1066 and All That: Anglo-Norman English

This episode is a brief overview of the changes to English language and literature wrought by the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Interstitial Correction: She Who Must Be Obeyed
Music: "Rejoice" (GF Handel) perf.  Advent Chamber Orchestra; "Medieval Flute" (Carlos Carty)

Transcript

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Today’s episode is “1066 and All That: Anglo-Norman English.” It is a bit of a link, a bridge between two quite interesting bits of English literary history over a river of what must be quite dull Anglo-Norman literature, given that nearly any anthology of British literature you open, be it high school, college, or general interest, the editors almost invariably jump from the end of the Anglo-Saxon period in around the year 1100 straight to the full flowering of English poetry proper with Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 1300s.  Really, the casual reader, to glance at these books, one could not be blamed for coming away with the notion that people stopped writing in England for two and a half centuries.

And, if I’m honest, you wouldn’t be far wrong.  Definitely wrong!  But not far.

For, you see, English stopped being the prestige language in England for those 250 years.  The elite – the aristocracy, the royal court, the law courts, diplomats –  all spoke (gasp!) French!  Some kings of England during this period were not even fluent in English!

“How?!” you say, “How did this shocking eventuality come about?”  Well, let me tell you the story of Billy the Bastard and his Norman Conquest.

William the Bastard was the Duke of Normandy, a region in what is now northern France that had been ceded to the Viking Rollo in 911 after the Siege of Chartres.  “Norman” is, in fact, a contraction of “Norseman” or “Northman” – a term for those pre-millennial Scandinavian raiders.  Anyway, William had a creditable claim to the English throne from the English King Edward the Confessor.  When that sainted monarch died early in the year 1066, William’s dreams of English glory burnished.

But he was not the only one who believed he was the next in line.  The Saxon Earl of Wessex, Harold Godwinson, was Edward’s brother-in-law, and besides, half of success is showing up, so since Harold was actually in England at the time of Edward’s passing, the Witan (the ruling council) popped Harold on the throne and thought everything was tickety-boo.

Things were not tickety-boo, dear listener, not by long shank.  William planned an invasion of England to secure his rights.  But that’s not all!  The King of Norway, Harald Hardrada, also made a claim on the throne based on an agreement made decades earlier by Harthacnut, then King of Denmark and England.  To complicate complicated matters, Harold Godwinson’s disaffected brother Tostig actually encouraged Hardrada’s claim, so the Norwegian king too prepared a force to assert his right to the English crown.

All of these events have been rehearsed in other podcasts in far greater detail than I wish to go into here, and so, as brevity is the soul of wit, I will be soulfully witty.  Hardrada met the forces of King Harold II at Stamford Bridge and was soundly defeated.  Hooray! went the rejoicing.  Indeed, had King Harry not gotten the bad news about William of Normandy’s landing at Pevensey, we would probably think of Harold’s victory at Stamford as one of the great military feats of English history, rather than as a deceptive prelude to the end of the Anglo-Saxon era.

For Billy the Bastard had indeed landed at Pevensey, so Harold King had to march his weary army some 200 miles in an attempt to keep England English.  At Hastings, on October 14, 1066, Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, got an arrow in the eye.  Requiescat in pace.  William the Bastard assumed the more impressive sobriquet William the Conquerer, William I, the first Norman king of England.

And he spoke French.  English became the language of a defeated and disgraced underclass.

1066 is one of those dates that seem so definitive, so precise.  October 13, 1066: Saxon England.  October 15, 1066: Norman England.  Of course, history stubbornly refuses to cleave itself so neatly, and so it’s best to think of 1066 as an inflection point.  Without doubt, the Conquest strengthened England’s connections to the continent and helped to ensure that it would become more European in its outlook than Scandinavian.  And certainly, the arrival of the Normans and their language would have lasting effects on the language listeners to this podcast speak today.  But there is much to suggest that, while half a millennium of Anglo-Saxon language and literature were submerged following the Norman conquest, much was preserved and would become integral to the language of medieval England that we call Middle English.

It’s traditional to regard the Conquest’s effect on the English language as literally catastrophic – as a complete over-turning that aligns nicely with the supposed precision of the date.  That, as a result of the native language’s suppression, English lost its inflections, that its vocabulary became increasingly Latinate, and that French poetic models supplanted the alliterative tradition.  All this did indeed occur, but much of this was underway before the Normans established a new hegemony.  Besides, Norman French already had some Germanic DNA because of the Norse, so the skids were greased.  Norman French was a Germanic language that had been Romancized to become a Romance language itself.

