The Adventure of English (10 page)

“Swerian” is an Anglo-Saxon word and probably began as the description of someone taking a solemn oath. Surprisingly few of our popular swear words are Anglo-Saxon in origin. The terrible oaths in Chaucer were profanities. In the Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer writes:

There's “Goddes precious herte” and “Goddes armes” and “Jhesu shorte thy lyf.” To avoid the wrath of the Church, shorthand became a fashion. God's blood became “ 'Sblood!” Christ's wounds became “ 'Swounds!” then “ 'Zounds!” This could deflect censure. It is a reminder of how very powerful the Church was, how pervasive its authority. These minced oaths came into full play much later, in Shakespeare's time.

As you would expect of a writer whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, seems to have been to round up as many Englishes as he could and drive them along the same road to Canterbury, Chaucer was well aware of the dialects. It was still the case that words in southern English would have to be translated in some measure certainly for northern and possibly for Midland English. John Trevisa complained that Yorkshire English was so “scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng, and vnschape” (shrill, cutting, grating and ill-formed) that southerners like him could not understand it.

Chaucer in the Reeve's Tale gives us our first “funny northerner,” a character who has been with us ever since. He says “ham” for “home,” “knaw” for “know,” “gang” for “gone,” “nan” for “none,” “na” for “no,” “banes” for “bones.” He would be comfortably at home in 2003 in the north-east and Newcastle, in Cumbria around Wigton and in Yorkshire around Leeds. Why it was thought to be funny in itself is the beginning of an independent study to do with the south's suspicion of the north, its fear of it to which it responded savagely in earlier times and later tried to tame through nervously superior laughter, and much later a felt superiority in wealth, privilege, culture and accent. There was class, of course, although as some of the greatest old English and old Norse families hailed from the north that was not always an easy one. But as language became one of the markers of class, all non-London dialects began to feel they were condescended to.

Chaucer planted English deeply in the country which bore its name, with a brilliance and a confidence that meant that there was no looking back: Confidence in England and English was growing. The increasing use of the surname may perhaps be an oblique confirmation of this. They were needed, to differentiate between people with the same Christian names, as the pool of Christian names in common use was very small at this period. “Geoffrey” is Germanic but came to England through the Normans. “Chaucer” is French, from the Old French “Chausier,” shoemaker, perhaps from the place in which his grandfather had lived in Cordwainer (Leatherworker) Street. We saw that in the north the suffix -son became prevalent: Johnson, Rawlinson, Arnison, Pearson, Matheson, Dickson, Wilson. More generally, in this Chaucerian period, other surnames came in, often based on where people lived — Hill, Dale, Bush, Fell, Brook, Field, or words ending in -land and -ton. Maybe this was a belated catching up with the Norman-French nobility, all of whom were “de” somewhere or other, de Montfort, for instance. Then there were the occupational surnames: Butcher, Baker, Carver, Carter, Carpenter, Gardiner, Glover, Hunter, Miller, Cooper, Mason, Salter, Thatcher, Weaver. Place, occupation, inheritance, all these had to be stamped through man and woman, fastening them to their place, giving them full identities in a language and a country that was beginning to feel like theirs.

Yet Chaucer, anxious that he be read everywhere by those who could read English or understand it when it was read aloud to them, was still worried by the variety and confusion of languages in the land. He bids one of his poems,
Troilus and Criseyde,
a rather poignant and even a troubled farewell:

I find it touching that Chaucer could have such fears, but how could he have known that with later modifications his language, fed by the Central and West Midlands, nourished in wealthy London, aided by the development of printing in London, would become the basis for a Standard English which would go in “litel boks” not only all over England but all over the world?

We still have over fifty handwritten copies of
The Canterbury Tales
from the fifteenth century and we know that he reached an audience which included London merchants and Richard of Gloucester, the future King Richard III. Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of
The Canterbury Tales
and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.

A century and a half after his death, a monumental tomb was erected in his honour in Westminster Abbey. It is in what has become Poets' Corner, just a stone's throw from the house in which he died in 1400.

I think the best way to end this chapter is to quote from another great writer, Dryden, in the seventeenth century, writing of Chaucer:

W
here English took poets, others wanted to follow. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement was under way to force English into a central and commanding place in the society whose first and expanded tongue it was. The state had to be challenged, and the Church. It was with the Church that English had its most violent struggle. The brutalities involved beggar belief.

