How the Normans changed the way we speak

Introduction and childhood memories

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0:34Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in

1:05their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. Hello. One of my thrills, and I really do mean thrills, when I was a child, was exploring old castles. My parents took my brother and me to places all over England and Wales, where these great sombre buildings rose above the surrounding countryside or towns. Incredibly, some were even

1:36in tiny villages, as with the one we often visited, in Skenfrith in Monmouthshire, Wales. There it sits, grey and forbidding, overlooking the houses and church. We would scamper over the broken walls, filling our heads with stories of knights of old, helmets and swords. In those days, my excitement was connected to the stories of King Arthur, or I should say, who I thought was King Arthur. So I peopled the castles with Sir Garwain and Sir Galahad and all the rest of the Arthurian gang and their round table. When we stood in the open spaces inside the castles, I conjured up tournaments

2:11and knights in armour, charging at each other, their horses dressed in bright blue and red. It was all very glamorous and not totally attached to the historic truth. I did my best to learn some of the technical terms of castle, like mott and bailey, or the word I could never pronounce, machicolations. The gaps at the top of walls through which defenders could pour on attackers, we were told, hot oil, rubbish, or to our delight, poo. The word machicolation comes from a French word,

2:43machicouli. Why French? Because, of course, most of these castles were built by the Normans, who came from Normandy. And here, some of the glamour and fun stops because these castles had a purpose to rule over and control the English population. In what was a quite remarkable era, the Norman aristocracy spread out across the English kingdoms and pretty successfully conquered them all. After all, we do call the king who started this off William the Conqueror. Though in France, they don't call him Guillaume le Conquerant, they call him Guillaume le Batard, William the Bastard.

3:20A description of his lineage, not his character, I hasten to add. But what are the language? Norman French and Old English were very different languages, bar some shared Latin on account of the shared Christian heritage. How were the occupants of those castles talking to each other? And then, how did the two languages, Norman French and Old English, merge? And then how does this connect with what I'm speaking? Are these words that I'm saying right now, leaving aside the borrowings from other languages, mostly English? Mostly Norman French? Or what? Well, to help me answer these

Counting borrowed words

3:55questions and many more, with me today is Philip Durkin, Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and leader of its team of specialist etymology editors. Welcome to the programme, Philip. Now, you looked into this in your book, Borrowed Words, and well, what did you find? Yes, in that book, I took a look at the thousand most frequent words in modern day written English, using a corpus of modern published written English documents to see what their origins were. Yeah. And almost 50% of those words are borrowed from other languages, nearly all of those from

4:30either French or Latin, or a mixture of both. And almost all of that 50%, in fact, came into English during the period we're interested in today, between 1066 and 1500, the centuries after the Norman conquest, when what we call Anglo-Norman was in use in England and some other parts of the British Isles. Right. So let me just throw in some just to kick us off. So if I say beef or pastry or jolly. Yeah, those are great examples. We could also say air, authority, city, easy, large, letter, place,

5:07poor, price, reason, rule, simple, story. You know, very, very difficult to speak modern English without using some Anglo-Norman words in there in the mix. Easy. You threw me there. But then, of course, a les, as in French, at ease, modern French. I had never thought of that. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Well, let's have some famous phrases from Anglo-Norman. You can tell me whether I'm right on these or not. The motto, the Order of the Garter, which was founded by Edward III, that's a bit later than William the Conqueror. Oni soit qui mali passe. Is that Anglo-Norman? Absolutely. Yes.

5:38And remind me, what does that mean exactly? May the shame be to he who thinks it. Ah, right. So shame be who bad there thinks. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. And then the other one that we see on the royal motto, it's a royal motto, isn't it? Dieu et mon droit, which sounds like modern French, God and my... Right. Right. Yes. So that survived in modern French, has it? Exactly that, as well as Norman French? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Those words are identical.

