Only a few expressions like court martial, attorney general, and body politic
reflect the habits of French word ordering. Because English had no official
status, for three centuries it drifted. Without a cultural pivot, some place to set a
standard, differences in regional usage became more pronounced rather than
less. As C. L. Barber notes: "Early Middle English texts give the impression of a
chaos of dialects, without many common conventions in pronunciation or
spelling, and with wide divergences in grammar and vocabulary."
And yet it survived. If there is one uncanny thing about the English language, it
is its incredible persistence. In retrospect it seems unthinkable to us now that it
might have been otherwise, but we forget just how easily people forsake their
tongues—as the Celts did in Spain and France, as the Vikings did in Normandy,
and as the Italians, Poles, Africans, Russians, and countless others all did in
America. And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history. English
survived. It is cherishable that a language that succeeded almost by stealth,
treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants,
should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.
Its lowly position almost certainly helped English to become a simpler, less
inflected language. As Baugh and Cable note: "By making English the language
mainly of uneducated people, the Norman conquest made it easier for
grammatical changes to go forward unchecked." In Old English, as we have
seen, most verbs were not only highly inflected, but also changed consonants
from one form to the next, but these were gradually regularized and only one
such form survives to this day—was/were. An explicit example of this
simplification can be seen in the Peterborough Chronicle, a yearly account of Anglo-Saxon life kept by the monks at Peterborough. Because of turmoil in the
country, work on the chronicle was suspended for twenty-three years between
1131 and 1154, just at the period when English was beginning to undergo some
of its most dramatic changes. In the earlier section, the writing is in Old English.
But when the chronicle resumes in 1154, the language is immeasurably simpler
—gender is gone, as are many declensions and conjugations, and the spelling has
been greatly simplified. To modern eyes, the earlier half looks to be a foreign
language; the later half is unmistakably English. The period of Middle English
had begun.
Several events helped. One was the loss by the hapless King John of Normandy
to the French crown in 120 4. Isolated from the rest of Europe by the English
Channel, the Norman rulers gradually came to think of themselves not as
displaced Frenchmen but as Englishmen. Intermarrying between Normans and
British contributed to the sense of Englishness. The children of these unions
learned French from their fathers, but English from their mothers and nannies.
Often they were more comfortable with English. The Normans, it must be said,
were never hostile to English. William the Conqueror himself tried to learn it,
though without success, and there was never any campaign to suppress it.
Gradually, English reasserted itself. French remained, until 1362, the language of
Parliament and, for somewhat longer, of the courts, but only for official purposes
—rather like Latin in the Catholic church. For a time, at least up until the age of
Chaucer, the two coexisted. Barnett notes that when the Dean of Windsor wrote
a letter to Henry IV the language drifted unselfconsciously back and forth
between English and French. This was in 1403, three years after the death of
Chaucer, so it is clear that French lingered.
And yet it was doomed.
By late in the twelfth century some Norman children were having to be taught
French before they could be sent away to school.
By the end of the fourteenth century Oxford University
introduced a statute ordering that students be taught at least partly in French "lest
the French language be entirely disused." In some court documents of this period
the syntax makes it clear that the judgments, though rendered in French, had
been thought out in English. Those who could afford it sent their children to
Paris to learn the more fashionable Central French dialect, which had by this time become almost a separate language. There is telling evidence of this in The
Canterbury Tales, when Chaucer notes that one of his pilgrims, the Prioress,
speaks a version of French known only in London, "For French of Paris was to
hir unknowe."
The harsh, clacking, guttural Anglo-French had become a source of amusement
to the people of Paris, and this provided perhaps the ultimate—and certainly the
most ironic—blow to the language in England. Norman aristocrats, rather than
be mocked for persevering with an inferior dialect that many of them ill spoke
anyway, began to take an increasing pride in English. So total was this reversal
of attitude that when Henry V was looking for troops to fight with him at
Agincourt in 1415, he used the French threat to the English language as a
rallying cry.
So English triumphed at last, though of course it was a very different language—
in many ways a quite separate language—from the Old English of Alfred the
Great or Bede. In fact, Old English would have seemed as incomprehensible to
Geoffrey Chaucer as it does to us, so great had been the change in the time of the
Normans. It was simpler in grammar, vastly richer in vocabulary.
Alongside the Old English motherhood, we now had maternity, with friendship
we had amity, with brotherhood, fraternity, and so on
Under the long onslaught from the Scandinavians and Normans, Anglo-Saxon
had taken a hammering. According to one estimate about 85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English
Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental
words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep,
eat, house, and so on. They also include most of the short "function" words of
the language: to, for, but, and, at, in, on, and so forth. As a result, at least half the
words in almost any sample of modern English writing will be of Anglo-Saxon
origin. According to another study cited by McCrum ,
every one of the hundred most common words in English is Anglo-Saxon.
To this day we have an almost instinctive preference for the older Anglo-Saxon
phrases. As Simeon Potter has neatly put it: "We feel more at ease getting a
hearty welcome than after being granted a cordial reception."