The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  The erth was voyde and emptie and darcknesse was vpon the

  depe and the spirite of God moved vpon the water.

  Than God sayd: let there be lyghte and there was lyghte.

  It was in Antwerp that Tyndale became friendly with two Englishmen. They were hired assassins. They trapped him and took him to Vilvorde Castle, where he was imprisoned in the dungeon. They had got their man and though the Bible was out and circumstances in the politics of the Church were changing dramatically, the vengeance of Henry VIII would not be denied.

  In his last letter, Tyndale asked that he might have “a warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from the cold . . . a warmer coat also for what I have is very thin; a piece of cloth with which to patch my leggings. And I ask to have a lamp in the evening, for it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary, that I may continue with my work.”

  And continue, for a short while, he did, bringing us phrases, poignantly, heart-breakingly, like “a prophet has no honour in his own country,” “a stranger in a strange land,” “a law unto themselves,” “we live and move and have our being” and “let my people go,” and there would have been yet more, but in April 1536 Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a court in the Netherlands. The way they chose to kill him was to strangle him, to cut him off at the voice, which they did on 6 October 1536.

  Finally this sublime master of language, this heroic Christian scholar and the begetter of so much of our English language, was burned at the stake. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”

  Two years before Tyndale’s execution, Henry VIII, who had earlier been given the title “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X for denouncing Luther’s ideas, had left his wife Catherine and secretly married his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn. A new Pope, Clement VII, threatened him with excommunication. In 1535, Miles Coverdale, using Tyndale’s text wherever possible, published a complete Bible dedicated to the king, the first legal Bible in English. That was a year before Tyndale’s execution. Needing allies, Henry entered negotiations with some Lutheran princes in Germany in 1536, the very year of Tyndale’s execution, but there is no record of him giving a thought to the man whose words would now help him seal a hold on a new Protestant England. In 1537, the Matthew Bible — an amalgam of Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s — was allowed to be printed in England. In 1539 we have the Great Bible — the official version.

  After centuries of suppression, the walls came tumbling down and three Bibles were approved and published inside six years. And it went on: the Geneva Bible in 1560, the first in Roman type; the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, a revised version of the Great Bible; and the Douai-Rheims Bible of 1609–10.

  The English language flowed into religion. It had already returned to the court and into the state and begun to be the language of a vivid and vigorous national literature. Now with the split from Rome, it conquered the last and highest bastion, the Church.

  It was a principle of Protestantism that the Bible be available to everyone. In 1530 Sir Thomas More had complained bitterly about the shame of the Bible in English in the language of ploughboys. But the Great Bible of 1539 came with an introduction by More’s successor, Cranmer, which commended it to all: it was to be placed in every church in the land. A translation reads:

  Here may men, women; young, old; learned, unlearned; rich, poor; priests, laymen; lords, ladies; officers, tenants and mean men; virgins, wives; widows, lawyers, artificers, husbandmen, and all matter of persons of what estate or condition soever they be learn all things, what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, as well as concerning Almighty God as themselves and all other.

  It was unconditional surrender. It was defecting en masse to the side of the enemy. It was purging the past out of memory. It was now the King’s Bible’s English.

  Where the medieval Catholic Church and Henry VIII most violently up into the 1530s had kept the Bible from the people, Henry’s new Church set out to get the Bible to as many as possible. It has had an incalculable influence on the spread of our language. For centuries it was heard week in week out, sometimes day in day out, by almost all English-speaking Christians wherever they were, and its precepts, its images, its proverbs, its names, its parables, its heroes, its promises, its words and rhythms, sank deep shafts into the minds of the men and women who heard it. It went to the heart of the way we spoke, the way we described the world and ourselves. Its English bound the English together.

  By the beginning of the seventeenth century there were so many competing versions that seven hundred fifty reformers from within the Church of England requested James VI of Scotland, who had become James I of England, to authorise a new translation. Fifty-four translators were chosen from the Church and the universities to produce an edition which would be submitted to the bishops. The work took about five years and it cannot go unremarked that this tremendous endeavour makes the achievement of Tyndale appear all but superhuman.

  To go back to the Beatitudes, Tyndale writes:

  When he sawe the people he went up into a mountayne and when he was set, his disciples came to hym and he opened hys mouthe, and taught them, sayinge, “Blessed are the povre in sprite: for theirs is the Kyngdom of heven . . .”

  In the Authorised, the King James Version, it reads:

  And seeing the multitudes, he went vp into a mountaine: and when he was set, his disciples came vnto him. And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poore in spirit: for theirs is the kingdome of heauen . . .

  Tyndale had the final say.

