BRAGG: In 1 07 7, William the Conqueror,
ruler of Normandy and England,
ordered the construction of a special building.
It was to be part palace, part treasury,
part prison, and part fortress.
It was the White Tower on the banks of the Thames in London,
and it was a powerful symbol of the way that the Normans
were imposing themselves on this conquered country.
They hadn't just brought armies and architecture
to mark their authority.
They'd also brought their language.
The French vocabulary of power
forced its way into the English language.
"Crown" and "court" were both French words.
So were "castle" and "tower", and the barons who built them.
And so were "obedience" and "justice,
"treason", and "prison".
The Anglo-Saxon kings had governed
using the Old English language.
Now the Normans used French and Latin.
English had become the third language in its own country.
It would take over 300 years to emerge from the shadows.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media
In the years following the arrival of William's army
at Pevensey,
the Normans tightened their grip on England,
now part of a kingdom that extended across the channel.
Across the land,
William's men took over every position of power
in the state and in the church.
Within 60 years, the monk and historian William of Malmesbury
could write...
MAN: "No Englishman today is an earl or bishop or abbot.
The newcomers gnaw at the wealth and guts of England,
nor is there any hope of ending the misery."
BRAGG: He wrote in Latin.
Written English,
which had managed to establish itself so boldly
before the conquest,
was now dying.
It breathed its last here.
Now Peterborough Cathedral,
in the mid 1 2th century, part of Peterborough Abbey.
[Man speaking Old English]
Around the country, monks had been recording
the great events of the last 650 years
in books known as "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles".
They were written in the language of the people, English,
and there was nothing like them anywhere in mainland Europe.
[Man speaking Old English]
Since the Norman Conquest of 1 066,
these unique accounts had been abandoned one by one.
The "Peterborough Chronicle" was the last survivor.
In 1 1 54, a monk recorded that the abbey had a new abbot,
a man with the very French name of William de Waterville.
[Man speaking Old English]
"He has made a good beginning," the monk writes.
[Man speaking Old English]
"Christ grant that he may end as well."
With this last entry,
6 1 /2 centuries of written history came to an end.
Old English had ceased to be the language of record in the land.
But that didn't mean that it was going to go away.
Since the conquest, English in varying dialects
had remained the language spoken by 90% of the population,
from the south coast to the uplands of southern Scotland,
just a few miles north of here.
Even further north in Scotland and west in Wales,
the culture and language were still Celtic.
Old English had continued to develop and change,
partly as a result of contact with the language of the Danes,
particularly here in the north.
The grammar was becoming simpler.
More plurals were being formed by adding an "s".
"Naman", for example, the Old English plural of "name",
became "names", which would become our "names".
Prepositions were performing more of the functions
of the old word endings,
and word order was becoming more fixed.
Despite being the officially ignored language,
English would continue to evolve and change,
and it would endure,
resisting and absorbing the invaders' language
until the time came for it to resume centre stage
as a nation's language.
The "Peterborough Chronicle" of 1 1 54
also recorded that, in that year,
the people of England acquired a new king...
Count Henry of Anjou,
grandson of William the Conqueror
and the first of the Plantagenet kings.
A lover of learning,
he spoke fluent Latin as well as French,
but no English.
And the English acquired a new queen.
Eleanor of Aquitaine,
the daughter of William X of Aquitaine.
Henry II was crowned here in Westminster Abbey
in a lavish ceremony.
The clergy wore silk vestments that were more costly
than anything ever seen before in England.
The king and queen and the great barons
wore silk and brocade robes.
The luxury was fitting, it was thought,
for an occasion that solemnised the bringing together
of so much land and wealth.
Henry brought his inheritance of William the Conqueror's land
in England and Northern France.
Eleanor, the greatest heiress in the Western world,
brought with her a great swathe of what is now France,
from the Loire to the Pyrenees, from the Rhone to the Atlantic.
This was a huge kingdom, the greater part of it
made up of French-speaking lands across the channel.
As it grew,
the English lands and the English language
became an ever less significant part of it.
French and Latin were even more firmly entrenched
as the languages of the court and government of the country.
Yet after their coronation,
Henry and Eleanor rode in procession along the Strand,
and it's reported that the people shouted,
"WaesHael" and "Vivat rex,"
wishing them long life in English and in Latin.
