by Melvyn Bragg
In the years between Chaucer’s birth and Shakespeare’s death, English went through a process now known as the Great Vowel Shift. People in the Midlands and south of England changed the way they pronounced long vowels (long vowels are those that are held in the mouth for a comparatively long time, like the long “ee” in “meet,” rather than the short “e” in “met”).
Linguists describe the intricacies of these changes using a phonetic alphabet and diagrams showing how the tongue sits in the mouth — high or low, forward or back. But they can’t say why the great shift happened ; or whether it really was one large shift or two or more small ones; or why it happened less in the north (and, as we have seen, not at all to some Scottish cows).
The Great Vowel Shift can take a lifetime to investigate and another to explain. As I understand it, new and important studies are under way into its true causes and effects — one of several areas of mystery in medieval linguistics now in hot debate. But the main point, I trust, is this. Printing had largely fixed spelling before the Great Vowel Shift got under way. So to a large extent our modern spelling represents a pre-GVS system, whereas the language as a result of the GVS had changed enormously. Spelling fixed: spoken in turbulence: result — out of sync.
Writing eventually brings uniformity to language and the invention and spread of printing brought great power to writing. It was invented by Gutenberg in Mainz around 1453. England was slow into print — Caxton’s press only went into service in 1476. Printing marked the beginning of the information age. Because it became so easy to manufacture books in large numbers it became more difficult to control the spread of ideas. The flatbed press was a liberator.
William Caxton was born in Kent somewhere around 1420. He was apprenticed to a textile dealer and went to Bruges in the 1440s, where he did well. In 1462 he was appointed governor of the English Trading Company there, the Merchant Adventurers. Caxton was a man of learning as well as being a merchant and in 1469 he began work on a translation of a French account of the Trojan War. It was while working in Cologne that he learned about printing and once back in Bruges he set up a press to print his seven-hundred-page translation: The Recuyell [French — “compilation”] of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English. In 1476 he set up his press near Westminster Palace and before his death he had published ninety-six items, some in several editions.
The first dated book printed in England in English was Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres in 1477. Caxton printed romances, books of conduct and philosophy, history and morality and the first illustrated book in English, called The Myrrour of the Worlde, in 1481. He printed The Canterbury Tales, two editions, as well as other works by Chaucer, Malory’s Morte d ’Arthur and work by Gower and Lydgate and his own translations.
Caxton worried about how to achieve a common standard that would be understood and read by all. The prologues and epilogues to some of his translations reveal an anxiety similar to that expressed by Chaucer in the verse beginning “Go, litel bok.” “Certaynly,” he writes, “it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes euery man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre [country], wyll vtter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners and termes that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym.”
In the same passage he then gives what became a famous example of people from one part of the country, as Caxton said, “failing to make themselves understood in another.” Caxton tells us that he is translating the Latin poet Virgil from a French version but he does not know which English word to use for “eggs.” He tells a story of some merchants who are away from home and who visit a house to buy food. One asks the woman for “eggys” — the Old Norse form, common in the north and east. She tells him that she doesn’t speak French, at which he takes offence. Another asks for the same thing with a different form, “eyren,” which is Old English, still probably current in much of the south of England, and she understands. Caxton chooses “eggs.” It must have been the case many, many times that like the Masters in Chancery, the masters of the printing press became the arbiters of what would become standard and correct English spelling. Caxton gave himself what I regard as an encouraging rule of thumb: “In my Iudgemente,” he wrote, “the comyn termes that be dayli vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe.”
And the common daily terms he uses and chooses are generally those he hears around him, the speech of London and the south-east, though more heavily influenced by the Central and East Midlands than was once thought. That mongrel dialect through the printed book and the diktats from Chancery slowly takes precedence over the dialects of other regions, gradually becomes the common written language, anomalous spellings and all.
The King had set an example; Chancery followed; the printing press reinforced the importance of a common written language. By the end of the fifteenth century, English was the language of the state and equipped to carry messages of state in an increasingly uniform spelling north, south, east and west, its manuscripts and later its books rolling over the old dialects which nevertheless stayed stoutly on the tongue.
There was only one more kingdom for English to conquer. The keepers of this eternal kingdom, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, were being threatened by popular movements, like that of Wycliffe, all over Europe and their reaction was to dig in deeper and fight with all the natural and supernatural means they thought and were thought to have at their command. Latin was their armour, believed to be blessed and made invulnerable by God Himself. Any assault on the Latin Bible was an assault on the spirit, meaning and purpose of the Church.
In Little Sudbury, in Gloucestershire, in 1521, a young Oxford-educated tutor came out of the large household in which he was employed and began to preach “in the common place called Saint Austen’s Green” in front of the church. He was to write a book which became the most influential book there has ever been in the history of language, English or any other.
