The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England, ed. Nigel Saul
The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England, Ed. Nigel Saul, Oxford University Press, 1997
Medieval England; Identity, Politics, and Society, Nigel Saul.
In the 720s or 730s, after the establishment in the former Britannia of the mosaic of Germanic kingdoms, St Boniface dwelled on the apparent characteristics of the ‘English’. These, he considered, were sodomy, adultery, and drunkenness. Around the same time the Northumbrian Eius, in his life of the Wilfrid, said that the saint had been spared the execution at Lyons when he was found to be ‘of the English nation from Britain’ (‘de Anglorum gente ex Britannia’). (1)
Bede in one of his most famous passages categorized them as comprising three peoples—the Angles, from present-day Schleswig, the Saxons from Saxony, and the Jutes from Jutland. (2)
There are signs that the influence of Christ Church, Canterbury, may have been instrumental in disseminating a notion of Englishness. Canterbury wanted to draw all the English and Saxon people into its obedience and was accordingly keen to promote a notion of their unity. Bede drew much of the material for his history from Canterbury, and Nothelm, one of his informants, subsequently became archbishop. Bede’s unconscious acceptance of Canterbury’s ideas is implicit in the title that he gave to his work: an Ecclesiastical History of the English People (2)
After 871 the Vikings turned their attacks against Wessex, and within a few years they were penetrating deep into the kingdom. In 878, however, Alfred defeated them at Edington and Guthrum, their leader, submitted. In the following decade Alfred took the offensive. By the 880s or earlier he had recaptured London and at his death in 899 he was consolidating his position in the midlands. (2-3)
Alfred…But it was clear to him that if he was to fashion a united front against the Vikings he needed to stimulate a broadly national or ‘English’ feeling. He did this by fostering in his subjects a belief in themselves as a chosen race. Bede, whose work he had ordered to be translated, was his source of inspiration here. Bede had told the story of the conversion of the English to Christianity in the 600s. A couple of centuries later, when the Vikings were raiding and plundering, that Christian inheritance was in jeopardy. The reason for this, in Alfred’s view, was that the English, like the people of Israel, had sinned; and the torments which they were suffering were their punishments. The people of Israel had saved themselves by repenting; and the English should do likewise. God had singled them out for this supreme test, and it was possible for them to regain his favour by passing it. (4)
The Norman takeover in 1066 was more comprehensive in character than its predecessor. In the years around 1070 the Conqueror, faced with continuing native resistance, had gradually expropriated the Old English aristocracy and re-granted their lands to his own men. As a result, an entirely new aristocracy came into being which was endowed with lands on both sides of the Channel. More than anything else, it was the existence of this cross-Channel aristocracy which held the two dominions together. (5)
In the short term at least, the arrival of the Normans led to an assault on the traditional cultural values of the English. The English language was downgraded, and French became the language of polite society and Latin, over a long period, the language of government. It seems that in some cathedrals or abbeys the new Norman prelates challenged the sanctity of the more obscure early English saints: … But it has recently been shown that as early as the 1080s attitudes had begun to change. A process of assimilation began. An early indication of this is the growing respect shown to the pre-Conquest English cults… Simultaneously, it appears, English and Normans together were developing a new line in hagiography. The lives of the Old English saints were written or rewritten to meet the demands of the new age. (6)
The process of the merging of cultures was greatly aided by the growing interest that the Normans took in the country’s past. Whether because they were insecure or as part of the process of settling down the Normans quickly appropriated the English past to their own. Many of the leading chroniclers of the period—Orderic Vitalis, for example—were conscious that there were both English and Norman sides to their inheritance. Geoffrey Gaimar, a Norman who composed a history for the wife of minor Lincolnshire lord in the 1130s, treated the English pre-Conquest history as if it were part of the Norman heritage. Significantly, a number of leading English writers reciprocated by showing an interest in the Norman inheritance. …Geoffrey of Monmouth… (7)