The scale of the Norman migration

6:06So let's get a picture of how many people came over with William and where they went. Right. Yeah. Historians tell us we're looking at an army of around about 7,000 people and not much more than double that coming over in the next couple of decades. That's extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah. It's so small. And then just before, you just ran off that list of words that we're using every day in English and just to think it was this little band of blokes, not even as big as a football crowd. No, absolutely. And it really stays that way. The impact on the total population of people actually coming over the channel is very, very tiny. But what

6:41we do see is intense trans-channel contacts, interactions. So we've got nobles holding lands both sides of the channel. Then we've got people in their retinues, their followers and so on moving either side. We've got lots and lots of mercantile activity. But still, the numbers actively involved in this sort of movement are tiny in comparison with the total population of England and the rest of the British Isles. Which was about 2 million, am I thinking? Yeah, a couple of million people, I think we're talking about. Yeah. So you've got tiny little, we could call them Norman, to start off with anyway, Norman

7:16group coming over. And let's focus on the kind of French these people are speaking, because I do speak modern French, but how different is it from modern French? It's different from modern French in the same sort of way that medieval English is different from modern English. So various changes in pronunciation have happened over the centuries. Now, the variety of French that they're speaking is predominantly a sort of northern-ish variety of French. There's lots of Norman features in there, but it's not purely the dialect of Normandy,

7:51even at this date. William's army has plenty of people in it who are not actually Normans. And we've got lots and lots of traffic across the channel with people from all different parts of France. So you've given a picture of obviously the king comes over speaking it, but then he's got his retinue. So we're going down the social classes. We've got presumably foot soldiers who are recruited from the countryside and the cities. So is French being used just by the upper crust, or does it start spreading out? And how long does it take? I haven't quite got

8:24a picture of that.

Language hierarchy in court

8:26Well, immediately after the Norman conquest, what we've got is an imposed language, because we've got the king, the higher bishops, the nobility are all native speakers of French. And they want business to be conducted in the language they understand. They don't want people to be pulling a fast one on them by using a language that they're not familiar with, and everyone else has got to catch up. So we've got Latin used as the language of formal documents. The Doomsday Book is in Latin.

8:57But we've got French being used for verbal business in the courts. It's the language of parliamentary debates and so on. This is because the people at the very top want their language to be the language that is in use here. So English gets an enormous setback. Before the Norman conquest, English was used in all sorts of contexts that are regarded as quite advanced in the rest of Western Europe, because it was used for writing histories, in religious texts, in writing legal writs and so on. That gets pretty much stamped out after the conquest.

9:29Yes, there was a level of Saxon democracy, wasn't there? Yeah, absolutely. Or Tangamots, I think they were called, weren't they? Yes, yes. So after the conquest, if you want to interact with the people at the top, you need to pick up some French pretty quick. But we've got a period of centuries then where French became part of a really important hierarchy of languages. So you've got English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, and Anglo-Norman is sitting in the middle of that hierarchy. It's not generally the language

10:00of really formal record, but it's a language in which lots of business is done. And really fascinatingly, people seem often to have learned their Latin through the medium of Anglo-Norman. So it seems extraordinary, but we're talking boys here, but boys who were intended for any sort of literate career, who were attending the schools, would first of all acquire Anglo-Norman in very, very early childhood. And then in the grammar school, they would learn their

10:33Latin through the medium of Anglo-Norman. Oh, wow. I suppose, I mean, it does have an advantage in that you're switching from a mostly Germanic language, apart from these Christian Latin bits. You're going to a Romance language, Anglo-Norman, yes? And then learning, is that right? Yes, absolutely. And it's very hard to get a feel for these things, but I don't think once we're looking a little bit beyond the Norman conquest, we're not so much looking at a language of

11:04oppression. We're looking at a language that simply opened things out for different possibilities in life, that opened out the possibilities for transacting legal business, for merchants to interact with one another and make detailed records of their dealings with one another, that opened the way for trading across the channel. And French became the sort of the gateway to the rest of the world as well, because French was a much used language in the rest of Western Europe. English certainly wasn't.

11:35But back in England, let's say I'm a free man, a woman, and for some reason or another, I have to go to court. Then it's quite intimidating for me, isn't it? Because I can only speak what we call Old English or getting into Middle English, right? And I turn up at the court and these folks are speaking either in Latin or they're reporting conversations in Anglo-Norman to each other. And where am I? I'm sitting there going, quite way, Gardena, you know. Yeah, it must have been an enormous barrier for people, yes, and hence a great stimulus to acquire

12:09at least a working knowledge of this language. Yes. What words then, let's get some words from Anglo-Norman that are being used at this time? In the sort of earliest layer after the conquest, we go back to your words for bits of castles. We've got mot and moat, bailey, even castle itself is a sort of amalgam of inputs from Latin and from French. Also words like baron, noble, war and also peace. War? War is, yes, because in French that's guerre with a G on the front, isn't it?

