Since the Norman Conquest in 1066 the French language became more and more important.English nobility and other important positions in the church,mili-tary and other institutions were newly occupied by the French invaders.Now the upper class in England was replaced by Normans and French became their dominant language.However,the new ruling class formed only a minority of the population and the language existed side by side.The new kings of England spoke French,took French wives and lived mostly in France.
In the following years,the new order was accepted by the English people and as a result the English and Normans formed a new assorted society.
The most immediate consequence of the Norman domination in Britain is to be seen in the wide use of French language in many spheres of life.For almost three hundred years French was the official language of administration:it was the language of king’s court,the law courts,the church,the army and the castle.It was also every day language of many nobles,of the higher clergy and of many townspeople in the South.The intellectual life,literature and education were in the hands of French-speaking people;French,alongside Latin,was the language of writing.Teaching was largely conducted in French and boys at school were taught to translate their Latin into French instead of English.
It was not the case that Norman and Central French annihilated existing English words. Instead, these sources plus Latin created registers; i.e. styles of speaking and vocabularies that could be distinguished in terms of how polite or formal they are. So English suddenly has twins or even lexical triplets of words with the same referents, but different social connotations.
kingly (O.E) royal (Fr.) regal (L.)
rise (O.E.) mount (Fr.) ascend (L.)
ask question interrogate
fast firm secure
holy sacred consecrated
fire flame conflagration
How do we distinguish these words? While they have the same reference or meaning, the Old English source is more down-to-earth and common than the more polite French-based word, and the more ornate or sophisticated Latin-based one.
Let’s try to figure out which is the word that is native—Old English—and which is originally a French borrowing:
ox beef
pig, swine pork
infant child
judgment doom
freedom liberty
felicity happiness
help aid
conceal hide
holy saintly
love charity
meal repast
aroma stench
wedding marriage
desire wish
It was in this period that Parliament began its gradual evolution into the democratic body which is it today. The word “parliament”, which comes from the French word parler (to speak), was first used in England in the thirteenth century to describe an assembly of nobles called together by the king. In 1295, the Model Parliament set the pattern for the future by including elected representatives from urban and rural areas.
Many food names in English are French borrowings. After the Norman Conquest under William the Conqueror (1066) French words began to enter the English language increasing in number for more than tree centuries. Among them were different names of dishes. The Norman barons brought to Britain their professional cooks who showed to English their skill.
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Learners of the English language notice that there is one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another for the same beast when it is killed and coked. The matter is that English peasants preserved Anglo-Saxon names for the animals they used to bring to Norman castles to sell. But the dishes made of the meat got French names. That is why now we have native English names of animals: ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, and French names of meals from whose meat they are cooked: beef, veal, mutton, pork. (By the way “lamb” is an exception, it is a native Anglo-Saxon word). A historian writes that an English peasant who had spent a hard day tending his oxen, calves, sheep and swine probably saw little enough of the beef, veal, mutton and pork, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters.
The French enriched English vocabulary with such food words as bacon, sausage, gravy; then: toast, biscuit, cream, sugar. They taught the English to have for dessert such fruits as: fig, grape, orange, lemon, pomegranate, peach and the names of these fruits became known to the English due the French. The English learned from them how to make pastry, tart, jelly, treacle. From the French the English came to know about mustard and vinegard. The English borrowed from the French verbs to describe various culinary processes: to boil, to roast, to stew,
to fry.
One famous English linguist exclaimed: “It is melancholy to think what the
English dinner would have been like, had there been no Norman Conquest!”.
For all that, England never stopped being an English-speaking country. The bulk of the population held fast to their own tongue: the lower classes in the towns, and especially in the country-side, those who lived in the Midlands and up north, continued to speak English and looked upon French as foreign and hostile. Since most of the people were illiterate, the English language was almost exclusively used for spoken communication.
At first the two languages existed side by side without mingling. Then, slowly and quickly, they began to permeate each other. The Norman barons and the French town-dwellers had to pick up English words to make themselves understood while the English began to use French words in current speech. A good knowledge of French would mark a person of higher standing giving him a certain social prestige probably many people become bilingual and had a fair command of both languages.
