The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  That fro the tyme that he first bigan

  To riden out, he loved chivalrie,

  Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.

  Here Chaucer has inherited and appropriated the language and the ideas brought over by Eleanor of Aquitaine and in doing so he has created a figure who would feature in English history and in English literature deep into the twentieth century. He may be lurking yet: the man of quality and privilege who was also a man of integrity, modest and courteous especially to women, a man prepared to fight for a cause that was good but not brutalised by war, a gentle man. The element of irony is there: this roll-call of battle honours can also be described as a catalogue of massacres. Yet, idealised, satirised, caricatured, lovingly rediscovered century after century, Chaucer’s Knight is the first of many characters who defined what we thought or wanted to believe one aspect of being English was.

  This brief paragraph could be repeated for almost all the pilgrims. Through his English, Chaucer gave England its first National Portrait Gallery.

  Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,

  That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy;

  Hire gretteste ooth was but by Seinte Loy;

  And she was cleped [called] madame Eglentyne.

  A Monk ther was, a fair for the maistrie [fit to wield authority],

  An outridere, that lovede venerie [hunting]

  A Marchant was ther with a forked berd,

  In mottelee, and hye on horse he sat;

  The Millere was a stout carl [fellow] for the nones;

  Ful byg he was of brawn . . .

  Perhaps part of the appeal is what we might call the canny cross-class cluster. Not only from different parts of England but from different strata of society they come, joined in a common purpose, and whipped into line by the landlord, Harry Bailey. They take their turn to tell their stories. This gallery rises above feudalism, it presents a society of people happy to deal on equal terms before God and in story-telling. It has the deep attraction of a Golden Age and gives off the warm feeling that these were people who had come through a long tunnel and wanted to go together towards a new light, riding on the pleasure of their language and its new subtle abilities to etch them into history.

  What Chaucer did most brilliantly was to choose and tailor his language to suit every story and its teller. The creation of mood and tone and the realisation of characters through the language they use is something we expect of writers today, so it is difficult to realise how extraordinary it was when Chaucer did it. He proved that the re-formed English was fit for great literature.

  The range and variety of the language can clearly be seen by looking at just two of the stories. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the language of high Romance — used with open sincerity and admiration in the Knight’s Tale — is used satirically to tell the mock-Romantic comic story of a vain cockerel and his favourite chicken:

  This courtly cock had at his command

  Seven hens to do his pleasure

  They were his sisters and his paramours

  And marvellously like him in colouring

  Of them the one with the most beautifully coloured throat

  Was named the fair damsel Pertelote.

  This gentil cok hadde in his governaunce

  Sevene hennes for to doon al his plesaunce,

  Whiche were his sustres and his paramours,

  And wonder lyk to hym, as of colours;

  Of whiche the faireste hewed on hir throte

  Was cleped faire damoysele Pertelote.

  French words dominate here — “governaunce,” “plesaunce,” “paramours.” “Governaunce” and “plesaunce” are quite new, first recorded around the middle of the fourteenth century. Chaucer liked French borrowings and enjoyed introducing his own synonyms. English had the noun “hard”: Chaucer introduced the French (from Latin) “difficulte.” He gave us “disadventure” for “unhap,” “dishoneste” for “shendship,” “edifice” for “building,” “ignoraunt” for “uncunning.” Chaucer’s reputation in France was high in his own lifetime and looting the old conqueror’s language was fair game. He was unself-conscious about this new English: there was no rigid fundamentalism about it, eclecticism and elasticity were all.

  The greatest contrast to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the Miller’s Tale, where Absolon, the parish clerk, makes a midnight assignation with a neighbour’s wife which, as it were, backfires:

  Then Absolon wiped his mouth very dry

  The night was dark as pitch or coal

  And out of the window she stuck her hole

  And Absolon fared neither better nor worse

  But with his mouth he kissed her naked arse.

  This Absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie,

  Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,

  And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,

  And Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers,

  But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers.

  The style is direct, colloquial, with few French words. For earthy words he goes to Old English — or to the streets for “ers.”

  Sir Geoffrey Chaucer, courtier and scholar, had no problem with what we might call rude or saucy words. When Harry Bailey tells the Chaucer character to shut up (Chaucer has sent himself up with a tale of Sir Thopas in dreadful doggerel), he says:

  “By God,” quod he, “for pleynly, at a word,

  Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!”

  There are plenty of other examples, the bluntest of which is probably that uttered by the sexually demanding Wife of Bath:

  What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone?

  Is it for ye wolde have my queynte alone?

  What really offended people then was swearing by God or by parts of God. When Harry Bailey asks them to tell a tale “For Goddes bones,” the Parson protests at this sinful swearing.

