The Norman Conquest of the English Language
At first the English withstood the Norman attack of 1066. But soon they succumbed to the invaders, as did their virile language of record. An article by H.R. Loyn.
We read Elizabethan prose at times with an antiquarian curiosity but little linguistic difficulty. With a few tricks learned, Chaucer is open to the intelligent schoolboy or schoolgirl. With many more tricks and much greater intellectual effort early Middle English prose can be mastered, and the Englishman can still just believe that he is reading English. Beyond the twelfth century it takes the faith of Barnes, the Dorset poet, or the skill of Professor Henry Higgins to convince an Englishman that this is still his own tongue. Language-men call the language of Anglo-Saxon England 'Old English'; to the intelligent scholar on the Clapham omnibus it is better thought of as Anglo-Saxon, a different language from English, demanding from him as much effort and sheer hard intellectual grind as, say, modern Norwegian, though mercifully not as much as modern German. Why should this be so? Is time alone enough to account for it? Or does the red thread of the Norman Conquest run across our linguistic history as it does across our social and institutional past?
There is an intelligible reason for attributing much if not everything to the Normans. Sir Walter Scott reminded us long ago of the social pressures that caused the cow and the calf and the sheep to be Saxon in the field and French when served up as beef and veal and mutton. There are also reasons for attributing nearly all change to wider European phenomena. The 100 years from 1050-1150 witnessed rapid development for all the communities in western Europe, and it is not surprising that the age of the Investiture Contest, the Crusades, and the so-called twelfth- century renaissance should experience radical changes in language, the triumph of Latin, a true movement from epic to romance. It is the object of this article to look again at the evidence relating to the 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 a