English was still alive in the streets.
In the court and royal palaces,
new ideas from across the channel were in the air
and new words to express them,
words which sang of courtesy and honour,
questing and damsels,
jousting and tournaments.
French words, every one.
The vocabulary of romance and chivalry was heard in England.
[Singing in French]
BRAGG: Eleanor, England's new queen,
was considered the most cultured woman in Europe.
It was she, more than any other,
who patronised the poets and troubadours
whose verses and songs created the romantic image
of the Middle Ages as the age of chivalry,
a glorious vision that was never realised
outside the pages of medieval literature.
1 00 years before,
the word "chevalerie",
formed round the word for "horse",
had simply meant "cavalry".
It was the fierceness of the mounted warriors
that had carried the day for the Normans at Hastings,
and, since then, many English peasants
had come to know the mounted Norman soldiers
as little more than thugs and bullies
who ran the country by force.
But now mounted warriors had become knights
and the word "chivalry" came to mean
a whole model of ideals and behaviour,
infused with honour and altruism;
one that prescribed how to act towards one's leige lord,
one's friends and enemies,
and, of course, fair, cruel ladies.
Ideas had shifted and words with them.
It was in Eleanor's reign
that French writers brought the stories
of Arthur and his knights
out of the history books and into poetry,
cultivating a language far richer and subtler
than the one that the first Norman settlers
had spoken and written.
The poets rhapsodised about Eleanor,
celebrating her as the most beautiful woman in the world,
pouring out the impossible longing for the perfect woman
that was at the heart of the cult of courtly love.
The poetry of affairs of the heart had come to England,
singing of pain and joy,
and beginning a line in literature
that runs through Shakespeare's sonnets
and the great Romantic poets
to today's three-minute pop lyrics.
# Oh, my love #
# My darling #
# I've hungered #
# Hungered for your touch #
# A long, lonely time #
BRAGG: Shit!
[Oinking]
Meanwhile, England's native inhabitants
were singing their own songs
about things in their less exalted condition,
things that concerned them every day.
They sang in their own language, English.
[Man singing in Old English]
# Sumer is icumin in lhude sing, cuccu #
# Groweth sed and bloweth med and springth the wude nu #
# Sing, cuccu #
# Awe bleteth after lomb, lhowth after calve cu #
BRAGG: That song was first recorded in 1 225,
making it one of the earliest pieces of English
that's still recognisable today.
There's not a single French word in it.
Words like "summer", "come", "sow", "seed", and "new"
can be traced right back to the flat lands of Frisia.
"Spring" and "wood" can be found
in the Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf".
And "mary", "sing", and "loud"
in the works authorised by Alfred the Great.
There's a pure line of Old English vocabulary here
in a song that comes from the peasants and the land,
at the opposite end of the social scale
from the troubadours' songs.
The French language of the grand lords
hasn't penetrated down to the common people.
Certainly, the native English and the French overlords
lived very different lives.
William the Conqueror
had introduced the system of feudalism into England
and, though evolving,
it still defined all economic and social relations,
expressed in French words like "villein" and "vassal",
"labourer", "bailiff", and "factor".
In the country, where 95% of the population lived,
the English were essentially serfs, another French word.
Not technically slaves but tied for life to their lord's estate,
which they worked for him
and, at a subsistence level, for themselves.
While the English-speaking peasants
lived in small cottages or huts,
their French-speaking masters
lived privileged lives in their castles.
Our modern vocabulary still reflects the distinction
between them.
English speakers tended the living cattle
which we still call by the Old English words of ox or cow.
French speakers ate the prepared meat
which came to the table,
which we call by the French word, beef.
In the same way, the English sheep became the French mutton,
calf became veal, deer, venison, and pig, pork.
English animal, French meat in every case.
The English laboured. The French feasted.
Where English underlings and French masters
lived and worked together,
the boundaries between their languages inevitably wore away
and the vocabularies of court and countryside mingled.
For example, local men would have been involved
in the training and flying of a nobleman's hawks.
And some now common words have come to us from falconry.
The word "falcon" itself comes from French,
as does "leash",
which referred to the strip of material
used to secure the bird,
and "block", on which the bird stood.
Our word "codger" comes from the often elderly man
who assisted the falconer
by carrying the hawks on a cadge or cage.
