The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

On May 17, 1382, in Blackfriars in London, on a site now boasting a Victorian public house whose tiled decor remembers Wycliffe’s time, a synod of the Church met to examine Wycliffe’s works. There were eight bishops, various masters of theology, doctors of common and civil law and fifteen friars. It was a show trial.

In 1399, Henry IV was to accept the crown in English. Chaucer delighted readers and appreciators of English everywhere with The Canterbury Tales. But the Church slammed the door. Yet the Lollards risked their lives and carried on, meeting in hidden places, we are told, especially in Herefordshire and Monmouthshire.

In 1412, twenty-eight years after Wycliffe’s death, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered all of Wycliffe’s works to be burned and in a letter to the Pope entered a list of two hundred sixty-seven heresies “worthy of the fire” which he claimed to have culled from the pages of Wycliffe’s Bible.

With the Primate of England looking on, Wycliffe’s remains were disinterred and burned, thus, presumably, it was thought, depriving him of any possibility of eternal life.

Wycliffe’s remains were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, which was a tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon afterwards a Lollard prophecy appeared: The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea. And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad Wide as the waters be. In English.

The principal residence of the monarchy was the Palace of Westminster — today better known as the Houses of Parliament. The enormous hammer-beamed Hall survived the great fire of 1834, and in that Great Hall would have been the first circle of government which would have included the Signet Office. This office wrote personal letters on behalf of the monarch, which carried the royal seal. Henry decreed that the Signet Office should use English. This provided at last a breach in the walls guarding the citadel of French; English poured through it. French was dispossessed of the language of office.

The obstinacy of the English dialects is as impressive as the capacity of English to standardise, to absorb and to spread around the world. Almost one thousand years after the Anglo-Saxons had arrived with what was the fundament of the language, a man from Northumberland could still have the greatest difficulty in understanding a man from Kent. This local tenacity and loyalty continued for centuries and in certain areas it perseveres. It is like an ineradicable counterpoint. We have a world language but a Geordie can still baffle a resident of Tunbridge Wells a mere three hundred miles away, as he did in Caxton’s day.

The variety was profligate. Take the word “church” for instance, one of the most common in the language. In the north of England at that time it was commonly called a “kirk” while the south used “church.” However, according to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, “kirk” could be spelled “kyrk,” “kyrke,” “kirke,” “kerk,” “kirc,” “kric,” “kyrck,” “kirche” and “kerke”; “church” was variously “churche,” “cherche,” “chirche,” “cherch,” “chyrch,” “cherge,” “chyrche,” “chorche,” “chrch,” “churiche,” “cirche.” And then there were “schyrche,” “scherch,” “scherche,” “schirche,” “schorche,” “schurch,” “schurche,” “sscherch.”

There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word “through” and over sixty of the pronoun “she,” which is quite hard to imagine.

“I” became “I”; previously “ich” (and many other variants) had also been allowed.

“Hath” and “doth” were retained until the nineteenth century, but their eventual replacements appear as “has” and “does.”

The Masters of Chancery had no qualms about taking on literary genius either: they preferred “not” to Chaucer’s “nat,” “but” for his “bot,” “these” for “thise,” “thorough” for “thurgh.” The men from Westminster knew best. This standard still admits of a lot of variation and we are not going to see a spoken standard until much later, but English was being square-bashed into its first drilled lines.

Chancery English, partly, it appears, because of the flow of people into London from the Midlands and the employment of a number of them as scribes, shows the influence of the Central and East Midlands dialects as well as that associated with London. So it could claim, when it emerges as the material of a literary language after about 1500, that it drew on a ...

There is a scroll of doggerel in many school classrooms today which reads: We’ll begin with a box and the plural is boxes. But the plural of ox should be oxen not oxes. Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese. Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice. But the plural of house is houses not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen? The cow in a plural may be cows or kine, But the plural of vow is vows and not vine. And I speak of foot and you show me your feet, But I give you a boot . . . would a pair be called beet? . . . This reflects the survival of old plural forms (ox, oxen), historical sound changes in Old English words (foot, feet), and loan words adopting “s” as a plural (vows). Broadly, there were reformers who wanted to spell words according to the way they were pronounced and traditionalists who wanted to spell them in one of the ways they always had been.