  The fifty-four translators made very little attempt to update his language, which was now eighty years old. Even though by 1611, English had undergone further revolution, the King James translators would still use “ye” sometimes for “you,” as in “ye cannot serve God and Mammon,” even though very few said “ye” in common speech any more. They used “thou” for “you,” “gat” for “got,” “spake” for “spoke” and so on. Either they were too struck by the beauty and power of Tyndale’s prose to want to interfere with it, or this was a deliberate act of policy. They may have chosen to keep archaic forms. They made the Bible feel ancient, mysteriously spiritual, out of the past, imbued with deeply rooted traditional authority.

  We are told that the men who made the final drafts read them aloud over and over again to make sure that they had the right rhythm and balance, matters which Tyndale, a preacher as well as a scholar, knew about well. The English Bible has often been called a preacher’s Bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.

  In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was with God,

  and the Word was God.

  The same was in the beginning with God.

  All things were made by him;

  And without him was not anything made that was made.

  In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

  And the light shineth in darknesse,

  And the darknesse comprehended it not.

  And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among vs.

  English at last had God on its side. The language was authorised by the Almighty Himself.

  10

  A Renaissance of Words

  To write of the English Renaissance without putting Shakespeare at the centre of it is indeed Hamlet without the Prince, but Shakespeare must wait for a couple of chapters while we prepare the ground.

  In the thirty or forty years that bridged 1600, the English language could lay fair claim to being reborn, yet again, but with a self-conscious luxuriance and a world reach quite new. It is as if its appetite, far from being sated by the feast of French which it had digested and turned into English, was whetted and enlarged by it and looked around greedily for more nourishment.

  As so
often in the history of English the new chapter came by water. It is worth remembering that Spanish could have settled here. Philip II’s formidable Armada of 1588 should have brushed aside the English opposition on the seas. His armies, the best trained and most successful in Europe, would almost certainly have found little to match them on a march to a largely undefended London. It seemed no contest. We know that God or bad weather, superior English seamanship or a combination of all three checked his attempt, but at the time the danger was acutely felt, so much so that Elizabeth I — a monarch by divine right — took to horse and went to the port of Tilbury near the mouth of the Thames.

  There, before a great crowd and the ships and crews who would determine the future of her kingdom, she used English to raise their confidence, lift up their spirits, in superb rhetoric, the art of which she had been taught by her Cambridge tutor, Roger Ascham. Mounted on her horse, in the middle of the army, she spoke in inspirational English. This is the version as reported in 1654:

  My loving people, we have been perswaded by some, that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our self to armed multitudes for fear of treachery: but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful, and loving people. Let Tyrants fear, I have always so behaved my self, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength, and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you as you see, at this time, not for my recreation, and disport, but being resolved, in the midst, and heat of the battaile to live, or die amongst you all, to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my Honour, and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the bodie, but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and Stomach of a King, and a King of England too . . . We shall shortly have a famous victorie over those enemies of my God, of my Kingdomes, and of my People.

  England had indeed a famous victory, blessed by some luck, over a much superior enemy.

  And English had a famous escape. For Spanish too was a marauding and conquering language.

  After 1588, the naval effectiveness of the comparatively small island grew even stronger and opened up the world to trade. This brought a massive injection into the language. As England imported a huge cargo of goods, English imported a huge cargo of vocabulary. Another ten to twelve thousand new words entered English in this Elizabethan and Jacobean period and delivered a new map of the world and new ideas.

  At the time of the Spanish Armada, England was well behind other European powers in the reach of its colonial conquests and English inevitably lagged badly in the influence it exerted abroad. Portuguese had already made its mark in Brazil and was biting deeply into southern America; Spanish had been spoken in Cuba and Mexico for more than half a century and Spain was taking its trade, its religion and its culture and its language all around the New World. Over eight hundred years earlier, Arabic had raced through the Middle East and North Africa and could still be called an imperial language, while Hindi was comfortably establishing itself as a vernacular if not a literary language throughout the populous Indian region.

  On a very much smaller scale during the sixteenth century, English had begun to spread more widely to parts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Yet even in its more limited scope, English showed its voracity for new words and its power to enfold them almost instantly into the mother language.

  France still provided rich pickings. In they came, the new loan words: “crew” (creue); “detail” (detail); “passport”(passeport); “progress” (progresse); “moustache” (moustache); “explore” (explorer). Other words from or via France include “volunteer,” “comrade,” “equip,” “bayonet,” “duel” and “ticket.” English sailors and traders could not get enough of them. It was a national appetite, a national sport, asset stripping foreign word banks. “Embargo” (embargo), “tornado” (from tronada, “thunderstorm”), “canoe” (canoe) from French and Spanish; “port” (port) though, which seems to come from or via Spanish and Portuguese, is Old English. Spain and Portugal brought “armada” and “banana,” “desperado,” “guitar” and “hammock,” “hurricane,” “mosquito” and “tobacco.” Nor were the Dutch left out: “keelhaul” (kiehalen), “smuggle” (smokkelen), “yacht” (jaghte), “cruise” (kruisen), “reef ” (rif ), “knapsack” (knapzak) and “landscape” (landschap) all come from the Dutch. So does the exoneration of Anglo-Saxon, for so long thought the source and origin of our favourite swear words. It has been suggested that it was English sixteenth-century sailors who brought in “fokkinge,” “krappe” and “buggere” (though that is ultimately “Bulgarus,” Latin for Bulgarians), which they had found irresistible in Low Dutch. Even when they are found in earlier English, these words are not swear words. “C — — t” is not taboo; “bugger” does not mean sodomite until the period we are talking about.