"Bate" described the bird
beating its wings and trying to fly away.
"Check" meant at first refusing to come to the fist.
Our word "lure" comes from the leather device
still used in training and recalling the hawk.
"Quarry" was the reward given to the falcon for making a kill.
When a bird moulted, she was said to mew,
and from that, came the name of the buildings
where hawks were kept, mews.
Today, that name can still be seen attached to streets
where estate agents rather than hawks hunt their quarry.
We've just heard nine French words
that came into English from one activity alone.
Steadily, French vocabulary was pouring over English.
The French influence on the English language as a whole
is enormous in terms of vocabulary,
not in terms of grammar,
but in terms of vocabulary, it's unmatched by any other language.
For example, "fruit" replaces the Old English "waestm".
Pretty quickly, within the space of about 40 or 50 years,
"waestm" simply isn't used.
But the majority of words don't replace Old English.
They stand side by side with them.
So we have a word like "apple" in Old English,
meant any kind of fruit,
whereas what happens is,
because "fruit" comes in and basically expresses that,
"apple" starts to mean a very specific sort of a fruit.
I think it's not true to say that, generally speaking,
French words came into the language
and ousted the Old English words out of it.
Generally, what seems to happen
is that the Old English word simply narrows in meaning.
BRAGG: It was now almost 1 50 years since the Norman Conquest.
Though the people at the top had changed,
the ascendancy of French was still absolute.
Written English, that triumphant achievement
of Alfred and English scholars, was dead,
and spoken English was being progressively colonised
throughout society by French words.
But the balance of power and of languages
was about to shift.
Of course, early 1 3th century English society
consisted of more than English peasants grubbing the land
and French-speaking nobility lording it in their castles.
Trade was on the increase.
The wool trade in particular made parts of England rich.
On the proceeds, grand churches were built
even in modest villages like this one at Northleach
in the Cotswolds.
Services would, of course, be conducted in Latin.
[Choir singing in Latin]
Towns were growing,
sometimes French and English towns together
as at Norwich and Nottingham.
Then, as now, London was the magnet.
Its population would double
in the course of the 1 3th century.
As feudalism loosened its grip,
English speakers would flood in from the country
Iooking for opportunities, a better life.
Already established
were the French-speaking court officials, administrators,
lawyers, and merchants,
but also craftsmen who gave us the French names
for some tools of the trade.
Measure, mallet, chisel,
pulley, bucket, trowel.
This is Petty France in London.
Its name shows that it originally housed
a community of French immigrants.
In the early Middle Ages,
there were areas like this in many English towns,
home to craftsmen and merchants who had come here from Normandy.
English and French speakers met and mingled in these places,
and the English middle classes
picked up French words by the thousand.
Merchant, money,
price, discount,
bargain, contract,
partner, embezzle.
The English didn't just borrow French vocabulary.
They took their names.
Then, as now, names were a matter of fashion
and the fashion in the early 1 3th century was for French.
So out went the good Old English
Ethelberts, Aelfrics and Athelstanes,
Dunstans, Wulfstanes, and Wulfrics,
and in came the new-fangled Richards and Roberts,
Simons and Stephens, Johns, Jeffreys,
and, most popular of all, Williams.
It seemed that everywhere French was the name of the game.
If this process had continued
whereby French percolated and penetrated
into every area of English society,
then French could eventually have engulfed English.
That didn't happen.
Why not?
One critical reason was that,
because of particular historical events,
French speakers in England
became cut off from their cultural and linguistic roots.
In 1 204, the reigning monarch, John,
king of Normandy, Aquitaine, and England,
Iost his Norman lands
in a war with the much smaller kingdom of France.
The Norman dukedoms,
ancestral lands of William the Conqueror
and cultural homelands,
were part of another empire now.
As long as the French nobility
and middle classes who lived in England
kept contact with their homelands in Normandy,
as long as they thought of themselves as French
and married within French families,
their identity and language were secure.
When they lost their connections across the channel,
their language began to lose its grip on English.
One thing that happened was that French speakers,
even within the noblest families,
began to look for wives not from across the channel
but in England.
They married English speakers,
and in doing so, they married, as it were,
into the English language as well.
It's said that the hand that rocks the cradle
rules the world.