Later medieval Britain was a religious society. The Roman Catholic Church controlled and pervaded all aspects of earthly life including the intimately sexual. It also held the keys to a heaven and hell which were very real in the minds of most who were fed ceaselessly and cleverly with priestly persuasions, stories of miracles, promises of eternal happiness and threats of eternal torture and damnation. You challenged the might of the Church only if you were extremely powerful and even the powerful would quail and crack when the full range of the Church's instruments of power and conviction were brought to bear. But there were those in England, men of faith, totally committed to the idea that English should become the language of God and in a series of heroic efforts they set out to make that happen even though it would invoke the fearsome wrath of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

The central power of words in fourteenth-century England lay in the Bible. There was no Bible in English. There had been some piecemeal translations of the Gospels and parts of the Old Testament in Old English and there were Middle English versions of the Psalms. In formal terms, God spoke to the people in Latin. Latin, though not the monopoly of the clergy, was certainly fortressed by it. The proper relationship between the believer and the Bible was one mediated by the priest in Latin. He would interpret scripture for the common people. It was not unlike a single party state with a single party line on everything. The Bible was in Latin — a language wholly inaccessible to the vast majority — and Bibles were few. The justification was that this was the word of God and to know God was a blessing and a richness beyond all understanding. The priest, it was argued, being ordained a true man of God, would avoid sinful misinterpretation and heresy. He would make sure the devil was shut out. This meant that it was impossible for most English people to know the Bible for themselves.

If you wanted to communicate with God in English, you might be lucky with an idealistic local priest who would preach a sermon on a biblical text — but his starting point and his finishing point would be in Latin: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” There were other ways. Most notably there were the Mystery Plays such as those which began to be performed in York outside the cathedral, the minster, a building every bit as big and daunting as its twin, the Norman castle on the other side of the city.

These Mystery Plays tell the Christian story from the creation of God to the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. They are religious plays but they are not, nor were they allowed to be, the scriptures. They could be called a biblical soap opera. Every year, even today, one of the dozen plays, each originally put on by an often appropriate guild (the carpenters took care of the Crucifixion), is given in the English of the fourteenth century.

In 2002, it was the turn of the Shepherds' Play. In these few lines, the shepherds wonder what gift they can offer to Christ; first, here's a literal translation:

In Middle English, a little later than Chaucer:

There can be little doubt of the fear and love most of the population had for their religion and for their Church, and their reliance on it for comfort, for hope and for everyday pleasures, feast days, saints' days, grand processionals. But the common people were on the outside, as can still graphically be seen in York every year as the Mystery Players circle the town and perform in the shadow of the minster, but are not allowed through its doors.

When they went into the minster to stand or kneel respectfully at the back — and everyone had to go, church attendance was compulsory — the service was a remote affair. The whole emphasis was on the mystery of it, the priests like a secret society, the Latin words so awesome in their ancient verity that, although some phrases would have stuck over the years, the whole intention was to impress and to subdue and not to enlighten. There was of course no English Hymnal, and no Book of Common Prayer. You were at the mercy of the priests. Only they were allowed to read the word of God and they did even that silently. A bell was rung to let the congregation know when the priest had reached the important bits. The priest stood not as a guide to the Bible but as its guardian and as a guardian against common believers. They would not be allowed to enter into the Book.

It would be a formidable struggle to wrench that power from the priests, to replace that Latin with English. It is an inspiring passage in the adventure of English, a time of martyrdom and high risk, of daring, scholarship and above all a generous and inclusive belief that the word of God should be in the language of the people. The battle would eventually tear the Church in two, an inconceivable outcome when the first rumblings began in the second half of the fourteenth century. It would claim many lives. But many were ready to die for it, to make English the language of their faith.

The prime mover in the fourteenth century was a scholar, John Wycliffe, probably born near Richmond in Yorkshire, admitted to Merton College, Oxford, when he was seventeen, charismatic, we are told, and a fluent Latinist. He was a major philosopher and theologian who believed passionately that his knowledge should be shared by everyone. From within the sanctioned, clerical, deeply traditionalist honeyed walls of Oxford, Wycliffe the scholar launched a furious attack on the power and wealth of the Church, an attack which prefigured that of Martin Luther more than a hundred years later.