12:41Carry on with those, yes, sorry? Oh, court or service. There's more of a mixture, but, you know, those examples I gave, they're words that are to do with social control. We are finding quite a lot of that very early on. There's not much grassrootsy stuff there, is there? We haven't got wheat or barley, have we? Are they French? No. No, they're not. But a word I love as an example, carry, which is one of those words that is distinctively Anglo-Norman because it's got the ca, not a cha. In continental French, it's charrier. It's from a word for a cart, ultimately the same as our word car,

13:14which also comes in from Anglo-Norman. Carry is a word for moving things about by cart, for transportation of goods. And that's how it exists in Anglo-Norman. It's a word that was in use all the time for shipping things about, importation of goods used in the docks and so on. And we find it in English from the early 1300s. And by the late 1300s, we get it being used by Chaucer, Langland, all sorts of people in the much broader use that we're familiar with, bearing things from place to place. Today we say carry rather than bear, unless

13:47we're being very, very formal. And that's really a bit of Anglo-Norman slang. It's the same carting things about, schlepping them about. That's where it's come from.

Pronunciation and the Black Death

13:56So let's just focus on some of the distinctive features about Norman French at that time. What would be different about the way Norman French was being spoken as opposed to Central France? We can pick out some words that show different features of pronunciation. So we have pairs like ward and guard, where those both come from the same French words. They come from different dialect variants. So the w of ward is a Norman and Northern feature, whereas the g of guard

14:27is a Central French, General French feature. You could have other doublets like warranty and guarantee shows the same thing, or catch and chase are the same word historically, cattle and chattel. The k sound is the Norman, Northern form, and the chuff form is what you find in Central French, but also you find it a bit in Anglo-Norman. More research has been done on Anglo-Norman over the decades. There's a wonderful thing called the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. And can people find that online?

14:59Yes, absolutely. They're showing the dialect mixture that existed in French in use in England, rather than distinctive borrowings from across the channel as opposed to ones that have in English. Yes. Well, as we say, you know, language use, language pronunciation, it's always mixing all the time. We're always in a melting pot, aren't we? Precisely. Do we get people saying anything about who is using which language? Are they observing it and saying, oh, look, so-and-so down the road, he thinks he's getting a bit uppity because he's talking in French? We certainly get evidence of people wanting to learn Anglo-Norman or wanting to improve their

15:33Anglo-Norman. There are heaps of glossaries, but these aren't sort of basic vocabularies. They're full of things like plant names rendered into Anglo-Norman and also Latin. So they're definitely intended for people who already know some French. I'm immediately thinking of dandelion, which is don de lion, the tooth of lion. Yes. Yes. Or lettuce is a word. Oh, yes. Lettu in modern French. Yes. Yes. But we do also have comments on people learning French. And that's really interesting because we've got a marvellous

16:08text that actually tells us about when the shift is happening, when people are learning their Latin directly through English rather than through French. Yes. And our witness on the ground actually pins it on the Black Death in the early 1300s. Oh, right. And people try to blame all sorts of things on the Black Death, use it to explain absolutely every possible change. But very interesting, our witness tells us that the Black Death is involved in this story. And why would that be a link? Because there were so few people. I'm missing the link. Because of the shortage of schoolmasters. Ah. So we've got

16:42a text from the early 1300s, before the Black Death, written in Latin by an English writer called Ranulph Higdon. And he tells us, this damaging of the mother tongue, as to say English, is for two reasons. One is that children in school, against the usage and manner of all other nations, are compelled to put aside their own language and to write their lessons and compositions in French, and have done so since the Normans first came to England. So this is a little bit of cultural resistance. This is somebody

17:15saying, we don't like this French stuff. And we don't like it, the fact that our children are getting this French stuff imposed on them. Is that what he's saying? It is. Yes, it is. And he goes on to say, rustics want to make themselves more like the gentry, and seek to speak French with great industry, in order to be more highly thought of. Upwardly socially mobile. But then in the 1380s, someone translated this into English, a Cornish writer called John Treviser. And he added a passage immediately after that one. So I'll render this into modern English. He says, this manner of doing