It's likely that by the middle of the 1 3th century,
many children in families
which would previously have been French-speaking
were learning English from their mothers or nurses.
[Singing in Old English]
BRAGG: No doubt many of the children
of Anglo-French marriages grew up bilingual,
perhaps speaking one language to the servants
in the castle kitchen
and another at dinner in the great hall.
By 1 250, there's even some evidence
that children of the nobility
were having to learn French from a written primer,
grappling with the vocabulary
of what was becoming effectively a foreign language.
By the middle of the 1 3th century,
more and more French speakers throughout society
were themselves beginning to speak English,
becoming bilingual.
The result was that,
while French itself became more of a foreign language,
French vocabulary, French words,
continued to stream into English.
Many more words are recorded after 1 250 than before.
Abbey, attire, censer, defend,
figure, malady, music, parson,
plead, sacrifice, scarlet, spy,
stable, virtue, marshal, park,
reign, beauty, clergy, cloak,
country, fool, heir, pillory.
And because French was the international language of trade,
it acted as a conduit for words from the markets of the East,
Arabic words that gave to the English
saffron, mattress,
hazard, camphor,
alchemy, lute,
amber, and syrup.
Our phrase "checkmate" comes, through French,
from the Arab "shah mat", "The king is dead."
As we've heard, very often,
the imports didn't replace existing English words,
but settled down with them,
each word adopting a slightly different meaning.
The same thing had happened with English and Old Norse,
this layering effect.
So, a young English hare
came to be named by the French word "leveret".
English, swan. French, cygnet.
A small English axe is a French hatchet.
"Ask", English, and "demand", from French,
have slightly different meanings,
as do "bit" and "morsel", "wish" and "desire",
"might" and "power", "room" and "chamber".
On the surface, some of these words
appear to be interchangeable,
and sometimes they are.
But more interestingly, there are fine differences.
That's the beauty of it.
"Answer" is not quite "respond".
"Begin" isn't always "commence".
"Liberty" isn't always "freedom".
Shades of meaning, representing new shades of thought,
were massively absorbed into our language at that time.
The range of what I would call "almost synonyms"
became one of the glories of English,
contributing to the language's precision and flexibility,
allowing its speakers and writers over the centuries
to select, very precisely, the right word.
Rather than replace English,
French was helping equip and enrich the language
for the central role that it was on its way to reassuming.
Towards the end of the 1 3th century,
a new idea of the English people was being born.
The Norman lands across the channel
were a foreign country now.
Even the families who traced their roots
back to William the Conqueror's Norman followers,
men with French names and French blood,
started calling themselves true-born Englishmen.
Behind me is the tomb of Edward I.
"The Hammer of the Scots," it says there in Latin.
Latin was the language of official business,
but when the French king Philip
threatened invasion of England in 1 295,
Edward used the English language
as a symbol of nationhood to galvanise support.
"If Philip is able to do all the evil he means to,
from which God protect us,
he plans to wipe out our English language
entirely from the Earth," he said.
The old language, reborn,
could now be a rallying point for a new mongrel people.
The invasion never came.
And though Edward made the English language
a symbol for the country,
he didn't elevate it to official use.
Latin and French were still the languages of state affairs.
It was Edward's direct ancestor, William the Conqueror,
who, more than two centuries before,
had enshrined Latin and French
as the written languages of state,
banishing English.
But as the 1 3th century gave way to the 1 4th,
English was becoming the one language out of the three
that everyone in the country could be counted on to know.
In 1 325, for instance,
the chronicler William of Nassyngton could write...
MAN: Latin can no-one speak, I trow
But those who it from school do know
And some know French, but not Latin
Who're used to court and dwell therein
And some know Latin, though just in part
Whose use of French is less than art
And some can understand English
Who neither Latin know, nor French
But unlettered or learned, old or young
All understand the English tongue.
[Man singing in Old English]
BRAGG: And around the country,
written English was emerging from the shadows.
Songs in the French troubadour style but with English words
appeared,
as did a few vernacular poems.
In some places, the Old English religious homilies
had continued to be copied and circulated.
The bestiary, in which birds and animals were portrayed
and their behaviour made the basis
for lessons in Christian morality,
was a particular medieval form.
They were usually written, as here, in Latin,
but in a late 1 3th century example,
the text is not in Latin but in English.