  Again and again even in those brief lists we can see how the words not only increased the vocabulary but set in train lines of thought which went way beyond the original descriptive function of the word and bred shoals of new English meanings and thought. “Progress,” for instance, from the French; “embargo” from Spanish and Portuguese; “smuggle” and “landscape” from the Dutch — all of these have grown and multiplied inside English.

  When English sailors encountered new foods and fruits and barrelled them up to try their luck in the riverside markets of England, they brought the names or an Anglicisation of the original names with them: “apricots” and “anchovies,” again from or via Spain and Portugal. “Chocolate” and “tomato” from French: though, a good example of the melting pot of language, “tomato” could also be from the Spanish.

  About fifty other languages joined the cargo of new words brought back in this period and swiftly integrated into English. In some cases there was an intermediary language. The language of the Renaissance bristled with imported words. “Bamboo” (Malay); “bazaar” (via Italian) and “caravan” (via French), both Persian; “coffee” and “kiosk” (Turkish via French); “curry” (Tamil); “flannel” (Welsh); “guru” (Hindi); later there would be “harem” and “sheikh” and “alcohol” (Arabic); “shekel” (Hebrew); “trousers” (Irish Gaelic). Off they went, English ships all over the world, trading in goods, looting language.

  But this game or addiction was not confined to men on ships. It was a time when English artists, scholars and aristocrats began to explore Europe. Their preferred destination was Italy, the dominating culture of the time. There they were awestruck by the architecture, the art, the music, and brought back words which described what they saw and once again provided a platform for new ideas, in this case ideas about a cultural explosion, which England so far had heard mostly from an islanded distance. But back they came, flashing off their purchases from abroad: “balcony,” “fresco,” “villa” (from Latin), “cupola,” “portico,” “piazza,” “miniature” and “design” — all from Italian — as are “opera,” “violin,” “solo,” “sonata,” “trill,” “cameo,” “rocket” (which could also be French) and “volcano”: “soprano” and “concerto” came later.

  Yet the biggest and most important seam of all at that time was mined in England itself, chiefly in Oxford and Cambridge.

  It is another twist in the adventure of English that the heirs of those classical scholars whose learning and courage had pushed through the translation of the Bible from Latin into English and toppled Latin’s supremacy for ever now led the movement to revive the study of Latin. It was, I think, this growing addiction to uncover new words which was the driving force in this revival.

  Renaissance scholars at the two universities founded schools teaching pure and literary Latin. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s tutor, was just one of those Renaissance scholars. Classical texts written by Seneca, Lucan and Ovid, for example, were sourced from the medieval manuscripts into which they had been copied and translated into English. The scholars, or humanists as they came to be known, saw Latin as the language of classical thought, science and philo
sophy, all of which were gathering interest as the Renaissance rolled through the minds of Europe. It was also the universal language, with which they could communicate with other European scholars. Thomas More wrote his Utopia in Latin in 1517 — it was only translated into English in 1551. Isaac Newton, in 1704, published his Opticks in English. It was translated into Latin in 1706, since Latin remained the language of international debate and controversy. Milton’s usefulness to Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s was greatly to do with his skill in putting forward Cromwell’s arguments in a Latin which would impress his enemies in Europe.

  It is tempting to think that part of this impetus came from the victory of English in the Bible. Latin was no longer associated with suppression. It was no longer first and most emphatically thought of as the acknowledged word of God. All these scholars were religious; they had to be, to be allowed to study as scholars in the first place. There would have been differing degrees of belief but Christianity was the unchallengeable belief system. Yet Latin was no longer primarily the servant of the Church. It could come out of the west doors and play, be explored for other than religious purposes, be used to discover old ideas and name them new. Now that it had won through, English could afford to and wanted to plunder the old enemy.

  Thousands of Latin words came into the English vocabulary of educated people. In the rush to co-opt them, the scholars made scarcely any effort to change them. They were gobbled up, raw and whole. “Excavate” (excavare), “horrid” (horridus), “radius” (radius), “cautionary” (cautionarius), “pathetic” (patheticus), “pungent” (pungentum), “frugal” (frugalis), “submerge” (submergere), “specimen” (specimen), “premium” (præmium). And the words “manuscript” and (from the Greek) “lexicon” and “encyclopaedia” were absorbed into English.