The English saw themselves as different from other peoples. Towards their neighbours in the Celtic lands to the west the English affected a definite superiority. John of Salisbury, writing in the 1150s, said that the Welsh were ‘rude and untamed; they lived like beasts and although they nominally profess Christ, they deny him in their life and ways.’ Gerald de Barri was equally scathing in his comments about the Irish. ‘They are so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture…They are a wild people, living like beasts, who have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral farming.’ This attitude of superiority was probably rooted in a belief that the English economy was more advanced. (7)
The English ate better than the Celts; they ate better and they grew better crops. They were conscious of belonging to a wealthier and more civilized world. The fact that they spoke French lent weight to this perception because French was becoming the lingua franca of a cosmopolitan European-wide community. Only in relation to the subjects of the king of France did the English feel a certain inferiority. (8)
In John of Salisbury’s time national identities in Europe were only vague and in process of formation. Political boundaries generally did not coincide with boundaries between peoples, and loyalties were as much to lords as to territories. (8)
With the recovery of Normandy by the French in 1204, England was severed from her closest mainland partner. Her political society became self-contained, and the Anglo-Norman nobility, already Anglicized, became, in effect, an English nobility. (8)
By the mid- to late fifteenth century the nexus of ties, cultural and familial, that had bound the English nobility to their peers in Europe appears to have been weakening. At the same time the monarchy itself was becoming less cosmopolitan. Fewer marriage alliances than before were contracted with foreign houses. In the 200 years to 1420 every English ruler had taken a foreign wife; in the ninety or so years after that only one did, the hapless Henry VI. Increasingly kings looked for their brides to the native nobility. There were good domestic reasons for so doing: the Yorkist and Tudor dynasties had their origins in the nobility and needed to consolidate their ties with that group. All the same, the trend was symptomatic of narrowing horizons. The English monarchy was retreating from its once dominant, if not pre-eminent, position in Europe. Periodically after 1450 kings attempted to stage a comeback: Edward IV followed in the footsteps of Henry V in 1475, when he took an army to France. But the days of redrawing the map of Europe were over. (12)
By the thirteenth century papal influence was felt in every corner of Europe. Popes were intervening in the internal affairs of states, taxing ecclesiastical wealth, sponsoring the dispatch of crusaders, and summoning General Councils. The papacy had come a long way from the time, three centuries before, when it was little more than the object of the competing ambitions of the senatorial families of Rome. The reasons for the rise of papal power were several. One of the most important was the successful outcome to the struggle with the empire at the end of the eleventh century which led, in the longer term, to a decline in the emperor’s authority. A second reason was the growth in the twelfth century of the crusading movement, which had its origins in a papal initiative and which stimulated the levying of papal taxation. A third was the development of canon law and the growth of appellate procedures which brought suitors and litigants to Rome and placed the pope at the head of an elaborate judicial system. ( 13)
By the fifteenth century, however, the faithful were no longer going on pilgrimage in the numbers that they had. A variety of factors help to account for this. One was a gradual shift in devotional patterns. In the early and central middle ages devotion was focused on images. All over England minor cults grew up around such images. Images were seen as aids to prayer and devotion, but they did not inspire pilgrimages. A second reason for the change was that people were collecting their won relic. By the fourteenth century it was relatively easy to lay one’s hands on a few. Sir John Fastolf put together a collection that included a relic of the true Cross, an arm of St George, and a finger of St John the Baptist. (17)
Anglo Saxon England; c. 500-1066, Janet L. Nelson
Early medieval historians used oral material, but then structured their written narratives around models taken from the Bible. Bede wrote ecclesiastical history presupposing the existence of an ‘English people’: a new chosen people, who naturally had to move into their promised land, and were quite different from the aboriginal inhabitants. (25)
More recent historians too have had their guiding narratives for writing of the Anglo-Saxon period. In the seventeenth century, the central theme was the freedom of a class, the yeoman of England, subjected to the Norman yoke in 1066, but sticking triumphantly to their common law and re-emerging to challenge absolutist foreign (Scottish) kings. In the nineteenth century, the favoured narrative was a nation’s story. It was told in masterly fashion by Bishop Stubbs. Its heroes were the English (regardless of class), who differed distinctively from both Romans and Celts, but shared with the German a propensity to develop democracy and civilization. Stubbs wrote in the heyday of Empire and before the twentieth-century wars had made Germanness suspect. (26)
