Robert Mccrum - The Story of English - Chap 2

2
The Mother Tongue
The making of English is the story of three invasions and a cultural

revolution. In the simplest terms, the language was brought to
Britain by Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes,
influenced by Latin and Greek when St Augustine and his followers
converted England to Christianity, subtly enriched by the Danes,
and finally transformed by the French-speaking Normans.
From the beginning, English was a crafty hybrid, made in war and
peace. It was, in the words of Daniel Defoe, ‘y°ur Roman-Saxon-
Danish-Norman English’. In the course of one thousand years, a
series of violent and dramatic events created a new language which,
by the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, was intelligible to modern eyes and
ears without the aid of subtitles.
The English have always accepted the mixed blood of their
language. There was a vague understanding that they were part of a
European language family, but it was not until the eighteenth
century that a careful investigation by a gifted amateur linguist
began to decipher the true extent of this common heritage.
‘ TH E C O M M O N S O U R C E ’
In the early days of the Raj, Sir William Jones, a British judge
stationed in India, presented a remarkable address to the Asiatick
Society in Calcutta, the fruits of his investigations into ancient
Sanskrit. A keen lawyer, Jones had originally intended to familiarize
himself with India’s native law codes. To his surprise, he discovered
that Sanskrit bore a striking resemblance to two other ancient
languages of his acquaintance, Latin and Greek. The Sanskrit word
for father, transliterated from its exotic alphabet, emerged as pitar,
astonishingly similar, he observed, to the Greek and Latin pater. The
THE MOTHER TONGUE 47
Sanskrit for mother was matar; in the Latin of his school days it was
mater. Investigating further, he discovered dozens of similar corre
spondences. Though he was not the first to notice these similarities,
no one before Sir William Jones had studied them systematically.
The Sanskrit language, he announced to the Asiatick Society on that
evening of z February 1786, shared with Greek and Latin ‘a stronger
affinity . . . than could possibly have been produced by accident; so
strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three,
without believing them to have sprung from some common source,
which, perhaps, no longer exists’.
Two centuries of linguistic research have only strengthened
Jones’s basic proposition. We now know that the languages of about
one-third of the human race come from this Indo-European
‘common source’. These include the European descendants of Latin,
French, and Spanish, a great Slavic language, Russian, the Celtic
languages, Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the offshoots of German —
Dutch and English. A second important breakthrough in the search
for the truth about ‘the common source’ came from the folklorist
Jakob Grimm, better known, with his brother Wilhelm, as a
collector of fairy-tales. ‘Grimm’s Law ’ established the important
connection between a p in Latin (piscis) and an f in English {fish).
Thus the German vater (and English father) has the same root as the
Sanskrit/Latin pitaripater. Words such as me, new, seven and
mother were also found to share this common ancestry. Now the
Indo-European basis for the common source was clear.
It is sometimes said that you can deduce the history of a people
from the words they use. Clever detective work among some fifty
prehistoric vocabularies has now led to a reconstruction of the
lifestyle of a vanished people, the first Indo-European tribes, the
distant forebears of contemporary Europe. From the words they
used —words for winter and horse —it seems likely that the Indo-
Europeans lived a half-settled, half-nomadic existence. They had
domestic animals —oxen, pigs, and sheep —they worked leather and
wove wool, ploughed the land, and planted grain. They had an
established social and family structure, and they worshipped gods
who are the clear ancestors of Indian, Mediterranean, and Celtic
deities.
Who these people were, and when exactly they lived, is a hotly
48 THE STORY OF ENGLISH
disputed mystery. According to the Garden of Eden myth, they lived

in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, but this theory was exploded
by nineteenth-century archaeology. Today, there are some who
argue for the Kurgan culture of the Russian steppes, others for the
farming culture of the Danube valley. The dates vary from 6000 BC
to 4500 BC. The most widely accepted theory locates the environ
ment of the Indo-Europeans in a cold, northern climate in which
common words for snow, beech, bee, and w olf played an important
role. Furthermore, none of these prehistoric languages has a word
for the sea that we can find. From this, and from our knowledge of
nature, it is clear that the Indo-Europeans must have lived inland
somewhere just north of the Black Sea.
Two innovations contributed to the break-up of this Central
European society: the horse and the wheel. Some of the Indo-
Europeans began to travel east and, in the course of time, established
the Indo-Iranian languages of the Caucasus, India, Pakistan, and
Assam. Others began to drift west towards the gentler climates of
Europe. Their descendants are found in Greece, Italy, Germany, and
the Baltic. Both the Rhine and the Rhone are thought to take their
names from the Indo-European word meaning flow. English has
much in common with all these languages. A word like brother has
an obvious family resemblance to its Indo-European cousins:
broeder (Dutch), Bruder (German), phrater (Greek), brat (Russian),
brdthair (Irish), and bhratar (Sanskrit).
TH E CELTS
One of the earliest westward migrations was made by a people
whose descendants now live in Cornwall, the highlands of Scotland,
Ireland, Wales, and Brittany: the Celts. These Gaelic-speaking tribes
were natives of the British Isles long before the English. Today, the
people of Wales prefer to call themselves cymry, or ‘fellow-
countrymen’, a reminder that they - together with the Irish, Scots
and Cornish —are the true Britons.
The language of Wales - Cymraeg - is part of a Celtic family
stretching north to the islands of the Hebrides and south to the
remoter parts of Britanny. Welsh and Breton, in fact, are very closely
related, and the traditional Breton-French onion sellers who used to
bicycle through the valleys of Wales every summer were able to

communicate with their Welsh-speaking customers.
The Welsh have remained as fiercely independent in words as in
deed. The Cambrian mountains, the mountain range that gave the
fleeing Britons a refuge from the conquering Anglo-Saxons, isolated
the Welsh language from outside influence for centuries. Some
attribute the resilience of the language to the translation of the Bible
from English into Welsh by William Morgan in 1588. Even at the
beginning of the industrial revolution, in which the coal mines of
Wales were to play such a vital part, the vast majority of the people
still spoke Welsh. In the great social and economic upheavals of
Victorian Britain there were some who believed that Welsh culture
was being irreparably threatened and they fled to Patagonia. In
retrospect, they were unduly alarmist. Despite the anglicizing
inroads of intermarriage, education, and industrialization, the
persistence of Welsh language and culture is remarkable. At the turn
of the century, two-thirds of the Welsh were bilingual, and accord
ing to a recent census, some 517,600 (or some 20 per cent) still claim
to be Welsh speakers.
Today, Welsh language and culture flourish. The language is used
in education, and it has theoretical equality with English in law and
administration. Welsh nationalists have successfully campaigned -
like the Quebec separatists — for bilingual road signs. The Welsh-
language television station, S4C, is popular and successful. The
annual Eisteddfod (first held at Cardigan Castle in 117 6 ) keeps alive
an idea of culture that goes back to the days when the Welsh enjoyed
sovereignty of the island called Britannia. The strength of this Welsh
culture has permeated the English spoken in Wales. Eluned Phillips,
winner of the Eisteddfod Crown, believes that Welsh-English
speakers can always be identified by the lilt of their speech. She
remarks that even with Richard Burton, who spoke almost perfect
Standard English, his Welsh roots were recognizable in ‘the
melodious lilt of his voice and the sing-song way he used to talk
English, the resonance, the rounded vowels — in the music of the
language’.
The Welshness of the English spoken in Wales also appears in
sentence construction. According to Eluned Phillips:
1 The home of the Indo-Europeans. The languages of about one-third of

the human race have what William Jones called ‘a common source'. (This
is why, for example, the Sanskrit word deva resembles the English word
divine.) At some time between 3500 and 2500 BC, the Indo-European
community, which was probably based in Central Europe, began to travel
east and west. Today, the Indo-European family of languages stretches
from the Hebrides in the west to the Indian subcontinent in the east, and
includes descendants of Latin, like French and Spanish; the Slavic
languages of European Russia; the Celtic languages of Ireland, Wales and
Scotland; and the Germanic tongues, like Danish, Dutch, and English.
*
u ~ J Celtic c 400 8C
f c - i Celtic c .1500-1000 BC
SU Existing Celtic
NORWEGIAN
- SWEDISH
NORTH GERMANIC
JB m Fr is i a n ; lo w
german j,
D U T C H ■ > •
* w estg erm M c
H/GH
; GERMAN
L_ j N Germanic
;•£ '
R ll l~ 1 W Germanic
2 The Germanic and Celtic languages. At one time the Celtic family of
languages dominated large parts of what is now Western Europe. The
Germanic family divided over the centuries into High and Low German.
In Welsh we tend to invert our sentences, perhaps putting the adjective after
the noun . . . 1 was talking to a neighbour the other day. She is from the
valleys and we were talking about a young Welshman who had died. What
she said to me was, ‘Pity it was that he died so early’, which is really a literal
translation of the Welsh . . . We also have a habit of using throwaway
words —like, indeed, look you —and 1 think this originally started because
we couldn’t finish the translation from Welsh in time. So a word like
‘indeed’ became an important stop-gap.
The Welsh contribution to English literature is also distinctive, and