MAN: The wild deer has two properties.
He draws out the viper from the stone with his nose
and swallows it.
The venom causes the deer to burn.
Then he rushes to the water and drinks...
The devil is like the whale.
He tempts men to follow their sinful lusts,
and, in return, they find ruin.
It is the weak in faith,
the little ones that he thus beguiles.
BRAGG: And it was an animal which,
in just a few years' time, would, by a cruel twist of fate,
give English its greatest boost yet.
A small, black rodent with a Latin name.
Rattus rattus. The black rat.
In 1 348, ancestors of these black rats deserted a ship
that, coming from the Continent, had docked near Weymouth.
They carried a deadly cargo,
a germ that modern science calls pasteurella pestis,
that the 1 4th century named the Great Pestilence,
and that we know as the Black Death.
Plague had come to Britain.
Infected rats carried the deadly germ east, then north.
They sought out human habitations,
building nests in the floors,
climbing the wattle-and-daub walls,
shedding the infected fleas that fed on their blood,
and transmitted bubonic plague.
It's been estimated that between a quarter and a third
of England's population of 4 million died.
In some places, whole communities were wiped out.
This is Ashwell in Hertfordshire.
In the bell tower of the church, some desperate soul,
perhaps the parish priest,
scratched a poignant record on the wall in bad Latin.
MAN: The first pestilence was in 1 350, minus one.
1 350. Pitiless, wild, violent.
Only the dregs of the people live to tell the tale.
"The dregs" were those of the English-speaking peasantry
who had survived.
Though the Black Death was a human catastrophe,
it set in train a series of social upheavals
which would speed the English language
along the road to full restoration
as the real and recognised language of the nation.
[Choir singing]
For one thing, the Black Death dealt Latin,
the language of the church, a body blow.
Where people lived communally,
as the clergy did in monasteries and other religious orders,
the incidence of infection and death
was disproportionately high.
At a local level,
many parish priests either caught the plague
from tending their parishioners
or simply ran away.
As a result of the plague,
the Latin-speaking clergy in some parts of England
were reduced by almost a half.
Many of their replacements were barely literate laymen
whose only language was English.
England after the Black Death was a very different place.
In many parts of the country,
there was hardly anyone left to work the land
or tend the livestock.
The acute shortage of labour
meant that those who did the work
had the power to break from their feudal past
and demand better conditions, higher wages.
Times were changing.
Wages rose.
The price of property fell.
Working people seized the opportunities
they'd never had before.
The fortunes of the common people were changing.
They were rising through society,
and they took their English with them.
By 1 385, English had replaced French in the schoolroom,
and as education and literacy spread,
so did the demand for books in English.
And English was already finding a place
in the state and in the law.
In 1 362, for the first time in three centuries,
English was acknowledged as a language of official business.
Since the conquest, court cases had been heard in French.
Now the law recognised
that too few people understood that language,
probably because many of the educated lawyers
had died in the plague.
From now on, it was declared,
cases could be pleaded, showed, defended,
debated, and judged in English.
In the same year, 1 362,
Parliament was opened here at Westminster.
For the first time ever,
the chancellor addressed the assembly not in French,
but in English.
MAN: For the worship and honour of God,
King Edward had summoned his prolates, dukes, earls, barons,
and other lords of his realm
to his Parliament,
holden at Westminster the year of the King...
And soon, English would once again be the language of kings.
The country hadn't had an English-speaking monarch
since Harold had been hacked to death at Hastings in 1 066.
In 1 399, King Richard II was deposed
by Henry, Duke of Lancaster.
Parliament was summoned here, to the Great Hall at Westminster.
The dukes and lords, spiritual and temporal,
were assembled.
The royal throne, draped in cloth of gold, stood empty.
Then Henry stepped forward,
crossed himself, and claimed the crown.
And in a great symbolic moment,
he made his speech not in the Latin language of state business
or the French language of the royal household
but in what the official history calls his mother tongue,
English.
In the name of the Fadir, Son, and Holy Gost,
l, Henry of Lancaster,
chalenge this rewme of Yngland
and the corone
with all the membres and the appurtenances,
als I that am disendit be right lyne of the blode
comyng fro the gude lorde Kyng Henry Therde,
and thorghe that ryght that God of his grace hath sent me,
with the helpe of my kyn and of my frendes, to recover it...
the whiche rewme was in poynt to be undone
for defaut of governance and undoyng of the gode lawes.
