by Melvyn Bragg
The dregs are where our story of English moves on. These dregs were the English peasantry who had survived. Though the Black Death was a catastrophe, it set in train a series of social upheavals which would speed the English language along the road to full restoration as the recognised language of the natives. The dregs carried English through the openings made by the Black Death.
The Black Death killed a disproportionate number of the clergy, thus reducing the grip of Latin all over the land. Where people lived communally as the clergy did in monasteries and other religious orders, the incidence of infection and death could be devastatingly high. At a local level, a number of parish priests caught the plague from tending their parishioners; a number ran away. As a result the Latin-speaking clergy was much reduced, in some parts of the country by almost a half. Many of their replacements were laymen, sometimes barely literate, whose only language was English.
More importantly, the Black Death changed society at its roots — the very place where English was most tenacious, where it was still evolving, where it roosted.
In many parts of the country there was hardly anyone left to work the land or tend the livestock. The acute shortage of labour meant that for the first time those who did the basic work had a lever, had some power to break from their feudal past and demand better conditions and higher wages. The administration put out lengthy and severe notices forbidding labourers to try for wage increases, attempting to force them to keep to pre-plague wages and demands, determined to stifle these uneasy, unruly rumblings. They failed. Wages rose. The price of property fell. Many peasants, artisans, or what might be called workingclass people discovered plague-emptied farms and superior houses, which they occupied.
The English and English were breaking through. Wat Tyler led the Peasants’ Revolt, which in its mere five days of life threatened to do for England in 1381 most of what the French revolutionaries did for France in 1790. If it can be said to have failed by one act and one man, then that man was the boy king — thirteen years old — Richard II. He stopped it by having the guile and the guts to meet Wat Tyler and his conquering army (they had taken the hitherto impregnable White Tower of London) at Smithfield, addressing him in English. At Smithfield, using English under duress, he pulled Wat Tyler into a trap in which he was murdered and immediately and daringly rode across to the rebels and addressed them, also in English. He gave promises which placated them and turned them home, promises which he soon broke, homes in which they were hunted down. But English was at the heart of it. As far as we know, Richard II is the first recorded example of a monarch using only English since the Conquest. And he reached for it when he was within a few minutes of seeing his kingdom transformed utterly.
Just as importantly, though, the revolt was fired by the preacher John Ball, whose words were already notorious and whose sermon at Greenwich the day before the rebels marched on London began: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The heft of what he said, all in English, with his gift for rhyme, was far nearer the Old English epics than the graces of the imported French troubadours.
John Ball, priest of Saint Mary, greeteth well all manner of men and bids ’em in the name of the Trinity, Father and Son and Holy Ghost, stand manly together in truth, and helpeth truth, and truth shall help you. Now reigneith pride in price, and covetousness is held wise, and lechery without shame, and gluttony without blame. Envy reigneth with treason, and sloth is taken in great season. God make the reckoning, for now is time. Amen.
English was the language of protest and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the highest in the land. And the highest of the land used it in 1381, to chop down the revolt of thousands of English speakers.
It was about this time that English replaced French in the schoolrooms, and for that we have the authority of the Cornishman John of Trevisa (d. 1402). In 1387, at Oxford, he translated Ranulf Higden’s Latin Polychronicon, the chronicle of many ages from the Creation to 1352. Higden reviews the language situation before the first plague and comes to conclusions which must cause us to challenge assumptions based on the benign (for English) effects of Anglo-Norman mixed marriage and hence the bilingualism among Anglo-Norman children. In his view, English was in great peril from 1066 onwards. Higden saw a decline in English before the plague and accounted for it in this way, as John Trevisa’s translation tells us: “On ys for chyldern in scole agenes þe vsage and manere of al oþer nacions, buþ compelled for to leue here oune longage . . .”
In Modern English:
One [reason] is that children in school, contrary to the usage and custom of all other nations, are compelled to abandon their own language and carry on their lessons and their affairs in French, and have done so since the Normans first came to England. Also the children of gentlemen are taught to speak French from the time that they are rocked in their cradle and learn to speak and play with a child’s trinket, and rustic men will make themselves like gentlemen and seek with great industry to speak French to be more highly thought of.
Higden’s view is tougher than the more easy-going view of intermarriage, that it bred English-speaking children who would carry native language with them inside the fortresses of the foreigner. No doubt there is truth in both accounts, but I like Higden’s stern note, its reminder of what occupation meant and how it affected not only the progeny but the generality, not only the children in the cradle but the rustics learning French, seeking to join the ruling club.
