This Little Britain Read online

  Anglo-Saxon rule didn’t extend merely to land and territory; it covered language too. Although a certain amount of intermarriage must have taken place between invaders and ‘slaves’, that intermarriage was reflected hardly at all in the spoken word. Virtually no Celtic words survived the onslaught, and those that did are telling. Modern English words such as tor, crag, combe, cairn, cromlech, dolmen and loch are all Celtic, and they all describe features of the landscape which simply hadn’t existed in the flatlands from which the invaders had come. The newcomers took the words they absolutely needed and ditched the rest. Only a few dozen Celtic words survive in English today.

  While the Celts always referred to their invaders as Saxons,* the newcomers themselves began to call themselves Anglii, their new country Anglia, and (in due course) their language Englisc. It’s that language which we speak today. Of the hundred most commonly used words in modern English, almost all are Old English in origin, including all but one of the top twenty-five. (In order: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from. The Old Norse intruder in this list is they. The word the appears in this book some 5,850 times.) These twenty-five words make up about one third of all printed material in English. The top hundred words make up about a half. The first French-derived word doesn’t appear until number at seventy-six.

  You can tell a lot about a society from the language it speaks. The language of the Anglii was domestic, rural, warlike, concrete. Words such as man, daughter, friend and son are Old English. So are dog, mouse, wood, swine, horse. So are plough, earth, shepherd, ox, sheep. So are love, lust, sing, night, day, sun. So are words such as so, are, words, such, as. The one linguistic invasion of real significance in those years was Christianity. As the pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to the new religion, new words (mostly Greek or Roman in origin) crept in to handle the new concepts: bishop, monk, nun, altar, angel, pope, apostle, psalm, school. The number of new words was small, less than 1 per cent of the existing vocabulary, but they extended the language by giving it ways of expressing new thoughts, new concepts.

  With the language to do it, the Anglii began to produce a literature of their own, probably a great one. If people wanted to preserve their work, they wrote not in English but in Latin. As a consequence, most work that was written in English has been lost for ever. Fortunately, though, enough of the old literature has survived for us to get a feel of what was lost. Beowulf is the first great surviving work of literature written in English, a story of strange monsters and Dark Age realpolitik. Here, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, is the arrival of the monster Grendel at the feasting hall:

  In off the moors, down through the mist-bands

  God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

  The bane of the race of men roamed forth,

  hunting for a prey in the high hall.

  Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it until it

  shone above him, a sheer keep

  of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time

  he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling

  —although never in his life, before or since,

  did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders.

  This extract gives us the true feel of Anglo-Saxon: gritty, alliterative, forceful, direct. In Heaney’s words: ‘What I had always loved was a kind of four-squareness about the utterance…an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world.’

  Warrior-like it may have been, but Anglo-Saxon almost died nevertheless—not just once, but twice. The first major threat came with the Viking invasions when, but for Alfred the Great, we might well have ended up speaking Norse, not English. The second near-death experience came with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Because the new king, William, had been hard up for cash, he’d paid for much of his help with pledges of English land. When victory came, those pledges were redeemed. All of a sudden, every position of power in England was filled by French speakers. The new noblemen spoke French. Bishops and abbots spoke French. The court spoke French. The king made a short-lived effort to learn English, then gave up and stuck to French. As an official language, English completely vanished. In its written form, its disappearance was almost total.

  For centuries, a kind of linguistic apartheid reigned. English peasants continued to speak English. The court continued to speak French. But in between the top and bottom layers of society, mixing was inevitable, as Normans married English, as French babies were cared for by local women. At the level where the two societies met, the English language underwent the most rapid—and important—transformation of its life.

  A torrent of new words poured in from the French, thousands of them, far more than had ever come from Norse or Celtic. The Normans brought a new kind of justice and administration to the land. Arrest, attorney, bail, bailiff, felony, fine, pardon, perjury and verdict all come from the French. They brought new concepts of chivalry: courtesy, damsel, honour, romance, tournament, chivalry. The arts, science, the domestic scene—all borrowed heavily from French words: music, paper, melody, grammar, calendar, ointment, pantry, lamp, curtain, chimney. And while the English worked the fields tending the oxen or cows, sheep, calves, deer and pigs (all English words), it was as often as not their French masters who got to eat the resulting beef, mutton, veal, venison and pork (all French ones).

  On the whole, these new words didn’t replace the older English ones, they sat alongside them. That’s why the language now has so many alternatives: the fancy French model and the plainer English one. For example, the English ask sits beside the French question, interrogate, demand. The English king rubs shoulders with royal, regal, sovereign. We have English hands but do French manual work. For three hundred years such words poured over the Channel, leaving English immeasurably enriched, a different language.

