Old English Female Names and their Meanings

As I’ve found myself saying quite a lot recently, my new book, Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England, features over 130 named women. Looking at the index puts a certain Christmas tune in my head: 8 Ælfgifus, 7 Æthelburhs, 6 Eadburhs, 5 Ælfflæds, 4 Cyneburhs, 3 Ealdgyths, 2 Wynflæds, and a partridge in a … okay, maybe not, but you get the idea!

Sometimes, these Old English names cause a problem, especially when so many people appear to have the same, or similar name. For me, it’s no different from the Williams and Richards of the Anglo-Norman period (apparently, when Henry the Young King (eldest son of Henry II) held his Christmas court in Normandy in 1171, it was said that the guests included no fewer than 110 knights all called William.*) or even the court of Henry VIII where More, Wolsey, Cranmer, Cromwell, Boleyn, Tallis and many others were all called Thomas.

However, the pre-Conquest names are less familiar because they essentially come from another language. Helpfully, though, they are almost always made up of two elements, which are translateable.

If we look at the first elements:

Ælf  - this one means elf
Æthel - noble
Cyne - kingly, so - royal
Ead - happy, blessed
God - God
Leof - dear, loved
Mild - gentle, meek
Wulf - Wolf. 

And the second elements:

Burh - town (fortified). It has been suggested that it might have been symbolic of the expectation for women to defend them.**
Flæd - beauty
Gifu - gift
Gyth - war
Swith - strong
Thryth - strength

Then we can start to put some names together. 

Æthelgifu - noble gift
Leofgifu - beloved gift

Ælfthryth - elf strength
Wulfthryth - wolf strength

And so on.

Along with wulf, it’s clear that the female name elements aren’t all ‘sugar and spice’: burh, thryth, swith and gyth are all quite forceful.

And, like wulf, some elements are used for both female and male names, but they are usually the first element. So ead (happy, blessed) could be used for a king - Eadgar, Eadweard (Edward) or for a king’s wife - Eadgyth (Edith).

After a while, you begin to notice that certain names are male, and certain are female. By and large, the difference lies with the second element. Beorht (bright), ræd (counsel - often presented as red), weard (guardian), frith (peace), wine (friend); these are male name elements. 

So it becomes easier to recognise them. If I see a load of Æthel names in a book index, I can skim straight to the female names, ignoring Æthelred, Æthelfrith, Æthelberht, and concentrating on finding Æthelthryth, Æthelflæd or Æthelgifu.

But don’t be thrown by names which look female - they usually aren’t if they end in ‘a’ - such as Anna or Goda, both male names. Any Old English female names ending that way have usually been modernised. Æthelflæd is sometimes presented as Ethelfleda, while Godgifu becomes Godiva. Once you understand that the 'g' in gifu is soft, and that the 'u' is more of an 'a' sound, then Godgifu to Godyifa to Godiva is quite logical.

Of course, as with all periods, certain names were more popular at times than others. In the seventh century, the Æthel element was less commonly used, so that Æthelred of Mercia stands out among his brothers Merewalh, Wulfhere, Peada, and his father Penda (note the male 'a' endings again with those last two). 

But get to the late ninth century onwards and the nobility is awash with Æthels and Ælfs. There’s one anomaly and she takes up a large portion of the book. She’s not an Æthel or an Ælf, and her name actually does end in 'a'. Her name was Emma, and she was from Normandy. She married two kings of England, first Æthelred the Unready, and then Cnut. The English though, gave her a new name: Ælfgifu. Of course they did! But at least we can work out what it means!

*Thanks to Charlene Newcomb for this nugget
 **Barbara Yorke  Æthelflæd Conference, Tamworth 2018

It's All About Context: Deciphering Old English

Context is everything. I don't claim to be any great shakes at Old English, but I am learning to recognise certain words and phrases.

Most people, I suspect, who saw this word would not have a clue what it means or how to say it, much less what it means: þrīe. Similarly, this word: mōnaþ

But if we start with some pronunciation hints, then it gets easier. The þ is a th sound. So mōnaþ is month. I'll come back to þrīe later.

Other words still in use today are also fairly unrecognisable in their original form: dæg and geong.