9
William Tyndale’s Bible
The prediction of the Lollards, that Wycliffe’s Bible would live on, was not a vain prophecy. Early in the reign of Henry VIII, the new king was still promising the Pope that he would burn any “untrue translations.” By these he meant Wycliffe’s Bible which, despite all the efforts of the court and the Church, was still relentlessly circulating in the land in hand-copied editions.
Henry VIII set his powerful and efficient Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to hunt down heretical books. Wolsey, aware that Martin Luther had shaken the Roman Catholic Church in 1517 with the demands he had nailed on the church door at Wittenberg, and as anxious as his master to please the Pope, instituted a nationwide search. On May 12, 1521, a bonfire of confiscated heretical works was made outside the original St. Paul’s Cathedral. The flames, it was said, burned for two days. The great book-burning was clearly a foretaste of what could and would happen to those who insisted on challenging the Pope’s authority.
This was the year in which William Tyndale began his public preaching on St. Austen’s Green and set out on the path which was to bring about a radical change both in the English language and in English society.
It is not always easy fully to comprehend or even imagine what was at stake. It was a great power battle. The reach of the Roman Catholic Church across many countries, states, principalities and peoples was unique. It was wealthy and a sought-after ally in war. It demanded obedience through its monopoly of the one true faith. Its parish priests covered almost every acre of ground, heard confessions, had the power to absolve sins, enforced attendance at church, the paying of Church taxes and conformity with the Church’s rulings on all matters of public and of private morality; even sex was a Church matter. Its great cathedrals, splendid artefacts, dazzling robes, processions and festivals provided a backdrop of glamour and excitement to what was very often a bleak and meagre existence. Above all, and key, the Church had unique access to God and so to eternal life. Only through the Roman Catholic Church
could anyone contact God and have any chance of resurrection.
Wycliffe, Luther and Tyndale challenged that. They wanted ordinary people to have direct access to God, and a Bible in the language of the people was the way to make that happen. The battle over language became outright rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church as the gatekeeper to God, the claim to be His sole representative on earth, whose earthly laws all Christians must obey every bit as much as they obeyed the laws of heaven. This had proved intolerable to different groups over the centuries and now the river of protest was swelling. The rebellion was led by deeply religious men and women. They too believed in the virgin birth, in the divinity of Christ, above all in the Resurrection. They were light years away from atheism or even agnosticism. They wanted the souls of the people to be saved but not through orders and sermons handed down from a central Latinate control in Rome for whose authority they found no evidence in the Bible. And to the rebels, the fate of the soul was the most vital matter in life: it was worth dying for.
Centuries later there would be those who would feel much the same about liberty, but even they could not have been more zealous, even fanatical, more totally convinced of the rightness of their cause as men such as William Tyndale were of theirs. After all, Tyndale was doing no less than serve the one true God, the maker of all things, the Creator, the Almighty, the giver and taker of life, the judge of all men and women, the harvester of the good, the slayer of evil. There could be no greater service in life than to do His work.
To Tyndale, English was, in effect, the way in which God could best reach the people of that language and the way in which they could best reach Him. The fight for the English Bible was a battle for salvation through the scriptures. To a priest who challenged him, Tyndale replied, “Ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth a plough to know more of the scriptures than thou dost.”
Like Wycliffe, Tyndale was an Oxford classical scholar and like Wycliffe he wholly contradicts the idea that such a scholar, who was also, as Tyndale was, an ordained priest, was fated to be a mild, placeseeking conformist. Tyndale took risks and lived a life comparable to that of any twentieth-century revolutionary “hero,” and met an end worse than most of them.
It is interesting that the large household in Gloucestershire in which he was tutor was owned by a wealthy family, a new breed of successful wool merchants who called themselves “Christian Brethren,” the polite and politically safer name for Lollards. They built a private chapel in their garden dedicated to St. Adeline, the patron saint of weavers, and they appear to have been happy secretly to fund Tyndale’s plans. This quality of support so early in his life must have given Tyndale any extra encouragement he might have needed.
But like Wycliffe, he appears to have been a man totally driven by an idea. In 1524, at the age of thirty, William Tyndale left England to pursue his work outside the repressive spy-state set up by Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. He would never return.
He met Erasmus and later Luther, the two key men in the movement towards what became Protestantism. He settled in Cologne and began single-handedly to translate the New Testament not from Latin but from the original Greek and Hebrew. It was this, no doubt, coupled with Tyndale’s genius for language, which made his translations so telling and memorable.
Two years later, six thousand copies had been printed abroad — evidence of the substantial nature of the patronage Tyndale must have received from the wool merchants of Gloucestershire, and of the speed and efficiency of print. The new Bibles were packed and sent to the coast ready to be smuggled into England. Yet again English comes to England from across the sea, this time written English, some of the most sublime ever put on paper.