  It wasn’t just new words, it was new ways of writing too. Compare these two bits of verse, one French, one English.

  Foy porter, honneur garder

  Et pais querir, oubeir

  Doubter, servir, et honnourer

  Vous vueil jusques au morir

  Dame sans per.

  (I want to stay faithful, guard your honour / Seek peace, obey / Fear, serve and honour you / Until death / Peerless lady—

  Guillaume de Machaut.)

  And the English one:

  Summer is y-comen in,

  Loude sing, cuckoo!

  Groweth seed and bloweth mead

  And spring’th the woode now—

  Sing cuckoo!

  Ewe bleateth after lamb,

  Low’th after calfe cow.

  Bullock starteth, bucke farteth.

  Merry sing, cuckoo! (Anon)

  The French verse is smooth, melodious, liquid. It is clever writing. Its themes are courtly love, honour and chivalry; its principal sound effect coming from that smoothly repeated soft rhyme. The English verse is the exact opposite. It’s earthy, lusty and crude. It talks about animals and farts. It’s a language at home in the fields, not the court. It uses rhyme, but does so not in a smooth and flowing way like the French, but in a way designed to make the most of the natural swing and rhythm of spoken English. That old Anglo-Saxon taste for alliteration is still there (calf / cow, bullock / buck). This is a language that enjoys its own sound effects; the one thing it won’t do is stay polite and well mannered.

  The point isn’t that one form of writing is better than the other. The point is that English writers suddenly faced a huge expansion in their choice of how to write. They could be lusty, earthy, crude, jaunty. Or they could be Latinate, posh, abstract, clever. Or, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, they could mix and match, moving from the earthy to the sublime and back again. That expressive richness has been the language’s greatest resource, and it has been core to the achievements of its greatest writ
ers.

  That choice of how to write is still with us today. Britain’s two best-known poets of recent times have been Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Here is Ted Hughes, writing about a ewe having problems giving birth:

  I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

  And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

  Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

  Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

  Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

  Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery

  Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof…

  This is Anglo-Saxon in modern clothes. Hughes is earthy, concrete, in-yer-face. He uses compound nouns, alliteration and thumping stresses. It’s verse that lives in the fields, and raises two fingers to the court.

  Here, in contrast, is the way Philip Larkin writes about animals—in his case, retired racehorses.

  Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps

  Two dozen distances sufficed

  To fable them: faint afternoons

  Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,

  Whereby their names were artificed

  To inlay faded, classic Junes…

  This is pure French. The language is Latinate, high-flown, smooth and elegant; a language comfortable with the Royal Enclosure, not the dung and straw of the stable yard.

  In short, English became—and remained—a language in which you could swear like a German, or seduce like a Frenchman. You could make war using one vocabulary, and philosophize with another. No other European language has that suppleness, that blend of Germanic directness and Latinate elegance. If our literary tradition is as great as any in the world, then that greatness owes much to the language that gave it birth.

  * They still do. That’s what the Scots word Sassenach means.

  HALF-CHEWED LATIN

  It began with the Black Death.

  In Bristol, where it struck first in 1348, some 45 per cent of the population died. Across the country, the death toll was lower, but still vast. As the country fell dying, the only growth industry was that of burial, and since priests were constantly in contact with the sick and dying, the death rate among the clergy probably exceeded even that of the general population. In January 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote, ‘Priests cannot be found for love nor money…to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments.’ Since those last sacraments would have been viewed as of vital importance in Catholic England, the problem was a serious one. Dreadful times bring drastic remedies. The bishop went on to say that, in the absence of a priest, it would be proper for the dying to confess their sins to a lay person or even (steady on!) ‘to a woman if no man is available’.

  Perhaps it was this new DIY approach to dying which fostered new ways of thinking, or perhaps it was simply the collision between hard times and a complacent Church. At all events, the age produced its revolutionary, an Oxford scholar named John Wyclif. Wyclif began to compare the Church he saw around him with the words of scripture, and he found the Church wanting. He wrote, ‘Were there a hundred popes and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.’

  Logically, then, if scripture was so important, it should be available to everyone—and available in English, not Latin. In our own secular times, it’s hard to get overexcited by such a suggestion, but in a world where it was not altogether clear whether Church or state exerted more power, Wyclif’s proposal was revolutionary, a clear threat to the status quo.

  Wyclif didn’t just talk about what ought to be done, he made sure that it was done. A group of scholars, working in line with Wyclif’s doctrines, began to translate the Bible. It was by no means the first time in European history that a vernacular translation had been produced, but it was the first time that a complete translation had been produced by serious scholars working in explicit defiance of Church doctrine. To offer a contemporary analogy, it was as if Wyclif and his fellows were seeking to introduce the freedoms of the Internet to a society that had long known only state-owned media. The English language was the battering ram. The result, one day, would be the Protestant Reformation itself.

