This page contains two documents: 1) Norman Invasion Paper, and 2) Norman Invasion, attachments to accompany the paper

Edelweiss Study Club

February 8, 2019

Marylyn J. Parins

The Norman Conquest of England

The papers we have heard earlier this year did change the world, or parts of the world in significant ways—dams affected millions, the potato mattered to Europe, as did other aspects of the Columbian exchange, the fall of Constantinople reconfigured eastern Europe and western Asia and helped usher in the Renaissance in Europe, and the Magna Carta has certainly left its mark on our legal system. The revolutionary Hamilton has had many repercussions in the current music world, and yes, World War I caused major upheaval and global change. . But none of those I have listed has had such a direct impact on us right now this minute as the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. For this event changed our LANGUAGE, the very words we are speaking here today. And indirectly, this event too has had a global impact as today English is the first or the second language in dozens of countries—not just England, the United States, Canada, and Australia, where it is the first language, but as a second language all over the world. It is the language that colonialism left behind in India and Pakistan, and much of Africa where, indeed, it often serves to unite speakers of different native dialects or even languages. It is the language of technology and of trade. More people by head count speak Mandarin than English as a first language, but that is just because there are so many of them. Hardly anyone speaks Mandarin as a second language, because there is no place except China to speak it in.

It is of course impossible to say exactly what we would be speaking today had the Norman Conquest not occurred. Before the Conquest, inhabitants of England were mostly Anglo Saxons, Germanic conquerers who had displaced the Celtic population after the withdrawal of the Romans in the 5th century. They brought with them Germanic languages, similar to German, Danish, Norwegian, and so on. Their language and literature developed independently in England for some 600 years. One example of that language is the great epic poem Beowulf, composed in the 8th or 9th Century in England. I have given you an example in the handout. (Look at Handout 1, read some.) Obviously this is not a familiar language, although one can recognize a few surviving words—we, how the, oft, he, under, and the almost fully intelligible line That was good king. An easier example, partly because it is prose, not poetry, but mostly because we know what it is supposed to say, is on the next page. (Do some of the Lord’s Prayer.)

Without the Norman Conquest, English would most likely have proceeded as other Germanic languages did. All were highly inflected, as was Anglo-Saxon. That is, word endings had to be changed to show gender, number, tense, and so on (think Latin). And the way these Germanic languages add to their word-stock is most often by compounding. As we still do to a degree—think greenhouse, moonlight, blackboard, and one of my favorites from Old English, day’s eye, compressed to daisy. So we would probably be speaking something that would sound a lot like modern Danish or low German. But this was not to be, and here’s why.

Up to 1066, England was ruled mostly by Anglo Saxon kings. Alfred the Great managed in the 9th century to hold invading Northmen—mostly just called Danes—to the north of England by treaty, keeping the south free. In the north of England, however, there began a mingling of languages that were already similar—Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) and Scandanavian (Viking) dialects. Many words of Scandanavian origin entered the English language in these north-eastern areas. Later, Cnut the Dane from 1016 to 1035 ruled over an empire that included all of England, plus Norway, Denmark, and lands along the Baltic, bringing more Scandanavian influence. But his line died out. In 1042, Edward the Confessor, son of Aethelred the Unready, came to the English throne. Unready does not actually mean unprepared here, it comes from Unraed, meaning not counseled or poorly counselled. It was Aethelred who lost England to Cnut, and fled to Normandy, his wife’s home. Edward his son was raised almost entirely in France, at the court of his cousin William of Normandy. When he came to the throne of England, he brought a lot of Norman-French friends with him. Edward had encouraged his cousin William to think he would get the English throne on Edward’s death. But Edward apparently did not make his wishes known before he died, or simply reneged, and Harold, son of Godwin, powerful earl of the West Saxons, was elected by the other earls. William was irritated, and promising lands and favors in England to all who would help him, amassed a considerable army. (Because of primogeniture, lots of second and third sons had no family lands, and had to seek careers in army or church.)

Then while Harold was away in the north fending off an attack by the King of Norway, William invaded in the south. Harold hastened south, losing some of his army on the way—many had been sent home for harvest—and engaged in the Battle of Hastings, in which he, Harold, was killed. (Show BAYEUX tapestry) William fairly quickly subdued the south, and once London capitulated he was crowned King of England. Moving over the whole of England, William managed to eliminate much of the surviving Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, the men at least. Widows could be married off to landless knights, thus handing over intact estates.

So within a decade, there was a new, Norman aristocracy, and the same was true in the church, as bishops and archbishops were deposed in favor of Norman prelates brought

from France for the purpose. Ditto the law courts. Within a very short time, English was replaced by Norman French among the upper classes, in government, and in the church. Latin of course continued doing what it had been doing, serving as the language of record, scholarship, international correspondence, and so on.

Think what this did to the English language. True it continued to be spoken by commoners, labourers, peasants, and the merchants and tradespeople who served them. But it virtually ceased to be a written language—most of these speakers were illiterate after all. When a language stops being written, it becomes less fixed, more subject to change, and this happened to English. Inflectional word endings began to fall away over time, and when this happened, word order became more important to meaning than in many other languages. Consider the sentence I just said—In English word order became more important to meaning, and rearrange the words: In order, more meaning English became important word. Unintelligible. It would not have been if all the old grammatical endings were still in place, identifying which words were nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on.

But English never disappeared. It remained the language of a majority of the people living in England—90-95%. Oral poetry was recited and ballads were sung, and were eventually written down.

