The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  The first thing to say about this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is how clear and authoritative it is. It gives us an excellent historical account in what had become a language capable of exact record, rare anywhere and at any time, all but unique in the world of the eleventh century.

  This passage does not refer to the background of the invasion — a background depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry: the illuminated window to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There we see Edward the Confessor, a lover of Normandy, who named William, Duke of Normandy, as his successor. There we see the richest and most powerful of the English earls, his wife’s brother, Harold Godwineson, Earl of East Anglia, pledging loyalty to William, in Normandy, on two caskets of holy relics. Was what happened next treachery? The tapestry shows Harold being crowned in Westminster Abbey on the very day that Edward was laid to rest there.

  But William thought he had God on his side. The Chronicle concurs by writing of “the sins of the nation” — the English defeat was a just punishment. Harold’s risky strategy, hurling all his best men into the front line in a make-or-break battle following a hurried march from the Battle of Stamford Bridge, deprived the land of English earls and chieftains, the very leaders and organisers who could have regrouped to fight another day against an opponent whose lines of communication were unreliable. But God had given William the fair wind to be denied both Philip II’s colossal Armada and Napoleon Bonaparte’s brooding mass of becalmed flotillas. Thanks to Harold’s comprehensive defeat, there was no one left to oppose William post-1066 save the northern earls who believed they could deal independently with the Conqueror. They tried. They failed. The north was wasted. As the chronicler goes on to say in that same passage: “Bishop Odo and Earl William stayed behind and built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!”

  The chronicler seems to have readjusted his perspective here: “evil has increased very much,” he writes, and earlier, “he ravaged all the country that he overran.” He was careful to give due to his new masters and put God on their side: he was scrupulous, too, in revealing something of the power of what became the Norman juggernaut: “England” was taken over. It had become, and would for a long time remain, the offshore appendage of a Normandy-based power who saw it as a treasure-house of land and loot. Much as the Frisians had done.

  English was also in danger. The Anglo-Saxons had all but eliminated the existing Celtic language from what was to become English. The Viking Danes had come within a whisker of doing the same to English. In the first case, Old English had shown its ruthless determination to take on no other tongue. In the second, it had been assisted by a most extraordinary warrior-scholar king. It had also begun to treat with that threatening language, the Danish, to draw it in, take what it needed. But now? Leaderless, oppressed, under the Norman heel?

  There is an immediate clue in the name itself. The word “Hastings” came from -ing (Old English), “the people or district of ” Hæsta, a warrior, whose name comes from “hæst,” an Old English word for violence. So into the unconscious went a place marking a defeat, but by some necessity of survival, its name was subversively inspirational: not entirely unlike that other great inspirational defeat, Dunkirk. It was English which held the naming day. And yet the actual site of the engagement was named not with an English word like “fight” but with a word from the language of the Norman victors, battle. This was the new reality.

  The Normans who conquered England were Norsemen by blood and there could be reasonable expectation that the languages would mesh. But by the time their ships landed at the old Saxon shore of Pevensey — the precise spot where Frisians had landed in 491 — the language they spoke was a variety of French. The Darwinian properties had worked their evolutionary ways on the human tongue and French had swallowed up their Old Norse. Its roots now were not in the Germanic languages which had come to England, but in Latin. It is fascinating that the Norsemen’s language was all but completely wiped out in France, whereas its close kin in England, in the north, put up a real fight and forced its way into Old English, even into the roots of its grammar.

  But the Normans came with an alien tongue and they imposed it. On Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey. The service was conducted in English and Latin. William spoke French throughout. It is said that he attempted to learn English but gave up. French ruled. And the French language of rule, of power, of authority, of superiority, buried the English language.

  William held his new realm by building a string of stone castles which at that time and for long afterwards must have seemed impregnable. He had no hesitation — in York for instance — in razing whole areas of a large town to plant his castle prominently and surrounded by open land to give it most advantage. When we see a castle such as the one at Rochester, even now, broken though it is, we see power manifest. Those walls guarded those in charge and protected them. Cathedrals too would be built to confirm and emphasise the stone power of the Norman conquerors. God is on our side, those great cathedrals — Durham, York — said. Look at the mighty works that we conquerors can make and despair of ever rising up against us. The size, structure and massiveness of those buildings in a single-storeyed or, more unusually, double-storeyed society of lowly architecture must have created an awesome effect. A new world had landed.

  As with stone, so with words. Over the next two centuries, French rained heavily on the English. Words of war: “army” (from armee), “archer” (from archer), “soldier” (from soudier), and “guard” (from garde) all come from the victors. French was the language which spelled out the new language of the social order. “Crown” (from corune), “throne” (from trone), “court” (from curt), “duke” (from duc), “baron” (baron), “nobility” (from nobilité), “peasant” (from paisant), “vassal” (vassal), servant (servant). The word to “govern” comes from French (governer), as do “authority” (from autorité), “obedience” (obedience) and “traitor” (from traitre).