Eluned Phillips believes that this, too, has deep Celtic roots. ‘You
can always tell when a Welshman is writing in English because of the
flamboyance of the descriptions. I think that comes down from the
old Celtic warriors who used to go into battle [against the Anglo-
Saxons] not only with terror in their veins, but with red hot waves of
ecstasy.’
The Celtic Britons had the misfortune to inhabit an island that
was highly desirable both for its agriculture and for its minerals. The
early history of Britain is the story of successive invasions. One of
the most famous was the landing of Julius Caesar and his legions in
55 BC. After a difficult start, the Roman Empire kept the British
tribes in check - or at any rate at bay - beyond Hadrian’s Wall. The
evidence of the splendid palace at Fishbourne, near Chichester,
suggests that many Celtic Britons became quite Romanized. The
poet Martial claimed, with the boastfulness of poets, that his work
was read even in the remote island of Britannia. A few Roman words
crept, corrupted, into British usage: place-names like Chester,
Manchester, and Winchester, are derived from the Roman word
castra, meaning a camp. Once the legions withdrew (traditionally in
AD 410) and the Empire collapsed, this achievement was threat
ened. Along the shores of Europe, a new generation of raiders was
turning its attention to the misty, fertile island across the water.
The tribes which now threatened the Celtic chiefs of Britain were
essentially Germanic, another branch of the Indo-European mi
gration. After the Celts, the movement of the Germanic people into
the Baltic region, Northern Germany, Denmark, and the Nether
lands produced two more massive branches in the great language
tree of Europe. To the north, there were the Norse tongues of
Scandinavia; to the south, the family of West Germanic languages.
This second branch divided into the High German and the Low
German. The first serious historian of these Germans was the
Roman writer Tacitus, who gives us the earliest picture of the tribes
that became the first Englishmen.
Tacitus was writing near the zenith of the Roman Empire. The
armies of Rome were garrisoned across Europe from Britannia to
Bucharest, throughout the known world. There was an obvious
fascination with the unruly peoples of the North, especially the
troublesome ones like the Germans. In his Germania, ‘ On the Origin
and Geography of Germany’, Tacitus makes a colourful evaluation
of the character and customs of the tribes that absorbed so much of
Rome’s political and military power. The Germans, he says, have the
virtues Rome has lost. They love freedom; their women are chaste;
there is no public extravagance. He characterizes the various tribes.
The Tencteri excel in horsemanship, the Chatti have ‘hardy bodies,
well-knit limbs and fierce countenances’, the Suebi tie their hair in a
knot, and so on. But no picture is perfect. There are, Tacitus writes,
seven tribes about whom there is ‘nothing particularly noteworthy’
to say, except that they worship the goddess Mother Earth, ‘a
ceremony performed by slaves who are immediately afterwards
drowned in the lake’. One of these seven barbarous tribes was ‘the
Anglii’, known to history as the Angles, who probably inhabited the
area that is now known as Schleswig-Holstein.
By a curious irony, the savage and primitive rituals of the Anglii
have not been entirely forgotten. Peat-water has a curious property.
In the nineteenth century, Danish farmers, digging for peat, un
covered the bodies of some sacrificial victims, presumably of the
Angles, perfectly preserved in a bog. Known as the Moorleichen
(swamp corpses), or bog people, they are now on view in a number
of Danish museums. One man had been strangled. Another’s throat
had been cut. They are astonishingly well preserved: you can see the
stubble on one man’s chin. These leathery corpses are the distant
ancestors of the English-speaking peoples.
The speech of the Anglii belonged to the Germanic family of
languages. Further south, probably living among the marshy islands
of coastal Holland, were the Frisii (Frisians), a raiding people whose
descendants still live and farm in the area known as Frisia or
Friesland, and speak a language that gives us the best clue to the
THE STORY OF ENGLISH
Hoiyheac! ;
Si David:
Milford
fT iu il W elsh-speaking
Non W elsh-speaking
3 The Welsh language. The language of Wales is the descendant of the

language spoken by the defeated Britons. It has proved remarkably resilient
to the spread of English, a fact that is sometimes attributed to the
translation of the Bible from English into Welsh by William Morgan in 1588.
The Eistedfodd, which was first held at Cardigan Castle in 1176, is the
present-day symbol of the survival of Welsh language and culture, both a
source of pride and a focus for a resurgent nationalism. In Wales today
about 20 per cent of the population are still bilingual and there is a
successful Welsh TV channel, S4C.
sound of Anglo-Saxon English. Most people would probably

associate Frisia with cows. It is an identification the native Frisians
seem proud of. In the central square of the main town, Leeuwarden,
where you might expect to find an equestrian memorial to a local
hero, there is a larger-than-life statue of a milk-laden cow. Today
there are about 300,000 Frisian speakers who travel up and down
the dykes and canals, working the flat, marshy land much as their
ancestors have done for centuries. The Frisian for cow, lamb, goose,
boat, dung, and rain is ko, lam, goes, boat, dong and rein. And the
Frisian for ‘a cup of coffee’ is in kopke kofje.
The similarity between Frisian and English, both with strong
Germanic roots, emphasizes how close English is to German, Dutch
and Danish. The Germanic echoes in all these languages betray their
oldest and deepest roots. And it is no accident that the Dutch, for
instance, often seem to speak English with as much ease as the
English themselves. The evidence of a place like Friesland suggests
that if that linguistic cataclysm, the Norman Conquest of 1066, had
not occurred, the English today might speak a language not unlike
modern Dutch.
TH E M A K IN G OF E N G L ISH
According to their own record of events, The Anglo-Saxon Chron
icle, the first invaders of the British Isles - the Angles, Saxons and
Jutes —sailed across the North Sea from Denmark and the coastal
part of Germany, still known as Lower Saxony, in the year AD 449.
By all accounts, they had lost none of their taste for terror and
violence. ‘Never,’ wrote the chronicler, ‘was there such slaughter in
this Island.’ The native Britons were driven westward, fleeing from
the English ‘as from fire’. The English language arrived in Britain on
the point of a sword.
The process of driving the British into what is now called the
‘Celtic fringe’ did not happen overnight. The most successful
resistance was organized by a dux bellorum (as Nennius called him)
named Artorius — probably the legendary King Arthur — who
managed to establish an uneasy peace for perhaps a generation. In
the long run, though, the Anglo-Saxons — ‘proud warmakers,
victorious warriors’ — were unbeatable. They put the Britons to
flight at places like Searoburgh (Old Sarum) and elsewhere, occu
pied oid Romano-British settlements like Camulodunum (Colches

ter) and Verulamium (St Albans), and strengthened their control
over some of the most fertile parts of the islands. In the course of the
next 150 years they set up seven kingdoms (Northumbria, Mercia,
East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex) in an area which
roughly corresponds to present-day England. They called the
dispossessed Britons wealas, meaning ‘foreigners’, from which we
get the word Welsh.
The extent to which the Anglo-Saxons overwhelmed the native
Britons is illustrated in their vocabulary. We might expect that two
languages - and especially a borrowing language like English -
living alongside each other for several centuries would borrow freely
from each other. In fact, Old English (the name scholars give to the
English of the Anglo-Saxons) contains barely a dozen Celtic words.
Three of these, significantly, refer to features of the British landscape
that the English could not have known in their flat, marshy
continental homelands: crag, tor (a high rock) and combe (a deep
valley, as in High Wycombe). Another likely borrowing is риса, an
evil spirit, who eventually turns up as Puck, Shakespeare’s mischief-
maker.
Place-names tell a similar story. Some modern river names are
Celtic, not English (Avon means ‘river’), and some towns have
Roman-British names: Londinium became London —the Old Irish
lond means ‘wild’ . Lindum Colonia became Lincoln, partly derived
from the Welsh llyn, meaning ‘lake’. Dubris —also dwfr for ‘water’
in Welsh - became Dover. But most English place-names are English
or Danish. When, for instance, the English settled among the ruins
of Isurium they called their town Aldborough, which means simply
Old Town. One or two place-names give a vivid indication of the
mutual antipathy, the yawning communication gap, that existed
between the two sides. Cheetwood in Lancashire is a tautology.
Cbeet is an old Celtic word for ‘wood’. It is as though the English
could not be bothered to learn the language of the island they had
conquered. Again, in Buckinghamshire, there’s a place called Brill,
which comes from Bre-Hill. Yet bre is the Celtic for ‘hill’ . Whoever
named the place in Old English obviously did not understand even
the most common words of the native language. This is a pattern we
shall find repeated again when the English language travelled to

North America and Australia.
The hostility went both ways. A fragment of an early Welsh folk
song tells of a young man going ‘with a heart like lead’ to live in ‘the
land of the Saxons’ . To this day the gap between the English on the
one hand and the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish on the other, is
often huge. The Welsh campaign for bilingualism; the Scots proudly
retain separate legal and education systems and frequently despise
the Sassenachs, a Scots Gaelic version of ‘Saxons’ ; and the Irish have
been at war with the people they now, ironically, call ‘the Brits’ on
and off for nearly eight centuries. On the face of it, the English
language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence. Yet the
lyrical spirit of the Celts imbues English literature and speech from
the earliest ballads to the present day. In the way that some of the
greatest Roman poets came from the provinces, many of the finest
writers in English - for example, Swift, Burns, Burke, Scott,
Stevenson, Wilde, Shaw, and Dylan Thomas —are of Celtic origin.
English speakers have a huge debt to the poetic mind of the Celts,
and it was the scattered people of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales who
took the English language on many of the world journeys we shall be
describing.
To the Celts, their German conquerors were all Saxons, but
gradually the terms Anglii and Anglia crept into the language, also
referring to the invaders generally. About 150 years after the first
raids, King Aethelbert of Kent was styled rex Anglornm by Pope
Gregory. A century later the Venerable Bede, writing in Latin,
composed a history of what he called ‘The English church and
people’ . In the vernacular, the people were Angelcynn (Angle-kin)
and their language was Englisc. By AD 1000, the country was
generally known as Englaland, the land of the Angles.
Gradually, the Anglo-Saxons settled down and began farming
their new property. They were an agricultural people. Their art is
full of farming, and so is their vocabulary. Everyday words like
sheep, shepherd, ox, earth, plough, swine, dog, wood, field, and
work all come from Old English. After the hard struggle of daily life
in the fields, they loved to celebrate, from which come words like
glee, laughter, and mirth. Not all the words have the same meaning
now. Mirth used to mean ‘enjoyment’, or ‘happiness’ and even

