. In the 1940s, for instance, a young soldier called Harold Manning went to Iceland when the Allies occupied that country. He came from South Cumbria and his vocabulary was freckled with Norse words from the dialect. In Iceland, perhaps the most formaldehyde-protected of the Old Norse tongue, he used words from his home dialect and made himself understood. Within a week or two he was conversant with the Icelanders. Old Norse was that deeply bitten into the Old North.

  And it is that Nordic element, always building on Old English but in the north clawing deeply into the language, which lies at the core of the fundamental separation — so often noted — between the north and south of England. It is a divide which even today, with the levelling out of the language, distinguishes the north from the rest of Britain and will perhaps provide a platform for a return to a form of regional government for Northumbria as England finally loosens its hold on its first colonies. But that is another story. In the ninth century such a prospect would have been a luxury. English had a surprisingly slender chance and but for a visionary strategy it could well have slid away.

  So I would say “Aah’s gaan yem.” “Gaan,” or “gan” or “gangan,” meaning to go, was an Anglo-Saxon word also known to the Vikings. “Yem” means home in Scandinavian. In Old Norse it is “heim.” I would “laik in t beck.” “Leika” is an Old Norse word for “play”; “bekkr” a word for “stream.” I would “axe for breed.” “Axe” is from the Anglo-Saxon “acsian,” “breed” is northern but Anglo-Saxon in origin, meaning bread. I would say “nowt” (nothing) and “owt” (anything) from the Anglian words “nawiht” and “awiht.” I would climb a “yek” (oak) tree to get a “yebby” (stick). “Claggy” was sticky, and like “clarty” (muddy), it most likely comes from Scandinavian. I wore “claes” (clothes), Anglo-Saxon, and as a “lad” (Anglo-Saxon) I would “loup” (Old Norse) “ower a yat or yet” (a gate — northern pronunciation) or “gawp” (stare) at a “brock” (Celtic, badger). And “yen” will always be one.

  Hybrid county dialects like these, which
used to be spoken by the majority in a Britain of proud geographical minorities, are now disappearing as we move to cities and as the way of life which informed the way of speech falls away. It is impressive to see the efforts being made by dialect societies and local publishers to keep the tongue alive, to keep in touch, through the history in speech, with that period when we were stitching together languages old and new. But until very recently we still sounded not unlike those who had brought them from the western European shorelands more than a millennium ago.

  English not only survived the Danish invasion, eventually it benefited. When Alfred looked around at the state of the written culture, he found it to be in ruins. He used English to help weld together a demoralised and fragile people. It is also true that his stern sense of Christian duty — another of the factors which so endeared him to discerning Victorians — drove him to reinstitute the scholarship and learning which a century of Danish raids, often on the soft targets of monasteries, had so badly depleted. The high days of Bede and the tradition he exemplified had gone.

  In the whole of Wessex, Alfred could barely find a handful of priests who could read and understand Latin. If they could not understand Latin they could not pass on the teachings of the religious books that told people how to lead virtuous lives. They could not save souls. Alfred found a chronic spiritual sickness in his kingdom and, as in war, he led from the front. At the age of forty, he learned Latin to help with the translations. For he had come up with a radical solution that hinged not on Latin but on English through translations. And in doing this, he took English to new heights of achievement.

  In the preface to his own translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Alfred wrote: “I remember how, before it was all ravaged and burned, I’d seen how the churches throughout all England stood filled with treasures and books. And there was also a multitude of God’s servants who had very little benefit from those books because they could not understand anything of them since they were not written in their own language.”

  Their own language was, of course, English. Alfred decided to come to the study of Latin through English. The best scholars could then go on to learn Latin and join holy orders. The rest would still have access to spiritual guidance, but it would be written in English. Centred on his capital town of Winchester, he drew up an extraordinarily imaginative plan — unmatched anywhere else in Europe — to empower the written vernacular which would not only bring the word of God to many denied it but also promote literacy, encourage scholarship and help unite the realm.

  “We should,” he wrote, “translate certain books which are most necessary for men to know into the language that we can all understand and also arrange it as, with God’s help, we very easily can if we have peace, so that all the youth of free men now among the English people, who have the means to be able to devote themselves, may be set to study, for as long as they are of no other use, until the time that they are able to read English writing well.”

  And English, the word “Englisc,” was here used as confidently as the word “Latin.” Alfred’s power and intelligence put it on the map of languages.

  He had five books of religious instruction, philosophy and history translated from Latin into English. This was a laborious and costly undertaking but consistent in its thoroughness and vision with the man who drew a line across England to keep the peace, founded a navy and built up Winchester into a royal capital city. Copies of these books were then sent out to the twelve bishops in his kingdom. Further to emphasise the importance he attached to these books, Alfred also sent the bishops a costly pointer used to underline the text.

  The head of one of those pointers was discovered in 1693 in Somerset. It is crafted in crystal, enamel and gold and is now on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is inscribed “Ælfred had me made” — in English. Alfred the Great had made the English language the jewel in his crown. His Wessex dialect would become the first Standard English.