If I said, "Se mann is eald", I might not be understood. But if I tell you that g is often a soft y sound, then you'll know that dæg means day. And armed with that fact, and that "Se mann is eald" means the man is old, then deciphering geong might become easier if we say "Se mann is geong." Yes, geong means young.

So now we know that þ is equivalent to th, we can work out what broþer means. Especially if we see it alongside other words: fæder, mōdor, broþer, dohtor.

Wudu on its own doesn't look much like a modern word. But if we team it with ford and weald, then we have wood, ford and forest. Ford and weald are both in use today.

Going back to þrīe. If you haven't worked it out already, let me put it with its friends:

ān

twēgen

þrīe

fēower

fif

siex

seofon

eahta

nigon

tien

It doesn't always work though. The numbers 1-10 might now be recognisable, but although mōnaþ is now clearly month, it's only vaguely helpful here:

Æfterra Gēola
Sol-mōnaþ
Hrēþ-mōnaþ
Easter-mōnaþ
Þrimilce-mōnaþ
Ærra Līþa (and Þrilīþa which is a sort of leap-month!)
Æftera Līþa
Weod-mōnaþ
Hālig-mōnaþ
Winterfyllēð
Blōt-mōnaþ
Ærra Gēola

However, look at the first and last of the list of months. Remember that G is a soft y sound, and you'll see Yule. Specifically, After-Yule and Before-Yule. Also see if you can spot Holy-Month and Blood-Month. Now that you know before and after, then the middle months, before and after Līþa, make sense as being before and after something, in this case, midsummer. 

Eald and geong, once we know about pronunciation, can morph easily into old and young.

But another of pair of words is not so easy: lytel and micel. You can probably work out little, but what about micel, which means great? Well, it does still exist in a modern form, as the dialect word muckle.

There are other words which seem far removed from their modern counterparts. Dōm, for example, meaning judgement. But if we remember the rather more archaic word doom, then it makes sense.

As I said, context is everything. I recently went into the local school where I teach and read them this: 

Fæder ūre, þū þē eart on heofonum, 
Sī þīn nama gehālgod. 
Tō becume þīn rice. 
Gewurde þīn willa 
On eorþan swā swā on heofonum. 
Urne gedægwhamlīcan hlāf syle ūs tōdæg. 
And forgyf ūs ūre gyltas, 
Swā swā wē forgyfaþ ūrum gyltendum. 
And ne gelæd þū ūs on costnunge, ac alȳs ūs of yfele
soþlice.

Fæder ūre is the giveaway, especially if we switch those two words around, which gives us 'Our Father' and suddenly eart on heofonum looks more like 'art in heaven'. Of course, now that we know that dæg means day, tōdæg shouldn't present a problem. Some of the pupils guessed what it was, but if I'd shown them this to start with, I think they'd have been stumped. 

Even so, once we know some of the strange Old English letters and some basic pronunciation rules, then this line
si þin nama gehalgod (think: si thin nama ye-halyod) reveals itself to be 'hallowed be thy name'.

As I said, I am far from an expert (and should point out that there are other Old English letters, one of which, ð, can also be th) and can only pick out the odd word or phrase. This post is just meant to be a bit of fun. But Old English, when you look closely, does very often translate easily into modern English. It's just a question of looking closely, and sometimes joining up a few dots.

So, here's one to leave with you, and if you follow the rules above, you should have no problem working it out: þrītig*.

[Thanks to Dawn Burgoyne for permission to reproduce here her wonderful version of the Lord's Prayer which she wrote out and illuminated for me. Spellings of OE words taken from A Guide to Old English by Bruce Mitchell & Fred C. Robinson. *thirty]

"Word Hoard" and the Difficulties of Making Dialogue Authentic

"I hold your oaths fulfilled." These words are spoken by Aragorn in the film version of Tolkein’s The Return of the King. 

I found myself thinking about whether all of the dialogue was derived from Old English (OE). The short answer is no, but it did remind me of a time when I decided to see if it was possible to construct dialogue for my novels – set in Anglo-Saxon England – using only words derived from either OE, or old Norse (ON).

Here’s some dialogue from a very early draft of one of my novels: 

"No no, all is well; you sit. It is cooler here in the yard. I was thinking, though, that the roads from the south may be hard enough to ride on now, which means that Lord Helmstan might be home soon. Can we bake a few more loaves? Would it help to knead the rest outside?"