There was a resilience to Anglo-Saxon civilization in England that is sometimes overlooked in the quick and dirty narrative.  It began as a collection of disparate tribes warring among themselves over land and resources and prestige.  But as the centuries wore on, they became increasingly unified as a single people.  They became Christianized, which further cemented these bonds.  Especially following the reign of King Alfred the Great in the 9th century, these formerly Germanic peoples regarded England as a native homeland.  The Danes and Norse, peoples with similar historical and geographical roots, they regarded as foreign invaders.  Political unification, linguistic unification, and the common Viking enemy all pushed the nascent idea of a unique people. And as England moved increasingly from an oral to a literate culture, there came an almost talismanic regard for writing, both English and the language of the Church, Latin.

But the replacement of Old English with Norman French as the language of prestige did encourage a proliferation of English dialects.  Alfred’s establishment of the West Saxon dialect as the language of literature and the court served to stabilize English.  But when William replaced the Saxon nobility with Normans, that stability faltered and English became a collection of provincial dialects.

And so whatever changes in the language were underway in the 11th century were certainly hastened by the Norman French ascendency.   Inflectional changes, like the uniform “e” instead of multiple vowel endings, were a hallmark of the shifts.  There are some 900 words borrowed into English directly from Norman French that reflect a bias toward French superiority.  The perfectly respectable Anglo-Saxon villeins and churls (peasant laborers) found that they were now terms of abuse.  It is still more elegant to live in a mansion than a house, to sleep in a chamber instead of a room.  Often mentioned is the distinction between the name of the animal and the name of the food it becomes.  The English cow produces French beef, the English sheep the French mutton.  To produce is English, to consume French.

We can see evidence of vocabulary changes in the language of social, political, and religious institutions.  Words like council, state, and government come from the Normans.  Feudal terms like duke, madam, sir, and manor likewise.  The Normans gave us the legal terms judge and justice and the military ranks of general and sergeant.  They gave the Church clergy and religion and prayer.  Education got lessons and pupils.  Art got color, trade got money, and the ranks of the employed now included butchers, painters, and tailors.  Attorneys were given even more ways to say things, often redundantly.  Our legal doublets, like cease and desist, free and clear, breaking and entering, lands and tenements, and goods and chattels, are all derived by linking an older Saxon term with the newer Norman one.

And we got our swear words – some of which George Carlin has expounded upon.  I think the safest one to mention in a family-friendly podcast such as our own is the Old English verb scitan.  It means, of course, to shit.  To poop.  Now, back in Anglo-Saxony times, if a young lad told his Mom he had to shit, she didn’t scold him or wash his mouth out with soap.  She probably would move him away from the nice linen, though.  However, after the Conquest, when English becomes the language of the underclass, such terms become clearly declasse and, as a result, we get an extraordinarily useful word to describe a bodily function, the product of that function, a general term for our stuff, and a way of pointing out the nonsense that most people talk most of the time.  Thanks, Billy!

The most significant changes brought about by the Conquest to the language came in the realm of literature.  While Continental styles were increasingly known in Anglo-Saxon England, the arrival of the Normans made their language the vehicle of literature for two and a half centuries.  Which is why anthologies tend to dance over the Anglo-Norman period.  English “literature” during this time was largely folk and popular, and as primarily oral, does not survive.  Much English writing of the time is didactic – intending to teach religious lessons – and written by lower and less-educated clergy whose quality of pencraft was somewhat insufficient.

Chief among the casualties of Anglo-Saxon poetry was the long Old English alliterative line, the style we explored in Beowulf and the elegies.  Over this period, that long line is broken in half (the caesura that marked the pause instead became a line break).  The alliteration – repetitive sound effects at the beginning of words – were redirected to the end of the line as rhyme, and the line was made metrically regular, each having a fixed number of syllables and a regularized accentual pattern.

Here is an early lyric poem in Middle English, which was set to music and sung as a round with six-part polyphony.  It’s variously called “The Cuckoo Song” or “Sumer is ycumen in” or “The Summer Canon.”  I’ll post a link to a performance on the website and Instatwitbook.  From probably the mid-13th century, it’s a good example of the transformations English writing was undergoing at the time

Sumer is i-cumin in—

Lhude sing, cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med

And springth the wude nu.

Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,

Lhouth after calve cu,

Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth—

Murie sing, cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu,

Wel singes thu, cuccu.

Ne swik thu naver nu!

Summer has come in,

Loudly sing, Cuckoo!

Seeds grow and meadows bloom

And the forest springs anew,

Sing, Cuckoo!