There was another party, however. We could call them the Tamperers. In a desire to make the roots of the language more evident and perhaps give it more style, more class, some words that had entered English from French were later given a Latin look. The letter “b” was inserted into “debt” and “doubt,” the letter “c” equally unnecessarily into “victuals.” Words thought to be of Greek origin sometimes had their spelling adjusted so that “throne” or “theatre” acquired their “h”; “rhyme” on the other hand was awarded its “h” just because “rhythm” had one. On a similar principle or whim, an “l” was inserted into “could” because it was still present — as a silent “l” — in “should” and “would.” In the sixteenth century this became a fad designed to winnow out the under-educated, stump children and fox foreigners.

The Tamperers were attempting in their way to bring reason to bear on the development of the language. English has never been very partial to reason and as if to prove it, at the same time as the “b”s and the silent “l”s and “h”s were being smuggled into perfectly sound words, the Great Vowel Shift occurred which resulted in many of the English pronouncing most things differently anyway. When properly read aloud, the fourteenth-century English of Chaucer sounds strange to modern ears in a way that, on the whole, the late sixteenth-century English of Shakespeare does not. For example, Chaucer’s way of saying “name” would have rhymed with the modern “calm,” his “fine” with our “seen”; he would have pronounced “meet” more or less as we would pronounce “mate,” “do” as “doe,” and “cow” as “coo” (as it is still pronounced in parts of Scotland).

In the years between Chaucer’s birth and Shakespeare’s death, English went through a process now known as the Great Vowel Shift. People in the Midlands and south of England changed the way they pronounced long vowels (long vowels are those that are held in the mouth for a comparatively long time, like the long “ee” in “meet,” rather than the short “e” in “met”).

Printing had largely fixed spelling before the Great Vowel Shift got under way. So to a large extent our modern spelling represents a pre-GVS system, whereas the language as a result of the GVS had changed enormously. Spelling fixed: spoken in turbulence: result — out of sync.

Writing eventually brings uniformity to language and the invention and spread of printing brought great power to writing. It was invented by Gutenberg in Mainz around 1453. England was slow into print — Caxton’s press only went into service in 1476.

The first dated book printed in England in English was Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres in 1477. Caxton printed romances, books of conduct and philosophy, history and morality and the first illustrated book in English, called The Myrrour of the Worlde, in 1481. He printed The Canterbury Tales, two editions, as well as other works by Chaucer, Malory’s Morte d ’Arthur and work by Gower and Lydgate and his own translations.

Caxton tells us that he is translating the Latin poet Virgil from a French version but he does not know which English word to use for “eggs.” He tells a story of some merchants who are away from home and who visit a house to buy food. One asks the woman for “eggys” — the Old Norse form, common in the north and east. She tells him that she doesn’t speak French, at which he takes offence. Another asks for the same thing with a different form, “eyren,” which is Old English, still probably current in much of the south of England, and she understands. Caxton chooses “eggs.” It must have been the case many, many times that like the Masters in Chancery, the masters of the printing press became the arbiters of what would become standard and correct English spelling. Caxton gave himself what I regard as an encouraging rule of thumb: “In my Iudgemente,” he wrote, “the comyn termes that be dayli vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe.”

Tyndale’s words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circled the globe. We use them still: “scapegoat,” “let there be light,” “the powers that be,” “my brother’s keeper,” “filthy lucre,” “fight the good fight,” “sick unto death,” “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “a man after his own heart,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” “signs of the times,” “ye of little faith,” “eat, drink and be merry,” “broken-hearted,” “clear-eyed.” And hundreds more: “fisherman,” “landlady,” “sea-shore,” “stumbling-block,” “taskmaster,” “two-edged,” “viper,” “zealous” and even “Jehovah” and “Passover” come into English through Tyndale. “Beautiful,” a word which had meant only human beauty, was greatly widened by Tyndale, as were many others.