  From that short sample a new world emerges. We know who is in charge: those who have the language. We see a system being put in place — to reinforce the invaders; the language tells us that. It renames the rules and the ruled, it manacles English to the command words of French. And it spread everywhere.

  In the law, for instance, “felony” comes from felonie, “arrest” from areter, “warrant” from warant, “justice” from justice, “judge” from juge, “jury” from juree. On it goes: to “accuse” from acuser, to “acquit” from aquiter, “sentence” from sentence, to “condemn” from condemner, “prison” from prisun, “gaol” from gaiole.

  It has been estimated that in the three centuries following the Conquest perhaps as many as ten thousand French words colonised English. They did not all come at once — though the words of authority and law and rule were imposed immediately — but 1066 opened up a stream for French vocabulary which raced through until the fourteenth century and has continued to course into English, on and off, ever since. “Battle,” “conquest,” “castle,” “arms,” “siege,” “lance” and “armour” came first and came to stay. Today they sound as English as “ground” or “blood” or “sword” or “son.” The new court motto: “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Evil be to him that thinks evil). The Normans seized the centre of power and it was their language which described the new order they brought to bear.

  Over the next three hundred years French words, loan words which have since become “our own,” were imposed in control positions in art, architecture and building, Church and religion, entertainment, fashion, food and drink, government and administration, home life, law and legal affairs, scholarship and learning, literature, medicine, military matters, riding and hunting and social ranking.

  How was English to survive this invasion, and one led by those to whom obedience was unyieldingly demanded? The only way for even moderately ambitious English men and women to breathe any air of power or culture
was to learn French and leave English in the kitchen.

  But even in the kitchen it was not safe. Nearly five hundred words dealing with food, eating and cooking entered English from French. In any “city” (from cité), there would be “porters” (portiers) trading in, say, fish. In “salmon” (from saumoun), in “mackerel” (from mackerel), “oysters” (from oistres), “sole” (sole); or in meat, “pork” (from porc), “sausages” (from saussiches), “bacon” (from bacon); or in fruit (from fruit), “oranges” (orenges) and “lemons” (limons), even “grapes” (grappes). Or for a “tart” (tarte), a “biscuit” (bescoit), some “sugar” (çucre) or “cream” (cresme).

  If you go into a restaurant and ask for a menu (French words that came in during the nineteenth century — the invasion of terms describing and contextualising food has never stopped) you will certainly also encounter words that came in during the Middle Ages. ( We will of course sit at a table, on a chair, eating from a plate with a fork — all from French or widened into a modern meaning by French influence.) “Fry” (from frire), “vinegar” (from vyn egre), “herb” (from herbe), “olive” (olive), “mustard” (from moustarde) and, key to it all, “appetite” (from apetit).

  This density of occupation affected all of the fifteen categories I listed above, and always appeared to take over the key positions. French was as ruthless and strategically shrewd as the Norman French army: the former found the means to dominate the language just as the latter found the way to dominate the land.

  Domesday was a good word for it. Twenty years after the Battle of Hastings, William sent out his officers to take stock of his kingdom. The monks of Peterborough were still recording the events of history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and they noted, disapprovingly, that not one piece of land escaped the survey, “not even an ox or a cow or a pig.” William claimed all.

  There are two volumes of the Domesday Book (one called Little Domesday, the return from East Anglia) and they show how complete the Norman takeover of English land was and how widespread their influence and their language. Half the country was in the hands of just one hundred ninety men. Half of that was held by just eleven men. Here are a few of them:

  Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain (both half-brothers of William)

  William de Warenne

  Roger of Mowbray

  Richard fitzGilbert

  Geoffrey de Mandeville

  William de Briouze

  Not one of these great landowners spoke English.

  The Domesday Book was written in Latin. This was to emphasise its legal authority in a way English was now thought incapable of doing.

  If you believe that words carry history and meaning often deeper than their daily purpose, then we see with the coming of the Normans an almighty shift of power. The words that regulated society and enforced the hierarchy, the words that made the laws, the words in which society engaged and enjoyed itself, were, at the top, and pressing down relentlessly, Norman French. Latin stood firm for sacred and high secular purposes. English was a poor third in its own country.

  It is easy with hindsight to say that “obviously” English has survived. But hindsight is the bane of history. It is corrupting and distorting and pays no respect to the way life is really lived — forwards, generally blindly, full of accidents, fortunes and misfortunes, patternless and often adrift. Easy with hindsight to say we would beat Napoleon at Waterloo: only by a whisker, according to the honest general who did it. Easy to say we would win the Second World War: ask those who watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain in Kent in 1940. Easy to say the Berlin Wall was bound to fall. Which influential commentator or body of opinion said so in the 1980s? Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. As often as not, when the dust was flying, no one at the time knew what the outcome might be.

