The Norman conquest of 1066

The Danish influence in the north was enormous. The scale of their settlements

can be seen from the fact that more than 1,400 place names in northern England

are of Scandinavian origin. For a long time, the people in some places spoke

only Old English while in other places, often on the next hillside, they spoke

only Old Norse. Occasionally this arrangement lasted for years-in the Shetland

Islands, in the far north of Scotland, it lasted for centuries, with the people speaking a Norwegian dialect called Norn until well into the 1700s , of which

some 1,500 dialect words survive to this day—but for the most part the two

linguistic sides underwent a replaced and peaceful merger. A great many

Scandinavian terms were adopted, without which English would clearly be the

poorer freckle, leg, skull, meek, rotten, clasp, crawl, dazzle, scream, trust, lift,

take, husband, sky. Sometimes these replaced Old English words, but often they

took up residence alongside them, adding a useful synonym to the language, so

that today in English we have both craft and skill, wish and want, raise and rear,

and many other doublets. Sometimes the words came from the same source but

had grown slightly different in pronunciation, as with shriek and screech, no and

nay, or ditch and dike, and sometimes they went a further step and acquired

slightly different meanings, as with scatter and shatter, skirt and shirt, whole and

hale, bathe and bask, stick and stitch, hack and hatch, wake and watch, break and

breach.

But most remarkable of all, the English adopted certain grammatical forms. The

pronouns they, them and their, for instance are Scandinavian This borrowing of

basic elements of syntax is highly unusual, perhaps unique among developed

languages, and an early demonstration of the remarkable adaptability of English

speakers.

One final cataclysm awaited the English language: the Norman conquest of

1066. the Normans were Vikings who had settled in northern France 200 years

before. Like the Celtic Britons before them, they had given their name to a

French province, Normandy. But unlike the Celts, they had abandoned their

language and much of their culture and become French in manner and speech.

So totally had they given up their language, in fact, that not a single Norse word

has survived in Normandy, apart from some place-names. That is quite

remarkable when you consider that the Normans bequeathed 10,000 words to

English. The variety of French the Normans spoke was not the speech of Paris,

but a rural dialect, and its divergence from standard French became even more

pronounced when it took root in England—so much so that historians refer to it

not as French, but as Anglo-Norman. This, as we shall see in a moment, had

important consequences for the English language of today and may even have

contributed to its survival.

No king of England spoke English for the next 300 years. It was not until 1399,

with the accession of Henry IV, that England had a ruler whose mother tongue was English. One by one English earls and bishops were replaced by Normans

(though in some instances not for several years). French-speaking craftsmen,

designers, cooks, scholars, and scribes were brought to Britain. Even so, for the

common people life went on. They were almost certainly not alarmed that their

rulers spoke a foreign tongue. It was a commonplace in the past. Canute from the

century before was Danish and even Edward the Confessor, the last but one

Anglo-Saxon king, spoke French as his first tongue. As recently as the

eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even

though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without

mastering his subjects' language. Common people did not expect to speak like

their masters any more than they expected to live like them. Norman society had

two tiers: the French-speaking aristocracy and the English-speaking peasantry.

Not surprisingly, the linguistic influence of the Normans tended to focus on

matters of court, government, fashion, and high living. Meanwhile, the English

peasant continued to eat, drink, work, sleep, and play in English.

The breakdown can be illustrated in two ways. First, the more humble trades

tended to have Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker), while the more

skilled trades adopted French names ( mason, painter, tailor). At the same time,

animals in the field usually were called by English names (sheep, cow, ox), but

once cooked and brought to the table, they were generally given French names

(beef, mutton, veal, bacon.

Anglo-Norman differed from the standard French of Paris in several ways. For

one thing, Parisian French, called Francien, tended to avoid the "w" sound. So

while the Normans pronounced quit, question, quarter, and other such words as

if they were spelled kwit, kwestion, and kwarter, Parisians pronounced them

with a hard "k" sound. Equally, standard French used cha-in some constructions

where the Normans used ca-. Thus we have such differences as carry/charrier,

cauldron/chaudron, cattle/chattel. (Our word chattel was adopted later.) The

Normans used the suffixes -arie and -orie, while the French used -aire and -oire,

which gives us such pairings as victory/victoire and salary/saloire. Anglo-

Norman kept the s in words such as August, forest, and beast, while Francien

gradually forsook them for a circumflex: Août, forêt, bête.. [All of these cited by

Baugh and Cable.

Norman French, like the Germanic tongues before it, made a lasting impact on

English vocabulary. Of the 10,000 words we adopted from Norman French,some three quarters are still in use—among them justice, jury, felony, traitor,

petty, damage, prison, marriage, sovereign, parliament, govern, prince, duke,

viscount, baron. In fact, nearly all our words relating to jurisprudence and

government are of French origin, as many of the ranks of aristocracy, such as -

countess, duke, duchess, and baron, but not—perhaps a bit oddly— king and

queen. At the same time, many English words were adopted into French.

Sometimes it is not possible to tell who was borrowing from whom—whether,

for example, we took aggressive from the Normans or they took their agressif

from us, or whether the English intensity came before or after the Norman

intensite. In other matters, such as syntax, their influence was less dramatic