‘religious joy’ . Merry, as in Merry Christmas or Merry England,
could mean no more than ‘agreeable’ or ‘pleasing’.
It is impossible - unless you go in for tortuous circumlocution - to
write a modern English sentence without using a feast of Anglo-
Saxon words. Computer analysis of the language has shown that the
roo most common words in English are all of Anglo-Saxon origin.
The basic building-blocks of an English sentence —the, is, you, and
so on - are Anglo-Saxon. Some Old English words, like mann, bus,
and drincart, hardly need translation. Equally, a large part of the
Anglo-Saxon lexicon — for example, a word like tungdwitega
meaning ‘an astrologer’ —is, to us, totally incomprehensible. These
roots are important. Anyone who speaks or writes English in the late
twentieth century is using accents, words, and grammar which, with
several dramatic modifications, go all the way back to the Old
English of the Anglo-Saxons. There is an unbroken continuity from
here to there (both Old English words). When, in 1940, Winston
Churchill wished to appeal to the hearts and minds of the English-
speaking people it is probably no accident that he did so with the
plain bareness for which Old English is noted: ‘We shall fight on the
beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the
fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never
surrender.’ In this celebrated passage, only surrender is foreign —
Norman-French.
Old English was not a uniform language. From the beginning it
had its own local varieties, just as today, on a much larger scale, the
English of California differs from the English of Auckland or of
London. The regions of Old English correspond with surprising
accuracy to the main varieties of contemporary spoken English in
the British Isles. When a Geordie from Newcastle pronounces a
word like path with a short a, or a farmer in Hardy country, in
Dorchester for example, burrs his rs, the pronunciation is a heavily
modified throwback to the local English speech of Anglo-Saxon
times. Even the ancient kingdom of Kent, conquered by the Jutes
from Jutland, still has a distinct speech-pattern whose origins can be
traced back to that first invasion.
The Anglo-Saxons, by all accounts, were very sophisticated in the
arts of speech. Theirs was, after all, an oral culture. In the late
twentieth century, we work on paper, relying on typewriters, word
processors, and Xerox machines. If we make an agreement, we insist
on seeing it in ‘black and white’. But most Anglo-Saxons would have
been unable to read or write - they had to rely on speech and
memory. Their oral tradition was highly developed; they enjoyed
expressing their ideas in an original, often rather subtle way. They
valued understatement, and liked riddles, and poems which went in
circles. These preferences suggest a certain deviousness about them,
although they also liked to cultivate an air of plain bareness, which is
not an unknown art even today.
The Anglo-Saxon love of ambiguity, innuendo, and word-play,
which remains a distinguishing characteristic of the English lan
guage to this day, can be seen very clearly in the collection of Old
English verse known as The Exeter Book o f Riddles. Riddle 69 is
simply one line: ‘On the way a miracle: water become bone.’ This is
ice. Riddle 45 is ostensibly about dough:
I’m told a certain object grows

in the corner, rises and expands, throws up
a crust. A proud wife carried off
that boneless wonder, the daughter of a King
covered that swollen thing with a cloth.
The same love of intricacy and interlacing is obvious in the visual

art of the Anglo-Saxons, in their jewellery and their manuscripts.
The jewellery discovered by archaeologists excavating the ship-
burial of an Anglo-Saxon king at Sutton Hoo shows a mastery of
geometric pattern, and provides the visual counterpart to the
complicated minds of the first English poets. It is easy to overlook
the cultural difficulties facing the Anglo-Saxons. By Roman
standards, they did not have a very developed society. But they had
lived more or less outside the pale of the Roman Empire and had no
experience of ‘civilization’. Everything had to be done for the first
time — it was a process of trial and error. Historically, the Anglo-
Saxons have had a rather mixed press; but they deserve great credit
for the energy and determination with which they developed their
own sense of culture.
SCOTLAND
4 The home of the English. The Germanic tribes - the Angles, Saxons,
] and Jutes - who invaded England during the fifth century AD came from
j the shores of northern Europe, from Holland, Germany, and Denmark. In
the words of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: 'Angles and Saxons came from
the East. Across the broad sea they sought Britain.' The closely related
Germanic languages which they spoke formed the basis of English. (There
is some dispute as to whether the Jutes came from what is now Jutland,
or from what is now Frisia.) The Saxons landed in the south and west,
along the ‘Saxon shore', the Angles in the east (in the part still known as
East Anglia), and the Jutes in Kent. The English language arrived in Celtic
Britain, defenceless after the withdrawal of the Roman legions, on the point
of a sword.
TH E W ORDS OF GOD
The civilizing energies of the Anglo-Saxons received an enormous
boost when Christianity brought its huge Latin vocabulary to
England in the year AD 597. The remarkable impact of Christianity
is reported by the Venerable Bede in a story which says as much
about the collision of Old English and l.atin as it does about the
spread of God’s word. According to the famous tradition, the
mission of St Augustine was inspired by the man who was later to
become Pope Gregory the Great. Walking one morning in the
market-place of Rome, he came upon some fair-haired boys about to
be sold as slaves. He was told they came from the island of Britain
and were pagans. ‘What a pity,’ he said, ‘that the author of darkness
is possessed of men of such fair countenances.’ What was the name
of their country? he asked. He was told that they were called Angles
(.Anglii). ‘Right,’ he replied, ‘for they have an angelic face, and it is
fitting that such should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven. What
is the name,’ he continued, ‘of the province from which they are
brought?’ He was told that they were natives of a province called
Deira. ‘Truly are they de ira,’ is the way Bede expresses the future
pope’s reply, ‘plucked from wrath and called to the memory of
Christ. How is the king of that province called?’ They told him his
name was Aella. Gregory, who appears to have had an incorrigible
taste for puns, said, ‘Alleluia, the praise of God the Creator must be
sung in those parts.’ Bede says that Gregory intended to undertake
the mission to Britain himself, but in the end he sent Augustine and a
party of about fifty monks to what must have seemed like the end of
the earth.
Augustine and his followers would have been aware that the tribes
they were setting out to convert were notoriously savage. The risk
must have seemed almost suicidal. But fortune smiled. Augustine
and his monks landed in Kent, a small kingdom which, happily for
them, already had a small Christian community. The story of the
great missionary’s arrival at the court of King Aethelbert is memor
ably reported by Bede:
When, at the king’s command, they had sat down and preached the word of
life to the king and his court, the king said: ‘Your words and promises are
fair indeed; they are new and uncertain, and I cannot accept them and
abandon the age-old beliefs that 1have held together with the whole English
nation. But since you have travelled far, and I can see that you are sincere in
your desire to impart to us what you believe to be true and excellent, we will
not harm you. We will receive you hospitably and take care to supply you
with all that you need; nor will we forbid you to preach and win any people
you can to your religion.’
After this, perhaps the earliest recorded example of English toler

ance, the liberal-minded king arranged for Augustine to have a
house in Canterbury, the capital of his tiny kingdom. He kept his
word; Augustine’s mission went ahead unhindered.
The conversion of England to Christianity was a gradual process,
but a peaceful one. No one was martyred. The mission received a
boost in AD 635 when Aidan, a charismatic preacher from the Celtic
church in Ireland, independently began the conversion of the north.
The twin sources of English Christianity are reflected in the two Old
English words for its central symbol, the cross. In the north there
was the Irish version, cros. Down south an earlier, German
borrowing, also derived from the Latin crux, produced cruc. Cruc
has vanished from the language, though there is a Crutched Friars
Street (friars with crosses) in London to this day.
With the establishment of Christianity came the building of
churches and monasteries, the corner-stones of Anglo-Saxon cul
ture, providing education in a wide range of subjects. Bede, himself a
pupil at the monastery in Jarrow, writes that not only were the great
monk-teachers learned ‘in sacred and profane literature’, they also
taught poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. The new monasteries also
encouraged writing in the vernacular, and all the plastic arts.
Astonishing work in stone and glass, rich embroidery, magnificent
illuminated manuscripts, were all fostered by the monks, as were
church music and architecture.
The importance of this cultural revolution in the story of the
English language is not merely that it strengthened and enriched Old
English with new words, more than 400 of which survive to this day,
but also that it gave English the capacity to express abstract thought.
Before the coming of St Augustine, it was easy to express the
common experience of life - sun and moon, hand and heart, sea and
land, heat and cold - in Old English, but much harder to express
more subtle ideas without resort to rather elaborate, German-style
portmanteaux like frnmiveorc (fruma, beginning, and iveorc, work

