The History of English Part II: From Conquest to Printing Press

I'm currently writing a story set in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings. One of the immediate changes must have been the language barrier which was surely constructed. Or was it?

The first part of my story of English (see HERE) concluded with the coming of the Normans, and a tale from the 12th century sums up what happened after the Normans settled. A local priest witnessed a miracle, where after the laying on of hands, a mute man was cured and was thereafter able to speak English and French. The priest was resentful. Brother William, he said, had laid hands on this man and instantly he could speak two languages, whereas he, the local priest, had to remain dumb in the presence of the bishop. This priest, it transpired, knew little Latin, and no French.

A page from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

In 1154, the English monks who had written the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (established by Alfred the great) put down their pens. French was the language to speak, and Latin was used for writing and remained the principal language of religion and learning. A visitor from another planet would assume that English disappeared, to be replaced permanently by French.

However, we know this is not so.

In a document from c.1100, Henry I addresses “All his faithful people, both French and English.” Orderic Vitalis (1074-c.1142), an historian born of a Norman knight and an English mother, complained when he was sent to a monastery in Normandy that he heard “A language [French] that I did not know.”

Imagine a minor Norman knight being given a small manor in the English countryside. Surrounded by English-speaking ‘natives’, he would have to pick up a fair amount of English if he wished to be understood.

Perhaps we can also thank ‘Bad’ King John for the survival of the English Language. His loss of the French territories forced the nobility to choose one or the other. “My brother Amaury” said Simon de Montford, “released to me our brother’s whole inheritance in England, provided that I could secure it; in return I released to him what I had in France.” In 1244 the king of France declared that, “As it is impossible that any man living in my kingdom, and having possessions in England, can competently serve two masters, he must either inseparably attach himself to me or to the king of England.”

King John

In the 1230s, Henry III had become the first king of England since 1066 to give distinctively English names to his sons – Edward and Edmund. The eldest son, Edward I, was very conscious of his Englishness, and French gradually became an acquired language. Documents began to be written in English again and during the 100 Years War there was a massive impetus to speak English. Church sermons, prayers and carols were all expressed in English. During the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, Richard II spoke to the peasants in English.

But English was now what we term Middle English (ME) – a written record of what had been happening for a while in spoken English. An example of how the language was changing is the case of the letter y. In Old English (OE) it represented a short vowel, written by French scribes as u. The OE word mycel became ME muchel, which became modern much. When y stood for a long vowel it was written by the French scribes as ui. So the OE fyr became the ME fuir and the modern fire. This sound, though, was pronounced differently in different parts of the country, sometimes representing the i in kin, but in Kent and parts of East Anglia it was more like the e in merry. In the west it was the oo in mood, but spelt with a u. So the OE for kin, cyn, could be kyn, ken, or kun.

The OE byrgen had ME variants birien, burien, berien and became our modern bury, using the Kentish pronunciation berry, yet busy has the western spelling but is pronounced as the London/E Midlands bizzy.

The five main speech areas – Northern, West and East Midland, Southern, and Kentish are similar to contemporary English speech areas.

The triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London shared the same kind of English, which may be said to have become the basis for Standard English of the modern age.

Geoffrey Chaucer

London English came to be exemplified by one man: Geoffrey Chaucer. Choosing to write in English, he brought about the rebirth of English as a National Language. One line from his Troilus and Criseyde shows the journey of the language up to that point:

Criseyde says to Troilus: "Welcome, my knight, my pees, my suffisance."

Welcome, my, and knight, are all English words, although the original OE cniht meant boy, before it became loaded with French military connotations. Pees (peace) is one of the earliest words to come with the conquest, replacing the OE grith. Suffisance, an overblown synonym for satisfaction, is from French, via Latin.

Chaucer’s time also saw another monumental change, with the emergence of surnames. People began to be associated with where they lived (Brooks, Rivers, Hill, and Dale) or their occupation (Butcher, Hunter, Glover, Sadler, Miller, Cooper).


Chaucer wrote in English, but the official language of government was still, for the time being, French. Henry V became the first English king since Harold to use English in official documents and, in the summer of 1415, when he crossed the Channel to fight the French, the first letter he dictated was, symbolically, written in English.

Chaucer Manuscript

English spelling is confusing, as we explored last time, but if you wonder why head doesn't sound like heat, or why steak doesn't rhyme with streak, and some doesn't rhyme with home, you can blame the Great Vowel Shift. Between roughly 1400 and 1700, the pronunciation of long vowels changed. Mice stopped being pronounced meese. House stopped being pronounced like hoose. (Although there is an area near Sheffield where it is pronounced arse*.) Some words, particularly words with ea, kept their old pronunciation. Northern English dialects were less affected.

It might reasonably be argued that in some ways the regional dialects of the north remain closer to the original OE or even Old Norse (ON). Melvyn Bragg (A Cumbrian-born broadcaster and writer) overheard someone in a Scandinavian restaurant proclaim “As garn yam” (I’m going home.) To this day, inhabitants of Cumbria would understand this. Cumbrian vowel sounds probably did not shift to the same extent, so that we might still hear someone at Windermere telling us “I’m aboard a boat I bought about a week ago” with vowel sounds that make it seem more like, “As aboard abort about a boot a week sin.”

In other areas of the country, use of words typifies dialect. In the east of England, particularly Norfolk, the word that replaces it at seemingly every opportunity. “Thank you for bringing that book back, I’ll put that back on the shelf.” “That’s now raining.” “That’s a cold wind in the east; that don’t go round you, that go right through you.”

But I digress. English spelling was about to be not standardised, but dictated, by the printers. And here we come back to those spelling anomalies which I mentioned in more detail in Part I.

Ever wondered about the silent middle of words like night and right? In OE, the letter h was used for words like ham (home) and niht (night). This puzzled the French scribes, who couldn’t use a g, which was already in use, nor h, for the same reason. So they compromised with a gh to denote the sound. Although the pronunciation of this sound was dying out (it’s still in use in Scotland nicht/night) the spelling had become established and, crucially, William Caxton used it. His first printed book has a preface dedicated to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, whom he describes as a “Ryght noble, gloryous and myghty prince.”

Brut Chronicle, printed by Caxton

Gradually, spelling was falling prey to rules, although it had some way to go. And while French did not ‘take over’, its influence on spelling is clear. OE had a word sinder, meaning the residue left by metal in a furnace, the French had cendre, meaning ashes, and the two fused to become the modern word, cinder.

By the time printing arrived, in the 1470s, the above-mentioned Great Vowel Shift was well underway. Caxton himself lamented the variety of spelling and pronunciation: “And certainly our language varyeth far from that which was used and spoken when I was born.” With the arrival of printing came a more systemised way of using punctuation marks, but spelling was still quite varied. What printing did do, however, was sound the death knell for the OE letters ‘thorn’ (þ) and ‘eth’ (ð) and ‘yogh’ (Ȝ). Spelling might not yet be standardised, but the alphabet was.


*The Arse that Jack Built - BBC Radio 4

Part I: The Early History of English

Further Reading:
A Little Book of Language – David Crystal
Spell It Out – David Crystal
The Story of English – McCrum, Cran & MacNeil
Whatt Fettle Mun: A Celebration of Cumbrian Dialect – T Barker
Broad Norfolk - J Mardle
A Dictionary of Cumberland Dialect – Richard LM Byers
Concise Oxford Dictionary
Wordcraft – S Pollington

Find me at anniewhiteheadauthor.co.uk
And on Amazon


[A version of this article originally appeared on the EHFA Blog]

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]