In his last letter, Tyndale asked that he might have “a warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from the cold . . . a warmer coat also for what I have is very thin; a piece of cloth with which to patch my leggings. And I ask to have a lamp in the evening, for it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary, that I may continue with my work.” And continue, for a short while, he did, bringing us phrases, poignantly, heart-breakingly, like “a prophet has no honour in his own country,” “a stranger in a strange land,” “a law unto themselves,” “we live and move and have our being” and “let my people go,” and there would have been yet more, but in April 1536 Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a court in the Netherlands. The way they chose to kill him was to strangle him, to cut him off at the voice, which they did on 6 October 1536. Finally this sublime master of language, this heroic Christian scholar and the begetter of so much of our English language, was burned at the stake. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”

Where the medieval Catholic Church and Henry VIII most violently up into the 1530s had kept the Bible from the people, Henry’s new Church set out to get the Bible to as many as possible. It has had an incalculable influence on the spread of our language. For centuries it was heard week in week out, sometimes day in day out, by almost all English-speaking Christians wherever they were, and its precepts, its images, its proverbs, its names, its parables, its heroes, its promises, its words and rhythms, sank deep shafts into the minds of the men and women who heard it. It went to the heart of the way we spoke, the way we described the world and ourselves. Its English bound the English together.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century there were so many competing versions that seven hundred fifty reformers from within the Church of England requested James VI of Scotland, who had become James I of England, to authorise a new translation. Fifty-four translators were chosen from the Church and the universities to produce an edition which would be submitted to the bishops. The work took about five years and it cannot go unremarked that this tremendous endeavour makes the achievement of Tyndale appear all but superhuman. To go back to the Beatitudes, Tyndale writes: When he sawe the people he went up into a mountayne and when he was set, his disciples came to hym and he opened hys mouthe, and taught them, sayinge, “Blessed are the povre in sprite: for theirs is the Kyngdom of heven . . .” In the Authorised, the King James Version, it reads: And seeing the multitudes, he went vp into a mountaine: and when he was set, his disciples came vnto him. And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poore in spirit: for theirs is the kingdome of heauen . . . Tyndale had the final say. The fifty-four translators made very little attempt to update his language, which was now eighty years old. Even though by 1611, English had undergone further revolution, the King James translators would still use “ye” sometimes for “you,” as in “ye cannot serve God and Mammon,” even though very few said “ye” in common speech any more. They used “thou” for “you,” “gat” for “...

After 1588, the naval effectiveness of the comparatively small island grew even stronger and opened up the world to trade. This brought a massive injection into the language. As England imported a huge cargo of goods, English imported a huge cargo of vocabulary. Another ten to twelve thousand new words entered English in this Elizabethan and Jacobean period and delivered a new map of the world and new ideas. At the time of the Spanish Armada, England was well behind other European powers in the reach of its colonial conquests and English inevitably lagged badly in the influence it exerted abroad. Portuguese had already made its mark in Brazil and was biting deeply into southern America; Spanish had been spoken in Cuba and Mexico for more than half a century and Spain was taking its trade, its religion and its culture and its language all around the New World. Over eight hundred years earlier, Arabic had raced through the Middle East and North Africa and could still be called an imperial language, while Hindi was comfortably establishing itself as a vernacular if not a literary language throughout the populous Indian region.

It has been suggested that it was English sixteenth-century sailors who brought in “fokkinge,” “krappe” and “buggere” (though that is ultimately “Bulgarus,” Latin for Bulgarians), which they had found irresistible in Low Dutch. Even when they are found in earlier English, these words are not swear words. “C — — t” is not taboo; “bugger” does not mean sodomite until the period we are talking about.