= creation). Now, there were Greek and Latin words like angel,
disciple, litany, martyr, mass, relic, shrift, shrine, and psalm ready to
perform quite sophisticated functions. The conversion of England
changed the language in three obvious ways: it gave us a large
church vocabulary; it introduced words and ideas ultimately from as
far away as India and China; and it stimulated the Anglo-Saxons to
apply existing words to new concepts.
Church words came from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Disciple,
shrine, preost, biscop, nonne, and munuc (monk) all have Latin
origins. Apostle, pope, and psalter are borrowed, via the Scriptures,
from Greek. Sabbath comes from Hebrew. Angelos (messenger) and
diabolos (slanderer) were transformed into angel and devil, central
figures in the Madame Tussaud’s of early Christianity. Easter is a
curiosity: the word preserves the name of Eostre, the pagan goddess
of dawn. To understand the speed and completeness with which the
language of the Bible was absorbed into Old English, we have only
to think of the way in which our own contemporary vocabulary has
become permeated by the language of psychology and psychoanaly
sis with words like ego, id, angst, and subconscious.
The oriental origins of the Christian faith introduced words from
the Bible —camel, lion, cedar, myrrh —which must have seemed as
exotic and strange to a seventh-century Englishman as, say, recent
borrowings from Japanese culture like kamikaze and ju-jitsu did at
first. Also from the. East came exotic words like orange and pepper,
the names India and Saracen, and phoenix, the legendary bird.
Oyster and mussel are both Mediterranean borrowings, while
ginger comes ultimately from Sanskrit.
Perhaps most interesting of all is the way Old English reinvented
and rejuvenated itself in the face of this Latin cornucopia by giving
old words new meanings. God, heaven, and hell are all Old English
words which, with the arrival of Christianity, became charged with
a deeper significance. The Latin spiritus sanctus, or Holy Spirit,
became translated as Halig Cast (Holy Ghost), feond (fiend) was
used as a synonym for Devil, and Judgement Day became, in Old
English, Doomsday. The Latin evangelium (good news) became the
English god-spell, which gives us gospel. To this day, the power of
the English language to express the same thought or object in either
5 The varieties of Old English. There are more varieties of English in

Britain than in any comparable area of the English-speaking world, and the
origins of this diversity can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon settlement.
The present-day division of the country into the South, Midlands, and North
is matched by the regions of Saxon, Mercian, and Northumbrian English.
The distinctive tones of the South-East - Kentish - are first owed to the
Jutes. The Gaelic language was spoken in Cornwall until the eighteenth
century, and still persists in Wales. Note the influence of rivers in marking
the speech boundaries. (The Saxons also provided some English county
names: Essex, Middlesex, and Sussex for the East, Middle and South
Saxons.)
an early vernacular or a more elaborate Latinate style is one of its

most remarkable characteristics, and one which enables it to have a
unique subtlety and flexibility of meaning.
By the end of the eighth century, the impact of Christianity on
Anglo-Saxon England had produced a culture unrivalled in Europe.
The illuminated manuscripts of the famous monastery at Lindis-
farne, on Holy Island off the Northumbrian coast, show how words
and pictures had both achieved a kind of perfection. But in the
eighth and ninth centuries this culture faced another threat from
what was to become the second great influence on the making of
English —the sea-warriors from the North.
TH E V IK IN G IN V A SIO N S
The mass movement of the Scandinavian peoples between the years
AD 750 and 1050, one of the great migrations of European history,
began as plunder-raids and ended as conquest and settlement.
People from what is now known as Sweden established a kingdom in
part of European Russia. Adventurers from Norway colonized parts
of the British Isles, the Faroes, and Iceland, pushed on to Greenland
and eventually the coast of Labrador. And the Danes - also called
Norsemen —conquered northern France (which became Normandy)
and finally England. Collectively, these peoples are referred to as the
Vikings, a name which is thought to come either from the Norse vik
(a bay, indicating ‘one who frequents inlets of the sea’) or from the
Old English wic, a camp, the formation of temporary encampments
being a prominent feature of Viking raids. In the past, the Vikings
have been described as daring pirates but, while there is obviously
much truth to the stereotype, recent scholarship likes to emphasize
the long-term peaceful benefits of the Norse landings. It has been
suggested, too, that the native Anglo-Saxons took advantage of the
Viking raids to settle old scores with each other. Unlike the Anglo-
Saxon race war against the Celts, which preserved virtually no trace
of the Celtic languages in English, the Danish settlers had a
profound influence on the development of Old English.
The Viking raids against England began in earnest in the year AD
793 when the monasteries of Jarrow and Lindisfarne were sacked in
successive seasons and plundered of gold and silver. By the middle of
the ninth century almost half the country was in Viking hands. The
Norsemen, referred to by the Anglo-Saxons as ‘Danes’, turned their

forces against the jewel in the crown: the kingdom of Wessex.
The king of Wessex was a young man named Alfred, who had
inherited the throne in 871 after his brother was killed beating off
the first of the Danish attacks from the north. It is perhaps a measure
both of Alfred’s qualities and of the desperate situation in Wessex
that Alfred was chosen in preference to his brother’s sons. For a
time, the Vikings seemed unstoppable. By 878 Alfred was reduced to
taking refuge with a small band of followers in the marshes of
Somerset on the island of Athelney. The story of Alfred burning the
cakes while brooding on the plight of his kingdom symbolizes the
gravity of his situation. This was the moment at which it became
suddenly possible that English might be wiped out altogether. With
no English-speaking kingdoms left, the country would gradually
speak Norse. The turning-point came that same year. Alfred raised a
fresh army of men from Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, and,
surprising the Danes, overwhelmed them at the battle of Ethandune,
a victory commemorated by a white horse carved on the hillside.
The subsequent Treaty of Wedmore saved Wessex. The Danes
withdrew to the north. Alfred and the English-speaking Saxons
ruled in the south and the country was partitioned roughly along the
line of Watling Street, the old Roman road that ran from London to
Chester. Having won the war, Alfred set out to make sure he won
the peace. His problem was that his power-base was too small to
guarantee that the peace with the Danes would hold, or that
Englishmen living outside Wessex in, for example, Mercia (Worces
tershire and Warwickshire) would not be gradually drawn into the
Danish empire.
As king of Wessex Alfred had sovereignty only over people who
lived in the counties of the south-west centred on Dorset, Wiltshire,
Somerset, and Hampshire, based around the capital city, Winches
ter. He had no power over, for example, people who lived in
Oxfordshire or Shropshire. Yet his continued survival against the
Vikings depended on men and money from the counties outside
Wessex. Somehow he had to retain political control of territory that
was not his. He did this by appealing to a shared sense of
Englishness, conveyed by the language. Alfred quite consciously
used the English language as a means of creating a sense of national

identity.
Without Alfred the Great the history of the English language
might have been quite different. He set about restoring his kingdom
to its former greatness. He began rebuilding the monasteries and the
schools. It was his inspiration to use English, not Latin, as the basis
for the education of his people. At the age of nearly forty, amid what
he called the ‘various and manifold cares of his kingdom’, he learnt
Latin so that he could translate (or arrange for the translation of)
various key texts, notably Bede’s Historic! Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum (History o f the English Church and People). Alfred
describes his English-language campaign in a famous preface:
Therefore it seems better to me . . . that we should also translate certain
books which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language that
we can all understand, and also arrange it . . . so that all the youth of free
men now among the English people . . . are able to read English writing as
well.
There is one story (recorded by his biographer, Bishop Asser) that

perhaps demonstrates more than any other Alfred’s understanding
of books and language. When he was young, Asser writes, Alfred
was sitting, with some other children, at his mother’s feet. She had
on her lap a book written in English, and the boy was struck by the
beauty of the decorated initial on the first page. As the story goes, his
mother said that she would give the book to whoever could learn the
book and repeat it to her. So Alfred went away, learnt the book,
returned to his mother, repeated the text, and won the prize. Not
only does the story convey —as it was designed to do —the future
king’s drive and tenacity; it also reveals his belief in the importance
of culture. Alfred understood that his people needed history to
remind them of their loyalties. So he instituted a chronicle, a record
of current events, unique in Europe. The saviour of the English
language, he was also the founder of English prose. No other English
monarch is remembered as ‘Great’.
After Alfred, the Danes and the Saxons lived alongside each other
for generations, more or less at peace. Because both their languages
had the same Germanic roots, the language frontier broke down and
a kind of natural pidginization took place that gradually simplified
THE STORY OF ENGLISH
Lindisfarne AD 793
i on let
-Whitby
6 The influence of the Norsemen. The Norse raids, beginning with the
destruction of Lindisfarne in 793, had a lasting influence on the structure
and vocabulary of English. After their defeat by Alfred the Great, the Danes
withdrew north of a line agreed by treaty (known later as ‘the Danelaw’),
where they settled alongside the Saxon communities. This map shows how
the east coast bore the brunt of Viking attacks, how Norse settlement was
confined within ‘the Danelaw’ , and how the Vikings left their mark on the
place-names of the North Country. One of the most characteristic Norse
place-name endings was by, meaning ‘a farm’.
the structure of Old English. Professor Tom Shippey, who has made
a close study of the mingling of Saxon and Viking culture, vividly
explains the process:
Consider what happens when somebody who speaks, shall we say, good
Old English from the south of the country runs into somebody from the
north-east who speaks good Old Norse. They can no doubt communicate
with each other, but the complications in both languages are going to get
lost. So if the Anglo-Saxon from the South wants to say (in good Old
English) ‘I’ll sell you the horse that pulls my cart,’ he says: i c selle the that
hors the draegeth minne waegn.’
Now the old Norseman —if he had to say this —would say: ‘Ek mun selja
ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine.’
So, roughly speaking, they understand each other. One says ‘waegn’ and
the other says ‘vagn’. One says ‘hors’ and ‘draegeth’ ; the other says ‘hros’
and ‘dregr’, but broadly they are communicating. They understand the main
words. What they don’t understand are the grammatical parts of the
sentence. For instance, the man speaking good Old English says for one
horse ‘that hors’ but for two horses he says ‘tha hors’. Now the Old Norse
speaker understands the word horse all right, but he’s not sure if it means
one or two because in Old English you say ‘one horse’, ‘two horse’. There is
no difference between the two words for horse. The difference is conveyed
in the word for ‘the’ and the old Norseman might not understand this
because his word for ‘the’ doesn’t behave like that. So: are you trying to sell
me one horse or are you trying to sell me two horses? If you get enough
situations like that there is a strong drive towards simplifying the language.
Before the arrival of the Danes, Old English, like most European
languages at that time, was a strongly inflected language. Common
words like ‘king’ or ‘stone’ relied on word-endings to convey a
meaning for which we now use preopositions like ‘to’, ‘with’, and
‘from’. In Old English, ‘the king’ is se cyning, ‘to the king’ is thaem
cyninge. In Old English, they said one start (stone), two stanas
(stones). The simplification of English by the Danes gradually helped
to eliminate these word-endings, as Tom Shippey explains:
Nowadays we say the same thing for all the plurals. We say, stone, stones
and king, kings. The language became simplified because these compli
cations become very difficult to keep going when you have to speak to
someone who does not have a total grasp of it, and perhaps especially
difficult if you’re talking to someone who has a 90 per cent grasp of it. The
vital 10 per cent is just enough difficulty to give the wrong impression. It's
very much the situation you have now between the Danes and the Swedes.
They think they can understand each other; they say they can understand
each other. But they go away from the same conversation with different
opinions about what’s actually been agreed.
A little church in Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, tells the story of the

