Durbeck. Chester. Candle. Cross. Law. Person. Chair. Obligation. Size.
There could hardly be a better example of the uneasy movement of Aryan migrations than the history of the settlement of the British Isles. We find them, first of all, as far back as we can look, inhabited by an unknown population who left their barrows and tumuli dotted about the country, whose society seems to have been matriarchally organized, and who, if the name Pict may be taken as any indication, probably had the habit of painting or tattooing their bodies. At length, several centuries before our era, the first Aryan wave reaches these shores in the persons of the Celts, who spread over England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where they have been pointed out and variously described by historians as Britons, Ancient Britons, Welsh, Gaels, Celts,... They settle down and live for some centuries the primitive life of savages, till half-way through the first century B.C. they are disturbed by a little Aryan tongue reaching out from the well-nigh spent Italian wave. Pagan Rome establishes a brief dominion over a small portion of Britain, drives roads, builds camps and cities, and after some four hundred years is sucked back again to the Continent. Another century, and the Angles and Saxons, borne forward on the crest of the Teutonic wave, overrun the main island, driving the Celts into its extremities, whence they regurgitate, before finally settling down, upon various military and missionary enterprises which have played an important part in our history. But already another ripple of the Teutonic wave is upon us, rocking over the seas in the long boats of the Scandinavian Vikings, and almost before they have left their impress on the eastern quarter of the land, a third—the Normans this time—is breaking on Britain once again at Pevensey. The liquid metaphor is unavoidable, for no other image seems adequate to express what actually happened. To watch through the glasses of history the gradual arrival and settlement of the Aryans in this country is to be reminded irresistibly of the rhythmic wash and backwash, the little accidental interplays of splash and ripple, which accompany the tide as it fills an irregularly shaped pool.
Every one of these motions has left its mark on our language, though the traces of the earliest immigration of all—that of the Celts—are rather scarce. The clearest vestiges of it are to be found in the proper names of our rivers, for a surprising number of these contain one or other of the various Celtic terms for ‘water’ or ‘river’, e.g. avon, dwr (ter or der), uisge (wye, usk, is, ax), while the other parts of the name are often composed of words for ‘water’ taken from another Aryan language, as in Derwentwater, Windermere, Easeburn, Ashbourne,... An ingenious theory has been evolved to account for this. In the case of the Dur-beck in Nottinghamshire, and the Dur-bach in Germany, it has been supposed that in the first place a body of Celtic immigrants squatted by the side of a stream which, as they were not extensive travellers, they knew simply as the dwr—‘The Water’. Their Teutonic successors inquired the name of the stream, and on learning that it was dwr, naturally assumed that this was a proper name. They accordingly adopted it, and tacked on one of their own words for ‘water’—‘bach’ or ‘beck’, just as we may speak of the ‘Avon River’ or the ‘River Ouse’. The phenomenon occurs so persistently both in this country and all over Europe that this explanation can hardly be altogether fanciful.
The four hundred years of Roman colonization, following Julius Caesar’s landing in 55 B.C.—years which left such permanent and conspicuous vestiges on the face of England—have made little enough impression on her language. Fresh as the memory of that civilization must have been when the Angles and Saxons arrived, they seem to have learnt nothing from it. A few towns, such as York (Eboracum), retain in a more or less corrupted form the particular titles given to them by their Roman founders, but outside these almost the only Latin words which our ancestors can be proved to have taken from the Britons are port and ‘castra’ (a camp), surviving to-day in Chester and in the ending of many other town names such as Winchester, Lancaster, Gloucester,...
Then, during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles and Saxons began to flow in from the Continent, bringing with them old Aryan words like dew, night, star, and wind, which they had never forgotten, new words which they had coined or developed in their wanderings, and Latin words which they had learnt as provincial subjects of the Roman Empire,[11] bringing, in fact, that peculiar Teutonic variant of the Aryan tongue which forms the rich nucleus of our English vocabulary. Their arrival here was followed almost immediately by their conversion to Christianity; and this moment in our history was a pregnant one for the future of Europe. For now the two great streams of humanity—Teutonic blood from the one side, and from the other the old classical civilization, bearing in its dark womb the strange, new Christian impulse—met. The Latin and Greek words which entered our language at this period are concerned for the most part with the dogma and ritual of the Church; such are altar, candle, clerk, creed, deacon, hymn, martyr, mass, nun, priest, psalm, shrine, stole, temple, and many others. Far more important was the alteration which now gradually took place in the meanings of many old Teutonic words—words like heaven, which had hitherto denoted a ‘canopy’, or bless, which had meant to ‘consecrate with blood’. But to this we must return later, when we come to consider what is called the “semantic” history of English words—that is to say, the history of their meanings.