Language and literature are seen as central to English uniqueness. In this story, the later Anglo-Saxon period becomes very important, because most OE literature belongs to it. Aelfric and Wulfstan have inspired whose scholarly industries. (26)
Roman Britian ended, militarily and politically, early in the fifth century, when Continental writers confirm Gildas’s impression of withdrawal of Roman armies. … Archaeologists offer evidence of change in everyday life. No more coins were minted in fifth-century Britian; no more wheel-thrown pottery was manufactured; no more Latin inscriptions were put up except, it seems, in South Wales, nor stone or brick buildings erected…. Cemetery evidence shows that many residents of Kent, the Thames valley, and Hampshire were dressing in the same style as ‘barbarians’ on the Continent, and practiced similarly un-Roman burial customs. (28)
For Bede, the arrival of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory, and led by the Italian monk Augustine, was a sign of unequivocal progress: God’s grace bestowed on the Anglo-Saxons. The Gospels that Augustine brought with him survive: they embody not only Christ’s power, not only the power of the book, but the authority of the culture of the ancient Mediterranean. Later Anglo-Saxon missionaries imagined illiterate warriors quailing before the written Word that came to them from Rome. It was Augustine and his colleagues, certainly, who enabled Aethelbert to ‘establish for his people, after the example of the Romans, judicial decrees which written in the English language are preserved to this day’, in other words, put spoken Old English into the written form for the first time. (33)
Language and Literature, Derek Pearsall
‘Old English’ is the more usual modern term for the language of the period distinguishing it from ‘Middle English’ (c.1100-1500). (246)
The language here is the West Saxon of Alfred’s Wessex. The dialects of the Germanic settlers in the parts of the country they settled, as Kentish (the dialect of the Jutes), West Saxon (which soon dominated the other Saxon dialects), and Northumbrian and Mercian (the languages of the two Anglian kingdoms). (246)
Old English accepted very few borrowings from the indigenous Celtic language, apart from some river-names (Avon, Es, Usk, Wye), and not a great many from Latin, whether from the Roman inheritance (weall, ‘wall’, straet, ‘street’) or from later ecclesiastical importation (biscop, from Latin episcopus.) Like modern German, Old English expanded its vocabulary by compounding rather than borrowing, for instance, tungol-craeftiga, ‘star-crafty one’, for ‘astronomer’. It was more receptive to borrowings form the more closely related Scandinavian language of those who settled in the north and east of the country from the late ninth century onwards, and many modern words can be recognized as being of Scandinavian derivation, for instance words with sk- such as ‘sky’, ‘skin’, ‘skirt’, (cf. ‘shirt’ from Old English), and some very common words such as ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘their’, and ‘are’. (247)
The natural processes of change in the spoken language were concealed during the last two centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period by the existence of a standard written language. When English lost its status, after the Conquest, as a major language of writing and record, the spoken language resumed its more traditional role as the determinant of what was written, and the changes that had been taking place over two centuries, as well as the changes currently taking place, were released fully into the written forms of English. This is why Middle English, though it does not come into existence suddenly, is so markedly different in appearance from Old English, why Middle English seems so ‘English’ and Old English so ‘foreign’. … Sound-differences long concealed in standard West Saxon spelling, such as the different pronunciations conventionally represented by the letter c, are now distinguished by scribes less or not at all conversant with traditional spelling practice: … (257)
Of more fundamental importance are the changes in grammar and syntax that make the structure of Middle English so different from that of Old English (a ‘synthetic’ language) and so much more like that of modern English (an ‘analytic’ language). The significant change is the reduction in the number of inflections, already well advanced even in written late Old English. … As a result of the erosion of inflexional endings, the forms of words alone can no longer be relied upon to convey the relationship of the parts of a sentence, as they could in Old English (or Latin); word-order becomes overwhelmingly important….and other syntactical relationships are increasingly conveyed by noun-phrases, with a corresponding increase in the number of ‘little words’ such as prepositions and articles. Meaning is ‘shaken out’ into the characteristic loose-limbed but dynamic structures that make English such a powerfully adaptive language. (257-8)
