by Melvyn Bragg
Yet English was deluged with French words. It was the great flood and there seemed no ark in sight. How did English survive and re-emerge?
It took wars, it took patriotic resilience and it took one of the greatest natural disasters anyone had ever seen.
5
The Speech of Kings
Trade loosened the bonds between the Norman French and the natives. In the middle of the thirteenth century, the wool trade made parts of England rich. Great churches were built even in modest villages. Towns grew in size, sometimes French boroughs and English settlements together, as at Norwich and Nottingham. London’s population was to double in the course of the century, drawing in English speakers from the countryside. It seemed all but impossible for English to storm the castles: the cities might provide a better opportunity. There were French-speaking court officials, administrators, lawyers and great merchants, but surely English could get a foot on the language ladder further down.
Even here it seems it was difficult. The French also brought over craftsmen who gave us the French names for the tools of the trade: “measure” for example, “mallet,” “chisel,” “pulley,” “bucket,” “trowel.” Again, the deal seemed one way only. The name of Petty France in London is evidence that it originally housed a community of French immigrants which then became a business-trading centre (there were areas like this in many English towns). English and French speakers mingled but it was French which controlled the market. “Merchant” (marchant), “money” (monai), “price” (pris), “bargain” (bargaine), “contract” (contract), “partner” (parcener), “embezzle” (enbesilier) — all French.
It still appeared that wherever it turned, English met yet another phalanx of French. They even took its names away. The Old English names began to die out: out went Ethelbert, Aelfric, Athelstan, Dunstan, Wulfstan, Wulfric; in came Richard, Robert, Simon, Stephen, John, and most popular and sycophantic (or was it politic?) of all, William.
Despite the great numerical superiority of its followers, English was a mass without leaders or a strategy, its words sung in the fields and flickering into manuscripts but no match at all for the French. It was helpless, it seemed, before an inevitable pressing down, a percolation which would eventually eat away at it and so reduce its powers that more and more of its speakers would feel compelled to put it aside. It was not a language of advancement, a language of power, a language of hard commerce or even of educated conversation.
A defeat on the field of battle and in France itself in 1204 was the first truly encouraging sign that all might not be lost. John, King of Normandy, Aquitaine and England, lost his Norman lands in a war with the much smaller kingdom of France. The Norman dukedoms, ancestral lands of William the Conqueror, his cultural and linguistic homelands, were part of another empire now. The Norman barons of England had to choose where their allegiance lay: Philip II of France would tolerate no split loyalties. Choices were made. Simon de Montfort, for example, took over all his brother’s English holdings and gave him his own land in Normandy in return.
Most importantly of all, the French began to be thought of as foreigners. That can scarcely be overestimated. When, later in the thirteenth century, Henry III did the natural French-speaking Norman thing and considerably strengthened the French representation at his court, there was strong anti-French feeling and complaints that London was full of foreigners. One defeat had threatened English; one hundred twenty-eight years later, another defeat gave it hope. The Normans in England had to begin to consider themselves as anti-Norman.
This was the first step on a very long journey. England was now home because many had little choice, but the adoption of English did not follow. When the barons rebelled against King John and presented their demands in the most famous document in our history, Magna Carta, they had it drawn up in Latin. Latin was the language of God, the language of deep tradition, the common language of the western civilised world, a sacred language. Even when there was another rebellion, this time against Henry III in 1258, the barons again wrote to the king in Latin. But they also sent a letter around the shires to tell the people what they wanted, and that was written in English. Royalty however was not to be addressed in the basic language of the land over which it ruled, and indeed it was the fight to seduce and force the kings of England publicly to acknowledge English which was to be the first of many major and necessary victories before the language regained the position it had held under Alfred the Great and Harold Godwineson.
There was, however, a fifth column: English women. The evidence for intermarriage is early and strong and although the English women would marry into households dominated by French and may well have learned and been obliged to learn French, they could scarcely have left their English outside the back door. It penetrated those unassailable castles in ways no English band of insurgents could hope to do. And they would bring their own servants, their own wet nurses. It has been said many times that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and in some households children may have grown up bilingual, as easily able to switch languages or codes as many children can today from their dialects, their patois, their inherited home-talk, to the standard speech demanded by the school or the state.
We have some lyrics of the period. This one may have been sung as a lullaby to many an infant Norman lordling:
Merry it is while summer lasts
Amid the song of the birds
But now the wind’s blast approaches
And hard weather.
Alas, how long the night is
And I, most unjustly used,
Sorrow and mourn and fast.
It would have been sung in Old English:
Mirie it is, while sumer ilast
Wið fugheles song
Oc nu necheð windes blast
And weder strong.
Ei, ei! What þis nicht is long!
And Ich wið wel michel wrong
Soregh and murne and fast.