But Henry VIII and Wolsey’s spies informed them of this invasion. It now seems quite extraordinary, but the whole country was put on alert. In order to prevent the word of God in English landing in the land of the English, naval ships patrolled the coastal waters, boats were stopped and searched, men were arrested and a great many Bibles were intercepted. The action taken was indistinguishable from being on a war footing, and to Henry VIII and Wolsey it was just that. Latin was the only word of God allowed by the state and now the state came out in full armed force to defend its most loyal ally, the Church.
At first tens and then hundreds got through the lines. The Bishop of London then tried another tack: he sought to buy the entire print run through an intermediary.
“O he will burn them,” Tyndale is supposed to have said when he heard of this. “I am the gladder,” he went on, “for these two benefits will come thereof. I shall get money of him for these books to bring myself out of debt and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God’s word.” And that is what happened. The bishop bought and burned the books and Tyndale used the money to rework, prepare and print a better version, as it were at the Church’s expense.
Tyndale’s aim was simple: “I had perceived by experience,” he wrote, “that it was impossible to stabilise lay people in any truth unless the scripture were to be plainly set before their eyes in their mother tongue so that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text.” He did this in a plain, conversational style as in this passage from Genesis:
But the serpent was sotyller [subtler] than all the beastes of the felde which ye Lorde God had made and sayd vnto the woman, Ay syr [sure] God hath sayd ye shall not eate of all maner trees in the garden. And the woman sayd vnto the serpent, of the frute of the trees in the garden we may eate, but of the frute of the tree that is in the myddes of the garden (sayd God) se that we eate not, and se that ye touch it not; lest ye dye. Then sayd the serpent vnto the woman: tush ye shall not dye.
But the glory of Tyndale is in his soaring poetic which is yet always earthed, you feel, in the truth as in the Beatitudes from the Gospel According to St. Matthew:
Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome off heven.
Blessed are they that morne: for they shalbe comforted.
Blessed are the meke: for they shall inherit the erth.
Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes:
for they shalbe filled.
Blessed are the mercifull: for they shall obteyne mercy.
Blessed are the pure in herte: for they shall se God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shalbe called
the chyldren of God.
Blessed are they which suffre persecucion for rightwenes sake:
for theirs ys the kyngdome off heven.
Blessed are ye when men shall reuyle you and persecute you and shall
falsly say all manner of yvell saynges against you ffor my sake.
Reioyce and be glad for greate is youre rewarde in heven. For so
persecuted they the prophets which were before youre dayes.
Ye are the salt of the erthe.
It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale’s writing. Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale’s words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circled the globe.
We use them still: “scapegoat,” “let there be light,” “the powers that be,” “my brother’s keeper,” “filthy lucre,” “fight the good fight,” “sick unto death,” “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “a man after his own heart,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” “signs of the times,” “ye of little faith,” “eat, drink and be merry,” “broken-hearted,” “clear-eyed.” And hundreds more: “fisherman,” “landlady,” “sea-shore,” “stumbling-block,” “taskmaster,” “two-edged,” “viper,” “zealous” and even “Jehovah” and “Passover” come into English through Tyndale. “Beautiful,” a word which had meant only human beauty, was greatly widened by Tyndale, as were many others.
It is too fanciful to believe that the words t
hemselves were so powerful and illuminating that Henry VIII and Wolsey redoubled their efforts to kill off the man and all his works, but these English words do have an instant memorability and authority that must have shaken the Latinate establishment. Tyndale was not only bringing the word of God to the people, he was also, within that process, bringing in words which carried ideas, described feelings, gave voice to emotions, expanded the way in which we could describe how we lived. Words which tell us about the inner nature of our condition; words which, as in the beatitudes, express as never before or since the great loving dream of a moral life which applies to everyone and challenges every ruling description of society from the beginning until today. Writer after writer, in the UK, in the USA, in Australia, on the Indian subcontinent, in Canada, in Africa and the Caribbean, has absorbed Tyndale’s rhythms, appropriated and played with his words and been enriched by the opportunities his language provided, the vocabulary for thought.
Before long England was ablaze for Tyndale’s Bible, this time on fire to read it. Thousands of copies were smuggled in. In Tyndale’s own happy phrase, “the noise of the new Bible echoed throughout the country.” Produced in a small pocket-sized edition that was easily concealed, it passed through cities and universities into the hands of even the humblest men and women. The authorities, especially Sir Thomas More, still railed at him for “putting the fire of scripture into the language of ploughboys” but the damage was done. The English now had their Bible, legal or not. Eighteen thousand were printed: six thousand got through.
Tyndale spent his life on the run. Constantly hounded by Catholic spies, he moved secretly around the Protestant-sympathising lands of northern Europe. In 1529, off the coast of Holland, his ship was driven on to the rocks and the entire manuscript of his new translation of the Old Testament was lost. Yet in the following year he is printing it in Antwerp.
In the begynnynge God created heven and erth.