However, Trevisa’s own footnote to this part of his translation, written about fifty years after the original, says: “is manere was moche y-vsed tofore þe furst moreyn . . .”
This practice was much used before the first plague and has since been somewhat changed. For John Cornwall, a teacher of grammar, changed the teaching in grammar school and the construing of French into English; and Richard Penkridge learned that method of teaching from him, and other men from Penkridge, so that now, AD 1385, the ninth year of the reign of the second King Richard after the Conquest, in all the grammar schools of England, children abandon French and compose and learn in English . . .
This was a sea change.
As education and literacy spread, so did the demand for books in English. The language was recommencing its long march.
In 1362, for the first time in almost three centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded, defended, debated and judged in English. In that same year, Parliament was opened in the hammer-beamed Great Hall in the Palace of Westminster. For the first time ever, the Chancellor addressed the assembly not in French but in English. Surprisingly, there is no record of the words spoken: what follows is a reasonable guess, based on forms of words used in other contemporary documents. “For the worship and honour of God, King Edward has summoned his Prelates, Dukes, Earls, Barons and other Lords of his realm to his Parliament, held the year of the King . . .”
But that was not the crown. It took thirty-seven more years for Norman-French royalty to bend the kingly knee to the English language. Stoked no doubt by an interminable war with France which had already lasted on and off for sixty-one years, those who sat on the throne of England felt forced to use their people’s tongue.
The country had not had a monarch take the crown in English since Harold Godwineson in 1066. It is debatable whether it had a first-language English-speaking king since then. But English was about to capture the crown.
In 1399, King Richard II was deposed by Henry, Duke of Lancaster. The document deposing him and his speech of abdication are in English. Parliament was summoned to the Great Hall at Westminster. The dukes and lords, spiritual and temporal, were assembled. The royal throne, draped in cloth of gold, stood empty. Then Henry stepped forward, crowned himself
, and claimed the crown. In a great symbolic moment he made his speech not in the Latin language of state business, not in the French language of the royal household, but in what the official history, tellingly, calls “His Mother Tongue.” English.
In the name of Fadir, Son, and Holy Gost, I, Henry of Lancaster chalenge this rewme of Yngland and the corone with all the members and the appurtenances, als I that am disendit be right lyne of the blode comying fro the gude lorde Kyng Henry Therde, and thorghe that ryght that God of his grace hath sent me, with the helpe of my kyn and of my frendes, to recover it — the whiche rewme was in poynt to be undone for defaut of governance and undoing of the gode lawes.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, claim this realm of England and the crown with all its property and privileges — because I am legitimately descended from the blood of the good lord King Henry the Third — and by that right that God’s grace has granted me, with the help of both my family and my friends, to recover it; the which realm was in danger of being ruined by lack of government and the undoing of good laws.
Henry, Duke of Lancaster, became King Henry IV and English was once again a royal language. It had been touch-and-go many times. And Latin and French had not lost their grip as the languages of official business and of the Church. But English had made its boldest public gain for three centuries and it sat once more on the throne. At last the tide seemed to be turning in its favour, although there would be much blood spilled before it gained status as the first language in all matters to do with English life.
Now, though, as if in celebration of this victory, it would welcome its first truly great literary champion, a writer who could harness its new capabilities to produce great stories, and poetry, a literature fit for the language that had come through.
6
Chaucer
Chaucer was the first writer of the newly emerged England. He told us what we were. In The Canterbury Tales in particular he describes characters we can still see around us today and he writes of them in the new English, Middle English, English that had somehow withstood the battering given by French and come back to begin its fight to regain control of the country in which it had been nourished.
David Crystal in his Encyclopaedia of the English Language writes: “In no other author . . . is there better support for the view that there is an underlying correspondence between the natural rhythm of English poetry and that of English everyday conversation.”
Here, at the end of the fourteenth century, English speakers talk directly to us, through skilful stories told by a group of pilgrims to ease the time as they ride from Southwark in London to Canterbury Cathedral. There are several reasons to pause and look around the world of English with Chaucer but most importantly for me, he brings on to the stage the range of individually realised characters, high and low, broad and refined, and of words apt for each, coarse and delicate, satirical and mockheroic, which signpost not only much of future English literature but much of English life. Most importantly of all, he decided to write not in Latin — which he knew well — not in the French from which he translated and which might have given him greater prestige, but in English, his own English, London-based English. Power had moved out of Wessex away from Winchester and it was now London, together with the twin universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which increasingly would set the often much resented and resisted Standard English.