And yet, even after the middle of the thirteenth century, the record shows that French words continue to stream into English. The worrying thing, when you do the sums, is that far more words came in after 1250 than before. Even though England was setting itself up against France, French words, having found a breach, poured across the Channel unstoppably in their thousands. Here are a few of them: “abbey” (abbaïe), “attire” (atirer), “censer” (censier), “defend” (defendre), “leper” (lepre), “malady” (maladie), “music” (musik), “parson” (persone), “plead” (plaidier), “sacrifice” (sacrifice), “scarlet” (escarlate), “spy” (espier), “stable” (stable), “virtue” (vertue), “park” (parc), “reign” (regne), “beauty” (bealte), “clergy” (clergie), “cloak” (cloke), “country” (cuntrée), “fool” (fol).
Each one of those words could nourish two or three paragraphs on what was brought to England through the word. A word like “virtue,” for instance, part of the theme of chivalry now woven into the thinking, brought a secular sense of moral attainment into a land where the Church had provided all the words and thoughts for any elevated morality. The word then took off and metamorphosed into several other meanings: it allied itself with honour and with courage, for example, embellishing both; it became a boast, it became a weakness to be satirised; from rare and aristocratic it became common and earnest. It came to mean reason or merit or worth. “By virtue of the power vested in me” it began to dip below the horizon of well-used words. Soon it may be obsolete. Yet in its life, for eight hundred years, virtue alone, that one word, has illuminated and explained something of what we think we are, it has enriched our description of ourselves, uncovered yet more of the human condition which seems to crave infinite description. It is not just a word but a little history of our thought and actions. Virtue might or might not be its own reward. It was certainly ours.
Because French was at that time the international language of trade, it acted as a conduit, sometimes via Latin, for words from the markets of the East. Arabic words that it then g
ave to English include: “saffron” (safran), “mattress” (materas), “hazard” (hasard), “camphor” (camphre), “alchemy” (alquimie), “lute” (lut), “amber” (ambre), “syrup” (sirop). The word “checkmate” comes through the French “eschec mat” from the Arabic “Sh h m t,” meaning the king is dead. Again, as with virtue and as with hundreds of the words already mentioned, a word, at its simplest, is a window. In that case, English was perhaps as much threatened by light as by darkness, as much in danger of being blinded by these new revelations as buried under their weight.
Yet the best of English somehow managed to avoid both these fates. It retained its grammar, it held on to its basic words, it kept its nerve, but what it did most remarkably was to accept and absorb French as a layering, not as a replacement but as an enricher. It had begun to do that when Old English met Old Norse: hide/skin; craft/skill. Now it exercised all its powers before a far mightier opponent. The acceptance of the Norse had been limited in terms of vocabulary. Here English was Tom Thumb. But it worked in the same way.
So, a young English hare came to be named by the French word “leveret,” but “hare” was not displaced. Similarly with English “swan,” French “cygnet.” A small English “axe” is a French “hatchet.” “Axe” remained. There are hundreds of examples of this, of English as it were taking a punch but not giving ground.
More subtle distinctions were set in train. “Ask” — English — and “demand” — from French — were initially used for the same purpose, but even in the Middle Ages their finer meanings might have differed and now, though close, we use them for markedly different purposes. “I ask you for ten pounds”; “I demand ten pounds”: two wholly different stories. But both words remained. So do “bit’” and “morsel,” “wish” and “desire,” “room” and “chamber.” At the time the French might have expected to displace the English. It did not, and perhaps the chief reason for that is that people saw the possibilities of increasing clarity of thought, accuracy of expression, by refining meaning between two words supposed to be the same. On the surface some of these appear to be interchangeable and sometimes they are. But much more interesting are these fine differences, whose subtleties increase as time carries them first a hair’s breadth apart and then widens the gap, multiplies the distinctions: just as “ask” has evolved far away from “demand.”
Not only did they drift apart but something else happened which demonstrates how deeply not only history but class is buried in language. You can take an (English) “bit” of cheese, and most people do. If you want to use a more elegant word you take a (French) “morsel” of cheese. It is undoubtedly thought to be a better class of word and yet “bit,” I think, might prove to have more stamina. You can “start” a meeting or you can “commence” a meeting. Again, “commence” carries a touch more cultural clout, though “start” has the better sound and meaning to it for my ear. But it was the embrace which was the triumph, the coupling which was never quite one.
That’s the beauty of it. That was the sweet revenge which English took on French: it not only anglicised it, it used the invasion to increase its own strength; it looted the looters, plundered those who had plundered, out of weakness brought forth strength. For “answer” is not quite “respond”; now they have almost independent lives. “Liberty” isn’t always “freedom.” Shades of meaning, representing shades of thought, were massively absorbed into our language and our imagination at that time. It was new lamps and old; both.