These peculiar linguistic conditions could not remain static. The struggle between French and English was bound to end ion the complete victory of English, for English was the living language of the entire people, while French was restricted to certain social spheres and to writing. Yet the final victory as still a long way off. In the 13th c. only a few steps were made in that direction. The earliest sign of the official recognition of English by the Norman hinges was the famous Proclamation issued by Henry 3 in 1258 to the councilors in Parliament. It was written in three languages: French, Latin and English.
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The three hundreds years of the domination of French affected English more than any other foreign influence before or after. The early French borrowings reflect accurately the spheres of Norman influence upon English life; later borrowings can by attributed to the continued cultural, economic and political contacts between the countries. The French influence added new features to the regional and social differentiation of the language. New words, coming from French, could not be adopted simultaneously by all the speakers if English; they were first used in some varieties of the language, namely in the regional dialects of Southern England and in the speech if the upper classes, but were unknown in the other varieties of the language.
The use of a foreign tongue as the state language, the diversity of the dialects and the decline of the written form of English created a situation extremely favorable for increased variation and for more intensive linguistic change.
In the course Early M.E. the area if the English language in the British Isles grew. Following the Norman Conquest the former Celtic kingdoms fell under Norman recluse. Wales was subjugated in the late 12th c. the English made their first attempts to conquest Ireland. The invaders settled among the Irish and were soon assimilated, a large proportion of the invaders being Welshmen. Though part of Ireland was ruled from England, the country remained divided and had little contact with England. The English language was used there alongside Celtic languages-Irish and Welsh – and was influenced by Celtic.
The E.M.E. dialectal division was preserved in the succeeding centuries, though even in Late M.E. the linguistic situation changed. In Early M.E. while the state language and the main language of literature was French, the local dialects were relatively equal. In Late M.E., when English had been reestablished as the main language of administration and writing, one of the regional dialects, the London dialect, prevailed over the others.
For a long time after the Norman Conquest there were two written languages in England, both of them foreign: Latin and French. English was held in disdain as a tongue used only by common illiterate people and not fit for writing. In some dialects the gap in the written tradition spanned almost two hundred years.
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The earliest samples of Early M.E. prose are the new entries made in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles from the year 1122 to the year 1154, known as the Peterborough Chronicle.
The works in the vernacular, which began to appear towards the end of the 12th century, were mostly of a religions nature. The great mass of these works are homilies, sermons in prose and verse, paraphrases from the Bible, psalms and prayers. The earliest of these religious works, the Poema Morala (‘Moral Ode’) represent the Kentish dialect of the late 12th or the early 13th.
Of particular interest for the history of the language is ‘Ormulum’, a poem composed by the monk Orm in about 1200 in the North-East Midland dialect (Lineolnshire). It consist of unrhymed metrical paraphrases of the Gospels. The text abounds in Scandinavianists and lacs French borrowings. Its most outstanding feature is the spelling system devised by the author. He doubled the consonants after short vowels in closed syllables and used special semicircular marks over short vowels in open syllables. Here are some lines from the poem where the author recommends that these rules should be followed I copying the poem.
Early M.E. written records represent different local dialects, which were relatively equal as forms of the written language, beneath the twofold oppression of Anglo-Norman and Latin writing. They retained a certain literary authority until it was overshadowed in the 14th c. by the prestige of the London written language.
The domination of the French language in England came to an end in the source of the 14th c. The victory of English was predetermined and prepared for by previous events and historical conditions. Little by little the Normans and English drew together and intermingled. In the 14th c. Anglo-Norman was a dead language; it appeared as corrupt French to those who had access to the French of Paris through books, education or direct contacts. The number of people who Knew French had fallen; Anglo-Norman and French literary compositions had lost their audience and had to be translated into English.
Towards the end of the 14th c. the English language had taken the place of French as the language of literature and administration. English was once more the dominant speech of all social classes in all regions. It had ousted French since it had always remained the mother tongue and the only spoken language of the bulk of the population.