way the Vikings almost won the war and how they lost the peace. In
the porch is a sundial. Lovingly chiselled into the stone is the
resoundingly Viking name of the man who made it: Orm Gamals-
son. But on closer inspection the inscription turns out to be worked
in Old English, not Old Norse. Barely one hundred years after his
people had invaded Britain, Orm Gamalsson is writing (and
presumably thinking) in English. Evidence of the way Saxon and
Dane lived alongside each other is in the place-names that survive to
this day. Saxon place-names are easy to spot. Places, like Clapham,
ending in ham (meaning a settlement), ing (as in Worthing), stowe
(as in Hawkstowe), sted (as in Oxsted), and ton (as in Brighton) are
all likely to be of Saxon origin. Viking place-names have similarly
characteristic endings. Anywhere ending in by (meaning originally a
farm, then a village) is almost certainly of Danish origin, as in
Grimsby or Derby. Another Viking place-name ending is wick as in
Swainswick, Keswick, and Chiswick. Thorpe (Danish) and thwaite
(Norwegian) are also common Viking names, as is toft (meaning a
plot of land), and scale (a temporary hut or shelter).
The place-names along a stretch of the Lincolnshire coast give an
indication of the way in which Saxon and Dane co-existed, and how
the Danes had to work hard to find land for themselves. Lincolnshire
is flat and marshy and liable to flooding from the sea. The Anglo-
Saxons lived inland in places like Covenham and Alvingham. But
less than five miles away, Danes lived in North Thoresby. Towards
the coast itself, having established a sea-dyke to drain the marshland
and make the land workable, Danish settlements were established in
Grainthorpe and Skidbrooke. (Evidence from a study of the type of
land settled indicates that the incoming Danes often left the English
undisturbed and settled on the less good, still-empty land.) The best
hint of the mixing of Saxon and Dane comes from a place-name like
Melton. Melton was almost certainly Middletoun in Old English.

When the Vikings came they would have recognized the meaning of
the name, but replaced the Old English middle with the Scandina
vian meddle, giving Meddleton, and finally Melton.
The impact of Old Norse on the English language is hard to
evaluate with much accuracy, precisely because the two languages
were so similar. Nine hundred words — for example, get, hit, leg,
low, root, skin, same, want, and wrong —are certainly of Scandina
vian origin and typically plain-syllabled. Words beginning with sk,
like sky and skein, are Norse. There are probably hundreds more we
cannot account for definitely, and in the old territory of the Danelaw
in northern England literally thousands of Old Norse borrowings,
words like beck (stream), laithe (barn), and garth (yard), survive in
regional use. Riding, derived from an Old Norse word meaning ‘a
third part’, was used to indicate the division of an English county,
Yorkshire, until recently. Riding is also used in Canada to describe a
parliamentary constituency. There is another influence derived from
these northern invaders we shall look at later: the beginnings of
Scots English.
In many cases the old Norse borrowings stood alongside their
English equivalents. The Norse skirt originally meant the same as
the English shirt. The Norse deyja (to die) joined its Anglo-Saxon
synonym, the English steorfa (which ends up in the dictionaries as
starve). You can rear (English) or raise (Norse) a child. Other
synonyms or near-synonyms include: wish and want, craft and skill,
hide and skin. Thanks to the Danes, the language was given another
dimension, more light and shade, and more variety.
The fusion of Saxon and Viking is epitomized in Beowulf, a poem
of some 3,000 lines, the greatest single work of Old English
literature, as intricate and subtle as the illuminated manuscripts
painted at the same time. It reveals a reflective and ruminative
temper of mind, obsessed with the transience of life, with heroism,
and with the keeping of dignity in the face of defeat. These lines are
typical of the mood of the poem:
There’s no joy from harp-play,

gleewood’s gladness, no good hawk,
swings through the hall now, no swift horse
tramps at threshold: the threat came:

falling has felled a flowering kingdom.
Other surviving poems from this time emphasize the character of rite
Anglo-Saxon experience. The poets write of the cruel sea, ruined
cities, the life of the minstrel, and of war and exile. The pinnacle of
the Vikings’ achievement - and of Danish integration into English
society - was marked around the year AD 1000, when Cnut, king of
Denmark (known to legend as wise King Canute), inherited the
English throne, conquered Norway, and ruled over most of the
Scandinavian world. From then on their story is one of rapid decline.
TH E N O R M A N IN V A SIO N
In 1066 the English language once again showed an astonishing
adaptability in surviving another major linguistic collision following
the landing of the Norman French at Hastings. It was the limpid
English prose of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that recorded this
event, in a few doom-laden paragraphs:
Then Count William came from Normandy to Pevensey on Michaelmas Eve

[28 September], and as soon as they were able to move they built a castle at
Hastings. King Harold was informed of this and he assembled a large army
and came against him at the hoary apple-tree, and William came against him
by surprise before his army was drawn up in battle array. But the king
nevertheless fought hard against him, with the men who were willing to
support him, and there were heavy casualties on both sides. Then King
Harold was killed and Earl Leofwine his brother, and Earl Gyrth his
brother, and many good men, and the French remained masters of the
field . . .
The Norman victory at Hastings changed the face of English for

ever. Harold was the last English-speaking king for nearly three
hundred years. It was, in the words of one scholar, ‘an event which
had a greater effect on the English language than any other in the
course of its history’. In the short run it must have seemed like a
disaster for the English. The Normans seized control of their new
territory with systematic rigour. Norman castles, built by English
workmen, were garrisoned by Norman soldiers and used as strong
points to hold down the countryside. The English royal family and
Harold’s court had been destroyed in battle. William established his
own regime, rewarding those who had supported his expedition

across the Channel. The English poet Robert of Brunne wrote:
To French and Normans, for their great labour,
To Flemings and Picards, that were with him in battle,
Hie gave lands betimes, of which their successors
Hold yet the seizin, with full great honour.
William also purged the English church: Norman bishops and

abbots gradually took over in the cathedrals and monasteries. For
several generations after the Conquest all important positions in the
country were dominated by French-speaking Normans.
William’s coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day
1066, an act of triumph, symbolized the condition of England for
the next two hundred years. He was crowned in a ceremony that
used both English and Latin. He himself spoke the French of
Normandy and though he tried to learn English at the age of forty-
three he was too busy to keep it up. So from 1066 there were three
languages in play and the overwhelming majority of English people
experienced the humiliations of a linguistic apartheid: religion, law,
science, literature were all conducted in languages other than
English, as words like felony, perjury, attorney , bailiff, and nobility
testify.
A twelfth-century miracle story expresses the bitter resentment
the English felt. A friend of St Wulfric of Haselbury, a certain
Brother William, laid hands on a dumb man who had been brought
to him. At once the man could speak both English and French. The
local parish priest, Brichtric, complained that this was unfair. He
had served the church faithfully for many years and yet Brother
William had made it possible for a total stranger to speak two
languages while he, Brichtric, had to remain dumb in the presence of
his bishop. Though he was a priest, Brichtric knew little or no Latin,
and no French.
Going by the written record alone, the supremacy of Norman
French and Latin seems total. In 115 4 , the English monks who
wrote The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle abandoned their work for ever. A
great silence seems to descend on English writing. In court, church,
and government circles, French was established as the smart and
Latin as the professional language. There is, for instance, the story of
Bishop William of Ely, Chancellor of England during the reign of