 "It would, my lady, thank you. There is enough flat bread to see us through, but if I can find how my idle daughters do with the grinding, I can bake with yeast and the finest ground meal to make bread for the lord. With your leave, I will go now and get that husband of mine to lift me down another bag of meal."

Hmm. It doesn't flow brilliantly well, does it? And the words aren’t even all derived from OE, or even pre-Conquest words. Lift, for example, is 12th-century ON, while bag is 13th-century ON.

So, if we want to pepper the dialogue with OE-derived words, what can we use, and what can't we use? It's surprising:

Alliterative couplets are okay - hale and hearty, forgive and forget.

But whilst we can reckon, we can't count.

We can't want, but we can crave, or wish.

We can eat our food at the board, but not the table, and we'll sit on a stool, not a chair.  Sounds a little uncomfortable; a bit basic. It gets worse:

You can't smile; you can only smirk or grin. (But since that means 'to bear your teeth' it doesn't sound as benign as a smile, somehow.)

You can't have a smell or an aroma; you can only have a stench. And this leads to another problem: so many OE words now have these negative connotations, and we have the Normans to thank for a lot of that.

And as for those Four-Letter-Words, well, the really nasty ones are not Anglo-Saxon and oddly, although I've just said that they hold such negative connotations, the Anglo-Saxon four letter words are now considered relatively inoffensive and, after all, they simply described body parts/functions - shit, arse, etc.

Of course, it can also boil down to a matter of how the words and phrases sound. If you were to discuss an 'Ursine preference for forest-based defecation' it would somehow sound more archaic than saying 'Bears like to shit in the woods,' and yet one would be more authentic than the other (even though like is 12th-century ON).

It seems that we really need those ON words. When, in Alvar the Kingmaker, I needed Alvar to respond to a threat, I found I couldn’t do it without the word ‘try’, which is thirteenth-century ON. But "You can try. Mercia has never yet bent to the rule of a Dane, be he Viking or Churchman," was preferable to: "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough." All OE-derived words, yes, but a little too modern-sounding!

Some other words just don't translate at all - for flower you'd have to use blossom but that's not really a singular noun, in so far as one couldn't pick a blossom. You can't have ceremony, or feast, or celebration. The OE word for such occasions is symbel, but it hasn’t survived in modern English.

We also need to consider that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t think in the same terms as we do. Interestingly, while eyes, chin, nose, brows and cheeks could all be used, I could find no OE word which equates to face (a word which traces its origins only to the thirteenth century) and to describe beauty in OE terms you’d have to talk of winsomeness.

Bearing in mind these differences in concepts, I tend to have my characters say naught because nothing meant something entirely different, akin to being an outcast, literally no thing. Dream is another word which conveyed a different concept, being more like a waking vision, or daydream, rather than something which visits only the sleeping mind.

It doesn’t do to be too strict with the language when discussing familial relationships, either. We can't have uncle, aunt or cousin, although we can have brother, sister, mother and father. Grandmother should really be greatmother, but it's clunky. In other family matters though, we can choose the OE forms, and have burials instead of funerals and weddings instead of marriages, which helps to build up the Anglo-Saxon 'voice'.

So, wherever there is a viable alternative to a modern/French-derived word, I’ll use it. Where it becomes nigh on impossible, though, is with the little, useful words. The following dialogue, from To Be A Queen, would have been difficult to write without using the conjunction because:

"So be it. But it is only because she is my sister that I bow to you."
   The sharp scything noise set his teeth on edge. Every Mercian in the room had his hand on his sword hilt, the blade hitched up to protrude from the scabbard. Alhelm stepped forward and fixed the piercing blue gaze on Edward once more. "No, my lord, it is only because she is your sister that we bow to you."

Could I have used an alternative? Sometimes, therefore will do instead, but not in all cases. I asked Jim Sinclair, OE specialist, for a suggestion, and he told me, “One possibility is for or that, as in 'But it is only for that she is my sister (Ac hit is ānlīce for þæm þe hēo is mīn sweostor.)’” While this might have been more authentic, I think it would have weakened the sound of the exchange between the characters.

