The Norman Conquest
The violent arrival of the Normans, relatively few in number but profound in their impact on English life, was ultimately to work to the benefit of the English language. New words and phrases were added in profusion to the existing stock, while the inevitable interchange between the indigenous population and their new overlords produced a simplification in linguistic structures. The gains for Old English and Norman French speakers were mutual, but by the time the process was complete there were no longer two languages. It took more than 200 years after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 for English to be reinstated as the language of law, education and government, but by then the reverse conquest was complete.
King Harold (?1020–66) was the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and the last English-speaking king for almost three centuries. Harold’s predecessor on the throne, Edward the Confessor (?1005–66), had no heir and William, duke of Normandy (?1028–87), was among the various claimants. William claimed to have been promised the succession by Edward, whose mother was Norman and who had spent much of his early life in Normandy. In addition Harold himself had sworn – or been made to swear – an oath to the same effect while he was a ‘guest’ in William’s court. Despite this, Edward apparently made Harold his successor on his deathbed.
While William was assembling an army on the other side of the Channel, the new English king was facing a threat at the opposite end of the country from King Harald Hardrada of Norway (1015–66), who also claimed to have been offered the English throne (though not by Edward the Confessor). Harold made a forced march north and defeated the Norse invaders at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. In the meantime the Normans under William landed at Pevensey, near Hastings. King Harold and a portion of his army returned south in haste. The famous battle ensued, with Harold fighting courageously, although it is debatable whether he died from an arrow through the eye, as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. But die he did, after one of the briefest reigns in British history, taking with him the Anglo-Saxon title to the throne. William, the duke of Normandy, had won, and the future of England and the course of the English language were to be changed for good.
William’s Rule
The Norman Conquest could have been the death-knell for the form of language known as Anglo-Saxon or Old English. If English had perished, there might have been a certain poetic justice to it, since the Angles and other invading tribes had themselves turned Celtic into a minority language hundreds of years before. At first glance it seems strange that English didn’t die out or at least become a marginal language. The triumph of William of Normandy, after his defeat of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, was swift and absolute. The battle was fought in mid-October and William was crowned king at Westminster Abbey less than three months later, on Christmas Day 1066.
William established his authority rapidly and, where necessary, with brutality. The so-called ‘harrying of the north’ was his response to attempted revolts in Northumbria, during which the majority of the population either died or fled. The same period saw resistance in the fenlands of East Anglia led by Hereward the Wake (Wake meaning ‘vigilant’), a near-legendary figure with a touch of King Arthur to him. The Norman victory over Hereward and other rebels consolidated the new king’s authority. But his ascendancy was not merely military. It extended over every important area of life.
A Norman abbot was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, replacing the Anglo-Saxon one, and other senior church posts were similarly filled. Court positions were given to the French-speaking nobility who accompanied William and they were also rewarded with great swathes of land. The result was the first great age of castle-building in England. The Tower of London was started in 1078, and by the Elizabethan period had become such a hallowed feature of the city that it was believed to have been built on the orders of Julius Caesar. At the other end of the country, the imposing Norman castle and cathedral of Durham, which continue to stand high above the River Wear after almost a millennium, are potent reminders of the might of William’s new, triumphal culture, as well as an indication of the need to put his stamp on the rebellious north of England.
French-speaking clerks and officials dominated the apparatus of government, which some 20 years after the Conquest drew up the Domesday Book. This statistical record of national property was far more thorough than anything yet attempted, and remained unequalled in its scope until the 19th century. It served less as a census than as a guide to prosperous land-holders and their taxable status. Meanwhile French merchants and craftsmen moved across the Channel seeking fresh opportunities for trade. The original English, the Anglo-Saxons, were reduced to walk-on roles in their own country, whether as labourers and servants or as minor tradesmen and functionaries.
England became a bilingual land, with the upper classes speaking and writing their brand of Norman French and the lower ones continuing to speak Anglo-Saxon. As far as written language was concerned, England was trilingual, since Latin was widely used in the church and in administrative circles, including the composition of the Domesday Book. But the conquerors’ variety of French was not only the language used by those who pulled the levers of power, it would also have been the fashionable way to speak. Indeed, the connection between French and fashionability may date from this time. French has a centuries-old link to fields such as cookery and diplomacy and, of course, the world of haute couture itself. Even today the deployment of terms like chic, savoir-faire, je-ne-sais-quoi, sangfroid and dozens of others may be considered sophisticated among some English speakers.
King William himself never learned to speak English. Although there is a story that he tried to master the language, he was either insufficiently dedicated to the task or occupied in putting down trouble in his newly acquired kingdom. Perhaps he was simply too busy elsewhere; William spent about half of his reign (1066–87) back in Normandy and sometimes did not visit England from the end of one year to another. This was an absentee pattern followed by several of the kings who succeeded him, like his son William Rufus (1087–1100).