  In Winchester he established what was effectively a publishing house. His sense of being English ran through everything he published. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had existed for centuries in different versions. Alfred brought these together in an act of compilation which seems as much an act of patriotism as of scholarship.

  A hundred years after Alfred, the Danes would again be on the rampage. At the Battle of Maldon in 991, the Danes defeated the English once more; the Danegeld was levied and in 1013 King Æthelred was exiled to Normandy. The Danish King Sweyn succeeded him. Authority in the land was once again decided on battlefields. But thanks to Alfred, authority in the language had been settled. The poem describing the Battle of Maldon is in Old English, full of the fury of alliteration, worked with words wisely woven. And still used today. Words like “heard” (hard), “swurd” (sword), “wealdan” (wield), “feoll” (fell), “god” (good) and, best of all, I think, “word” (word). Usually it is the victors who write the history. Here the defeated English did that service, proving that although the Danes had the land again, they could not possess the language.

  For even in the worst period of the renewed Danish invasions, the monk Ælfric was working in Winchester and then in Cerne Abbas, teaching Latin in the language of English to the same peoples, “the youth of free men,” whom Alfred had originally targeted. Ælfric was prolific in English; his books on the lives of saints, for example, were dramatic and popular. His colloquies, in Latin, were a series of dialogues between a master and his pupils, and Ælfric did it through drama. He would assign his pupils a role — a ploughman, a fisherman, a baker, a shepherd, a monk — and Ælfric would ask them questions about what they did. This gave the pupils a chance to answer in their own words, be spontaneous, individual, inventive. And when, some years later, Old English was written above the Latin, these teaching aids brought that free discipline to English itself.

  It is just as fascinating to look at the work of Archbishop Wulfstan, who wrote a sermon to the English when the Danes persecuted them most severely, in 1014. Called “Sermo Lupi,” it begins:

  Beloved men, recognise what the truth is: this world is in haste and it is drawing near the end — therefore the longer it is the worse it will get in the world. And it needs must thus become very much worse as a result of the people’s sins prior to the Advent of Antichrist, and then indeed it will be terrible and cruel throughout the world. Understand properly also that for many years now the Devil has led this nation too far astray and that there has been little loyalty among men although they spoke fair, and too many wrongs have prevailed in the land.

  A few of the same words in the Old English in which it was originally written will indicate similarities and differences. It begins: “Leofen men, gecnawað þaet soð is: ðeos worold is on ofste and hit nealæcð þam ende.”

  At that time it was widely believed that the world was about to end — a thousand years after either Christ’s birth or death. Apocalyptic signs would announce that. It seems to me at least possible that Wulfstan was aligning the Danes with the Apocalypse, even the Antichrist, while not missing out on this opportunity to lecture his countrymen on their sins and terrible shortcomings. In that sense he is on both sides, serving two territorial masters, excusing the invaders by giving them Apocalyptic trappings and urging his own to repent. On a more practical level, Archbishop Wulfstan served the English king Æthelred and was equally active in designing and preparing legislation for the Danish king’s court. The nationality of the rulers changed. The language and those who commanded the language remained, entrenched now in a power through words given them by Alfred.

  The Danes would be overthrown and once more an Englishman would be sworn in as sovereign. As he took his oath, in English, in the middle of the eleventh century, he inherited Alfred’s legacy, whose range of written vernacular history, philosophy, law and poetry had no peers anywhere in mainland Europe. Not only England but English seemed secure when Harold became king. But he would face other invaders and with them the greatest threat the Engli
sh language has ever encountered.

  3

  Conquest

  A victory in battle by Alfred saved the English language. Less than two hundred years later the defeat in battle of Harold threatened to destroy it. It was an event which had a greater effect on the English language than any other in the course of its history. Eighty-five percent of Old English vocabulary would eventually be lost as a result of that defeat and though some historians now regard the survival of English as inevitable, it seemed very unlikely at the time. Chroniclers three centuries on from the Conquest still feared for the language. England, and English, were overwhelmed, suppressed and beaten out of the controlling conversations of the time. The savagery and completeness of the defeat at Hastings, we are told, amazed all Europe.

  The year 1066 is such a smiling date in our history that we find it rather difficult today to load it with doom; 1066 and All That, the jolly title of the most entertaining version of our history, only emphasises its status as a harmless old granddad of a date. “We have never been conquered,” Elizabeth I is reported, perhaps apocryphally, to have said. “Save by the Normans,” replied a bold courtier. “But they could not have done it unless they had been us,” said the Virgin Queen, and in its way it is true: English eventually absorbed the conqueror.

  This is a translation of one of the versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1066. The chronicle had earlier been rescued and rearranged by Alfred but not with this record in mind:

  Then Count William came from Normandy to Pevensey on Michaelmas eve, and as soon as they were able to move on they built a castle at Hastings. King Harold was informed of this and he assembled a large army and came against him at the hoary apple tree. And William came against him by surprise before his army was drawn up in battle array. But the king nevertheless fought hard against him, with the men who were willing to support him, and there were heavy casualties on both sides. There King Harold was killed and Earl Leofwine his brother, and Earl Gyrth his brother, and many good men, and the French remained masters of the field, even as God granted it to them because of the sins of the people.