Because is not the only ‘little’ word which is necessary to aid flow. Others are seem, appear, doubt, and grateful (which is very modern, originating in the sixteenth century).

In another line from Alvar, the titular character gets rather cross with Bishop Oswald and Alvar’s brother asks him if he is behaving himself. Alvar replies: 

 “I should have felled him where he stood. Rotting crow-body…” Alvar sat down and shoved his legs out straight in front of him. “I reminded him that he is not one of us, but I only spoke the truth.”

For authenticity, I’d have needed to find another word for reminded. But it’s not so easy. Perhaps, ‘I bade him hark back'? Hmm, I don’t think it works as well.  Try it yourself - and no, you can't have reconsider, or pointed out!

In the following passage from To Be A Queen, the words in bold are Edward’s thoughts. They are not OE, but they are short, conveying urgency:

Five or six more steps through a river suddenly flowing treacle brought him to the bubbles of wet cloth. Batting aside a floating shoe, he grabbed the centre of the sodden, sinking lumps. Waist deep only, merciful Jesus, but so many weeds. Come here girl. He flipped her over and lifted her clear of the dragging wetness. Legs planted, he centred his weight and brushed the hair from her face. She coughed and he allowed himself to breathe again.

Girl is 13th century, merciful is 12th century. Could I have used OE? Again, I asked Jim Sinclair who said, "Tricky. Girl would be maid or maiden which are somewhat archaic and so narrower in meaning, though would work quite nicely in OE. Merciful is virtually impossible; there are some wonderful words for mercy/merciful in OE which haven't [survived] and the closest I can get is mild-hearted, which I don't think really does it."

Later in the chapter:

"I am here to look after you while my father cannot. As one day I will look after Wessex as my father has not. You are my sister. What else is there to know about why I saved you from drowning?" 

I asked Jim how I could say this without using save or rescue. He told me, "There's no obvious candidate here that I can think of. Possibly something simpler like kept from (Why I kept you from drowning) but, again, it's not really the same." Furthermore, drowning is 13th c. Drenching is the closest we can get using OE, but it doesn't convey the same meaning.

In the following two short sentences, is there a pithy alternative to the bold words?

1. "Kings are only as strong as the men who surround them."  Jim’s response was, "In OE you would use the word ymb meaning about, so maybe "Kings are only as strong as the men about them," or "...as the men they keep about them."
2. "Sometimes it is but one man who makes the difference."  Jim told me, "There are few OE options that have survived, but maybe an alternative idiomatic expression might be 'to turn the tide' - "Sometimes it is but one man who can turn the tide?"

So, whilst we seem to have established that it's necessary to use later words to make the dialogue flow, there are some which can nevertheless be used to give a 'flavour' of the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking and talking. 

For example: 
"Hit one, and the other will bleed. Ceolwulf only wears the king-helm because Guthrum's Vikings hold it on his head."

Here, I feel that king-helm is better than crown, and king-seat would be a better alternative to throne. (Even today, modern German is full of compound nouns.) Weapon-man is better than warrior; fyrdsman better than soldier. To continue giving a sense of time and place, in describing a royal vill and its layout, I used fowler's hut instead of mews.

Still, as authors we can't be sticklers; I'm not sure we would want novels set in Chaucer's time, for example, to have dialogue in impenetrable Middle English. 

I find that I can now hear my characters speaking in a way which is nothing like Old English, but is also not too modern sounding and I hope I’ve found a happy medium. Ultimately, then, it has to be a tale (not a story!) of authenticity (14th via Old French) versus truth (OE).

And if you don't agree, then have a read of this book and see if you still want to use only OE words:

You can find all my books in hardback, paperback and Kindle format HERE

[a version of this article appeared on EHFA]

Feast or Symbel?

Where can you eat beans, but not vegetables?
Where can you give your cows fodder, but not eat the beef?
Where can you plant garlic, but not carrots?

Yes, in Anglo-Saxon England.

There are two problems facing the researcher or novelist who might wish to provide some detail to the daily life of their characters:

Firstly, did they know of the items, be it food, or plants?

Secondly, did they have a name for the item which would be recognisable today?

