Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

But the Norman invasion of England was quite unlike the previous Germanic conquests of England in both scale and political consequence.

In scale, it was small, at least by comparison with the then population of England: William came with some five thousand knights, and the total numbers who ‘came over with the Conqueror’, all told, will have amounted to at most four times this number, twenty thousand to set against an English population of 1.5 million. [650]So in the first generation of Norman rule, perhaps one person in a hundred spoke Norman French.

In political consequence, it was not a raid, nor a mass migration, but a discrete invasion, grounded on a serious casus belli: William claimed that the king of England owed him allegiance, and went on to prove God’s support for his right through battle. The result was almost instant conversion of England from a Saxon to a Norman kingdom. The Normans, though few, effectively decapitated the English regime.

The linguistic effect of this looks devastating, especially to us reading the written record a millennium later. Now that the king and the nobility are French speakers, there is a new audience for the literary production of England; English vernacular literature—which with Irish had been the earliest to flower in the whole of Europe—ceases, and in its place comes Anglo-Norman courtly romance. From now on, laws, court judgments and legal depositions are almost all in French, a switch that shows up blatantly in the records; for increasingly it is legal documents which set the rules for Norman society and become the main objects of political struggle. The new order had less concrete effect among monks and clerics, since Latin remained the basic language of their intellectual work; but beside liturgy and theology, Latin also took over the functions of record-keeping and the writing of history. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which had been kept continuously since the reign of Alfred in the ninth century, dies out in 1155. By the mid-twelfth century, this division of functions between the languages had become rigid. There was little apparent role left for English, at least in written form. But this does not mean that the language was endangered in use: despite its low profile in the records, there is no reason to believe that it was spoken any the less among the vast majority of the people.

Partly, the spread of Norman French would have been limited by the very rigidity in the social hierarchy over which the Normans presided. Within the feudal system, the status of every English man and woman was largely determined by birth, with the Church providing the only paths for advancement through merit, and that severely limited through constraints of celibacy. As a result, the French-speaking nobility remained almost a closed society—though fresh blood, and hence no doubt some English in childhood, came in through marriages to Saxon maidens—and there was little or no scope for people to better their prospects through aping their masters. In feudal England, people knew their place, one usually defined within a village, and had little opportunity even to meet people with wider horizons.

Such social dynamics as did occur in these centuries were more horizontal than vertical, and due to the unmatched prowess of the Normans in fighting wars against their neighbours. Normans were fine cavalrymen, in fact the first invaders to bring their mounts with them across the Channel. [177]Once won on the battlefield, however, their power was cemented by the building of castles, fortified strongholds so permanent that many of them stand to this day. These were their main innovation. The Normans rapidly unified the somewhat loosely coordinated state of the Saxons, and proceeded to push back its borders. Beyond them lay Celtic-speaking regions, the north and west of the British Isles. Cornwall had already been part of the Anglo-Saxon weal, but in each of Cumbria, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Normans now made serious inroads.

Cumbria was the scene of a struggle that lasted from 1092 to 1157. Wales took longer; G went in the south-east was taken by 1087, but although ‘Marcher Lordships’, dependent on the Norman king, were soon established across the whole of southern Wales, resistance did not die away. In the twelfth century, most of the country aside from the southern coast and western borders had reasserted its independence, and there was a period of de facto acceptance of an indigenous Pura Wallia , surrounded by a Norman Marchia Wallie. Only in 1283 did the Angevin king Edward I complete the conquest. Even then, there were two more Welsh rebellions, a decade and then a century later. [178]

The penetration of Scotland, hitherto largely Gaelic-speaking, was less warlike. Lothian, in the south-east, had already been English-speaking since the Angles had taken Edinburgh in 638. King Malcolm III, [179]on the throne at the time of the Norman conquest of England, had been exceptionally Anglophile; he had spent some of his youth in England, ‘knew the English language quite as well as his own’, and had married an English princess, Margaret, who opened the Scottish court (then still at Perth) as a market for luxury goods from England. No natural ally for the advancing Norman power, then, Malcolm actually spent much of his reign on aggressive raids into Northumbria. Nevertheless, his successors, particularly David I (1124-53), were highly partial to Norman influence: Anglo-Norman became the language of the court, so that in the thirteenth century the Englishman Walter of Coventry remarked: ‘The more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture; and after reducing the Scots [i.e. Gaels] to utter servitude, they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service.’ [651]

But French-speaking nobles brought English-speaking attendants. And to sustain their way of life, they were joined by communities of burgesses, English-speaking, who profited from cross-border trade. Cross-border influence swelled, and people began to refer to their language as ‘Inglis’, and later (equivalently—for this was a very distinctive kind of English) as ‘Scottis’. It hardly mattered that the Scottish and English crowns remained intermittently at war through the late thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.

In Ireland, the Normans had accepted an invitation around 1166 from Diarmait Mac Murchada, newly deposed king of Leinster, to intervene on his behalf against the Irish High King. It was an act of opportunism on the part of the English king Henry II—neatly backed by a papal bull, Laudabiliter —but enabled him to channel some of the animal spirits of Marcher Lords looking for new conquests beyond Wales. The result was a settlement of Normans around Dublin, soon spreading out northward and westward, which became a permanent feature of the Irish landscape, and ultimately expanded to give the English Crown fitful control of the whole island.

In all these extensions to its domain, Norman influence brought the same rather complex linguistic regime: French for the rulers, English for their retinue, and Latin for technical support. In the long run, the English apex of the triangle proved the most influential, although functionally it was the most gratuitous: in all these lands, after all, it had to be superimposed on a subject population who spoke yet another language, Cumbrian, Welsh or (as in Scotland and Ireland) Gaelic, and which in the Gaelic case had as strong a literary tradition as English.

Language was not an explicit issue in the early days, before foreign domination had had a chance to spell out its effects over the generations; but when it did, it was English, and only English, which received the benefit of formal reinforcement. So when in 1366 the Norman authorities felt threatened by a resurgence of Gaelic influence in Ireland, causing that language to be used even in the English Pale around Dublin, their response was to issue (in French) the Statute of Kilkenny, which, after expressing a concern about the freedom of the Church and requiring strict apartheid in marriage compaternitie nurtur de enfantz concubinance ou de caise , ‘marriage, godparenting, fostering of children, concubinage or by amour’, curiously brackets a concern for language with proper saddle etiquette: