The Mother Tongue (7 page)

The early Anglo-Saxons left no account of these events for the simple reason that they were, to use the modern phrase, functionally illiterate. They possessed a runic alphabet, which they used to scratch inscriptions on ceremonial stones called runes (hence the term
runic
) or occasionally as a means of identifying valued items, but they never saw their alphabet's potential as a way of communicating thoughts across time. In 1982, a gold medallion about the size of an American fifty-cent piece was found in a field in Suffolk. It had been dropped or buried by one of the very earliest of the intruders, sometime between
A
.
D
. 450 and 480. The medallion bears a runic inscription that says (or at least is thought to say): “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman.” Not perhaps the most profound of statements, but it is the earliest surviving example of Anglo-Saxon writing in Britain. It is, in other words, the first sentence in English.

Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wife, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.)

It is difficult to conceive of the sense of indignity that the Celts must have felt at finding themselves overrun by primitive, unlettered warriors from the barbaric fringes of the Roman empire. For the Celts, without any doubt, were a sophisticated people. As Laird notes: “The native Celts had become civilized, law-abiding people, accustomed to government and reliable police, nearly as helpless before an invading host as most modern civilian populations would be.” Many of them enjoyed aspects of civilization—running water, central heating—that were quite unknown to the conquering hordes and indeed would not become common again in Britain for nearly 1,500 years. For almost four centuries they had been part of the greatest civilization the world had known, and enjoyed the privileges and comforts that went with it. A tantalizing glimpse into the daily life and cosmopolitan nature of Roman Britain surfaced in 1987 with the discovery of a hoard of curse tablets in Bath near a spring once dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva. It was the practice of aggrieved citizens at that time to scratch a curse on a lead tablet and toss it with a muttered plea for vengeance into the spring. The curses were nothing if not heartfelt. A typical one went: “Docimedes has lost two gloves and asks that person who has stolen them should lose his minds and his eyes.” The tablets are interesting in that they show that people of Roman Britain were just as troubled by petty thievery (and, not incidentally, just as prone to misspellings and lapses of grammar) as we are today, but also they underline the diversity of the culture. One outstandingly suspicious victim of some minor pilferage meticulously listed the eighteen people he thought most likely to have perpetrated the deed. Of these eighteen names, two are Greek, eight Latin, and eight Celtic. It is clear that after nearly four centuries of living side by side, and often intermarrying,
^*
relations between the Romans and Celts had become so close as to be, in many respects, indistinguishable.

In 410, with their empire crumbling, the Roman legions withdrew from Britain and left the Celts to their fate. Under the slow pagan onslaught, many Celts were absorbed or slaughtered. Others fled to the westernmost fringes of the British Isles or across the Channel to France, where they founded the colony of Brittany and reintroduced Celtic to mainland Europe. Some Celts—among them the semilegendary King Arthur—stayed and fought and there is evidence from place-names to suppose that pockets of Celtic culture survived for some time in England (around Shaftesbury in northeast Dorset, for example). But little is known for sure. This was the darkest of the dark ages, a period when history blends with myth and proof grows scant.

The first comprehensive account of the period is
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People,
written in Latin by the Venerable Bede, a monk at Jarrow in Northumbria. Although it is thought to be broadly accurate, Bede's history was written almost 300 years after the events it describes—which is rather like us writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay.

Despite their long existence on the island—the Romans for 367 years, the Celts for at least 1,000—they left precious little behind. Many English place-names are Celtic in origin (Avon and Thames, for instance) or Roman (the
-chester
in Manchester and the
-caster
in Lancaster both come from the Roman word for camp), but in terms of everyday vocabulary it is almost as if they had never been. In Spain and Gaul the Roman occupation resulted in entirely new languages, Spanish and French, but in Britain they left barely five words [according to Baugh and Cable, page 80], while the Celts left no more than twenty—mostly geographical terms to describe the more hilly and varied British landscape.

This singular lack of linguistic influence is all the more surprising when you consider that the Anglo-Saxons had freely, and indeed gratefully, borrowed vocabulary from the Romans on the continent before coming to the British Isles, taking such words as
street, pillow, wine, inch, mile, table,
and
chest,
among many others. The list of mundane items for which they lacked native terms underlines the poverty of their culture.

And yet for all their shortcomings, the Anglo-Saxons possessed a language that was, in the phrase of Otto Jespersen, “rich in possibilities,” and once literacy was brought to them, it flowered with astonishing speed. The main bringer of literacy, and of Christianity, was St. Augustine, who traveled to Britain with forty missionaries in 597 and within a year had converted King Ethelbert of Kent at his small provincial capital, Canterbury (which explains why the head of the English church is called the Archbishop of Canterbury, even though he resides in London). With that initial victory, Christianity quickly spread over the island, towing literacy in its wake. In only a little over a hundred years England became a center of culture and learning as great as any in Europe.

No one, of course, can say at what point English became a separate language, distinct from the Germanic dialects of mainland Europe. What is certain is that the language the invaders brought with them soon began to change. Like the Indo-European from which it sprang, it was a wondrously complex tongue. Nouns had three genders and could be inflected for up to five cases. As with modern European languages, gender was often arbitrary.
Wheat,
for example, was masculine, while
oats
was feminine and
corn
neuter [cited by Potter, page 25], just as in modern German
police
is feminine while
girl
is neuter. Modern English, by contrast, has essentially abandoned cases except with personal pronouns where we make distinctions between
I/me/mine, he/him/his,
and so on.