  “Swerian” is an Anglo-Saxon word and probably began as the description of someone taking a solemn oath. Surprisingly few of our popular swear words are Anglo-Saxon in origin. The terrible oaths in Chaucer were profanities. In the Pardoner’s Tale, Chaucer writes:

  And many a grisly ooth thanne han they sworn,

  And Cristes blessed body they torente [torn apart]

  There’s “Goddes precious herte” and “Goddes armes” and “Jhesu shorte thy lyf.” To avoid the wrath of the Church, shorthand became a fashion. God’s blood became “ ’Sblood!” Christ’s wounds became “ ’Swounds!” then “ ’Zounds!” This could deflect censure. It is a reminder of how very powerful the Church was, how pervasive its authority. These minced oaths came into full play much later, in Shakespeare’s time.

  As you would expect of a writer whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, seems to have been to round up as many Englishes as he could and drive them along the same road to Canterbury, Chaucer was well aware of the dialects. It was still the case that words in southern English would have to be translated in some measure certainly for northern and possibly for Midland English. John Trevisa complained that Yorkshire English was so “scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng, and vnschape” (shrill, cutting, grating and ill-formed) that southerners like him could not understand it.

  Chaucer in the Reeve’s Tale gives us our first “funny northerner,” a character who has been with us ever since. He says “ham” for “home,” “knaw” for “know,” “gang” for “gone,” “nan” for “none,” “na” for “no,” “banes” for “bones.” He would be comfortably at home in 2003 in the north-east and Newcastle, in Cumbria around Wigton and in Yorkshire around Leeds. Why it was thought to be funny in itself is the beginning of an independent study to do with the south’s suspicion of the north, its fear of it to which it responded savagely in earlier times and later tried to tame through nervously superior laughter, and much later a felt superiority in wealth, privilege, culture and accent. There was class, of course, although as some of the greatest old English and old Norse families hailed from the north that was not always an easy one.
But as language became one of the markers of class, all non-London dialects began to feel they were condescended to.

  Chaucer planted English deeply in the country which bore its name, with a brilliance and a confidence that meant that there was no looking back: Confidence in England and English was growing. The increasing use of the surname may perhaps be an oblique confirmation of this. They were needed, to differentiate between people with the same Christian names, as the pool of Christian names in common use was very small at this period. “Geoffrey” is Germanic but came to England through the Normans. “Chaucer” is French, from the Old French “Chausier,” shoemaker, perhaps from the place in which his grandfather had lived in Cordwainer (Leatherworker) Street. We saw that in the north the suffix -son became prevalent: Johnson, Rawlinson, Arnison, Pearson, Matheson, Dickson, Wilson. More generally, in this Chaucerian period, other surnames came in, often based on where people lived — Hill, Dale, Bush, Fell, Brook, Field, or words ending in -land and -ton. Maybe this was a belated catching up with the Norman-French nobility, all of whom were “de” somewhere or other, de Montfort, for instance. Then there were the occupational surnames: Butcher, Baker, Carver, Carter, Carpenter, Gardiner, Glover, Hunter, Miller, Cooper, Mason, Salter, Thatcher, Weaver. Place, occupation, inheritance, all these had to be stamped through man and woman, fastening them to their place, giving them full identities in a language and a country that was beginning to feel like theirs.

  Yet Chaucer, anxious that he be read everywhere by those who could read English or understand it when it was read aloud to them, was still worried by the variety and confusion of languages in the land. He bids one of his poems, Troilus and Criseyde, a rather poignant and even a troubled farewell:

  Go, litel bok . . .

  And for ther is so gret diversite

  In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,

  So prey I God that non miswryte the [thee]....

  That thow be understonde, God I biseche!

  I find it touching that Chaucer could have such fears, but how could he have known that with later modifications his language, fed by the Central and West Midlands, nourished in wealthy London, aided by the development of printing in London, would become the basis for a Standard English which would go in “litel boks” not only all over England but all over the world?

  We still have over fifty handwritten copies of The Canterbury Tales from the fifteenth century and we know that he reached an audience which included London merchants and Richard of Gloucester, the future King Richard III. Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.

  A century and a half after his death, a monumental tomb was erected in his honour in Westminster Abbey. It is in what has become Poets’ Corner, just a stone’s throw from the house in which he died in 1400.

  I think the best way to end this chapter is to quote from another great writer, Dryden, in the seventeenth century, writing of Chaucer:

  He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive Nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales the various Manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole English Nation, in his Age . . . the Matter and Manner of their Tales and of their Telling, are so suited to their different Educations, Humours and Callings, that each of them would be improper in any other Mouth . . . ’Tis sufficient to say, according to the Proverb, that “here is God’s Plenty.”

  7

  God’s English

  Where English took poets, others wanted to follow. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement was under way to force English into a central and commanding place in the society whose first and expanded tongue it was. The state had to be challenged, and the Church. It was with the Church that English had its most violent struggle. The brutalities involved beggar belief.