A closer look at the words borrowed from Latin and Greek in the developing area of medicine gives us a snapshot of the time. So successful was the classical branding of medical terms during the Renaissance that it has gone on ever since. Among the hundreds of words that arrived from Greek via Latin were our “skeleton,” “tendon,” “larynx,” “glottis” and “pancreas.” From Latin we also inherit “tibia,” “sinuses,” “temperature” and “viruses” as well as “delirium” and “epilepsy.” Our “parasites” and “pneumonia,” even our “thermometers,” “tonics” and “capsules,” are all words of classical origin. We talk of our bodies in ancient tongues.

There was also, perhaps, a little snobbery, which grew as time went on. To give something a Greek or Latin name gave it an exclusivity, made it something of a cult, meant that you had to have at least the smatterings of a superior education to be on terms with it, took it away from the common tongue, as had happened in the Church.

The late Roy Porter, when Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute, was eloquent about this: Suddenly you find that there are thousands of plants and elements and stars and things that nobody quite knew what to call. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet, he had to find a name. But what do you call a new planet? He wanted to call it “George’s Planet” after King George. That however was considered rather too vulgar . . . they worried that the French wouldn’t like it very much if a whole planet was called after England. So in the end they Latinised it and called it “Uranus” instead.... It was one of the great claims of so many nineteenth century scientists when they were naming the elements that they weren’t just scientists in the lab, but they were scholars of Greek or Latin. And therefore they were very proud of themselves when they thought of words like “paleolithic” instead of saying simply “dawn of time.” Paleolithic gave everything a higher status. . . . So when you found particular sorts of rocks in Mid-Wales, instead of calling them “slaty rocks” or “grey rocks” or “hard rocks” or “friable rocks,” you called them “Silurian.” Silurian was based on the Latin name of the tribes who’d lived there — a word taken from the writings of Caesar.

However, Cheke may have taken some comfort from the fact that some of the thousands of Latin and Greek words coined during the great Inkhorn Controversy did not survive. Natural selection had its way and “obtestate” (to bear witness) and “fatigate” (to make tired) have been lost, as have been “illecebrous” (enticing) and “deruncinate” (to cut off). “Abstergify” (to cleanse), “arreption” (a sudden removal) and “subsecive” (spare) have all slipped out of use. “Nidulate” (to build a nest), “latrate” (to bark like a dog) and “suppeditate” (to supply) have also disappeared. Whilst a word like “impede” survived, its opposite, “expede,” did not.

England had to wait until the dawn of the seventeenth century, 1604, to get its own dictionary. This represents the first indication of a challenge to the rest of Europe, as it was eight years ahead of the first Italian dictionary, and thirty-five years before the French. Although, to put it in a rather longer perspective, it was eight hundred years after the first Arabic dictionary and nearly a thousand years after the first Sanskrit dictionary in India.

The English population was growing, and growing more educated. One estimate is that by 1600, half of the three and a half million population — at least in towns and cities — had some minimal education in reading and writing.

Queen Elizabeth I has a fair claim to be the best educated monarch ever to sit on the throne of England. Apart from her mastery of rhetoric — demonstrated at Tilbury — she spoke six languages and translated French and Latin texts. Furthermore, she enjoyed writing poetry: I grieve and dare not show my Discontent; I love and yet am forc’d to seem to hate; I do, yet dare not say I ever meant; I seem stark mute but Inwardly do prate.

The Renaissance saw the beginning of the great writing rift, the splitting away of literature from everyday speech.

They roared into London and set up their theatres in Southwark. It was the principal nest of crime in the capital, it was filthy, crowded and dangerous, but it was cheap and next to the river for the convenience of those afraid to walk. It was also outside the City of London and hence the jurisdiction of the City Fathers who tended to deal with actors under the harsh laws against vagrancy. The Globe was built there in 1599. On these popular communal stages, something extraordinary happened which was to ornament, deepen, mine and charm English into a language capable, it seemed, of taking on anything, any thought, any action, any story, any feeling, any drama.