A New Layer of Language
Whatever the movement of the kings, the words they brought with them stayed put in England. Many of these words were associated with notions of honour and chivalry, which were absolutely central to the self-image of the medieval world, or at least to those who occupied its upper echelons. The Anglo-Saxon world, too, had placed great emphasis on honour and the warrior’s code, as the Beowulf poem demonstrates. But the centuries following the Conquest saw not just a refinement but a reinvention of these ideals; significantly, the role of women was highlighted. Courtly manners were brought to England and promoted by the Normans, particularly by such influential figures as Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), wife of Henry II (1133–89) and queen of England.
Over time, an estimated 10,000 verbal terms shifted from Norman French and became assimiliated, taking on a new English identity. But the newcomers were building on solid, earthy foundations. Expressions describing physical movement and body parts, basic foods and domestic interiors, these were Anglo-Saxon and remained so. The English ate bread, cheese and fish, and they drank ale. All the while they lived in houses with doors, floors, windows and steps. They used words which, allowing for small differences in spelling (brede, chese), are still in use to today. As important as the terms for basic actions and objects was the survival of the nuts and bolts of speech: I, you, we, a, the, and, but, if, however . . .
It has sometimes been said that the difference between the two languages – Anglo-Saxon and Norman French – is shown by the distinction between the (Old English) names given to animals when they were wandering around alive and the different (Norman) names given to them when they were cooked and served up at table. Hence the sheep in the field turns to mutton on the table, the cow to beef, the swine to pork. An extra level to this distinction is provided by the idea that the poor old English were out in the field tending the Anglo-Saxon flocks and herds while the Norman interlopers were being served the prepared French meats indoors. The notion, which was aired by Sir Walter Scott in his medieval romance Ivanhoe (1819), may be a bit cut-and-dried but it does convey something about the distribution of power between the two national groups.
Far from driving out Anglo-Saxon, Norman French became a very rich stratum laid on top of the native tongue. Not surprisingly, most of the words connected to law, governance and rank derive from the Norman: justice, perjury, attorney, prison, parliament, prince, baron, duchess. Sometimes there was a kind of marriage between English and French. In this process, the French gentil was added to English roots to produce gentle-man and gentle-woman. The mirror phrases law and order and ways and means, in which each part means essentially the same as the other, are literal evidence of a fairly harmonious coexistence. Law is Old English (originally from Norse) as is ways, while order and means derive from French.
Chivalry
For all the ruthlessness, even brutality, that marked the arrival of the Normans under William the Conqueror, the following centuries witnessed the emergence in England of high-minded conceptions of duty and honour that had originated in France.
The term chivalrye starts to appear in English in the early 12th century, and traces its roots through French before reaching back to the Latin caballus. By a slight irony, caballus was a slang term for a Roman cavalryman’s horse. It was the equivalent of ‘nag’ while the regular Latin was equus. Yet it is the old nag rather than the noble horse which has given us not just chivalry but, later on, cavalry and cavalier. The link was between the fighter on horseback, the knight, and the brave and honourable behaviour that he was expected to display.
Similarly, the expression ‘knight’ has unassuming origins. In Old English cniht meant no more than ‘boy’, but then the word took a step up to signify a male servant before getting a further promotion to indicate a man owing military service to the king or other feudal lord. Since a knight might receive land in return for his services, it is easy to see how his status could grow even more. By the Middle Ages, the knight had taken on all the familiar connotations of bravery, decency, modesty, etc. After that the word became dated, except as a title given by the crown to this day to British subjects, as in Sir Mick Jagger. Interestingly, Jane Austen in her novel Emma (1816) gives the surname of ‘Knightley’ to the most perfect and gentlemanly of all her heroes.
Another significant concept from French is that of curteisye, gracefulness and politeness. The adjective curtois (‘courteous’) came first and its primary definition links it to the sort of well-mannered behaviour that would be expected in the court of a prince (in Middle English, curt = court). Later on, courtesy lost a couple of letters to provide us with curtsy, the ‘bending of the knee’ or little bobbing motion, which is a sign of deference. Less respectably, court is also the root of courtesan, a court-mistress or high-class prostitute.
Why English Survived
So what were the reasons behind the survival of English? Why did the Normans not succeed in eradicating the tongue spoken by those they had conquered? Put simply, they didn’t try. Whatever their attitude towards the English as a subject people, there was no hostility towards English as such. William the Conqueror was brutal in putting down dissent, particularly in the north of the country, but there was no conscious attempt to replace one language with the other, no explicitly nationalistic sense that French was a superior tongue. Some of the earliest documents issued by William after the Conquest were actually in English, even if the king himself would not have been able to understand them.
