English, our mixed Mother Tongue

If it wasn’t for the French, we’d all be speaking German

Around the year 1190, a chronicler in Christ Church, Canterbury put pen to paper to transcribe the Gospels, a piece of writing which — unbeknown to him — would be the last written record of his language: Old English. 

Such was the transformation of the vernacular over just a short space of time that, 40 years later, it was recorded that a monk was trying to learn Old English, and towards the end of the 13th century another chronicler added the phrase ‘unknown language’ to some Anglo-Saxon text. To speakers of what was now Middle English, the old language was incomprehensible. 

England’s first printer, William Caxton, would later remark of a piece of Old English that ‘certaynly it was wreton in suchewyse that it was more lyke to Dutche than Englysshe: I coude not reduce ne brynge it to be understonden.’ While Old English is a beautiful language, to us it does indeed sound strange, far more German or Scandinavian, as this rendition of Beowulf illustrates.

The Norman Conquest dramatically changed our language, bringing an influx of loan words as English was replaced by French and Latin as the medium of government and law for three centuries.

Today only a quarter of English vocabulary is Germanic in origin, with over half coming from French or Latin, although the vast majority of the most common words are Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps, with the Conquest, English might have gone extinct altogether, just like several previous native languages of Britain, such as Cumbric, which lived on only in sheep-counting.

Although the last written evidence appears in 1190, Old English was on the way out long before. The second last entry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from 1135, is recognisably Anglo-Saxon; the last, made almost twenty years later, is radically different, a new language called Middle English. Older forms of English held out in the north, where Norman domination took longer to be established, but the tide overcame them.

The Francisation of English reflected the social status of the conquerors’ language. In the 13^th century, Robert of Gloucester wrote that:

Vor bote a man cone Frenss me telp of him lute
Ac lowe men holdep to engliss. & to hor owe speche 3ute.

(‘Unless a man knows French he is thought little of
And low-born men keep to English, and to their own speech still.’)

As English became the language of the low born, so French began to infiltrate as native speakers imitated the aristocracy and literate. As David Crystal wrote in The Stories of English, one can look at the Middle English poem Layamon’s Brut to see how swift the change was. This work was written in two stages, the first around 1200 and the rest perhaps 25 (or maybe 50) years later; while the earlier writing contains very few French loanwords, only 250 in 30,000 lines, and still includes such Old English words as aehte, boc-runen, heren, milce and wisen, by the time of the later passages, these have been replaced by treasur, letter, serve, grace and atyr (attire), and the later text contains far more French words. Similarly, in a chronicle written in Peterborough in the mid-12^th century there are just 29 French words; another, written 50 years later, has 250. 

French influenced the language most extensively in areas of life related to the court, justice, war and academia. Crystal noted that Chaucer’s use of French words varied hugely, with the ‘courtly narratives and scholarly expositions’ full of loan-words, and the more earthly passages containing more Anglo-Saxon. His Treatise on the Astrolabe, dealing with matters of science, are italicised by Crystal to emphasise the influence: ‘I apercyve wel by certeyne evydences thyn abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proporciouns; and as wel consider I thy besy praier in special to lerne the tretys of the Astrelabie.’

Today, almost all words relating to government and justice are French in origin, including prison, jury, felony, traitor, and, of course, government and justice. Likewise, titles are mostly Latinate, including sovereign, prince, duke and baron – although not king or lord, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘loaf-giver’.

The most obvious contrast is between words for the animals in the field and on the plate, since the English terms for the former – pigge, sceap, cu – survived, while the French terms for the dishes – porce, mutton, boeuf – became standard, reflecting the relative status of those eating meat and those working the fields. Words for semi-skilled trades like baker are Anglo-Saxon, while highly skilled professions like mason and tailor are French. 

The social divisions between Saxons and Normans were breaking down in the 12^th century, and by the time that England and Normandy were politically separated in 1204, the Anglo-Norman ruling elite were bilingual.

It wasn’t until the 14^th century, however, that English – which had the most extensive vernacular literature of any European language in the later Anglo-Saxon period – remerged. This was the era of Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland and the unknown author of ‘Pearl’, a deeply moving poem written by an unknown author from Cheshire or Lancashire, about his lost daughter. During this time Thomas Usk was the first to refer to ‘dame’s tongue’ (ie mother tongue) in The Testament of Love, written in 1384.

Chaucer came of age during the reign of Edward III, an especially troubling time when England continually warred with France, respite only coming in the form of the Black Death. It was during this period that many of the symbols associated with English nationhood became more firmly established, such as the veneration of St George and the use of the national flag. This time of national consciousness also saw the return of English.

In 1356, the same year as the Battle of Poitiers, the Mayor of London began proceedings in English; Parliament followed in 1362. Around the same time, the king ordered that English be spoken in law courts; legal documents were still written in French, and a mangled form of legal French would be used for much longer, but linguistic experts can work out from the syntax that they were now first thought-out in English. 

One theory is that the plague might have especially hit French speakers, concentrated more in dangerous professions like the clergy, and so there was no one left to teach what was still then the language of official business. Whether this is true, knowledge of the language must have become less common, for a surviving will from 1400 by the Sheriff of Kent, James de Peckham, bequeaths ‘all my books in French to those who know how to use them.’ (De Peckham’s children dropped the ‘de’ – the family had originated in the Low Countries - instantly making them sound considerably less grand.)

By 1385, someone even lamented that ‘nowadays children at grammar school know no more French than their left heel, and that is a misfortune for them if they should cross the sea and travel in foreign countries.’ And things have barely changed since.

At the end of the century Henry IV came to power, the first king whose mother tongue was English since 1066, opening Parliament by shouting ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ But it was a very different mother tongue to that of his ancestor Harold II.

Today, only 4,500 of perhaps 30,000 Old English words are still in use, but they form the backbone of modern English. In fact it is impossible to make any sense without it. Almost all of the most common 100 English words are Anglo-Saxon, with the exception of a handful of Norse terms and the neologism ‘okay’; by one measure, the most popular French word is just, ranked at 105.

Yet it is not true to say that the Normans alone changed our language. French almost certainly would have been influential anyway, as by the 12th century it was the lingua franca of western Christendom’s aristocracy and would remain so for several hundred years. Where Latin wasn’t the universal language of educated westerners, French tended to dominate; as one example, the art of cuisine developed in Paris in the 14th century, which is why chefs still learn an essentially French art, so we may have ended up with beef and pork anyway.

While the Norman conquest led to many French words entering English, by far the largest influx came in the 13th and 14th centuries when the University of Paris was the beating heart of western civilisation, with one-third of its students coming from England. 

As Crystal wrote, the period of peak borrowing came during the years 1375-1400, when 2,500 new loan words can be identified; by this stage English had already replaced French as the language of Parliament, and England now occupied much of France rather than the other way around. 

So French would almost certainly have come to influence English even if King Harold had won. Even before the Conquest, Old English had absorbed a number of French words, such as bacon, ginger, capon, dancer, weapon, prison, service, market and proud. The cultural influence of our large continental neighbour would have been too great. 

Yet that hasn’t stopped many writers speculating on what English might have sounded like, had things had gone differently on October 14, 1066…

… þurhwunian tō morgne

The UK edition of 1066 is now available to buy