It may be interesting to mention some facts showing how the transition came about. In 1362 Edward 3 gave his consent to an act of Parliament ordaining that English be used in the law courts, sine ‘French has become much unknown in the realm’. This reform, however, was not carried out for years to come: French, as well as Latin, continued to be used by lawyers alongside English until the 16th c. Yet many legal documents which have survived from the late 14th and 15th c. are written in English: wills, municipal acts, petitions. In 1363, for the first tome in history, Parliament was opened by the King’s chancellor with an address in English. In 1399 King Henry 4 used English in his official speech when accepting the throne. In 1404 English diplomats refused to conduct negotiations with France in French, claiming that the language was unknown to them. All these events testify to the recognition of English as the state language.
Howly and inevitably English regained supremey in the field of education. As early as 1349 it was ruled that English should be used at school in teaching Latin, but it was not until 1385 that the practice became general, and even the universities began to conduct their curricula in English. By the 15th c. the ability to speak French had come to be regarded as a special accomplishment, and French like Latin, was learnt as a foreign language. At the end of the 15th c. William Caxton, the first English printer, observed: ‘the most quantity of the people understand not Latin nor French here in this noble realm of England’.
One might have expected that the triumph of English would lead to weakening of the French influence upon English. In reality, however, the impact of French became more apparent. As seen from the surviving written texts, French loan-words multiplied at the very time when English became a medium of general communication. The large-scale influx of French loads can be attributed to several causes. It is probably that many French words had been in current use for quite a long time before they were first recorded. As it was aforementioned records in Early M.E. were scare and came mostly from the Northern and Western regions, which were least affected by French influence. Later M.N. texts were produced in London and in the neighboring areas, with a mixed and largely bilingual population. In numerous translation from French – which became necessary when the French language was going out of use-many loan-words were employed for the sake of greater precision, for want of a suitable native equivalent or due to the translator’s inefficiency. It is also important that in the course of the 14th c. the local dialects were brought into closer contact; they intermixed and influenced one another: therefore the infiltration of French borrowings into all the local and social varieties of English progressed more rapidly.
What the Norman Conquest really did was to tear away the veil that literary conservatism had thrownover changes of the spoken tongue.The ambition of Englishmen to acquire the language of the ruling class,and the influx of foreign monks into the religious houses that were the sourses of literary instruction,soon brought about the cessation of all systematic training in the use of English.The upper and middle classes became bilingual;and,though English might still be the language which they preferred to speak,they learned at school to read and write nothing but French,or French and Latin.When those who had been educated under the new conditions tried to write English,the literary conventions of the past generation had no hold upon them;they could write no otherwise than as they spoke.This is the true explanation of the apparently rapid change in the grammar of English about the middle of the twelfth century.
It would,however,be a mistake to say that the new conditions produced by the Conquest were wholly without influence on the inflectional structure of the spoken language.Under the Norman kings and their successors,England was politically and administratively united as it had never been before;intercourse between the different parts of the country became less difficult;and the greater freedom of intercommunication assisted the Southward diffusion of those grammatical simplifications that had been developed in the Northern dialect.The use of the French language among large classes of the population,which has left such profound traces in the English vocabulary,must have tended to accelerate the movement towards disuse of inflectional endings:though this influence must remain rather a matter of abstract probability than of demonstrable fact,because we have no means of distinguishing its effect from those of other causes that were operating in the same direction.Perhaps,the use of the preposition of instead of the genitive inflection,and the polite substitution of the plural for the singular in pronouns of the second person,were due to imitation of French modes of expression;but,in other respects,hardly any specific influence of French upon English grammar can be shown to have existed.
As with other foreign influences, the impact of French is to be found, first and foremost, in the vocabulary. The layers and the semantic spheres of the French borrowings reflect the relations between the Norman rulers and the English population, the dominance of the French language in literature and the contacts with French culture. The prevalence of French as the language of writing led to numerous changes in English spelling.
CHAPTER 2