At the higher echelons, however, there was no need for English for some 200 years after the Conquest. French was the language of the court, and therefore of the literature written for that court. Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, was a patroness of poets, many of whom dedicated their French works to her. Norman French was also the language of the law, and of the religious hierarchy. It was not that the Normans deliberately suppressed English; they more ignored it. Many families had estates in France as well as in England. When Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine, he acquired huge swaths of southern France. (Look at map.) These people needed to speak French. Henry, it is said, could understand some English but could not speak it. Eleanor required a translator always. Their son Richard the so-called Lion Heart spent less than a year of his life in England and spoke no English. There is no direct evidence about John, he of the Magna Carta, but his wife was French and no one in his family seems to have spoken English, so it is extremely unlikely he spoke English. Henry IV, who came to the throne in 1399, was the first English king after the Conquest—more than three hundred years after the Conquest, whose first language was English.

But in between high and low, there must have been a certain mingling of the two languages. Stewards on Norman estates, cooks in Norman kitchens, merchants and tradesmen who wanted to trade up—these people would at various times need both languages. The steward, probably a Norman retainer, needs to communicate not only with the master, but also with the servants, the peasants working the fields, raising the animals, etc. Ditto the cook in the master’s kitchen. One result of this kind of co-existence of the two languages in such places is the often cited fact that the name of the animal on the hoof, or in the barnyard or field, is almost invariably English, where the animal cooked and brought to the table is almost invariably French. As for example, swine and pig, cow and calf, sheep, deer are all words of English origin, whereas bacon, pork, beef, veal, mutton, and venison are from French.

As I’ve mentioned, the Norman kings and barons of England needed French—they were Norman French, many with estates in both countries, but this changed over time. In 1204, King John lost Normandy to the King of France, and relations between the two countries gradually deteriorated into the Hundred Years War—1337-1453.

By this time, naturally, the English court saw the French as the enemy and had turned increasingly to English as the language of choice. But this was a language now quite changed from the Old English that had been incomprehensible to the Normans at the time of the Conquest—as to most of us. The royal court had proved itself receptive to literature in English as early as the 1360s, but it was still a daring choice for Geoffrey Chaucer to choose to write only in English. His earliest long poem was the Book of the Duchess, a dream allegory written as an elegy to Blanche of Lancaster, dead wife of the king’s most powerful son and Chaucer’s patron, John of Gaunt. This suggests that John of Gaunt and indeed his family spoke English routinely. All Chaucer’s subsequent works were in English as well. Chaucer’s friend John Gower hedged his bets—one long poem in English, another in French, and another in Latin.In 1362, Parliament passed a law that all proceedings in the law courts would henceforth be in English, since, as the measure declared, French had become unknown to many.

Another thing that lead to the virtual abandonment of French in England is that the Anglo-Norman version of French had become a way less prestigious dialect than the Parisian French that had come to dominate. Noblemen who wanted their children to sound well-educated had to send the kids to France to learn French, so they wouldn’t sound like country cousins. This is the basis for Chaucer’s description of the Prioress, with her airs of rank and prestige.

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly,

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,

For Frenssh of Parys was to hir unknowe.

In other words, she spoke French with a heavyily provincial accent.

Just as Parisian French became the prestige dialect in the 14th century, so by century’s end, partly aided by Chaucer, in English London dialect had become the model. As you know, there are differing accents everywhere, especially in England, where conversation in Yorkshire, for example, is often unintelligible. And we are all acquainted with the existence of a prestige dialect and one judged substandard. Or at least those of us who, with our Arkansas dialect have ventured out into the larger world where we are sometimes considered to be mentally defective because of the way we speak.

So, when the English (the Normans were by now pretty much English) decided to return to their language, what was there? Well, it wasn’t Beowulf any more. The elaborate system of cases, genders, and numbers had vanished from the adjectives and articles—no der die das or le la les, just the the the. They were largely gone from nouns as well. With the exception of a few survivals of irregular plurals—goose, geese, child children, etc. there were only three noun endings—singular, possessive, and plural. girl, girl’s, girls. Verbs were less changed, but in some ways easier, since all new verbs were weak. That is, they added -ed for past tense and for past participle, although a number of verbs did retain their older strong verb forms where the vowel changes: ring rang rung, etc.

So the grammar is much simplified. But the huger change is in vocabulary, which has added hundreds of French words, and many Latin ones as well, to the vocabulary. Estimates range from 60 to 70 percent of the modern vocabulary of English are from French or Latin. However, in any given English sentence, there will usually be a larger percentage of English words, because of the survival of most function words—the, of, on, in, and, one, two, three, and so on. (look at pie chart) Let’s looks at some of these: (See list) Names of the months are all from Latin, but interestingly, all but one of the days of the week are retained from Old English: SUNday; MONday (moon); Tuesday, the god Tyr; Wednesday, Woden; Thursday, Thor, Friday, Freya. Only Saturday named for the Roman god Saturn is an exception.

The other Germanic languages added new words more by compounding than by borrowing, so that even in modern German, say, you get those long 19-syllable words like

geschellanhauptenkinderlungen—well I made that one up—but here’s a real one that means food intolerance: Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit, Mercifully, English after the Conquest did much less of this and simply borrowed the words from French, or Latin, or Greek as needed. As a result of this penchant for borrowing, English today has probably the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. So let’s look at this emerging English that Chaucer and others championed. (Go to C. Tales.) You can read this. Pronunciation is hard, and English pronunciation did change in major ways over the next hundred years. But if you ignore the sounds, the words on the page aren’t that bad. And although it retains much from Old English, especially in the way of small function words, it seems like a whole new language.

(Look at Wife of Bath). Within a hundred years, this fine new language will produce Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in another hundred will come Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Let’s just look at Malory, because here, it’s nearly done. I personally don’t think the language needed much more than this. It has, however, continued to grow and change, though more slowly now than in the dramatic years following the Conquest when English lost its place as a language of educated people. But as we have seen, it changed and it survived.