Richard the Lionheart (Coeur de Lion). Disgraced politically, the
bishop tried to escape from England in 1 1 9 1 disguised as a woman
and carrying under his arm some cloth for sale. He reached Dover
safely but was discovered when he was asked by an Engish woman
what he would charge for an ell of cloth. He could not reply because
he knew no English — and it was inconceivable that his low-born
captors could speak French.
The Norman kings were often totally ignorant of English,
although Henry 1, who had an English wife, was an exception and
could speak some English. No doubt in upper-class circles it was the
fashionable thing to speak French. To this day the use of French
words in conversation is thought to show sophistication, or savoir-
faire. The situation is summarized by the historian known as Robert
of Gloucester:
For but a man know French men count of him little.
But low men hold to English and to their own speech yet.
I think there are in all the world no countries
That don’t hold to their own speech but England alone.
Though French had the social and cultural prestige, Latin remained
the principal language of religion and learning. The English vernacu
lar survived as the common speech, obviously a matter of pride for
Robert of Gloucester. The mingling of these three powerful
traditions can be seen in the case of a word like kingly. The Anglo-
Saxons had only one word to express this concept, which, with
typical simplicity, they made up from the word king. After the
Normans, three synonyms enter the language: royal, regal, and
sovereign. The capacity to express three or four different shades of
meaning and to make fine distinctions is one of the hallmarks of the
language after the Conquest, as word groups such as rise-mount-
ascend, ask-question-interrogate, or time-age-epoch suggest.
Yet the use of French in England was probably natural to only an
élite of churchmen and magnates. The continuity of the English
language in the mouths of the mass of ordinary people was never in
doubt. Why did English survive? Why was it not absorbed into the
dominant Norman tongue? There are three reasons. First and most
obvious: the pre-Conquest Old English vernacular, both written and
spoken, was simply too well established, too vigorous, and, thanks
to its fusion with the Scandinavian languages, too hardy to be
obliterated. It is one thing for the written record to become Latin
and French (writing was the skilled monopoly of church-educated
clerks), but it would have needed many centuries of French rule to
eradicate it as the popular speech of ordinary people. The English
speakers had an overwhelming demographic advantage. Pragmati
cally, it is obvious that the English were not going to stop speaking
English because they had been conquered by a foreigner.
Second, English survived because almost immediately the Nor
mans began to intermarry with those they had conquered. Of
course, in the first generation after the Conquest, there were bound
to be deep divisions within society. There is a document dating from
around i ioo addressed to ‘all his faithful people, both French and
English, in Herefordshire’ from Henry 1. But this did not last. Barely
one hundred years after the invasion, a chronicler wrote that ‘The
two nations have become so mixed that it is scarcely possible today,
speaking of free men, to tell who is English and who is of Norman
race.’ One can imagine the situation of a minor Norman knight
living in a small manor in the English countryside surrounded by
English peasants, served in the house by English maids, his estates
managed by an English steward, and his children playing with
English children. He would have to pick up some English to survive,
and to quell the natural resentment of his subjects. There is plenty of
evidence of the peaceful co-existence of Norman overlords and
English subjects. There were French towns alongside the English at
Norwich and Nottingham. Southampton still has a French Street,
one of its principal thoroughfares in the Middle Ages. Petty France
in London is known to anyone who has had to visit the Passport
Office.
The great historian Ordericus Vitalis provides good evidence of
the decline of French in educated society, both courtly and clerical.
The son of a Norman knight and an English mother, Ordericus was
born less than a decade after the Conquest near Shrewsbury and was
taught Latin by a local priest. At the age of ten he was sent to
continue his education in a monastery in Normandy. There, he
writes (in Latin, of course), ‘Like Joseph in Egypt, I heard a language
which 1 did not know.’ In other words, he knew no French.
Third, and perhaps most important, in 1204, thanks to the

military impetuosity of King John, the Anglo-Normans lost control
of their French territory across the Channel. Many of the Norman
nobility, who had held lands in both countries and divided their time
between them, were forced to declare allegiance either to France or
to England. Simon de Montfort’s family separated their estates in
this way: ‘My brother Amaury,’ said de Montfort, ‘released to me
our brother’s whole inheritance in England, provided that I could
secure it; in return 1 released to him what I had in France.’ This
process of separation reached a turning-point in 1244 when the king
of France made a decisive move, announcing that, ‘As it is imposs
ible that any man living in my kingdom, and having possessions in
England, can competently serve two masters, he must either insepar
ably attach himself to me or to the king of England.’
‘ C O M M O N M EN KNO W NO F R E N C H ’
In the early years of the thirteenth century, long before the outbreak
of hostilities with France known as the Hundred Years War, we find
English making a comeback at both the written and the spoken level.
Church sermons, prayers, and carols especially are expressed in
English. The first known appearance of an English word in a Latin
document occurs in an account of a court case brought by Henry 111
against some of his citizens. The clerk, trained in Latin, who
recorded the proceedings found himself lost for the right Latin word
to describe the king’s suit. Instead, we find him writing in English
that it is nameless (or, as we should say, ‘pointless’). More and more
records were now kept in English; more and more upper-class
Englishmen were keeping up their French only for the sake of
appearances. The great silence that had apparently fallen over the
written language from 1066 to 1200 began to be broken, at first
with a few simple messages and then with a flood of documents.
English writings like The Owl and the Nightingale and the
Ancrene Riwle are probably the tip of an iceberg of lost manu
scripts: and of course church sermons and hymns would undoubt
edly have been given in English. Anti-French feeling —complaints
that London is full of foreigners —was greatly provoked during the
reign of Henry III, which ended in 1272. Henry was wholly French
and surrounded himself with French favourites. The confused
situation is exemplified by the Barons’ revolt of Simon de Montfort

in the middle of the century —for all his ancestry, it was distinctly
anti-French in spirit. At the same time, the English bishop Grosse
teste (obviously of Norman blood) denounced Henry’s French
courtly circle as ‘not merely foreigners; they are the worst enemies of
England. They strive to tear the fleece and do not even know the
faces of the sheep; they do not understand the English tongue . . .’
At the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I, who was very
conscious of his Englishness, whipped up patriotic feeling against
the king of France, declaring that it was ‘his detestable purpose,
which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue’. The growing
power and spread of the vernacular is expressed by a contemporary
poet who wrote:
Common men know no French

Among a hundred scarcely one
Even among the educated classes it seems clear that French had
become an acquired, not a natural, language. There is a little
textbook dating from the mid-thirteenth century written by a knight
known as Walter of Bibbesworth. It was designed to teach English-
speaking children how to learn French, ‘which every gentleman
ought to know’ . (Throughout Flurope, French was the language of
chivalry, just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the
language of diplomacy.) Two hundred years after the Norman
Conquest, the descendants of William’s knights were almost cer
tainly acquiring French in the schoolroom, not the cradle.
English had now become much more self-assertive. The new note
of nationalistic pride in the language is sounded in the introduction
to a long biblical poem called Cursor Mundi: ‘This book is
translated into English for the love of the English people, English
people of England, and for the common man to understand . . .’ As
English-language consciousness grew, churches and universities
tried to stop the decline of French. For instance, the foundation
statutes of Oriel and The Queen’s College (13 16 and 1340) at
Oxford University required that the undegraduates should converse
in French and Latin. At Merton things were obviously going to the
dogs. There was a report that the Fellows spoke English at High
Table and wore ‘dishonest shoes’. The battle for French was a losing
one, partly because English French was certainly not a prestige

dialect, a point that Chaucer makes with his usual irony when he
writes about the Prioress:
And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly,

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frenssh of Parys was to hir unknowe.
The Hundred Years War with France (13 3 7 -14 5 4 ) provided a

major impetus to speak English, not French. At the same time, the
outbreak of the mysterious disease known as ‘The Black Death’, by
making labour scarce, improved and accelerated the rise in status of
the English working man (a process that culminated in the Peasants’
Revolt of 13 8 1). It caused so many deaths in the monasteries and
churches that a new generation of semi-educated, non-French and
Latin speakers took over as abbots and prioresses. After the plague,
students at school began to construe their French and Latin lessons
in English not French, to the obvious detriment of French. In 1325,
the chronicler William of Nassyngton wrote:
Latin can no one speak, I trow,

But those who it from school do know;
And some know French, but no Latin
Who’re used to Court and dwell therein,
And some use Latin, though in part,
Who if known have not the art,
And some can understand English
That neither Latin knew, nor French
But simple or learned, old or young
All understand the English tongue.
English now appears at every level of society. In 1356 , the mayor

and aldermen of London ordered that court proceedings there be
heard in English; in 136 2, the Chancellor opened Parliament in
English. During Wat Tyler’s rebellion in 13 8 1, Richard II spoke to
the peasants in English. In the last year of the century the proceed
ings for the deposition of Richard II (together with the document by
which he renounced the throne) were in English. Henry IY ’s
speeches claiming the throne and later accepting it were also in
English. The mother tongue had survived.
M ID D LE EN G LISH
But English had changed; it had become the form known to scholars
as Middle English, a term devised in the nineteenth century to
describe the English language from AD 1 1 5 0 to 1500. The dis
tinction - given the collapse of Old English writing - is partly
artificial. Much of what is called Middle English is no more than a
record in writing of what had already happened to spoken Old
English. Thus, while spoken Old English had almost certainly lost
most of its inflections by the time of the Norman Conquest, it is not
until written Middle English that the changes show up in the
documents. Perhaps the most vital simplification, now' fully estab
lished, was the loss of Old English word endings, which were
replaced by prepositions, words like by, with, and from.
An example of what happened in the transition from Old English
to Middle English is shown in the story of the letter y. In Old
English, y represented, in some cases, the sound which French
scribes wrote as u : a short vowel. So Old English mycel became
Middle English muchel, which ends up as Modern English much.
But when y stood for a long vowel the long u was written by the
French scribes as ui. So the Old English fyr, becomes the Middle
English fuir, and the modern fire. To make the matter more
complicated, the original vowel sound, short or long, represented by
the Old English y, sounded different in different parts of the country.
In the North and East down to the East Midlands as far as London,
the short vowel sound became roughly like that represented by
modern English i, as in kin. In Kent and parts of East Anglia it
became the sound represented by e, as in merry. In the West
Country, it became the sound now represented by 00 as in mood,
but in those days spelt u. The same word at the same period in
Middle English was therefore spelt differently in different parts of
the country. Old English for ‘kin’, cyn, for example, could be kyn,
ken, or kun. In the case of byrgen (which had Middle English
variants birien, burien, berien) Modern English has kept the western
spelling, bury, while using the Kentish pronunciation, berry, while
busy reflects the western spelling but is pronounced as the London/
East Midlands ‘bizzy’.
So what had happened to the language map of England? The short
answer is that it had not changed much from Anglo-Saxon times,