The ewe bleats after the lamb,

The cow lows after the calf.

The bullock starts, the buck farts,

Merrily sing, Cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;

Nor will you ever stop now.

It’s a song celebrating the return of Spring, part of what the French called the “reverdie” (literally, “re-greening”) tradition.  It has a pronounced, bouncing rhythm which emphasizes the energetic fertility of spring.  This racing rhythm clips through short rhyming lines, to give the effect of a new life bursting forth.  The onomatopoeic sounds like “cuckoo” underscore this abrupt discharge of energy, while at the same time the long vowel sounds – all those “oos” – contrast the rampant capering of animals with the more languorous growing of plants .  

And, I feel that I would be remiss if I did not address that telltale sign of spring’s return, the farting of the buck.  Yes, while the ewe bleats and the cow lows, while the young bull frolics, the buck farts.  This is the beauty of poetry: its timelessness.  All of us in the western world look to the arrival of snowdrops and daffodils, the buds on the trees, the soothing peeping of young frogs, the arrival of the robin.  And, of course, Bambi’s heraldic flatulence.  Some have argued that nothing so vulgar would be found in a poem of such respectability of age, but I think that is mere Victorian prudishness and, as anyone who has been near farm animals grazing on the sweet and fibrous grasses of early spring knows, things can get noisily whiffy.

In addition to the sonic and metrical changes encouraged by the ascension of French, we also see a change in the tenor of narrative poetry.  Gone is the heroic trumpeting of Beowulf.  The new poetry explores ethical and psychological dilemmas that would be alien to the rather unidimensional hero of Anglo-Saxon epic.  Now, courtliness is the measure of the man.  Courtliness, as the name implies, is the prescribed behavior of the royal court – same as “courtesy.”  Polite manners, gentility, and codified chivalry.  The Norman Conquest really is the last stage in the establishment of a unified Christendom descended from the Roman Empire through the Roman Catholic Church.  An explicitly Roman ancestry, not a Germanic one.  Charlemagne and Arthur are the new heroes of romance.   

Romance, a genre obviously denominated by that classical civilization, is the literature of the feudal order.  As the horizontally-oriented bond of Anglo-Saxon comitatus gets replaced by the vertical hierarchy of feudalism, the literary concerns become similarly class-oriented.  Romance, tales in the romance language of French, concern the exploits of a knight who faces supernatural challenges to defend a lady or uphold an ideal.  Most familiar to most listeners will be the stories of the Knights of the Round Table, which we will cover in some depth in a later episode.  Ironically, however, while romance is explicitly the provenance of the aristocratic class, its thematic concerns frequently underplayed the role of birth in a person’s worthiness.  The refrain of many of these tales is that one is noble because of one’s behavior and good deeds, not because of ancestry.  Excellent examples of such romances are the “Lais of Marie de France” and the Worcestershire priest Layamon’s first English tellings of Arthurian legend, “Brut,” which posits the founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy, a descendent of the Roman hero Aeneas.

So, under the Normans, England reimagines itself as part of the classical heritage.  But while French reigned as the prestige language for centuries, the humble English tongue did not stop wagging and would eventually bellow its way into becoming a language of cultural significance to rival, and perhaps surpass, the ancient languages of Greek and Latin.  Political developments helped this along. In 1204, Bad King John lost Normandy to France and in 1224, royal decrees prohibited the holding of noble titles in both England and Normandy.  This fosters among the aristocracy a nascent sense of “Englishness,” an identity separate from that of the original conquerors.  Just as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes ceased internecine strife and saw themselves as distinct from their continental and Scandinavian forbears, so did Anglo-Normans begin to identify with their damp collection of North Atlantic islands. The beginning in 1338 of the Hundred Years’ War and its struggle for political and territorial supremacy between England and France encourages a sense of English nationalism.  By the 1360s, English is being used in the law courts and in Parliament while the first great English poets are doing their work in the vernacular: John Gower, William Langland, and, the greatest of them all, Geoffrey Chaucer.

We’ll cover those fellas in later episodes.  Thank you so much for listening – I'm very glad you do.  Feel free to drop me a line sometime.  I’d like to get to know the folks who listen.  Please like and subscribe to the podcast.  If you’ve a moment, please do leave a review.  More reviews means more visibility on podcast apps, so more people can find out about our little talks.  I would appreciate any little financial support you can give – just click the “Support the Show” button to help me offset the costs of putting these little talks on.  Until next time, I’ll just be saying “Cheery-bye.”  Cheery-bye!

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