The plays that were written by Shakespeare as well as those by his contemporaries, Marlowe, Jonson, Marston and Chapman, and later Webster and Middleton, attracted a truly incalculable proportion of the population of London. The Globe could hold between three thousand and three thousand five hundred people — and there were five other theatres in London which could rival the Globe. A ten-day run for a play counted as a long run and the London population of merely two hundred thousand inhabitants demanded constant novelty, especially as theatre-going became such a craze that most of those who wanted to had seen the play in the ten days. It has been estimated that a box-office hit like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus would have been seen by one in two men in London.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. His father, John, was a glover (there are more than seventy detailed and accurate references to gloves in his works); his mother, Mary Arden, came from a farming family. He was the eldest of three sons and four daughters and was educated locally until he was fifteen or sixteen. What happened to him until he landed in London in around 1591 is unclear, save that in 1582 he married Anne Hathaway (he was eighteen) and they had three children.

Most scholars today attribute thirty-eight plays, one hundred fifty-four sonnets and other major poems to Shakespeare.

You can scale Shakespeare by many routes: here we concentrate on his contribution to English. Well over two thousand of our words today are first recorded by him, either plucked out or invented by him.

Over four hundred years ago, Shakespeare had a vocabulary of at least twenty-one thousand different words: some have estimated that with the combination of words, this could have reached thirty thousand.

In the sixteenth century people began to start their sentences with “oh,” “why” and “well” as “pray,” “prithee” and “marry” began to die off. Shakespeare was on to them. Almost every word could be used as almost any part of speech. There were no rules and Shakespeare’s English ran riot.

In many ways Stratford-upon-Avon itself defined Shakespeare’s use of the English language. In the second half of the sixteenth century, it had fifteen hundred inhabitants, and as the son of a local businessman involved with everyone in the place, Shakespeare from the start would have known about the high and the low and lived among the middle. The local language would still have been rough-tongued, uttering its Old English openly: the roots of English would have been in his ears in his infancy.

Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded rather like some current regional accents as used today by older speakers — unsurprising given the stubborn grip of the dialects of England which retain pronunciations older than those in “educated” English. He would have used a rolled “r” in words like “turn” and “heard.” “Right” and “time” would be “roight” and “toime.”

Shakespeare rhymed “tea” with tay, “sea” with say, and “never die” with memory. “Complete” has the stress on the first syllable in Troilus and Cressida: “thousand com-plete courses of the Sun,” but on the second in Timon of Athens: “Never com-plete.” “An-tique,” “con-venient,” “dis-tinct,” “en-tire,” and “ex-treme” would all have the stress on the first syllable. “Ex-pert,” “para-mount,” and “par-ent,” on the last. There was a great deal of what might be termed “poetic licence.”

First there is the high language, then the specific clear definition. At the heart of Shakespeare, listening to it for acting, the great lines, often the most poetic, are the monosyllables. Deep feeling probably comes out in monosyllables.

Since Shakespeare’s time, one way to divide writers is between the embellished, the high extravagant stylists — Charles Dickens, James Joyce — and the more earthed — George Eliot, Samuel Beckett.

English went west once more on its most fateful journey since the fifth century. A weighty proportion of the early settlers came from East Anglia, the land of the Angles where Englalond became England. The Mayflower families and those who followed them were, on the whole, people of above-average literacy, moral certainty, religious passion and, possibly, among the most stout-hearted.

There are acknowledged claims to American-English paternity in the Jamestown area and on Tangier Island, where a quarter of America’s oysters and much valued crabs still keep alive a community of less than a thousand people whose accent is salted by an English Cornish dialect almost four hundred years old.

In terms of the European “competition,” the English Protestants were to score heavily because they came primarily not to plunder, which had been the gleeful purpose of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch and the English before them, nor even to trade; but to settle and build a new world in accordance with God’s law and above all following God’s word. They came to stay. And it is difficult to overemphasise the fact that they came with the Bible in English and they lived every hour of their days by that Bible. For the word of God in English, their predecessors — as we saw with Wycliffe and Tyndale — had suffered exile, persecution, torture and death.