  Yet for all Wyclif’s thundering denunciations of the Church, those first attempts at translation were oddly timorous. It was just as if, when it came to the point, the translators didn’t quite have the nerve to leave the original text behind. Here, for instance, is a chunk taken from the first psalm.

  Blisful the man, that went not awei in the counseil of unpitouse, and in the wei off sinful stod not; and in the chayer of pestilence sat not, But in the lawe of the Lord his wil; and in the lawe of hym he shal sweteli thenke dai and nygt.

  Even putting aside the archaic spellings, this text reads more like half-chewed Latin than proper English. But it was a start. Its authors must have recognized the weakness of that early version, because no sooner had the first translation been finished than a new and better one was begun. Those translations were transcribed by hand, then disseminated by wandering Lollard preachers. (Lollard, from the Middle Dutch word meaning ‘a babbler of nonsense’, came to be applied pejoratively to all Wyclif’s followers, who then came to embrace the term enthusiastically.)

  In a land where books were rare and precious, where the language of salvation had always been incomprehensible to the vast bulk of the population, those Bibles must have been the most extraordinary experience: liberating, poetic, exciting, inspiring. Many parish priests, indeed, would have understood next to nothing of the Latin that they had so solemnly intoned in church. With Wyclif’s new Bibles, weavers and housewives were suddenly being let into knowledge of God’s word itself, secrets that had previously been the property of only a tiny handful.

  Inevitably, of course, the movement was suppressed. Wyclif’s manuscripts were burned and the Lollards themselves arrested, often killed. But just as today the tide of technology tends to favour the Internet over those seeking to erect barriers against it, so too did the invention of the printing press shift things decisively in favour of revolution. Wyclif’s translations had had to be copied, slowly and painfully, by hand. Those that came after him in England and (particularly) Germany could churn out copies by the thousand. Costs fell, print runs increased. By 1526, William Tyndale, heavily influenced by Martin Luther, printed three thousand copies of his English language New Testament, then sold each copy for as little as four shillings. The authorities could no more track down and burn each copy than they could order trees to hold their leaves in autumn. An English-speaking God had finally, decisively arrived.

  As far as British exceptionalism is concerned the story ends there. An Englishman, John Wyclif, inaugurated a movement that would lead to the most important development in the Christian Church since the split between Catholic and Orthodox. That movement then shifted its centre of gravity eastwards to Germany, and England played no more than a secondary role in what followed. Yet to end the story at that point leaves off, at least from a literary point of view, its conclusion.

  As we know, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, on his death, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, converted the English Church into a genuinely Protestant one, something it had not been during Henry’s reign. During the six-year reign of Edward VI, around sixty new versions of the Bible were released. More followed under Elizabeth, then James.

  Compared with the old days, this was liberation indeed, but a troubling one all the same. It was all very well to write the gospels in the language of ploughboys, but the translations couldn’t all be equally good. Which ones were right, which wrong? It was time to set up a committee.

  The committee in question was a bureaucrats’ daydream. Fifty-four translators were appointed, split across six working groups, who toiled away for six years. The results were fed into yet another committee, a review committee, comprising scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. The review panel spent nine months in honing their texts. The resu
lt of their labours, the Authorised Version of the Bible (or the King James Bible), could have been a bureaucratic disaster, a hotchpotch of muddle and compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It has become, deservedly, one of the great monuments of English.

  The secret of its success was a simple one. All the committees, but most especially the final review committee, paid close attention to what would sound good when read aloud. Furthermore, keeping to their mandate of making scriptures accessible, the translators stuck to a honed-down lexicon of just eight thousand words. (Shakespeare, by contrast, uses some twenty thousand.) The result was grand, spare, sonorous and easy to understand. Here, for example, are the famous words from John’s Gospel, given in some of the major versions of the Bible up to this point:

  AN ANGLO-SAXON VERSION (995): ‘God lufode middan-eard swa, dat he seade his an-cennedan sunu, dat nan ne forweorde de on hine gely ac habbe dat ece lif’.

  WYCLIF (1380): ‘For god loued so the world; that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif’

  TYNDALE (1534): ‘For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him, shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.’

  KING JAMES (1611): ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.’

  Among these different versions, Wyclif’s words, with their strange spellings and disconcerting rhythms, seem to us like ancient history. The Anglo-Saxon is ancient history. Tyndale’s version rings out almost as clear and modern as the King James version. But it is only in its final appearance that these lines find their feet; meaning, rhythm and weight coming together in perfect balance.