17:49things was much used before the first plague, and has changed somewhat since. And he then goes through a list of various teachers in Cornwall, who had switched from using French as the medium to teach Latin, and had gone directly to using English as the medium. And he goes on to make some more comments about this. And he says that people now have an advantage on one side, but a disadvantage on another. Their advantage is that they learn their grammar in less time than children were accustomed

18:19to do. The disadvantage is that now grammar school children know no more French than their own left heel. And that is a problem for them, if they should cross the sea and work in foreign countries, and in many other circumstances also. And the gentry have now greatly ceased teaching their children French. And Treviser pins this on the Black Death. He says that it's a result of the Black Death that the teachers were no longer available to teach in the medium of French, and that instead they've resorted to teaching directly in English.

18:52So these French teachers, if I can shorten it like that way, these French teachers, they've died out. So when are we talking about where this French is, in effect, that's what he's bemoaning, isn't it? He's dying out. So when are we talking about? Talking sometime in the 1300s, which is interesting because it connects up with other things as well. In 1362, we've got Parliament being opened in English for the first time. And in that same Parliament, we've got something called the Statute of Pleading, which recommends that English rather than French

19:25should be used as the language for pleading in the courts. What year is that? 1362. So it wasn't necessarily followed straight away. There's an enormous amount of Anglo-French still around in the age of Chaucer. Chaucer's contemporary John Gower wrote three enormous poems, one in English, one in Anglo-Norman, one in Latin. You've got people writing personal letters home to their mothers in Anglo-Norman rather than English. It's still for lots of people. This is a real language in living use. But this is when it's starting to be in trouble, because now there's

19:57official sanction to use English. Certainly, English is no longer officially disfavoured. And I think that's where the shift really starts to become unstoppable, because if you don't have this barrier of having to acquire a second language in order to conduct your business, you're going to do it in English. You're going to be much less danger that you're going to make a crucial mistake if you can use your mother tongue. Yes. So at this time, if I get a picture of it, we're talking about the 14th century and the 1300s.

20:31There are people walking about speaking a kind of English. This is where English has got to, which will be mixed in with French words, words of French origin. They won't necessarily know they are. So let's have some examples from that period. I'm thinking partly of my reading of Chaucer at A-level and university. So what have we got coming in that where people think they're English, but they're speaking versions of French? Yeah. You've got words like achieve, allow, argue, art, base, claim, contract, cost, county, date, defence, difference, discover, disease, face,

21:09feature. And these words slip in easily as people are switching gradually from a trilingual culture to a bilingual or monolingual culture. So they're using English in contexts where they've been using Anglo-Norman or Latin for precisely the same purpose. So a lot of these words come in, not just with a single meaning, but with a whole host of meanings. You can look at a word like personal or general, person itself, and you can see that there are meanings across a whole range of

21:41fields. Legal, religious. Trades, for example. Absolutely trades, where people are switching from using one language to another. So we've got a great big amalgam of different inputs giving us an English vocabulary that has words that already have dozens of meanings that have been imported wholesale from Anglo-Norman and Latin. Yes, I'm thinking of carpenter. Yes, absolutely. Charpentier in modern French. Metal, the word metal, that's a French origin word, isn't it? In metalworking, we've got metal itself, pewter, forge, furnace, joiners and carpenters. We've got all

22:16sorts of things in the everyday language of trades. Fulconry is full of it, isn't it? Fulconry is absolutely, absolutely full of it. Fur and leather trades, high status words like ermine and sable. Also tan and tanner probably have a lot to Anglo-Norman influence. So it's a lot of different levels. So yes, that's the whole of society. These are all very necessary words, very necessary words, aren't they? We're not talking about where we began in the courts and

22:46the court, the royal court. We're now right in the root of society, aren't we? Absolutely. So we've got the language of administration, we've got the language of the intellectuals, but we've also got the language of trades and everyday business, hugely influenced by Anglo-Norman. So just to remind ourselves, the Battle of Hastings, 1066, Chaucer at the end of the 14th century, writing a poem in English, that's poems in English, full of what we might call French words. So it's kind of happened in the space of, what are we saying there, 250 years?