The extensive range of what I would call “almost synonyms” became one of the glories of the English language, giving it astonishing precision and flexibility, allowing its speakers and writers over the centuries to discover what seemed to be exactly the right word. Rather than replace English, French was being brought into service to help enrich and equip it for the role it was on its way to reassuming.
Even that great redoubt of French, the royal family, unbelievably slow in appreciating their good fortune in ruling the country they did with the language it was relentlessly replenishing, began to take notice.
In Westminster Abbey on the tomb of Edward I there are the words “The Hammer of the Scots” — in Latin. More important for English was Edward’s relationship with his new great enemy, France. When the French King Philip IV threatened to invade England in 1295, Edward used the English language as a symbol of nationhood to galvanise support.
“If Philip is able to do all the evil he means to,” he said, “from which God protect us, he plans to wipe out our English language entirely from the earth.” Coming from a king whose first language was French, whose immediate ancestors had put England and English under the heel, he may have meant it, but it was richly ironic. But he saw it as the rallying cry for this new mongrel people. The invasion never came and Edward put aside his opportunistic loyalty to English: in all official matters Latin and French were still the controlling languages of the Church and state.
Yet Edward’s desperate and inspired flash of English had been well calculated. As the thirteenth century gave way to the fourteenth, English was becoming the one language out of the three that everyone in the country could be counted on to know. In 1325, the chronicler William of Nassington could write:
Latyn, as I trowe, can nane
But þo þat haueth it in scole tane
And somme can Frensche and no Latyn
at vsed han cowrt and dwellen þerein . . .
A prose translation would read: “I believe that no one can speak Latin except those who have taken it at school, and some who are accustomed to the court and live there know French and no Latin.” It goes on: “And some whose grasp of French is shaky know a bit of Latin. And some understand English well who know neither Latin nor French. But educated and uneducated, old and young, they all understand the English tongue.”
That last sentence signals a thaw. English, for so long frozen, underground, so many of its words withered by the icy blast from Normandy, had begun to come through, above ground once more, still far from its old commanding position but ready to move upward. Songs in the French troubadour style now had English words. In some places, the Old English religious homilies had continued to be copied and circulated and this began to affect other aspects of Christian teaching.
The Bestiary, in which birds and animals were portrayed and their behaviour made the basis of lessons in Christian morality, was a particular medieval form. It was believed that the animal and plant worlds were symbolic of religious truths and that “the creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God.” They were usually written in Latin, but a late-thirteenth-century example gave the text not in Latin but in English. In Modern English it reads: “The deer has two properties. He draws out the adder from the stone with his nose and swallows it. The venom causes the deer to burn. Then he rushes to the water and drinks . . . The whale is the largest of all fish. He looks like an island when he is afloat. When he is hungry he gapes and out comes a sweet scent.”
The description of the lion can be used to show more clearly how the Bestiary worked. By penetrating this homely but intellectually imaginative Latin form, English demonstrated its hunger for growth, its willingness to tackle subjects which in the post-Conquest world would have been thought above its station.
A few lines of Middle English:
e leun stant on hille & he man hunten here
Oðerðurg his nese smel smake ðat he negge,
Bi wilc weie so he wile to dele niðer wenden . . .
A literal translation of the lion’s nature and qualities reads: “The lion stands on a hill, and when he hears a man hunting or through his sense of smell scents that he is approaching, by whatever way he will go down to the valley.”
And the symbolic meaning in terms of Christ, the devil, good and evil, reads:
Very high on the hill that is the Kingdom of Heaven
Our Lord is the lion that lives there, above.
Oh! When it pleased Him to come down to earth,
&nbs
p; Might never the devil know though he hunts secretly,
How he came down nor how he lodged himself
In that gentle maiden called Mary
Who bore him for the benefit of mankind.
It would be a lengthy, bloody, martyr-strewn and bitter fight that English would have to claim its proper place in the Church. This infiltration was an omen. It came in quietly and stealthily through the beasts.
As did the greatest of all recorded plagues. In 1348 Rattus rattus, the Latin-named black rodent, was the devil in the bestiary. These black rats deserted a ship from the continent which had docked near Weymouth. They carried a deadly cargo, a term that modern science calls Pasteurella pestis, that the fourteenth century named the Great Pestilence and that we know as the Black Death.
The worst plague arrived in these islands, and much, including the language, would be changed radically.
The infected rats scaled out east and then north. They sought out human habitations, building nests in the floors, climbing the wattle and daub walls, shedding the infected fleas that fed on their blood and transmitted bubonic plague. It has been estimated that up to one-third of England’s population of four million died. Many others were debilitated for life. In some places entire communities were wiped out. In Ashwell in Hertfordshire, for instance, in the bell tower of the church, some despairing soul, perhaps the parish priest, scratched a short poignant chronicle on the wall in poor Latin. “The first pestilence was in 1350 minus one . . . 1350 was pitiless, wild, violent, only the dregs of the people live to tell the tale.”