  In that spirit, I would suggest that for many English people, certainly the educated, it must have seemed the end of their authority in the land and the end of their language as any sort of authority. Just as some Celts had become Romanised, so some English became Normanised. It was the only way up, the only way out. The effects on English were severe for at least a hundred fifty years and for another hundred fifty the language had to continue to struggle, not so much for survival this time, as with the Danes, but somehow to swallow, digest and absorb this monstrous regiment of foreign words. They were pile-driven into the vocabulary and needed to be denied, defeated or somehow to become “our” “English” words, otherwise French would certainly depress, effectively eliminate English and overrule any claim it had to primacy.

  When, three hundred years later, English did finally emerge, it had changed dramatically. But first it had to take on its conqueror and somehow reconquer it. The language had to do what Harold Godwineson’s army had failed to do in 1066.

  Harold, King Harold, would be the last English-speaking king, the last king to take his oath in English, for three hundred years.

  4

  Holding On

  Under William the state of England became an estate of Normandy. When the new king ordered the construction of the White Tower by the Thames in London in 1077, he declared his hand. It was to be part palace, part treasury, part prison and part fortress. Even today it stands splendid and formidable, the sleek and fierce ravens which appear to guard it seeming to contain still the savage powers of the last invader of England who brought with him such a cargo of Norman French that not only the territory but the tongue of the land was threatened.

  William’s successors continued his simple policy of brutal appropriation. Across the land William’s men took over every position of power in the state and in the Church. Within sixty years of the Battle of Hastings, the monk and historian William of Malmesbury wrote: “No Englishman today is an Earl or Bishop or Abbot. The newcomers gnaw at the wealth and guts of England, nor is there any hope of ending the misery.” Those who, armed with much later evidence, speak of the inevitability of the survival of English might do well to imagine a conversation in the early twelfth century with that level-headed historian. His view, a view from the battlefront, would have been far less confident. He wrote in Latin. Written English, which had established itself so magnificently before the Conquest, was being rapidly sidelined.

  One of its proudest functions had been as a language of record in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which had recorded the great events of the past six hundred years. In Peterborough Abbey, in the mid twelfth century, that prime function of English, that unique tradition, breathed its last. These Chronicles had been written in the language of the people; there was nothing like them anywhere in mainland Europe. England was already a place with a long history written in its own language.

  The Chronicles were kept at several monastic institutions. After the Conquest, one by one they were abandoned. The Peterborough Chronicle was the last survivor. In 1154 a monk at Peterborough Abbey recorded that the abbey had a new abbot with the French name of William de Waterville.

  “He has made a good beginning,” the monk writes. “Christ grant that he may end as well.” With this last entry in English, more than six centuries of written history came to an end. Old English ceased to be the recognised and respected language of record in its own land. History was no longer with the Anglo-Saxons: and their language was of no consequence to those who saw the past in their own image. One way to destroy a personality is to cut out memory: one way to destroy a state is to cut out its history. Especially when that history comes out of the native language. Status is gone; continuity is disconnected; all that went into the making of the people the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles had recorded so carefully was of no account. The written language which bound it together guttered out.

  Yet just as Celtic in the fifth and sixth centuries was certainly the language spoken by the overwhelming majority of those who lived in “England” (then a loose aggregation of often warring kingdoms), so now English
after 1066 was still the language of the people. It has been estimated that in the beginning the Norman French accounted for no more than three or five percent of the population. The Romans had proved that an even smaller percentage could subdue great tracts of land, and the force of arms in many empires has been minute in number, disproportionate it would seem: the British in India for example, the French in Central Africa, Islam around the Mediterranean and the East. A conquering military elite can build up an astonishing momentum and the Norman French are among those who proved that. It helped that the English were virtually leaderless, their finest warriors slaughtered or captured or fled, their final northern power base no match alone for the invaders. And the invaders gave no quarter: misery, waste, pillaging, ravaging, these are the words that describe their Genghis Khan–like progress through a fatally weakened land.

  The language of the occupied no longer counted. But, as if language itself were a resistance movement, it continued not only to be spoken but to evolve, despite the heavy hand of Norman French which pressed it down, pushed it under the controlling conversations of society, its laws, its court talk, its churchmen. It may seem curious to bring grammar to bear on evidence here but grammar — rarely a word that strikes a welcoming note — is useful evidence. For if the grammar is changing, setting itself and meeting new challenges, if the internal engine of the language is still geared for change and adaptability in its own terms regardless of the new dominating tongue, that is good proof that a language is alive even if it is under siege.