There was a startling disparity in numbers between the Norman arrivals and the original inhabitants of the country, with estimates of William’s soldiers ranging from 15,000 men to as low as 5000. (Whichever figure we take, this was substantially fewer than the estimated 40,000 legionaries and auxiliaries who landed under the emperor Claudius in AD 43.) The English population of the late 11th century, by contrast, stood at around one and a half million. In addition, there was already a well-established spoken and written English culture, which would have been almost impossible to dislodge. This was a very different situation from the one obtaining centuries earlier when the Angles, Saxons and other tribes poured in and drove the Celts to the margins of the island. Over the years the Anglo-Saxons came in much greater numbers than the Normans and overwhelmed the Celts, who had little in the way of a written tradition of language. Even if no other advantage remained with the English after 1066 they had a tremendous superiority in numbers.
Another reason for the persistence of English was intermarriage between the two sides. Most of those who accompanied William across the Channel were, unsurprisingly, male rather than female. A high-ranking Norman soldier or administrator planning to stay and in search of a wife would almost inevitably have to look for one among English women. Their children, spending time with mothers and nurses, would have grown up if not bilingual then with a working knowledge of two languages. Meanwhile the French speaker, once he moved outside his military, court or professional circles, would have been dealing with English-speaking servants or minor officials such as stewards. In order to keep control or simply to conduct his day-to-day business, he would have had to acquire some of the language. Of course, this must have been a two-way process, with those English speakers in regular contact with the French picking up some of their language also.
But perhaps the most significant factor behind the eventual triumph of English is that it didn’t take very long, in historical terms, for the Norman conquerors to go native. Less than 150 years after the Conquest, William’s great-great-grandson, King John (1167–1216), lost control of Normandy. Within a few years the French nobility were no longer able to have a foot in both camps – possessing estates and owing loyalties both in France and England – and were compelled to declare their allegiance to one country or the other. By the time of Edward I (1239–1307), the monarch could use the threat to ‘our’ language as a rallying-cry against the enemy on the other side of the Channel, claiming that it was the French king’s ‘detestable purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue’. The outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337 set the seal on the antagonism between France and England and confirmed the value of all things English, including its evolving language.
An intriguing footnote is that this was not the first time the Normans had adapted to the language of an area they had conquered. In the late 9th century, when Alfred the Great’s England was threatened and nearly overrun by Viking invaders, the area of France around the mouth of the Seine and present-day Cherbourg had also been attacked and settled by Scandinavian tribes. The first duke of Normandy was actually a Norse chieftain, given the dukedom by a French king in 912 as a way of buying off trouble. The original settlers (or ‘pirates’, as the French called them) therefore spoke Norse but within a couple of generations they were using French. This has been called one of the quickest language shifts on record and is a foreshadowing of the rather slower development by which the descendants of the Norman invaders of 1066 adjusted to their new-found Englishness. Looked at in another light, it could be said that the Norman Conquest was a second, and even more successful, Viking invasion.
Subtle Linguistic Nuances
The blending of Norman French with Old English greatly increased the store of vocabulary and in that way enhanced the variety and complexity of language. Sometimes French achieved this by serving as a kind of conduit for expressions which had travelled further than across the English Channel. Lute, orange, amber, saffron, all come from Arabic via French. In other cases, where one word had existed for a single concept, two might now be available, as in the already noted law/order or ways/means.
The process extended far beyond simple synonyms. More words meant greater suppleness and subtlety. For example, from Old English we have ask, while from Norman French we get demand. In modern French, the infinitive form demander means the same as to ask, but the two words have acquired distinctly different senses in English, with demand being altogether more insistent than ask.
Sometimes there might be no surface difference between the words. Axe (OE) and hatchet (Fr) are synonymous, as are seek (OE) and search (Fr). Yet even here there are quite fine distinctions: the comparatively rare axeman is generally used in its literal sense of ‘someone with an axe’ (or is modern slang for ‘[rock] guitarist’) while hatchet man is always metaphorical and describes one who does other people’s dirty work, destructive and even illegal. Similarly with seek and search; the first may carry overtones of looking for something higher (seeking truth, enlightenment) while the second tends to be found in a more mundane context (searching for lost car keys).
The Language Simplified
However, the impact of Norman French was not just to give English a richer, larger vocabulary. Over time, it also simplified the ways in which words could be used and sentences put together.
Take the vexed business of gender. Norman French had two genders for nouns, masculine and feminine, as modern French still does. Old English went one better with three genders, having a neuter form to add to the other two: in pronoun terms the equivalent of he, she and it. Adjectives in both languages were inflected – that is, they took different endings according to the gender of the noun they were describing. To complicate things further, a French ‘masculine’ noun might have a ‘feminine’ equivalent in English, or vice versa. A speaker trying to bridge the gap between the two languages and doing his or her translation on the spot would first have to choose the right word for the occasion and then work out the right gender-ending for the adjective.