Old English had seven classes of strong verbs and three of weak, and their endings altered in relation to number, tense, mood, and person (though, oddly, there was no specific future tense). Adjectives and pronouns were also variously inflected. A single adjective like
green
or
big
could have up to eleven forms. Even something as basic as the definite article
the
could be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and had five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. It is a wonder that anyone ever learned to speak it.

And yet for all its grammatical complexity Old English is not quite as remote from modern English as it sometimes appears.
Scip, bæð, bricg,
and
þæt
might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations—respectively “ship,” “bath,” “bridge,” and “that”—have not altered in a thousand years. Indeed, if you take twenty minutes to familiarize yourself with the differences in Old English spelling and pronunciation—learning that
i
corresponds to the modern “ee” sound, that
e
sounds like “ay” and so on—you can begin to pick your way through a great deal of abstruse-looking text. You also find that in terms of sound values, Old English is a much simpler and more reliable language, with every letter distinctly and invariably related to a single sound. There were none of the silent letters or phonetic inconsistencies that bedevil modern English spelling.

There was, in short, a great deal of subtlety and flexibility built into the language, and once they learned to write, their literary outpouring was both immediate and astonishingly assured. This cultural flowering found its sharpest focus in the far northern kingdom of Northumbria. Here, on the outermost edge of the civilized world, sprang forth England's first great poet, the monastic Cædmon; its first great historian, the Venerable Bede; and its first great scholar, Alcuin of York, who became head of Charlemagne's palace school at Aachen and was one of the progenitors of the Renaissance. “The light of learning then shone more brightly in Northumbria than anywhere else in Europe,” Simeon Potter noted without hyperbole in his masterly study,
Our Language.
Had it not been for Alcuin, much of our ancient history would almost certainly have been lost. “People don't always realise,” wrote Kenneth Clark [in
Civilisation,
page 18], “that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.”

Barely had this cultural revival gotten underway than England and her infant language were under attack again—this time by Viking raiders from Scandinavia and Denmark. These were people who were related to the Anglo-Saxons by both blood and language. In fact, they were so closely related that they could probably broadly understand each other's languages, though this must have been small comfort to the monks, farmers, and ravaged women who suffered their pillaging. These attacks on Britain were part of a huge, uncoordinated, and mysterious expansion by the Vikings (or Norsemen or Danes, as history has variously called them). No one knows why these previously mild and pastoral people suddenly became aggressive and adventurous, but for two centuries they were everywhere—in Russia, Iceland, Britain, France, Ireland, Greenland, even North America. At first, in Britain, the attacks consisted of smash-and-grab raids, mostly along the east coast. The famous monastery of Lindisfarne was sacked in 793 and the nearby monastery of Jarrow, where Bede had labored, fell the following year.

Then, just as mysteriously, the raids ceased and for half a century the waters around the British Isles were quiet. But this was, to dust off that useful cliché, the quiet before the storm, a period in which the inhabitants must have watched the coast with unease. In 850 their worst fears were confirmed when some 350 heavily laden Viking ships sailed up the Thames, setting off a series of battles for control of territory that went on for years, rolling across the British landscape rather like two wrestlers, with fortune favoring first one side and then the other. Finally, after an unexpected English victory in 878, a treaty was signed establishing the Danelaw, a line running roughly between London and Chester, dividing control of Britain between the English in the south and the Danes in the north. To this day it remains an important linguistic dividing line between northern and southern dialects.

The Danish influence in the north was enormous. The scale of their settlements can be seen from the fact that more than 1,400 place-names in northern England are of Scandinavian origin. For a long time, the people in some places spoke only Old English while in other places, often on the next hillside, they spoke only Old Norse. Occasionally this arrangement lasted for years—in the Shetland Islands, in the far north of Scotland, it lasted for centuries, with the people speaking a Norwegian dialect called Norn until well into the 1700s, of which some 1,500 dialect words survive to this day—but for the most part the two linguistic sides underwent a relaxed and peaceful merger. A great many Scandinavian terms were adopted, without which English would clearly be the poorer:
freckle, leg, skull, meek, rotten, clasp, crawl, dazzle, scream, trust, lift, take, husband, sky.
Sometimes these replaced Old English words, but often they took up residence alongside them, adding a useful synonym to the language, so that today in English we have both
craft
and
skill, wish
and
want, raise
and
rear,
and many other doublets. Sometimes the words came from the same source but had grown slightly different in pronunciation, as with
shriek
and
screech, no
and
nay,
or
ditch
and
dike,
and sometimes they went a further step and acquired slightly different meanings, as with
scatter
and
shatter, skirt
and
shirt, whole
and
hale, bathe
and
bask, stick
and
stitch, hack
and
hatch, wake
and
watch, break
and
breach.

But most remarkable of all, the English adopted certain grammatical forms. The pronouns
they, them,
and
their,
for instance, are Scandinavian. This borrowing of basic elements of syntax is highly unusual, perhaps unique among developed languages, and an early demonstration of the remarkable adaptability of English speakers.

One final cataclysm awaited the English language: the Norman conquest of 1066. The Normans were Vikings who had settled in northern France 200 years before. Like the Celtic Britons before them, they had given their name to a French province, Normandy. But unlike the Celts, they had abandoned their language and much of their culture and become French in manner and speech. So totally had they given up their language, in fact, that not a single Norse word has survived in Normandy, apart from some place-names. That is quite remarkable when you consider that the Normans bequeathed 10,000 words to English. The variety of French the Normans spoke was not the speech of Paris, but a rural dialect, and its divergence from standard French became even more pronounced when it took root in England—so much so that historians refer to it not as French, but as Anglo-Norman. This, as we shall see in a moment, had important consequences for the English language of today and may even have contributed to its survival.