  Later medieval Britain was a religious society. The Roman Catholic Church controlled and pervaded all aspects of earthly life including the intimately sexual. It also held the keys to a heaven and hell which were very real in the minds of most who were fed ceaselessly and cleverly with priestly persuasions, stories of miracles, promises of eternal happiness and threats of eternal torture and damnation. You challenged the might of the Church only if you were extremely powerful and even the powerful would quail and crack when the full range of the Church’s instruments of power and conviction were brought to bear. But there were those in England, men of faith, totally committed to the idea that English should become the language of God and in a series of heroic efforts they set out to make that happen even though it would invoke the fearsome wrath of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

  The central power of words in fourteenth-century England lay in the Bible. There was no Bible in English. There had been some piecemeal translations of the Gospels and parts of the Old Testament in Old English and there were Middle English versions of the Psalms. In formal terms, God spoke to the people in Latin. Latin, though not the monopoly of the clergy, was certainly fortressed by it. The proper relationship between the believer and the Bible was one mediated by the priest in Latin. He would interpret scripture for the common people. It was not unlike a single party state with a single party line on everything. The Bible was in Latin — a language wholly inaccessible to the vast majority — and Bibles were few. The justification was that this was the word of God and to know God was a blessing and a richness beyond all understanding. The priest, it was argued, being ordained a true man of God, would avoid sinful misinterpretation and heresy. He would make sure the devil was shut out. This meant that it was impossible for most English people to know the Bible for themselves.

  If you wanted to communicate with God in English, you might be lucky with an idealistic local priest who would preach a sermon on a biblical text — but his starting point and his finishing point would be in Latin: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” There were other ways. Most notably there were the Mystery Plays such as those which began to be performed in York outside the cathedral, the minster, a building every bit as big and daunting as its twin, the Norman castle on the other side of the city.

  These Mystery Plays tell the Christian story from the creation of God to the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. They are religious plays but they are not, nor were they allowed to be, the scriptures. They could be called a biblical soap opera. Every year, even today, one of the dozen plays, each originally put on by an often appropriate guild (the carpenters took care of the Crucifixion), is given in the English of the fourteenth century.

  In 2002, it was the turn of the Shepherds’ Play. In these few lines, the shepherds wonder what gift they can offer to Christ; first, here’s a literal translation:

  Now look on me, my lord so dear

  Although I put me not in press.

  Ye are a prince without a peer,

  I have no present that may you please.

  Lo: a horn spoon that I have here,

  And it will hold good forty peas.

  This will I give you with good cheer.

  In Middle English, a little later than Chaucer:

  Nowe loke on me, my lorde dere,

  of all I putte me noght in pres.

  Ye are a prince withouten pere,

  I haue no presentte that you may plees.

  But lo! An horne spoone that haue I here —

  And it will herbar fourty pese.

  is will I giffe you with gud chere.

  There can be little doubt of the fear and love most of the population had for their religion and for their Church, and their reliance on it for comfort, for hope and for everyday pleasures, feast days, saints’ days, grand processionals. But the common people were on the outside, as can still graphically be seen in York every year as
the Mystery Players circle the town and perform in the shadow of the minster, but are not allowed through its doors.

  When they went into the minster to stand or kneel respectfully at the back — and everyone had to go, church attendance was compulsory — the service was a remote affair. The whole emphasis was on the mystery of it, the priests like a secret society, the Latin words so awesome in their ancient verity that, although some phrases would have stuck over the years, the whole intention was to impress and to subdue and not to enlighten. There was of course no English Hymnal, and no Book of Common Prayer. You were at the mercy of the priests. Only they were allowed to read the word of God and they did even that silently. A bell was rung to let the congregation know when the priest had reached the important bits. The priest stood not as a guide to the Bible but as its guardian and as a guardian against common believers. They would not be allowed to enter into the Book.

  It would be a formidable struggle to wrench that power from the priests, to replace that Latin with English. It is an inspiring passage in the adventure of English, a time of martyrdom and high risk, of daring, scholarship and above all a generous and inclusive belief that the word of God should be in the language of the people. The battle would eventually tear the Church in two, an inconceivable outcome when the first rumblings began in the second half of the fourteenth century. It would claim many lives. But many were ready to die for it, to make English the language of their faith.

  The prime mover in the fourteenth century was a scholar, John Wycliffe, probably born near Richmond in Yorkshire, admitted to Merton College, Oxford, when he was seventeen, charismatic, we are told, and a fluent Latinist. He was a major philosopher and theologian who believed passionately that his knowledge should be shared by everyone. From within the sanctioned, clerical, deeply traditionalist honeyed walls of Oxford, Wycliffe the scholar launched a furious attack on the power and wealth of the Church, an attack which prefigured that of Martin Luther more than a hundred years later.