Some of the terms are commonly known. The Anglo-Saxons ate cow; the Normans ate beef. Sheep/mutton, pig/pork - the differences are explained by the Norman words becoming the more 'civilised' option. Thus a stool becomes a chair, an arse becomes a derriere, and so on. 

When I'm writing fiction, I don't stick rigidly to the system of using words derived from Old English. It's not easy putting dialogue together when you can't use words like because, or try, or sky.

But sometimes the word will give me a clue as to whether an item I'm thinking of including in my Anglo-Saxon world has any right to be there.

What if, for example, you want a character to describe another's eyes as almond-shaped? If the Anglo-Saxons didn't know of almonds, then they simply wouldn't think in those terms. Well, it seems that they did know about them, although they were at the time quite an exotic import. So, a rich person, maybe only even a royal person, would know of such a delicacy, or perhaps only someone living near to a port.

The jury is still out, I believe, about rabbits, and whether the Romans or the Normans introduced them to England, but for safety's sake I make sure my characters only talk about hares.

So, assuming that we make sure only the meat, fruit and vegetables that go into the story were known to the Anglo-Saxons, would the names be familiar? Would it be possible to concoct a feast that not only used produce known to them, but with nouns derived from Old English? ('Feast' isn't by the way, the word would be symbel)

We could start with our meat course, and have cow. We wouldn't eat veal, but if we did, we'd have to call it calf. We might have goat meat, especially kid, but that would be called ticcen. Chicken would be fine, and so would goose. Fish, too, and eel, if you like that sort of thing. Herring, fluke and oysters are all okay, too. But sorry, if you want some plaice, you'll have to say facg.

Cheese will be plentiful, but if you want a ploughman's lunch you'll need to ask for a loaf, not bread, and I'm afraid you'll have to forgo the pickle and just stick with butter.

You could have a nice pottage, but you'd need to call it a briw, and in it you might find the afore-mentioned garlic, along with peas, beans, leeks and beets, but the onion would be ciepe. You'd maybe add some herbs for flavouring, but they wouldn't be called herbs. 

For pudding, you might have some fresh fruit, but if you want strawberries then you need to ask for earthberries, and raspberries would be hindberries.

It is difficult to know, when researching, what is meant by 'native' plant. I decided that if a plant or flower had a name derived from Old English, then it's probably safe to assume that it's a pre-Conquest inhabitant. 

So, happily, we have cress, mallow, hemp, hemlock, (not that you'd necessarily want to put that one in the pot!) nettle, hawthorn and hazelnut, but we'd probably have to do without parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. 

I say 'probably', because it's not a fail-safe method. It's known that the Anglo-Saxons ate cabbage, grew barley, and oats, but of those, only oats have a name that looks anything like the modern-day noun. 

The Anglo-Saxons drank wine, but not from 'grapes', (they called them wineberries!) although beer and hop are both derived from Old English, as is apple, but they turned their apples not into cider, but apple-wine.

Little Miss Muffet had curds and whey, but only whey is recognisably derived from Old English.

I'm not a fan of spices, and I like quite traditional food. I could live without that modern invention, the potato, and I think that this diet of dairy produce, meat and veg would suit me quite well. But it seems there were 'nasties'; not only did they have radishes - they called them rædic - but the vegetable called more might refer to carrots (yum) or parsnip (not so yum, unless I can roast them in honey.)

Ah, what about honey? Yes, it was available, but seemingly not used for sweetening foods, certainly not for cakes or fruit dishes, but possibly for drinks, and there is a recipe for pea soup sweetened with honey, which in Old English was called hunig. 

Still, if you are worried about the food tasting bland, there were many salt works, for instance at Nantwich and Droitwich, but even if we didn't know that, the name, sealt, makes it clear that the Anglo-Saxons were familiar with the condiment.

Ketchup though? Probably not.

The Early History of the English Language

Here’s a little test: Torpenhow. Know how to pronounce it? Know its derivation? If it helps at all, it’s in Cumbria, and it’s a hill… and its name is said to mean hill hill hill (though that's widely disputed). That’s English for you. But why? How did our language become so, well, strange? Or should that be weird? Why do we have so many different words for the same thing, and why does our spelling not even abide by its own rules?