though with the development of written English it had developed
strong local forms, written and spoken. For instance, the author of
Cursor Mundi notes that he found the story of the Assumption of
Our Lady in southern English and translated it for ‘northern people
who can read no other English’. And even Chaucer launches Troilus
and Criseyde with his famous ‘Go, litel book’, adding
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey 1 God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.
Spoken English differed from county to county as it does in rural

districts to this day. The five main speech areas —Northern, West
and East Midlands, Southern and Kentish —are strikingly similar to
contemporary English speech areas. Within the East Midlands, one
small nucleus of power, trade and learning —the triangle of Oxford,
Cambridge, and London —shared the same kind of English, which
may be said to have become the basis for Standard English in the
twentieth century.
Stanley Ellis, an authority on English speech varieties, has devoted
his life to studying the bizarre nuances and definitions of English
speech. He takes his tape-recorder into the English countryside and
by a process of gentle inquiry discovers local variations in usage, of
both vocabulary and accent. In this passage, he is trying to establish
the local Yorkshire for a watercourse. His informant speaks broad
Yorkshire, pronouncing ‘no’ as nae, ‘nude’ as noody and ‘leap’ as
lope.
Stan ley ELLIS: You’ve been in farming all your life. Farming’s altered a
lot, hasn’t it?
info rm an t : Oh, my God, there’s no comparison to when I started.
ELLIS: In the old days, how did you get your drainage to the fields? The
gutters would be drains, and the gutters would then run out into
the . . . ?
info rm an t : The beck.
ELLIS: Ah yes. The beck. N ow what’s the difference between a beck and
a gutter?
info rm an t :Why of course the beck’s considerably wider than th’ gutter
. . . We used to bathe in th’ beck you know. Oh aye. Went
hollocking down here and it was nowt to be nude and leap into th’
water.
Not only does Ellis establish the distinction between beck and
‘gutter’, and bollocking for ‘galloping’, he also collects a piece of
authentic folk practice —bathing in the river. In another part of the
country, in Kent for example, the conversation would have been
different. David North is one of Ellis’s pupils. His conversation with
a local farmer goes as follows:
david n o rth : What do you call a stretch of water at the edge of a field
that you drain the field with?
info rm an t : A stretch of water? A pond?
no rth : Well, the sort of thing along the hedge to drain —
info rm an t : Oh, the ditch, the dyke —well, some people call it dyke. My
old people called it ditch.
And so on. The one thing missing on the page of print, of course, is
the sound. In the first extract, the Yorkshireman is hard for most
people to understand; in the second, the man from Kent is easier,
even though he says doik for ‘dyke’ and oi for T . This is simply
because he is geographically closer to the Standard English dialect of
London. To put it another way, if Edinburgh not London were the
capital of the British Isles, Standard English would sound like
Scottish English. There is nothing special about Standard English
except that it happens to be the speech of the capital, the prestige
English.
‘ FIR ST FO U N D EU R AN D E M B E L L ISSH E R OF OUR

E N G L IS H ’
The career and achievement of one man, Geoffrey Chaucer,
exemplifies the triumph of London English. By making a conscious
choice to write in English, he symbolizes the rebirth of English as a
national language. Born in 1340 of a provincial middle-class family
in the wine trade, he was, in the custom of the time, educated as a
squire in a noble household, later joining the king’s retinue. He
began his writing life as a translator and imitator. His later work
offers some clues to the life of the poet. In The Parlement o f Fowles
he tells how he reads in bed at night because he cannot sleep. From
13 7 0 to 13 9 1, Chaucer was busy on the king’s business at home and
abroad. He is recorded negotiating a trade agreement in Genoa, and
on a diplomatic mission to Milan, from which he acquired a taste for
Italian poetry. Petrarch was still alive in Florence and Boccaccio was
lecturing on Dante, though there is no way of knowing if Chaucer
met either of them. During these years he composed much of his best
work: The House o f Fame, The Parlement o f Fowles, Troilus and
Criseyde, and translated the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.
It is likely that it was around this time that he began to work on his
masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, poems which he would either
read aloud in the traditional manner or, as was becoming the
practice, pass around for reading. In the final years of his life, with
England divided by fierce political rivalries, Chaucer’s career at
court faltered. The last reference to him comes in December 1399,
when he took a lease on a house in the garden of Westminster
Abbey. He died on 25 October 1400 and was buried in the Abbey.
Recognized as a great poet in his lifetime, in both France and
England (‘noble Geffrey Chaucier’, as a French poet called him), he
is one of those writers of genius on whom English has always
depended for its important transformations. He took as his subjects
all classes of men and women: the Knight, the Prioress, and the
famous Wife of Bath. Chaucer was alive to the energy and potential
of the language of everyday speech. He pokes fun at Yorkshire
speech, he dazzles the reader with word-play, and he mocks the
pretensions of people who claim to know French and Latin. He
writes of the Summoner:
Wei loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes,

And for to drynken strong wyn, reed as blood;
Thanne wolde he speke and crie as he were wood.
And when that he wel dronken hadde the wyn.
Than wolde he speke nor word but Latyn.
Of the Friar, Hubert, he says:
Somewhat he lisped, for his wantownesse,

To make his English sweete upon his tonge;
Chaucer benefited enormously from the preceding three hundred

years of language evolution. This can be shown in one line, the
words of Criseyde, spoken to her knight, Troilus:
Welcome, my knyght, my pees, my suffisance
Welcome, my knyght are all original English words, though knyght,

from the Old English cnibt, ‘boy’, has, under French social and
military influence, come to connote a vast structure of concepts and
feelings. Peace is one of the earliest words recorded as borrowed
from French after the Conquest, replacing English grith. Suffisance,
a grand, rather abstract word for ‘satisfaction’ is another French
borrowing, from an obviously Latin source. The richness of Middle
English, Latinized and Frenchified by Christianity and Conquest,
inspires the opening lines of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales, which many have quoted before and which we must quote
again:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne.
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . .
It was Dryden, writing in the seventeenth century, who gave most

eloquent expression to the debt the English language owes to its first
major poet:
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 G o d ’s
plenty.
Chaucer’s time also saw the emergence of English surnames, family

names. In Anglo-Saxon peasant society it was enough for a man to
be identified as Egbert or Heorogar. Later, a second stage would
produce the ‘son of’ prefix or suffix —Johnson, Thomson, Jobson.
As English society became more sophisticated, Christian or first
names were not enough. People began to be identified by where they
lived, hence Brooks , Rivers, Hill, and Dale. Or more specifically:
Washington, Lincoln, or Cleveland. The next most common form of
identification was occupation: Driver, Butcher, Hunter, Glover,
Sadler, Miller, Cooper, Weaver, Porter, Carpenter, Mason,
Thatcher, Salter, Waxman, Barber, Bowman, Priest, Abbot, Piper,
Harper, Constable. Then there were continental names of people/
families from abroad: Fleming, French, Holland. The Welsh con
tributed Evans (a version of Johns), Owens, and Rhys (Reece). The
Welsh LI underwent phonetic assimilation, giving us both Floyd and
Lloyd. Shakespeare’s Captain Fluellen was the English version of
Llewellyn. In Scotland, Me or Mac is well known as son of, a prefix
attached to occupations as in the South: McPherson means ‘son of
the parson’ . A few names go back into Scottish mythology. McCor
mack means ‘son of Chariot-Lad’ and McRory means ‘son of Red-
King’. The arrival of the Norman French also introduced names like
Fitzjobn, Gascoygne, Francis, Lorraine, Baillie, Gerard, Gerald,
Raymond, and Vernon. Geoffrey Chaucer himself had a French first
name and a half-French surname. Chaucer (from the Old French
chaustier, shoemaker) came from his grandfather’s residence in
Cordwainer (Leatherworker) Street.
Chaucer wrote in English, but the language of government was
still officially French. Yet only seventeen years after the poet’s death,
Henry V became the first English king since Harold to use English in
his offical documents, including his will. In the summer of 14 15 ,
Henry crossed the Channel to fight the French. In the first letter he
dictated on French soil he chose, symbolically, not to write in the
language of his enemies. This national statement indicates a turning-
point, as decisive in its own way as Alfred’s use of English in the
ninth century. Henry’s predecessor, Edward III, could only swear in

English; now it was the official language of English kings.
Henry V ’s example clearly made an impression on his people.
There is a resolution made by the London brewers, dating from the
year of Henry’s death, 1422, which adopts English by decree:
Whereas our mother tongue, to wit, the English tongue, hath in modern
days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned; for that our most
excellent lord king Henry the Fifth hath, in his letters missive, and divers
affairs touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets
of his will [in it]; and for the better understanding of his people, hath, with a
diligent mind, procured the common idiom (setting aside others) to be
commended by the exercise of writing; and there are many of our craft of
brewers who have the knowledge of writing and reading in the said English
idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French, before these times used,
they do not in any wise understand; for which causes, with many others, it
being considered how that the greater part of the lords and trusty commons
have begun to make their matters to be noted down in our mother tongue,
so we also in our craft, following in some manner their steps, have decreed
in future to commit to memory the needful things which concern us.
The importance of this statement is that the brewers have decided to

adopt English writing. The next step was for written English to be
expressed in printed form and for this crucial development we must
look at the life and work of William Caxton, as important for the
language in his own way as Geoffrey Chaucer, whose work he
printed.
William Caxton ‘was born and learned mine English in Kent in
the Weeld [Weald] where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude
English as is in any place of England’. He had an eventful life as a
merchant and diplomat, learned the art of printing on the Continent
and then, in retirement, introduced the press into England around
the year 1476, setting up his press within the precincts of Westmin
ster Abbey. He was an attractive, original, and thoroughly English
character: a man of gusto and humour, of business acumen and
pronounced political loyalties. He was perhaps the first editor-
publisher, printing the works of Chaucer, and other poets like
Gower, Lydgate, and Malory; but he also translated bestsellers from
France and Burgundy, and was himself a compulsive writer who
obviously delighted in printing his own works. For the history of
English spelling, Caxton’s decision to reproduce the English of