Massive influx of thousands of words from French…Meanwhile, borrowings from Latin are at first quite small in number but increase to a torrent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as English takes over more and more of the functions, in science and learning, traditionally reserved for Latin. (258)
A history of England is bound to give prominence to writing in English, but the real weight of the culture in the thirteenth century lies elsewhere, and it would be wrong to ignore the hegemony of Latin and Anglo-Normal in certain areas of discourse. Latin dominated the writing of history… Latin also dominated the world of learning… Anglo-Norman, however, was inevitably bound to prevail over Latin in the thoroughly Frenchified royal court and in aristocratic households throughout the country. (262-3)
After this century during which it was overshadowed by Anglo-Norman, English gradually assumed, during the course of the fourteenth century, its perhaps inevitable role as the principal and then the sole literary language of the English people. Latin of course long retained its monopoly as the language of monastic history… Anglo-Norman, meanwhile, was rapidly losing its character as a spoken vernacular and more slowly losing its hold on the centres of royal and aristocratic patronage. It continued to be used in official and legal documents well into the fifteenth century, but Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme (c.1375) represents the last gasp of literary Anglo-Norman. It is noteworthy that Gower tried to write a version of Continental French rather than the Anglo-Norman which was increasingly sneered at (as in the description of Chaucer’s Prioress) for its provincialism. (265)
The last barriers to literary English were those erected around the royal court, which remained predominantly French-speaking until the reign of Richard II; the French poet Jean Froissart was the important literary figure in the household of Queen Philippa in the 1360s, and Gower still thought French an appropriate language for his first major poem in the mid-1370s. The annexation of the court to English would have taken place anyway, but the process by which it did so coincides with the career of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), who has an air therefore of being responsible. He probably wrote poems in French during his early life as an esquire of the royal household, but he made a decisive choice to write in English in 1369, with his poem on the death of John of Gaunt’s wife, The Book of the Duchess, and English poetry never looked back. Little of his poetry is associated directly with court patronage, and the most supremely ‘courtly’ of his poems, Troilus and Criseyde (1381-6), is dedicated to his London friends Gower and Strode. But Chaucer, as a court and civil servant for much of his life, was to that extent a recipient of royal patronage and a member of the court ‘circle’: the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (1386-7) is addressed to Anne, Richard II’s queen, and the love-vision poems of The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls may have been written for court occasions. Later in his life, his court connections were looser, and the work of his last years, The Canterbury Tales, with its exploration of every kind of human society and European narrative form, is a world away from the fashionable love-romance of Troilus. (271)
Chaucer …invent the metrical form that has dominated English verse since his time—the pentameter, which he used in both couplet and stanza. (271)
His most distinguished fellow poet is John Gower (d. 1408), author of estates-satire in French (Mirour de l’Omme) and Latin (Vox Clamantis) and, after Chaucer had blazed the trail, of a major poem in English, the Confessio Amantis. First addressed to Richard II and subsequently, when Gower grew disillusioned with Richard, to Henry of Lancaster (the future Henry IV), the Confessio is a very large collection of stories arranged under the headings of the Seven Deadly Sins in the manner of a lover’s confession and exemplifying virtue in love and in the community at large. It is a work belonging to the older not the modern European tradition, written in the older short couplet not the pentameter, but it is a superb poem by any but Chaucerian standards. (272)
The most important event of the fifteenth century for the English language and for English literary culture is the introduction of printing into England by William Caxton in 1476. The English language was already on its way to being standardized on the model of the east midland dialect of London in the early fifteenth-century: the systematization of grammar and spelling in the professionally produced London copies of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve was one important influence; Henry V’s determination to have English as the language of Chancery and other official documents was another. (275)
Medieval England; Identity, Politics, and Society, Nigel Saul.
