Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [256]
Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French
In a sense, the Norman conquest of England in the mid-eleventh century was an anachronism, the last of the Germanic invasions to convulse a European country, a couple of centuries too late.*
The Normans, after all, were only five or six generations away from their Norwegian ancestry as Vikings, and Normanni is just a Latinisation of NorδrTcross;menn, ‘north men’, which is still the word for Norwegians in Icelandic Norse. At the end of the ninth century, under their leader Rollo, they had been living by their swords, but they sailed south, and settled in what became Normandy, having coerced the Frankish king Charles III (the Simple) into granting them title, by the Treaty of St-Clair-sur-Epte, c.911. There they proceeded to put away their roving and marauding ways, including the Norse language; as typical Germanic invaders, in a couple of generations they had given up using their own language, and adopted the local Romance tongue, which on their lips is known as Norman French. When Rollo’s descendant, William the Bastard, led his successful invasion of England in 1066, he brought this language into England with him.
English overlaid
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.2 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