Although Christianity did not come officially from Rome to England until Augustine landed in A.D. 597, it had already found its way here indirectly during the Roman occupation. Obliterated by the pagan Anglo-Saxons, it had continued to flourish in Ireland, and the actual conversion of most of the English is believed to have been the work of Celtic Christians, who returned from Ireland and established missionary bases in Scotland and Northumbria. Their influence was so extensive that ‘Scotia’, the old name for Ireland, came to be applied to the country which we still know as Scotland. Pat and Taffy, the popular nicknames for an Irishman and a Welshman, are descended from the Celtic saints, Patrick and David, and it is interesting to reflect that the Celtic missionaries were starting their work in Northumbria at almost exactly the same moment as St. Augustine landed in Kent. Thus Christianity enfiladed England, as it were, from both ends; and while the southern Anglo-Saxons were learning the Greek and Latin words to which we have referred, the Irish Christians in the north had been making the language a present of a few Celtic words, two of which—druid and lough—have survived. Again, although the name for the instrument of the Passion comes to us ultimately from the Latin ‘crux’, yet the actual form which the word cross has taken in our language is very largely due to these Irish Christians. But for them it would probably have been something like cruke, or cruce, or crose. This word has an interesting history. It was adopted from the old Irish ‘cros’ by the Northmen, and it is due to them that the final “s” took on that hissing sound which is represented in modern spelling by “ss”. We may suppose, therefore, that but for the Irish Christians the word would have been something like cruce, and but for the Northmen it might have been croz or croy.
In the ninth and tenth centuries these Northmen, the Scandinavian Teutons, whom our ancestors called Danes, established an ascendancy over a large part of England. They seem to have mingled easily with the English, and we can trace back to their dialect some of the very commonest features of our language. Thus, the Scandinavian pronouns, they, them, their, she, gradually replaced less convenient Anglo-Saxon forms, and it is to the Northmen that we owe that extremely useful grammatical achievement which has enabled us to form both the genitive and the plural of nearly all nouns by merely adding the letter “s”. Other Scandinavian words are call, get, hit, husband, knife, leg, odd, same, skin, take, want, wrong; and there are many more hardly less common. The mighty word law, together with outlaw, hustings, wapentake, moot, and riding (division of Yorkshire) serve to remind us that the Danish ascendancy was no hugger-mugger affair, but a firm political organization. The old Anglo-Saxon words which these Northern intruders replaced, such as niman, ‘to take’, and Rood (the Cross) have mostly fallen out of use; but in some cases the two words survive side by side. Thus, our useful distinction between law and right was once geographical rather than semantic, the two words covering roughly the eastern and the western halves of England.
And now there followed an event which has had more influence on the character of the English language than any other before or since. The conquest of England by the Norman[12] invaders brought about an influx of French words which went on increasing in volume for more than three centuries. At first it was little more than a trickle. For a long time the Norman conquerors did not mix much with their Saxon subjects. There are plenty of indications of this; for the languages, too, moved side by side in parallel channels. The custom of having one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another for the same beast, when it is killed and cooked, is often supposed to be due to our English squeamishness and hypocrisy. Whether or no the survival of this custom through ten centuries is due to the national characteristics in question it would be hard to say, but they have certainly nothing to do with its origin. That is a much more blameless affair. For the Saxon neatherd who had spent a hard day tending his oxen, sheep, calves, and swine, probably saw little enough of the beef, mutton, veal, pork, and bacon, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters. There is something a little pathetic, too, in the thought that the homely old word, stool, could be used to express any kind of seat, however magnificent, until it was, so to speak, hustled into the kitchen by the smart French chair. Even the polite, however, continued to use the old word in the idiom “to fall between two stools.” Master, servant, butler, buttery, parlour, dinner, supper, and banquet all came over with William, besides the names of our titular ranks, such as duke, marquis, viscount, baron, and countess. The French word ‘comte’ was evidently considered to be equivalent to the one existing Anglo-Saxon title, earl, with the result that count never became an English rank. But since it had not been the Saxon custom to give ladies titles corresponding to those of their lords, the word countess was able to fill an important gap. That the Feudal System had an educative value and played its part in creating modern ideals of conduct is suggested by such words as honest, kind, and gentle, which meant at first simply ‘of good birth or position’ and only acquired during the Middle Ages their later and lovelier meanings.