In the 720s or 730s, after the establishment in the former Britannia of the mosaic of Germanic kingdoms, St Boniface dwelled on the apparent characteristics of the ‘English’. These, he considered, were sodomy, adultery, and drunkenness. Around the same time the Northumbrian Eius, in his life of the Wilfrid, said that the saint had been spared the execution at Lyons when he was found to be ‘of the English nation from Britain’ (‘de Anglorum gente ex Britannia’). (1)
Bede in one of his most famous passages categorized them as comprising three peoples—the Angles, from present-day Schleswig, the Saxons from Saxony, and the Jutes from Jutland. (2)
There are signs that the influence of Christ Church, Canterbury, may have been instrumental in disseminating a notion of Englishness. Canterbury wanted to draw all the English and Saxon people into its obedience and was accordingly keen to promote a notion of their unity. Bede drew much of the material for his history from Canterbury, and Nothelm, one of his informants, subsequently became archbishop. Bede’s unconscious acceptance of Canterbury’s ideas is implicit in the title that he gave to his work: an Ecclesiastical History of the English People (2)
After 871 the Vikings turned their attacks against Wessex, and within a few years they were penetrating deep into the kingdom. In 878, however, Alfred defeated them at Edington and Guthrum, their leader, submitted. In the following decade Alfred took the offensive. By the 880s or earlier he had recaptured London and at his death in 899 he was consolidating his position in the midlands. (2-3)
Alfred…But it was clear to him that if he was to fashion a united front against the Vikings he needed to stimulate a broadly national or ‘English’ feeling. He did this by fostering in his subjects a belief in themselves as a chosen race. Bede, whose work he had ordered to be translated, was his source of inspiration here. Bede had told the story of the conversion of the English to Christianity in the 600s. A couple of centuries later, when the Vikings were raiding and plundering, that Christian inheritance was in jeopardy. The reason for this, in Alfred’s view, was that the English, like the people of Israel, had sinned; and the torments which they were suffering were their punishments. The people of Israel had saved themselves by repenting; and the English should do likewise. God had singled them out for this supreme test, and it was possible for them to regain his favour by passing it. (4)
The Norman takeover in 1066 was more comprehensive in character than its predecessor. In the years around 1070 the Conqueror, faced with continuing native resistance, had gradually expropriated the Old English aristocracy and re-granted their lands to his own men. As a result, an entirely new aristocracy came into being which was endowed with lands on both sides of the Channel. More than anything else, it was the existence of this cross-Channel aristocracy which held the two dominions together. (5)
In the short term at least, the arrival of the Normans led to an assault on the traditional cultural values of the English. The English language was downgraded, and French became the language of polite society and Latin, over a long period, the language of government. It seems that in some cathedrals or abbeys the new Norman prelates challenged the sanctity of the more obscure early English saints: … But it has recently been shown that as early as the 1080s attitudes had begun to change. A process of assimilation began. An early indication of this is the growing respect shown to the pre-Conquest English cults… Simultaneously, it appears, English and Normans together were developing a new line in hagiography. The lives of the Old English saints were written or rewritten to meet the demands of the new age. (6)
The process of the merging of cultures was greatly aided by the growing interest that the Normans took in the country’s past. Whether because they were insecure or as part of the process of settling down the Normans quickly appropriated the English past to their own. Many of the leading chroniclers of the period—Orderic Vitalis, for example—were conscious that there were both English and Norman sides to their inheritance. Geoffrey Gaimar, a Norman who composed a history for the wife of minor Lincolnshire lord in the 1130s, treated the English pre-Conquest history as if it were part of the Norman heritage. Significantly, a number of leading English writers reciprocated by showing an interest in the Norman inheritance. …Geoffrey of Monmouth… (7)
The English saw themselves as different from other peoples. Towards their neighbours in the Celtic lands to the west the English affected a definite superiority. John of Salisbury, writing in the 1150s, said that the Welsh were ‘rude and untamed; they lived like beasts and although they nominally profess Christ, they deny him in their life and ways.’ Gerald de Barri was equally scathing in his comments about the Irish. ‘They are so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture…They are a wild people, living like beasts, who have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral farming.’ This attitude of superiority was probably rooted in a belief that the English economy was more advanced. (7)
