Norman Conquests, but English Survives.

In my previous article on the idiosyncrasies of the English language, we left things in the middle of the 11th century, noting that way back then the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons shared a predominantly oral culture. One other thing that they had in common was the fact that the two tongues were ‘cousins’, meaning they were relatives from the same tree of languages, the Germanic one. However, in 1066 all that became history, as once again the English language suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of foreign invaders - this time from the north of France.

The date 1066 is probably indelibly etched into the minds of every British schoolkid. On October 14th of that year the Norman-French, under their Duke William, defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, thus bringing Saxon rule to a bloody close. I myself can still remember our class producing a series of posters depicting on one side the Norman archers, and on the other the unfortunate King Harold with a large arrow in his left eye. But then, maybe I was just lucky in having a good teacher.

So why is it such an important historic moment? Well, the arrow that struck down poor old King Harold actually pierced to the heart of English society and its language, to such a degree that even today savants are disputing its relevance. The pro-Saxon camp interprets the events of the Norman Conquest as a decline, “a destruction of a relatively sophisticated Anglo-Saxon culture by an alien and tyrannical Norman one”. However, the alternative perspective is that the conquest represented “a milestone on the road to civilisation, playing a key role in the development of modern English”.

Whichever view you hold, the fact remains that the Normans ushered in the fourth of the Seven Ages of English, the period of Middle English from around 1100 to 1450. This stage was without doubt the modern language’s most defining period, so let’s have a closer look at the detail, and see what all the fuss was about.

During this time both the vocabulary and the spelling of the English language became affected by Norman French, which became the ‘official’ language in England. In fact, educated citizens of that time were expected to be proficient in no less than three languages - English, French and Latin!

But let’s stay with Norman French a while longer. The invasion of 1066 caused a startling linguistic division to take place, between ‘low’ Anglo-Saxon and ‘high’ Norman French. French became the language of Courts and Kings; the language of honour, justice and chivalry. Poor old Anglo-Saxon English was relegated to ‘commoner’ status, the language of ‘the people’. In fact, legend tells us that William the Conqueror tried to learn English but failed, and for 300 years afterwards the Kings of England spoke French as their first language.

Moreover, quite soon after the invasion, English landowners became so ‘Frenchified’ that a sub-class called ‘latimiers’ arose. They were interpreters whose sole task was to mediate between the Norman-speaking landowners and their Anglo-Saxon-speaking labourers. In this social division we can partly explain the differences that exist today in modern Britain between the upper and lower classes and their greatly varying accents. Think Prince Phillip, and think Oasis: hardly the same language, is it? Well, at one time it wasn’t!

So just how and why did this linguistic divide along social lines take place? To answer this we need to look at how King William went about his conquering. After reducing the country to submission, he set about building a strong Norman state on the existing Saxon institutions. Therefore the Crown retained great powers over military, legal, economic and church matters: but it was now a Norman Crown, speaking Norman French. Moreover, the Normans’ enthusiasm for keeping records, preferably in Latin, meant that the Saxons’ oral traditions were soon replaced at the cultural and administrative levels too. In short, Saxon English got turfed out into the fields and the gutters. However, here it slowly began to pick up bits of the language that had thrown it there, and in this way English began its progress back towards dominance.

In fact, many words of French origin soon came to be assimilated into English usage. The earliest adoptions were, unsurprisingly, words such as ‘duc’, ‘cuntess’, and ‘curt’ (now duke, countess. and court). Other words like ‘messe’ (mass) and ‘clerc’ (scholar) also reflected the Normans’ dominance in the state institutions of court and church.

Interestingly, as the Dukedom of Normandy fell under the control of the French King in Paris, the Norman-French words were followed by words imported from central France. This serves to explain why in English we have two variants for ‘warden’ and ‘guardian’, ‘convey’ and ‘convoy’, as well as ‘gaol’ and ‘jail’. Estimates put a figure of 20% on the amount of French words that had wheedled their way into Saxon English by the 14th century, although the highest frequency words in the language were still those of Germanic origin.

We can see evidence of the ‘class-division’ of the language in relatively modern times. When Winston Churchill wanted to appeal to the hearts and mind of the common Englander during the last war, he used words of almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon stock. The bare statement “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender” contains only one word of French origin - ‘surrender’. Had he chosen to use ‘give up’ instead, he would have been 100% pure Anglo-Saxon!

And with Winston we’ll have to leave things for this week. Sadly, we’ve only really been able to take a quick look at the state of things soon after the arrival of William the Conqueror, his archers, and his language. So next week we’ll see how the two languages developed over the following couple of centuries or so.