I think the first clue might be that, as historian Ann Williams remarked, “We have little idea about what ‘spoken’ English was like before 1100 - virtually all the surviving texts are written in the literary standard (Standard West Saxon in modern scholarship) which was never a spoken language. The abrupt change in the Peterborough Chronicle in 1121 (pictured below) marks the moment when the scribe ceased to write in Standard West Saxon, and began to write in something like the local spoken dialect.”

And in reply, historian Stephanie Evans Mooers Christelow had this to add: “There is also the fact that people speak the language of their mothers: French men who married English women had bicultural children who most likely spoke English. French soldiers stationed in English towns had to learn English, and the French who resided in English villages did as well. According to the Cambridge History of the English Language, French vocabulary and syntax did not begin to significantly affect the English language until about 1300.”

So, there are two intriguing pieces of information here: a hint at the marked differences between written and spoken language, and the fact that it’s too easy, and inaccurate, to blame all our language anomalies on the Norman Conquest. So where did they come from?

Two thirds of England’s rivers take their names from ‘Celtic’ words, for example, Avon. We have place names which are a mixture - in the case of Much Wenlock, Much is from Anglo-Saxon mycel, meaning great, Wenlock comes from Celtic wininicas, white area, and the Anglo-Saxon loca, (place.) We have Roman influence, too, with castra (fort), seen in places such as Chester, and Manchester. Of course, the Anglo-Saxons did build forts of their own - burhs, which give Britain all the burgh and borough place names. But the Anglo-Saxons didn’t just come to fight, and/or defend, they also came to stay. They cleared places, to make space for their settlements, and gave us word endings like ley, ly, leay and leigh, which all mean 'clearing'. The Scandinavians followed suit and also added place names - by, booth, and thwaite.

The Normans did add a few of their own - Ashby was given to the de la Zuche family, (giving us Ashby de la Zouche) and Bewdley came from Beau Lieu (beautiful place).

But the Norman-French did not settle in with the same comfort as the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians, nor in the same number. As we saw above, the commoners kept speaking English, which was still evolving, nevertheless, and came to add many French words.

There is a wealth of information to be gleaned from the study of our place names, and as Margaret Gelling says in her Signposts to the Past, “The linguistic agility which enables modern English speakers to accept Salop as a form of Shropshire is paralleled by the ease with which Keighley is an accepted spelling form of a name pronounced Keethley.” (If you can, get a copy of her book and marvel at her enlightening discourse on the ‘correct’ pronunciation of Shrewsbury!)

Of course, places names have different pronunciations not just because of language development, as in the case of Shrewsbury (Shrowsbury/Shroosberry.) So what can regional dialect tell us?

What Fettle Mun is a book on Cumbrian dialect by Tim Barker. Remember Torpenhow? Well, it is pronounced Tra’penner, or Truhpenner. The Tor bit is from an ancient British word, meaning hill. The Pen is from Celtic (Welsh) and some say it means hill (though it's probably 'head'). How is Old Norse, and it means… hill. Yes, Barker confirms that our language is definitely a hybrid.

Cumbria has the same root as the Welsh word for Wales - Cymru. The shepherds’ counting system, Yan, T’yar, tethera, methera, pimp, is very close to the Welsh for 1-5 (Un, dai, tri, pedwar, pimp).

The Lakeland dialect contains lots of thees and thous, similar to older English - Dost thou is still in evidence is phrases like Duster, as in "Duster want a cup o’tea?"

English development is not unique, but it is unusual. Other languages have remained more pure; Canadian French, for example, is much closer to medieval French, and American English bears traces of that spoken by those on the Mayflower who, being English, would nevertheless have talked of fall coming after summer, and of having ‘gotten’ things.

But here in England we can find even earlier traces. Staying in Cumbria, The Dictionary of Cumberland Dialect (Ed. Richard LM Biers) tells us that gang means go, remarkably similar to the Old English (OE) for 'going' : gangan.

At the other end of the country, In Broad Norfolk, Jonathan Mardle tells us that in the ninth century the Danes invaded the East coast and martyred the Christian king, Edmund. People in East Norfolk used to call the carrion-crow ‘Harra the Denchman’ (Harold the Danishman) which suggests a very long folk-memory of the Anglo-Saxon terror of the heathen vikings.