The English ate better than the Celts; they ate better and they grew better crops. They were conscious of belonging to a wealthier and more civilized world. The fact that they spoke French lent weight to this perception because French was becoming the lingua franca of a cosmopolitan European-wide community. Only in relation to the subjects of the king of France did the English feel a certain inferiority. (8)
In John of Salisbury’s time national identities in Europe were only vague and in process of formation. Political boundaries generally did not coincide with boundaries between peoples, and loyalties were as much to lords as to territories. (8)
With the recovery of Normandy by the French in 1204, England was severed from her closest mainland partner. Her political society became self-contained, and the Anglo-Norman nobility, already Anglicized, became, in effect, an English nobility. (8)
By the mid- to late fifteenth century the nexus of ties, cultural and familial, that had bound the English nobility to their peers in Europe appears to have been weakening. At the same time the monarchy itself was becoming less cosmopolitan. Fewer marriage alliances than before were contracted with foreign houses. In the 200 years to 1420 every English ruler had taken a foreign wife; in the ninety or so years after that only one did, the hapless Henry VI. Increasingly kings looked for their brides to the native nobility. There were good domestic reasons for so doing: the Yorkist and Tudor dynasties had their origins in the nobility and needed to consolidate their ties with that group. All the same, the trend was symptomatic of narrowing horizons. The English monarchy was retreating from its once dominant, if not pre-eminent, position in Europe. Periodically after 1450 kings attempted to stage a comeback: Edward IV followed in the footsteps of Henry V in 1475, when he took an army to France. But the days of redrawing the map of Europe were over. (12)
By the thirteenth century papal influence was felt in every corner of Europe. Popes were intervening in the internal affairs of states, taxing ecclesiastical wealth, sponsoring the dispatch of crusaders, and summoning General Councils. The papacy had come a long way from the time, three centuries before, when it was little more than the object of the competing ambitions of the senatorial families of Rome. The reasons for the rise of papal power were several. One of the most important was the successful outcome to the struggle with the empire at the end of the eleventh century which led, in the longer term, to a decline in the emperor’s authority. A second reason was the growth in the twelfth century of the crusading movement, which had its origins in a papal initiative and which stimulated the levying of papal taxation. A third was the development of canon law and the growth of appellate procedures which brought suitors and litigants to Rome and placed the pope at the head of an elaborate judicial system. ( 13)
By the fifteenth century, however, the faithful were no longer going on pilgrimage in the numbers that they had. A variety of factors help to account for this. One was a gradual shift in devotional patterns. In the early and central middle ages devotion was focused on images. All over England minor cults grew up around such images. Images were seen as aids to prayer and devotion, but they did not inspire pilgrimages. A second reason for the change was that people were collecting their won relic. By the fourteenth century it was relatively easy to lay one’s hands on a few. Sir John Fastolf put together a collection that included a relic of the true Cross, an arm of St George, and a finger of St John the Baptist. (17)
Anglo Saxon England; c. 500-1066, Janet L. Nelson
Early medieval historians used oral material, but then structured their written narratives around models taken from the Bible. Bede wrote ecclesiastical history presupposing the existence of an ‘English people’: a new chosen people, who naturally had to move into their promised land, and were quite different from the aboriginal inhabitants. (25)
More recent historians too have had their guiding narratives for writing of the Anglo-Saxon period. In the seventeenth century, the central theme was the freedom of a class, the yeoman of England, subjected to the Norman yoke in 1066, but sticking triumphantly to their common law and re-emerging to challenge absolutist foreign (Scottish) kings. In the nineteenth century, the favoured narrative was a nation’s story. It was told in masterly fashion by Bishop Stubbs. Its heroes were the English (regardless of class), who differed distinctively from both Romans and Celts, but shared with the German a propensity to develop democracy and civilization. Stubbs wrote in the heyday of Empire and before the twentieth-century wars had made Germanness suspect. (26)