It was simpler to do away with gender altogether or, if that makes the process sound too conscious and deliberate, then it can be said that gender just disappeared. This is what had happened by the 14th century, establishing a pattern that remains unchanged to this day.
The great majority of nouns in modern English are gender-free or neuter. And even for those that are not – mother, policeman – there is no change in the qualifying adjective. If the policeman is happy then the mother is happy too. But in modern French not only do the definite and indefinite articles change according to gender, so too do the qualifying adjectives (e.g. le gendarme heureux, la mère heureuse).
Another significant change to Norman French practice was in the distinctive word ordering whereby the noun is followed by its adjective, as remains the case in modern French (so that the White House becomes la Maison Blanche). This was modified by the encounter and then the union with Anglo-Saxon. English usage had put the adjective in front of the noun for hundreds of years and here was a preference that stuck. The only exceptions in current English are a few French-derived terms like court martial and body politic, anomalies such as the title created by King Charles II, Astronomer Royal, and occasional adjective–noun inversions produced for the sake of rhetorical emphasis (He took an early interest in things mechanical).
The arrival of French also helped to standardize and simplify other things, particularly the endings of verbs. (Most nouns in both languages already shared the addition of ‘s’ in the plural.) A little grammar history is necessary when it comes to explaining what happened to verbs, and the distinction between the so-called ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ verbs. The ‘-ed’ ending is now applied to the great majority of English verbs when they shift from present to past: help/helped, work/worked, pick/picked. These are so-called ‘weak’ verb formations, ones which change in a regular way. That this is a predictable pattern is shown by a young child’s attempt to form a new past tense by saying things like ‘I see-ed her’, using an ‘-ed’ parallel which in this case is logical but wrong.
The term ‘strong’ is used to describe those verbs which, in the past tense, do not add ‘-ed’ but change their shape in a more irregular fashion: cling/clung, light/lit, sell/sold. Sometimes they are stubborn and register no change at all between past and present (burst, hit, put). A neat contemporary illustration of the difference is provided by the verb application of the word dive: the past tense in the US is dove (strong formation), while in British English it is dived (weak formation). Sometimes the strong and weak forms continue to survive side by side, as in strived and strove, weaved and wove, although the weak ‘-ed’ form in both these cases tends to be less common.
After the arrival of the Normans in 1066 there was an increasing tendency to regularize verbs by using the ‘-ed’ ending, particularly when words moved across from French and became assimilated into English. This had already begun to occur under the Danish influence in the north of England but it was speeded up by the impact of the Normans. It is not difficult to see how this might have occurred. Rather than fiddling around with various possibilities – whether to change the middle of the word or to leave it as it was or to chop it off early – it was more straightforward to apply a standard rule and fasten the simple ‘-ed’ on to the end. The general implication of this is that surviving irregular ‘strong’ verbs are descended not from French stock but from Old English (do/did, run/ran, see/saw). Their shape is a little piece of archaeology or linguistic carbon-dating. And because these verb forms are among the more commonly used English words, we probably assume that there is a greater degree of irregularity in the language than actually exists.
The English Conquest?
It took about 200 years for the Norman Conquest to become the English Conquest. In 1356 the order went out that law-court proceedings in London be conducted in English, not French. At the beginning of the same century, teachers in schools had used the language of William the Conqueror. Well before the century’s end, all instruction in the grammar schools was carried out in English. Although children thereby lost touch with the French part of their inheritance, one of the advantages of the switch to English was that it took the same children less time to learn their grammar. No doubt, the simplifying of verb endings and the dropping of genders and agreements all helped.
Change was slowest at the top. It was not until the coronation of Henry IV in 1399 that a new English king delivered a speech in English claiming his right to the throne. Henry had deposed his predecessor Richard II (1367–1400) and after his accession he had Richard murdered. Perhaps Henry wanted to make his claim to the throne crystal-clear because it was actually rather tenuous. Whatever the reason, at his coronation he spoke to his fellow-countrymen in their own tongue. Better late than never.
KEYWORD
Curfew
William the Conqueror was reputed to have introduced the curfew to England as a means of imposing civic order. Although there is no reliable evidence for this tradition it does reflect something of the tight grip that he exercised over his conquered land. Curfew comes from the old French covre-feu (‘cover-fire’) and originally applied to the evening bell rung in towns as a signal that fires should be extinguished. This was less an arbitrary display of power than a way of minimizing the danger of a blaze in tightly packed streets of houses made of combustible materials like wood and thatching. In its current use, a curfew describes a ban on the inhabitants of a place being out on the streets for a specified period, usually after dark. Whether or not King William I introduced the curfew, he might be gratified to know that this feudal measure is still employed by dictatorships and panicking authorities everywhere.