e state of the English language in 1066, and to consider the effects of the Norman Conquest upon its development.
The traditions behind the use of Anglo-Saxon were strong and long. Bede tells us that the Christian missionaries at Ethelbert's court in the earliest years of the seventh century helped to bring it about that legal decrees were written down after the examples or exemplars of the Romans, but also Anglorum sermone , in the tongue of the English; and, as such, the Laws of Ethelbert have survived to this day. Bede rejoiced that the scriptures were being studied in the languages of five different peoples in Britain: the English, the Britons, the Scots, the Picts, and the Latins, but he added that Latin had become common to the four other peoples named through the study of scripture. Nevertheless, he respected the vernacular, and showed great sympathy for the first known English poet, Caedmon, who translated Holy Scripture into his own tongue, that is English 'like, as it were, a clean animal, chewing the cud, turning it into the most harmonious song'. Bede himself composed in English. His last task, completed as he lay dying, was the translation of the Gospel according to St. John into English. His so-called death-song became one of the best recorded and best preserved fragments of English verse.
Bede died in 735. Later in 787 the papal legates to King Offa held a reforming synod in the Mercian Kingdom. They were determined that the people should know about their deliberations, and so the chapters of the reforming decrees were read out tam latine quam theochscae , both in Latin and in the 'theodish' tongue. Theodish or deutsch , the language of the people, is what the Germanic Anglo-Saxon vernacular seemed to the good Italian cardinals. King Alfred (871-99) made heroic efforts by his own hard work and example to translate and to make available to all 'those books which may be necessary for all men to know'. In a famous statement (we remember the substance, but sometimes forget the reservation) he gave it as his objective to bring it to pass that 'if we have peace... all the youth now in England, born of freemen who have the means that they may apply to it, may be devoted to learning, as long as they cannot be of use in other employment , until such time as they can read well what is written in English. Those whom one wishes to teach further and to be brought to Holy Orders could be instructed further in the Latin language'. A century later the greatest scholars of the age, Aelfric and Wulfstan, a shade shamefacedly at times, wrote in Anglo-Saxon. The Age of King Ethelred was also the Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon prose: grammarians, schoolmasters, lawyers, and administrators thought and wrote in Anglo-Saxon.
Why was this so? Why was there this persistent concern with and concentration on the vernacular? Were the Anglo-Saxons different from other peoples? Dare we take back our notorious lack of facility or sheer stupidity at language study 1,600 years and more? Is this seeming obsession with theodish so remarkable? Let us first look at four fields where the use of the vernacular was so conspicuous by the last century of Anglo-Saxon England on the part of ealdormen, in the European context both unusual and remarkable, that is to say the fields of law, administration, religion, and literature and learning.
A surprising volume of legal material has survived. Some indeed is in Latin. The Anglo-Saxon Church was part of the universal Church, Matters concerning procedures at baptism, arrangements for church services, penal clauses leading to excommunication and statements of marriage law were recorded by and for the priestly class in the universal language, Latin. But an astonishing amount of legal material went straight into the theodish tongue. Virtually all secular law and much of what we regard as ecclesiastical law when issued and authenticated by the King and the Witan has survived in the vernacular. Perhaps this is matter only for qualified surprise. We are after all dealing with the early Middle Ages and with a societ