Language and literature are seen as central to English uniqueness. In this story, the later Anglo-Saxon period becomes very important, because most OE literature belongs to it. Aelfric and Wulfstan have inspired whose scholarly industries. (26)
Roman Britian ended, militarily and politically, early in the fifth century, when Continental writers confirm Gildas’s impression of withdrawal of Roman armies. … Archaeologists offer evidence of change in everyday life. No more coins were minted in fifth-century Britian; no more wheel-thrown pottery was manufactured; no more Latin inscriptions were put up except, it seems, in South Wales, nor stone or brick buildings erected…. Cemetery evidence shows that many residents of Kent, the Thames valley, and Hampshire were dressing in the same style as ‘barbarians’ on the Continent, and practiced similarly un-Roman burial customs. (28)
For Bede, the arrival of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory, and led by the Italian monk Augustine, was a sign of unequivocal progress: God’s grace bestowed on the Anglo-Saxons. The Gospels that Augustine brought with him survive: they embody not only Christ’s power, not only the power of the book, but the authority of the culture of the ancient Mediterranean. Later Anglo-Saxon missionaries imagined illiterate warriors quailing before the written Word that came to them from Rome. It was Augustine and his colleagues, certainly, who enabled Aethelbert to ‘establish for his people, after the example of the Romans, judicial decrees which written in the English language are preserved to this day’, in other words, put spoken Old English into the written form for the first time. (33)
Language and Literature, Derek Pearsall
‘Old English’ is the more usual modern term for the language of the period distinguishing it from ‘Middle English’ (c.1100-1500). (246)
The language here is the West Saxon of Alfred’s Wessex. The dialects of the Germanic settlers in the parts of the country they settled, as Kentish (the dialect of the Jutes), West Saxon (which soon dominated the other Saxon dialects), and Northumbrian and Mercian (the languages of the two Anglian kingdoms). (246)
Old English accepted very few borrowings from the indigenous Celtic language, apart from some river-names (Avon, Es, Usk, Wye), and not a great many from Latin, whether from the Roman inheritance (weall, ‘wall’, straet, ‘street’) or from later ecclesiastical importation (biscop, from Latin episcopus.) Like modern German, Old English expanded its vocabulary by compounding rather than borrowing, for instance, tungol-craeftiga, ‘star-crafty one’, for ‘astronomer’. It was more receptive to borrowings form the more closely related Scandinavian language of those who settled in the north and east of the country from the late ninth century onwards, and many modern words can be recognized as being of Scandinavian derivation, for instance words with sk- such as ‘sky’, ‘skin’, ‘skirt’, (cf. ‘shirt’ from Old English), and some very common words such as ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘their’, and ‘are’. (247)
The natural processes of change in the spoken language were concealed during the last two centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period by the existence of a standard written language. When English lost its status, after the Conquest, as a major language of writing and record, the spoken language resumed its more traditional role as the determinant of what was written, and the changes that had been taking place over two centuries, as well as the changes currently taking place, were released fully into the written forms of English. This is why Middle English, though it does not come into existence suddenly, is so markedly different in appearance from Old English, why Middle English seems so ‘English’ and Old English so ‘foreign’. … Sound-differences long concealed in standard West Saxon spelling, such as the different pronunciations conventionally represented by the letter c, are now distinguished by scribes less or not at all conversant with traditional spelling practice: … (257)
Of more fundamental importance are the changes in grammar and syntax that make the structure of Middle English so different from that of Old English (a ‘synthetic’ language) and so much more like that of modern English (an ‘analytic’ language). The significant change is the reduction in the number of inflections, already well advanced even in written late Old English. … As a result of the erosion of inflexional endings, the forms of words alone can no longer be relied upon to convey the relationship of the parts of a sentence, as they could in Old English (or Latin); word-order becomes overwhelmingly important….and other syntactical relationships are increasingly conveyed by noun-phrases, with a corresponding increase in the number of ‘little words’ such as prepositions and articles. Meaning is ‘shaken out’ into the characteristic loose-limbed but dynamic structures that make English such a powerfully adaptive language. (257-8)