Not the least interesting of the words that must have come over from France about this time are such courtly flower-names as dandelion and pansy, from ‘dent-de-lion’ (describing the ragged leaves) and the sentimental ‘pensée’—remembrance. Many of these early Norman words seem to have a distinctive character of their own, and even now, after nearly a thousand years, they will sometimes stand out from the printed page with peculiar appeal. Perhaps this is especially true of the military vocabulary. That sharp little brightness, as of a window-pane flashing just after sunset, which belongs to the ancient, technical language of heraldry, such as argent, azure, gules, ... sometimes seems to have spread to more common Norman words—banner, hauberk, lance, pennon, ... and—in the right mood—we can even catch a gleam of it in everyday terms like arms, assault, battle, fortress, harness, siege, standard, tower, and war. The Norman-French etymology of curfew (couvre-feu) is too well known to require comment.
It will be noticed that nearly all these words are directly descended from the Latin, beef going back through ‘boeuf’ to ‘bov-em’, master to ‘magister’, duke to ‘dux’,... Thus already, by the thirteenth century, we can trace in our vocabulary four distinct layers of Latin words. There are the Latin words learnt by our ancestors while they were still on the Continent, such as camp, mile, and street;[13] there are the Latin words brought over by the Roman invaders, of which port and Chester were given as surviving examples; and thirdly there are those words—altar, candle, nun, ... brought over by the Christian missionaries as described earlier in this chapter. These three classes are reckoned to account for about four hundred Latin words altogether; and lastly there is this great deposit of Norman-French words, of which the number must have been running into thousands. For it was not only terms of general utility which were transferred from one language to another. A second and entirely different kind of borrowing now sprang up—the literary kind. For two or three centuries Poetry and Romance had been making rapid strides in Italy and France. The medieval habit of writing only in Latin was dying out and Dante in Italy and Du Bellay in France had both written treatises extolling the beauties of their native tongues. French lyric poetry burst into its early spring blossom among the troubadours, with their curious “Rose” tradition, and for two hundred years the English poets imitated and translated them as fast as ever they could. It was just at the end of this long period of receptiveness that an event occurred which fixed the ingredients of our language in a way they had never been fixed before. The printing press was invented.
A modern poet, looking back on that time, can scarcely help envying a writer like Chaucer with this enormous store of fresh, unspoilt English words ready to his hand and an unlimited treasury across the channel from which he could pick a brand-new one whenever he wanted it.
Here are three Norman-French borrowings, three fine English words with the dew still on them, in two lines. It was the May morning of English poesy.
For these were not “French” words. Right at the beginning of the thirteenth century the English kings had abandoned Normandy, and the English Normans, separated from their brethren, began to blend more and more completely with their neighbours. In England French remained at first the exclusive language of the Court and the law, but, as the blood of the two peoples mingled, the Norman words which were not dropped gradually altered their shapes, developing various English characteristics, which not only differentiated from their original French forms the words already in the language, but served as permanent moulds into which new borrowings could be poured as they were made. Gentil changed to gentle, pitee to pitie or pity; and it was the same with innumerable others. Familiar French-English terminations like -tion, -ty, -ance, -age, -able, -on, were already nearly as common in Chaucer as they are in the pages of an average modern writer. Begotten on Latin words by generations of happy-go-lucky French and English lips, they were fixed for ever by the printing press, and to-day, if we want to borrow a word directly from Latin, we still give it a shape which tacitly assumes that it came to us through the French language at about that time. As Nature takes the human embryo through repetitions of its discarded forms—fish, reptile, mammal, and vertebrate—before bringing it to birth, so whoever introduced, let us say, the word heredity in the nineteenth century went through the instinctive process of deriving from the Latin ‘hereditare’ an imaginary French word, ‘heredité’, and converting the latter into heredity. It is usually done when we wish to borrow a new word from Latin.
We have borrowed so many that it has lately been calculated that as many as one-fourth of the words which we can find in a full-sized Latin dictionary have found their way directly or indirectly into the English vocabulary. A large number of these are Greek words which the Romans had taken from them. Thus, taking into account those Greek words which have come to us by other channels, Greek and Latin form a very large and a very important part of the English language. All through the history of our nation the two threads can be seen running together. At first sight they appear to be so inextricably twisted round one another as to form but one solid cord, but in reality it is not so difficult to unravel them. The fact, for instance, that hospital, parliament, and prison are Latin, while church and school have only come through Latin from the Greek, is symbolical of the two main divisions into which the classical part of our language falls; for words which are genuinely of Latin origin—unless they have been especially used at some time to translate the thoughts of Greek writers—are very often concerned with the material outer world, but words of Greek origin are more likely to be landmarks in the world of thoughts and feelings.