23:19Yeah, yeah, three centuries or so. And once we're well into the 1400s, Anglo-Norman's as good as gone. We find survivals, but it falls away pretty quickly. But the inheritance is that a lot of these words keep on borrowing new meanings from French as used on the continent, because people didn't cease to be able to understand French. It was still seen as a very important language. Let's do the way words are made up, what's called morphology, I believe. So suffixes,

23:51the stuff we put on the end of words. So you mentioned parliament there earlier, we got that meant ending, which of course we can then use like a Lego brick, we can then move it onto other words when we want to make nouns. And there's several of these come in at this time. So we're not only talking about vocabulary, we're talking about how we make words. Tell us about these suffixes. Yeah, absolutely. And it's just as you've said, there are lots of these suffixes. Let's take that example of ment, m-e-n-t, forming nouns from verbs, denoting a state or the result of an action.

24:24And it comes into English through words that are borrowed, ready-made from French, like government, commencement, accomplishment. And then we start to find ment forming new words in combination with words of old English origin, like acknowledgement or wonderment. Interesting. So within one word, we get the, if I might use the word creole, we get the mixture of the two. So we've got knowledge, old English, ment, French. Yes, exactly. So it's become productive. And then we get words also apparently formed within English

24:56from elements that have both been borrowed. So fashionable doesn't show up in English records until the 1580s. I think Shakespeare uses it, fashionable. Yes, yes. And it appears to be formed from the borrowed verb, fashion, plus the borrowed suffix, bubble. So it's an English formation, but both of the elements have been borrowed. And almost certainly at this date, people don't perceive fashion. They recognise the correspondence of the French verb, but they're not necessarily thinking of it as a borrowing. It's been in English for centuries. It's simply become part of the system and you can make new things with it.

25:29You can make an adjective. So we've got meant and able. What other, what other ones have we got? What are the suffixes? Oh, we've got age, age in words like courage and savage. Ah, yes. The bloke who cuts my hair, my barber, he says, will you come in for a trimmage?

Spotting Norman words in modern text

25:47So that's great. So I've got an idea now for it. Maybe we could play a game. I'm going to read a passage. And then what if you call out, if you say yes, at any word that I say that is of Anglo-Norman French origin? It's actually a story I plucked from the BBC website. So I'll read it slowly. And when I hit a word that comes from Anglo-Norman, you just shout out yes. Yeah. All good. Right. Here we go. Getting rid of her engagement ring would have suggested. No, not. Ah, there you go. So I thought that would be. So I'm wrong there. A regret.

26:22Yes. The 34 year old doesn't feel. And after all, her marriage. Yes. Brought her daughter. Even just. Yes. Oh, just. Yes. Even just not wearing it would have felt like a waste. Yes. I didn't want it locked away in a box, she says. Diamonds. Yes. Are precious. Yes. Deb is part of a rising trend promoted. Yes. By jewellers. Yes. Around the world of women marking a new chapter. Yes.

26:55In their life with a new statement. Yes. Piece. Yes. The divorce. Yes. Ring. Yes. No. Sorry, not ring. Yes. I'm basically saying yes to agree with you. Very good. Lovely. So out of that, we got engagement, regret, marriage, just waste, diamonds, precious, promoted, jeweller's chapter, statement, peace and divorce. Absolutely. And I think just is the sort of standout example there because it's so embedded in English, that use of just as an adverb, even just not wearing it. Yes. And while we're on just, of course, that gave us the initial j sound, which the old English

27:30didn't have. They only had j at the end of a word, didn't they? Or in the middle of it. Yes, exactly. They didn't have a j at the beginning that we get with justice, judge and the rest of it. So there we are. There was a double bubble there. Yeah. Yeah. There's influence on the phonology as well. Yeah. Now you're listening to Word of Mouth. And as you may know, the programme's produced in partnership with the Open University. If you'd like to listen to my conversation with the Open University about the words we use, my own language journey and what I've learned from the stories behind how we speak, you can visit the BBC Radio 4 Word of Mouth programme

28:00page. And then just follow the links to the Open University.

28:06September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September Stock Up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavourful, nourishing food. Even better, there are hundreds of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas and seafood everyone loves. Their Build Your Own Family Meals feeds four for just $35. $35. Stock up at Whole Foods Market.

28:34Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian. And we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in

29:05their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

29:18Now, thanks very much, Philip Durkin. Now, how would you like to say goodbye in true Anglo-Norman French fashion? Well, just like in modern French, in Anglo-Norman, people could say adieu. Merci.

30:00And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.