Norfolk shepherds also have a counting system which sounds rather familiar - Ina, tina, tether, wether, pink.

They still call a song thrush a Mavis, the OE name, and they retain OE plurals - childr, housen. There is much of what we would term biblical language:  "Go ye into the village."

East Anglia became part of the Danelaw. The Danes inter-mingled and Danish became part of the East Anglian dialect. Then came the Flemish weavers in the 14th century. Then an influx of Dutch and Walloon weavers in the 16th century - the ‘strangers’ - brought the word ‘lucum’ (attic window) from the French ‘lucarne’. So not all of our French words come necessarily from Norman French. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Those who came to England early on spoke a Germanic language (Indo-European). The word for father in a document of AD800 is faeder. In Old High German it’s Fater and in Old Frisian fadar or feder. Modern German gives us Vater. We can see the connection. The Story of English (McCrum, Cran & MacNeil) adds that other Frisian words, ko (cow) lam (lamb) goes (goose) boat (boat) dong  (dung) and rein (rain) suggest that had the Conquest not happened, we might all be speaking something akin to modern Dutch.

We should therefore expect some hybrids (as we’ve seen in the place names) and some alternatives with the arrival of the Normans eg wedding/marriage. Although why we don’t have Lapin for rabbit, when it was the French who introduced rabbits to England - can anyone tell me?? (Seriously, I would love to know!)

But leaving aside hybrids, dialect and alternatives, why the different spellings of seemingly similar words?

OE contains barely a dozen Celtic words, and most of them, as we have seen, are geographical. And most place names are English or Danish. OE was not uniform, it had local varieties which as we’ve seen are still discernible today, and also regional accents as diverse as 'Geordie' in the north-east, Dorset with its soft ‘burrs’ and Kent, with speech patterns that go back to Jutish origins. The impact of Old Norse (ON) is harder to gauge because words were so similar to OE. But it has given us beck, laithe, garth - all generally found in areas of Viking settlement in the north, as is riding, a word for an administrative unit, which as an interesting aside, is also used in Canada for a parliamentary constituency.

Certain developments affected vocabulary: the coming of Christianity brought biblical words - Greek and Latin - and gave OE the ability to speak of concepts (frumweorc: from fruma, beginning, and weorc, work, which gives OE for creation), and the Conquest brought a linguistic ‘apartheid’ in areas of religion and law, with the introduction of words like felony, perjury, attorney, bailiff and nobility.

But many of our unusual spellings simply boil down to phonetics. The English had two letters for the th sound (þ and  ð) which became virtually interchangeable. They had no silent letters; every letter was pronounced. But there were weaknesses in the system - the same letter, c, was used for cold and child (cild) and king (cyning).

G was both hard and soft, and was also used for a sound similar to the ending of Scottish ‘loch’, as well as the j sound in hedge, which was written with a cg spelling (hecg). The sh sound was written sc - (scip = ship). 

So h, c and g were being used for several sounds.

There were similar problems with vowels; with no clue given in the spelling as to the length of the vowels. The scribes experimented with double letters and accents, but it wasn’t ideal. They had no silent letters, remember, so vowels couldn’t be used as clues to pronunciation.  But post-1066, double vowels came to be used (sweet, queen).

The Normans might not have had everyone speaking French, but they introduced new ways of hinting at pronunciation of English - sc became sh, cw became qu, and cg became dg, as in hedge.

They brought in the letter w, but this looked too much like v v (havving), so doubling up went out and the silent e was added to aid pronunciation (have, live). And suddenly it starts to become clear why we have all our spelling anomalies.

For anyone wondering about  through, trough, throw, threw, thorough, bough, and tough, I recommend David Crystal’s book, Spell it Out, for it would seem that a lot of our peculiar spellings were born of a need to show how words should be pronounced.

So, whilst the Normans might not have altered the way we spoke, they certainly altered the way our words were spelled. Or should that be spelt? 😉

It is my intention to revisit this subject, and in a future post I will look at how Old English and Anglo-Norman turned into what we call Middle English, and how, why and when even the nobility stopped speaking French.

See Part II HERE

[This post originally appeared on the EHFA blog on Tuesday, November 22, 2016]

[all illustrations are in the public domain, via Wikipedia]