Rome had spent herself in building up the external, visible framework on which European civilization was to hang; and this fact, observable in the word-relics of her military and political exploits, is observable still more intimately in the character and history of that great institution, our common law. Dignified vocables like justice, jurisdiction, jurisprudence, speak for themselves the lasting influence of the great Roman conception of ‘jus’—that abstract ideal of the relation between one free human being and another in so far as it is expressed in their actions. It is not that in any sense we took over the Roman system; lawyers as well as poets are keen to insist that we built up our own. But as freedom slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent, there was always before the early English kings and judges a sort of pattern—more than that, a vital principle which had outlived one body and was waiting to be clothed with another. It was the spirit of Roman law living on in her language.
A whole chapter might be written on the numerous English words whose meanings can be traced back to the usages of Roman law. Take, for instance, the word person. Derived, probably, from an Etruscan word meaning an actor’s mask, person was used by the Roman legislators to describe a man’s personal rights and duties, which were defined according to his position in life. Its present meaning of an individual human being is largely due to the theologians who hit upon it when they were looking for some term that would enable them to assert the trinity of Godhead without admitting more than one “substance”. When we remember for how long a time Latin continued to be the universal written language of educated Europe,[14] the language of history and philosophy as well as of theology, we can imagine how the subtle flavour of this word’s former meaning clung to its syllables through all their ecclesiastical soarings and was ready, as soon as it came to English earth, to assist the brains of our early lawyers in their task of imagining and thus creating that fortunate legal abstraction, the British subject. ‘Obligatio’ in early Latin meant merely the physical binding of someone to something; but in the Roman law of that date a defaulting debtor was literally bound and delivered a prisoner into the hands of his creditor. Thus, when a little later on this crude practice was abandoned, ‘obligatio’ came to mean the duty to pay—a duty which the creditor could now only enforce against his debtor’s property; and in this way the general meaning of our word obligation was developed. Similarly, retaliation came to us from the Latin ‘Lex Talionis’, the latter word being associated with ‘talis’ (such or same) and implying a punishment that fits the crime; while advocate, capital,[15] chattel,[15] classical, contract, emancipate, formula, heir, peculiar, prejudice, private, property, and testament are a few more examples of the same process, chosen from a great many.
Naturally many of these words came into the English language just after the Conquest. The French, being so much nearer to Rome, both in blood and in space, were a century or two ahead of the Teutons in their civilization, and the Normans, after their long sojourn on the Continent, brought with them to England quite a complicated system of legislature and executive. Besides the Latin words to which we have referred, there are a large number of legal terms which are not so easily recognizable as Latin, having passed through Late Latin, Low Latin, and Early French colloquial speech before they reached our shores. In some cases they only developed a specifically legal sense in Late Latin or even Early French. Yet because the whole spirit of Roman civilization had been so impregnated with legalism, the capacity for expressing exact legal ideas seems to have remained latent, through all their curious vicissitudes, in such words as assize (literally ‘a sitting down’), court, judge, jury, county, district, manor, rent,... Lawyers have gone on employing a queer kind of Anglo-French, in some cases, right down to the present day. The official use of “Law French” in legal documents was only recently abandoned, and such technical terms as champerty, feme sole, tort, ... survive to remind us of the days when an English-speaking lawyer would naturally write such a sentence as:
Arsons de measons felonisement faits est felony per le comen ley. (Arson of houses committed with felonious intent is felony by the common law.)
Convey, felon, forfeit, lease, mortgage, perjury, plaintiff, and defendant, on the other hand, have acquired a somewhat more general use; and indeed this Frenchified jargon, partly imported and partly built up by English lawyers as they went along, has produced in later times several words which the language as a whole would find it hard to do without. Among them are assets (French ‘assez’), burglar, cancel, conventional, disclaim, flotsam and jetsam, jettison, improve, matter-of-fact, mere, “the premises”, realize, size, and—in its modern sense—franchise; while culprit, which was used in court down to the eighteenth century, has an interesting history of its own. In former days, when the prisoner had pleaded “Not Guilty”, the Clerk of the Crown would open proceedings by saying “Culpable: prest”, meaning that the prisoner is “guilty”, and I am “ready” to prove it. In the official records of the case this formula was abbreviated, first to ‘cul-prest’ and afterwards to ‘cul-prit’, until later clerks formed the habit of running the two words together.
Looking at such words as cancel, improve, realize, and size, we can feel the force of Professor Maitland’s remark that in the Middle Ages “Law was the point where life and logic met”. It served another purpose besides that of establishing a secure polity; for through it some of the new Latin words which were gradually being created by its own, or translated from Greek, thought by the abstruse scholastic philosophy of the day found their way into the vocabulary of the people. Even the old word cause seems to have reached us by way of the law courts. They were thus the pipe through which a little of that hard thinking by the few, which underpins every great civilization, could flow into the common consciousness of the many, and in their terminology we can see most clearly an example of that never-pausing process by which the speculative metaphysics of yesterday are transformed into the “common sense” of to-day.