London and the South-East is crucial. Caxton and his successors
gave a special currency to London English.
Caxton’s decision was not as simple as it would seem in
retrospect. There were several standards with rival claims. It was not
easy for a writer and printer in the fifteenth century to choose a
version of English that would find favour with all readers. In one of
his prefaces, Caxton himself describes some of the difficulties he
encountered when he came to print English for the first time. He was
sitting in this study, he says, and without any new work to hand,
picked up a book that had recently been translated from Latin into
French, a paraphrase of Virgil’s Aeneid. Then, says Caxton, he
‘concluded to translate it into English, and forthwith took a pen and
ink, and wrote a page or two’ . But when he came to read through
what he had done, he found he had used so many ‘strange terms’ he
was afraid that he would be accused of translating in a way that
‘could not be understood by common people’ . Then he describes
how he consulted ‘an old book’ to improve his translation but found
‘the English so rude and broad that I could not well understand it’ .
He compared this with some Old English, which he found ‘more hke
to Dutch than English’. Next there were the problems of regional
variation: ‘Common English that is spoken in one shire varies from
another.’ He tells a story, expressed here with all the wonderful
idiosyncrasy of Middle English spelling and syntax:
In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a

shippe in tamyse, for to have sayled over the see into zelande, and for lacke
of wvnde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them.
And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in-to an hows and axed
for mete; and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde,
that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also
coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode
hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then
the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in
thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? Certaynly it is harde to playse every
man by cause of dyversite Hi chaunge of langage. For in these days every
man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre, wyll utter his commynycacvon
and maters in suche maners & termes that fewe men shall understonde
theym. And som honest and grete clerkes have ben wyth me, and desired me
to wryte the moste curyous terms that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene
playn, rude, & curyous, I stande abasshed. But in my judgemente the comyn
terms that be davli used ben lyghter to be understonde than the olde and
auncyent englysshe. And for as moche as this present booke is not for a rude
uplondysshe man to laboure therin, ne rede it, but onely for a clerke & a
noble gentylman that feleth and understondeth in faytes of armes, in love, &
in noble chyvalrye, therfor in a meane bytwene bothe I have reduced &
translated this sayd booke in to our englysshe, not ouer rude ne curyous, but
in suche termes as shall be understanden, by goddys grace, accordynge to
my copye.
When Caxton settled for the idiosyncrasies of the English he heard

in the streets of London —‘right’, for instance, reflects the fifteenth-
century pronunciation ‘richt’ (ch pronounced as in loch) - he (and
printers like him) helped to fix the language on the page before its
writers and teachers had reached a consensus. It is to this that
English owes some of its chaotic and exasperating spelling con
ventions.
The printing press, which made the spread of learning and
knowledge so much easier, was a communication revolution, the
cornerstone of the European Renaissance, that introduced a torrent
of Latin words into the language. Fifteenth-century English poetry is
over-burdened with what one critic called ‘half-chewed Latin’. The
Scottish poet Dunbar was similarly afflicted:
Hale sterne superne! Hale, in eterne
In God’s sight to schyne!
Lucerne in derne, for to discerne
Be glory and grace devyne;
Hodiern, modern, sempitern . . .
This sort of writing provoked Bishop Reginald Pecock to make what

is, perhaps, the first proposal (in a long tradition of such proposals)
to ‘purify’ the English language. Latinate borrowings, he argued,
should be purged. Instead of impenetrable, he proposed ungo-
throughsome ; instead of inconceivable, he suggested not-to-be-
thought-upon-able. Pecock was not taken seriously; by the eight
eenth century, however, such suggestions were given more weight.
The growing prestige and supremancy of the London standard is
reflected in the fact that Mak, the sheep-stealer in one of the early
miracle plays, attempts to impose upon the Yorkshire shepherds by

masquerading as a person of some importance and affects a
‘Southern tooth’ . The vitality, if not the sophistication, of English
culture is clear from the other plays of the fifteenth century:
Mankind, for instance, one of the hits of its time, which was written
around 1470, was designed for a company of strolling players, who
would have been professionals. The script includes the taking of a
collection during the performance, the first recorded instance of
commercial acting. It has some crowd-pulling bawdiness:
It is wretvn [written] with a coll [coal], it is wretyn with a coll,

He that schitith with his hoyll [hole], he that schitith with his hoyll,
But [unless] he wippe his ars clene, but he wippe his ars clene,
On his breche [breeches] it shall be sen, on his breche it shall be sen . . .
The play would have been performed in a church porch or in an inn-

yard, and because the play requires only six actors the company
could be highly mobile. Such troupes became enormously popular
throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Eventually the best of
the English groups settled in London and built the original open-air
theatres. The first appeared in 1576, when Shakespeare would have
been twelve years old. The players in Mankind were the ancestors of
the King’s Men and the Elizabethan dramatic tradition. Hamlet’s
excitement at the news that the Players are coming to Elsinore gives
us some idea of the enthusiasm with which such troupes were
greeted.
Mankind tells the story of a hard-working peasant. Under the
spell of the devil Titivillus and the Seven Deadly Sins, Mankind is
made to swear an oath of loyalty to Satan. Then Titivillus, the
forerunner of the lago-character in Shakespeare, prepares to ensnare
Mankind in a speech loaded with malice.
t it iv il lu s : Goo your wey, a dev[i]ll wey, go yowr wey all!

1 blisse yow with my lifte honde - foull yow befall!
A[nd] bringe yowr avantage into this place.
( E x e u n t . M a n e t T it i v i l l u s . )
To speke with Mankinde 1 will tary here this tide,
Ande assay his goode purpose for to sett aside.
The goode man Mercy shall no lenger be his g[u]ide.
In the end, having been saved from suicide, the deadliest sin of all,
the peasant repents and is forgiven. The language in Mankind —
original, funny, and high-spirited —is thoroughly and recognizably
English. (One could, in fact, imagine having a conversation with
‘Mankind’ himself in the street.) It has emerged from the shadow of
Latin and French and exploits the versatility it has acquired during
the last thousand years. The stage is now set for the English of
William Shakespeare and the Elizabethans.

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2

The Mother Tongue

The making of English is the story of three invasions and a cultural

disputed mystery. According to the Garden of Eden myth, they lived

bicycle through the valleys of Wales every summer were able to

1 The home of the Indo-Europeans. The languages of about one-third of

The Welsh contribution to English literature is also distinctive, and

3 The Welsh language. The language of Wales is the descendant of the

sound of Anglo-Saxon English. Most people would probably

pied oid Romano-British settlements like Camulodunum (Colches­

shall find repeated again when the English language travelled to

now. Mirth used to mean ‘enjoyment’, or ‘happiness’ and even

I’m told a certain object grows

The same love of intricacy and interlacing is obvious in the visual

After this, perhaps the earliest recorded example of English toler­

portmanteaux like frnmiveorc (fruma, beginning, and iveorc, work

5 The varieties of Old English. There are more varieties of English in

an early vernacular or a more elaborate Latinate style is one of its

Norsemen, referred to by the Anglo-Saxons as ‘Danes’, turned their

used the English language as a means of creating a sense of national

There is one story (recorded by his biographer, Bishop Asser) that

A little church in Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, tells the story of the

Melton. Melton was almost certainly Middletoun in Old English.

There’s no joy from harp-play,

tramps at threshold: the threat came:

Then Count William came from Normandy to Pevensey on Michaelmas Eve

The Norman victory at Hastings changed the face of English for

own regime, rewarding those who had supported his expedition

William also purged the English church: Norman bishops and

Bishop William of Ely, Chancellor of England during the reign of

Third, and perhaps most important, in 1204, thanks to the

situation is exemplified by the Barons’ revolt of Simon de Montfort

Common men know no French

one, partly because English French was certainly not a prestige

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly,

The Hundred Years War with France (13 3 7 -14 5 4 ) provided a

Latin can no one speak, I trow,

English now appears at every level of society. In 1356 , the mayor

answer is that it had not changed much from Anglo-Saxon times,

Spoken English differed from county to county as it does in rural

‘ FIR ST FO U N D EU R AN D E M B E L L ISSH E R OF OUR

Wei loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes,

Of the Friar, Hubert, he says:

Somewhat he lisped, for his wantownesse,

Chaucer benefited enormously from the preceding three hundred

Welcome, my knyght, my pees, my suffisance

Welcome, my knyght are all original English words, though knyght,

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

It was Dryden, writing in the seventeenth century, who gave most

He must have been a Man of a most wonderful comprehensive Nature,

Chaucer’s time also saw the emergence of English surnames, family

ninth century. Henry’s predecessor, Edward III, could only swear in

The importance of this statement is that the brewers have decided to

English spelling, Caxton’s decision to reproduce the English of

In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a

When Caxton settled for the idiosyncrasies of the English he heard

This sort of writing provoked Bishop Reginald Pecock to make what

miracle plays, attempts to impose upon the Yorkshire shepherds by

It is wretvn [written] with a coll [coal], it is wretyn with a coll,

pied oid Romano-British settlements like Camulodunum (Colches

After this, perhaps the earliest recorded example of English toler