The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. As often as not, when the dust was flying, no one at the time knew what the outcome might be.

One way to destroy a personality is to cut out memory: one way to destroy a state is to cut out its history. Especially when that history comes out of the native language. Status is gone; continuity is disconnected; all that went into the making of the people the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles had recorded so carefully was of no account. The written language which bound it together guttered out.

Merry it is while summer lasts Amid the song of the birds But now the wind’s blast approaches And hard weather. Alas, how long the night is And I, most unjustly used, Sorrow and mourn and fast.