Chaucer was not alone. There is Langland’s Piers Plowman, there is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there are homilies, sermons, rhymes and verses bursting out all over, a springtime of English not just released from bondage but energised and fortified by it. Chaucer was supreme at that time and by concentrating on him, telling his story along the way of our journey as his pilgrims did on their journey, we will, I hope, get some understanding of what English had achieved in these three hundred Normanised years. There is plenty to work on: he wrote forty-three thousand lines of poetry, two substantial prose works and curiosities such as A Treatise on the Astrolabe for the education of his son, Lewis.
The man’s life is well enough known, probably more certain in its details than the life of Shakespeare two centuries later. He was a Londoner, born in the mid 1340s, son of a London vintner, John Chaucer. In his adolescence, he became a page in the service of the Duke of Clarence and later served in the household of Edward III. It is important to emphasise that London was tiny by modern-day comparisons — a population of about forty thousand. Grandeur and the gutter were twinned in confined, crowded, sometimes dangerously infected places in which you did not risk drinking the water. A page at court would most likely be sent on messages and little missions all over the city and be able to savour all the variety of life on offer, life then being much lived on the streets. Dickens, the great fictional cartographer of London, is prefigured in Chaucer and both were steeped in the place.
Chaucer served in one of the campaigns in the Hundred Years War, was taken prisoner, and ransomed. There was material here well used and his rather grand marriage, to the daughter of Sir Payne Roet, whose sister later linked him by marriage to John of Gaunt, gave him high gossip at least, and access very likely to the centre of power. The idea of a writer making a living solely through writing was not entertained at that time. Chaucer had an income to find. He discovered ways to do this which in retrospect seem brilliantly planned to develop his art as a writer while satisfying his need for a purchase on the worlds of money, intellectual engagement, diplomacy and status. In the 1370s he began to travel abroad on diplomatic missions for the king. There was a trade agreement he negotiated at Genoa; on a mission to Milan he encountered the dazzling achievements of Italian poetry. Petrarch and Boccaccio were alive and Dante was cherished and much discussed. There is evidence of their influence in much of his work.
After about ten years in the saddle abroad, during which time he composed The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde and translated Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, he settled in London to become Controller of the Petty Customs. In 1386 he was elected as a Knight, or MP, for the shire of Kent. He began work on The Canterbury Tales and it is in this period that his fortunes fluctuate as the youth of Richard II helped provoke court intrigue: Chaucer gets into debt; he recovers to become Clerk of the King’s Works; he soon quits that for the unprepossessing post of Deputy Forester at Petherton in Somerset; he takes a lease on a house in the garden of Westminster Abbey in 1399 and dies the following year. It is a life which covered much of the important waterfront of the time and that knowingness, that lived experience, is one of the factors which gives The Canterbury Tales its historical strength. Of course the characters and the stories are inventions but nevertheless, we feel, grounded in close observation of and some participation in the world as it was then. Chaucer’s England is a believable place.
These are the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in a Modern English translation; they begin in spring in the rain:
When April with his sweet showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root
And bathed every vein in such moisture
Which has the power to bring forth the flower,
When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath
Has breathed spirit into tender new shoots
In every wood and meadow . . .
Then people love to go on pilgrimage.
So in his own language, a language written to be read aloud to a public more than read alone in private, Chaucer calmly, leisurely, gathers his listeners and readers together:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich lycour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
When Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes . . .
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
About twenty to twenty-five perce
nt of the vocabulary used by Chaucer is from the French. In that short extract there’s an average of at least one French word per line: “April,” “March,” “perced,” “veyne,” “lycour,” “vertu,” “engendred,” “flour,” “inspired.” Often they have meanings now lost: “lycour” = moisture; “vertu” = power. Later, “corage” = heart; “straunge” = foreign, distant. “Zephirus” is from Latin, “root” is from Old Norse. But there is no sense that English had been taken over. This language is English. All the words called by linguists “function words” — pronouns and prepositions — are from Old English; the nuts and bolts and the basic structure held.
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen [helped] whan that they were seeke.
The martyr was the murdered Archbishop, Thomas à Becket.
And that is the basic structure of the tales. Within that, as within the language, the variations through the stories themselves are numerous and exhilarating. They meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, five minutes’ walk from where the Globe would be built. In Chaucer’s as in Shakespeare’s time and until quite recently, it was a “mixed” area of London, a place of pickpockets, prostitutes, markets, pubs, traffic and foreign seamen crowding the twisting streets from the Thames, “real London” in Chaucer’s day and still now.
The characters ride in:
A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