Massive influx of thousands of words from French…Meanwhile, borrowings from Latin are at first quite small in number but increase to a torrent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as English takes over more and more of the functions, in science and learning, traditionally reserved for Latin. (258)
A history of England is bound to give prominence to writing in English, but the real weight of the culture in the thirteenth century lies elsewhere, and it would be wrong to ignore the hegemony of Latin and Anglo-Normal in certain areas of discourse. Latin dominated the writing of history… Latin also dominated the world of learning… Anglo-Norman, however, was inevitably bound to prevail over Latin in the thoroughly Frenchified royal court and in aristocratic households throughout the country. (262-3)
After this century during which it was overshadowed by Anglo-Norman, English gradually assumed, during the course of the fourteenth century, its perhaps inevitable role as the principal and then the sole literary language of the English people. Latin of course long retained its monopoly as the language of monastic history… Anglo-Norman, meanwhile, was rapidly losing its character as a spoken vernacular and more slowly losing its hold on the centres of royal and aristocratic patronage. It continued to be used in official and legal documents well into the fifteenth century, but Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme (c.1375) represents the last gasp of literary Anglo-Norman. It is noteworthy that Gower tried to write a version of Continental French rather than the Anglo-Norman which was increasingly sneered at (as in the description of Chaucer’s Prioress) for its provincialism. (265)
The last barriers to literary English were those erected around the royal court, which remained predominantly French-speaking until the reign of Richard II; the French poet Jean Froissart was the important literary figure in the household of Queen Philippa in the 1360s, and Gower still thought French an appropriate language for his first major poem in the mid-1370s. The annexation of the court to English would have taken place anyway, but the process by which it did so coincides with the career of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), who has an air therefore of being responsible. He probably wrote poems in French during his early life as an esquire of the royal household, but he made a decisive choice to write in English in 1369, with his poem on the death of John of Gaunt’s wife, The Book of the Duchess, and English poetry never looked back. Little of his poetry is associated directly with court patronage, and the most supremely ‘courtly’ of his poems, Troilus and Criseyde (1381-6), is dedicated to his London friends Gower and Strode. But Chaucer, as a court and civil servant for much of his life, was to that extent a recipient of royal patronage and a member of the court ‘circle’: the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (1386-7) is addressed to Anne, Richard II’s queen, and the love-vision poems of The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls may have been written for court occasions. Later in his life, his court connections were looser, and the work of his last years, The Canterbury Tales, with its exploration of every kind of human society and European narrative form, is a world away from the fashionable love-romance of Troilus. (271)
Chaucer …invent the metrical form that has dominated English verse since his time—the pentameter, which he used in both couplet and stanza. (271)
His most distinguished fellow poet is John Gower (d. 1408), author of estates-satire in French (Mirour de l’Omme) and Latin (Vox Clamantis) and, after Chaucer had blazed the trail, of a major poem in English, the Confessio Amantis. First addressed to Richard II and subsequently, when Gower grew disillusioned with Richard, to Henry of Lancaster (the future Henry IV), the Confessio is a very large collection of stories arranged under the headings of the Seven Deadly Sins in the manner of a lover’s confession and exemplifying virtue in love and in the community at large. It is a work belonging to the older not the modern European tradition, written in the older short couplet not the pentameter, but it is a superb poem by any but Chaucerian standards. (272)
The most important event of the fifteenth century for the English language and for English literary culture is the introduction of printing into England by William Caxton in 1476. The English language was already on its way to being standardized on the model of the east midland dialect of London in the early fifteenth-century: the systematization of grammar and spelling in the professionally produced London copies of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve was one important influence; Henry V’s determination to have English as the language of Chancery and other official documents was another. (275)
posted by Raul de Saldanha at
9:17 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home