His main argument was to distinguish the eternal, ideal Church of God from the material one of Rome. In short, he maintained that if something is not in the Bible there is no truth in it, whatever the Pope says — and, incidentally, the Bible says nothing at all about having a Pope. When men speak of the Church, he said, they usually mean priests, monks, canons and friars. But it should not be so. “Were there a hundred popes,” he wrote, “and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.”

This was inflammatory and cut away the roots of all established authority, especially as he and his followers like John Ball coupled this with a demand that the Church give away all its worldly wealth to the poor. The Church saw no option but to crush him. For Wycliffe went even further. He and his followers attacked transubstantiation, the belief that, administered by the clergy, the wine and bread turn miraculously into the blood and body of Christ; he attacked clerical celibacy, which he thought of as an institutional control system over the army of the clergy; he attacked enforced confession, the method, Wycliffe argued, by which the clergy could trap dissidents and check errors in thought; and indulgences, the purchase of which were said to bring relief from purgatory but also brought wealth to the Church; pilgrimages, as a form of idolatry; and Mystery Plays, because they were not the word of God. Wycliffe took no prisoners.

His prime and revolutionary argument, one which, if accepted in any shape or form, would have toppled the Church entirely, was that the Bible was the sole authority for religious faith and practice and that everyone had the right to read and interpret scripture for himself. This would have changed the world, and those who ruled the world knew it. He was to become their prime enemy. It is ironic that his main arguments had to be written in Latin — the international language of scholarship and theology — though there are English sermons by him and his followers.

It is remarkable enough that a young man in a quiet clerical college in a country long thought by Rome as on the “outermost edges of the known world” should raise up his fist against the greatest authority on the earth. He must have been fully aware of the risk he was taking. It is even more remarkable that he went on and did something, did so much, to put his ideas into practice and to enlist so much help from other scholars who also must have seen their whole life and life's work imperilled by this breathtaking venture.

What sustained them, I think, was the state of the Church as they saw it every day. It was intolerable to these Christian scholars. It was often lazy and corrupt. Bible reading even among the clergy appears to have been surprisingly rare, for often they did not have the Latin. When, for example, the Bishop of Gloucester surveyed three hundred eleven deacons, archdeacons and priests in his diocese, he discovered that a hundred sixty-eight were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, thirty-one did not know where to find those Commandments in the Bible and forty could not repeat the Lord's Prayer. To men of true conscience, integrity and faith, men like Wycliffe and his followers, this state of decay and lack of care in what mattered most, this debilitated belief and betrayal of vocation, had to be got rid of and defeated. The chief weapon, the natural weapon for a scholar, was a book: the Bible, in English.

A full Bible in English was unauthorised by the Church and potentially heretical, even seditious, with all the savage penalties including death which such crimes against the one true Church exacted. Any translation was very high risk and had to be done in secrecy.

Wycliffe inspired two biblical translations and rightly they bear his name. Both versions are made from the Latin Vulgate version and follow it so closely that it can be incomprehensible. Wycliffe prepared the first translation but the burden of it was undertaken by Nicholas Hereford of Queen's College, Oxford. He would have needed the help of many friends as well as recourse to a great number of books. It was not only the translation itself, a mammoth task, which faced them: the Bible had to be disseminated too. Rooms in quiet Oxford colleges were turned into revolutionary cells, scriptoria, production lines were established turning out these holy manuscripts, and from the number that remain we can tell that a great many were made. One hundred seventy survive, a huge number for a six-hundred-year-old manuscript, which tells us that there must have been effective groups of people secretly translating it, copying it, passing it on. Later, hundreds would be martyred, dying the most horrible deaths, for their part in creating and distributing to the people the first English Bible.

It is difficult to appreciate the extent and the audacity of this enterprise. Wycliffe was leading them into the cannon's mouth. All of them knew it and yet behind the obedient honey-coloured Latinate walls of Oxford colleges, the medieval equivalent of the subversive samizdat press which bypassed Stalin's controls in Russia was organised, and effectively. The operation is a long way from the image of medieval Oxford as a cloistered community of rather quaint time-serving scholarly clerks. Oxford was then the most dangerous place in England, leading the fight in an underground movement which challenged the biggest single force in the land and called into the public court the authority of the revealed language of God. Yet Wycliffe and his men believed they were to change the world and for a brief moment, it seemed, they had. The Wycliffe English Bible was completed. It was scaled out. It was read.