BRAGG: And so Henry, Duke of Lancaster,
became King Henry IV,
and English was once again a royal language.
The tide seemed to be turning in its favour.
By the end of the 1 4th century,
it was on course to regain its status
as the first language of the country.
And now it also had a literary champion
who could harness its full capabilities
to produce great writing,
Geoffrey Chaucer.
MAN: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye
that slepen al the night with open ye
so priketh hem Nature in hir corages;
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
Chaucer wrote those opening, showery lines
to "The Canterbury Tales"
more than six centuries ago in 1 38 7.
For millions of people since, "The Canterbury Tales"
have been the flowering of the medieval English language
and also a great staging post for English literature.
Chaucer, pictured here as one of his own pilgrims,
wasn't the only writer of his time
and he didn't invent the language he was working with.
But he, more than any other, recognised its richness,
the potential in having at his disposal
vocabularies from high and low society,
drawn from French and Old English,
and he worked it to the full.
Chaucer was a Londoner and an important man,
with connections to the royal family
and a high position in the civil service.
He'd travelled widely, perhaps even been a spy,
and he knew Latin and French.
He might have been expected,
like many other English poets of the time,
to write in either of those languages
for an exclusive audience,
but he didn't.
He chose to write in English,
the English that was spoken in London.
LOWE: Language of London would have been a huge mixture.
You've got people coming in from the Central Midlands,
from the Northern Midlands.
From the Northern Midlands,
they'd have been bringing more Scandinavian terms
because it's an area of strong Scandinavian settlement,
but we'd have also have heard French loan words,
which people would have heard in literature as well.
So it's a vibrant variety of English.
[Folk music plays]
MAN: Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye...
This is where the Tabard Inn used to stand.
Now it's the rather dismal backyard of Guy's Hospital.
This is where Chaucer's pilgrims gather
before setting out on their pilgrimage to Canterbury.
The buildings may have gone,
but Chaucer's characters,
a cannily constructed cross-section
of medieval society,
live on in his writing.
MAN: A knyght ther was and that a worthy man,
that fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour...
Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy;
A Marchant was ther with a forked berd,
In mottelee, and hye on horse he sat;
A good Wif was ther of biside Bathe,
But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.
The Millere was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones.
BRAGG: The pilgrims set off for Canterbury,
a journey of about three days then,
and, to pass the time, they told each other stories.
The stories have a range of styles,
from serious moral fables to bawdy farces
with episodes that wouldn't be out of place
in a "Carry On" film.
What Chaucer did most brilliantly
was to choose and tailor his language
to suit every tale and its teller.
The creation of mood and tone
and the realisation of characters through the language
is something we expect of writers today,
so it's difficult to realise
how extraordinary it was when Chaucer did it.
He showed, he proved,
that reformed English was fit for great literature,
which gives him a key part in our story.
This gentil cok hadde in his governaunce
Sevene hennes, for to doon al his plesaunce
Whiche were his sustres and his paramours,
And wonder lyk to him, as of colours;
Of whiche the faireste hewed on hir throte
Was cleped fayre damoysele
Pertelote.
Can you tell us what language is predominating
in this particular passage?
Well, you've got so many French words, haven't you?
They really hit you between the eyes.
Even today, I think, you'd notice them.
"Gouvernance", "plaisance", "paramour".
In fact, Chaucer is thought to be the person
who introduced "paramour"
into the English language himself.
And those words, "plaisance", "gouvernance",
all appear from about the 1 350s,
so they're quite new at a time
when Chaucer used them in the "Nun's Priest Tale".
Question is, of course, "Why is he doing this?"
Well, it's odd really, isn't it,
because this is a story about chickens.
It's a story about a cock and his hens,
and you'd have thought that perhaps a less refined language
might be in order.
But Chaucer is playing with the whole idea of an exulted style,
and so he's investing these hens and cocks
with a feeling of great literary quality.
You know, it becomes almost a mock epic.
BRAGG: Chaucer not only used existing French words
for poetic effect,
he also introduced his own elevated synonyms,
sometimes bypassing an English word
in favour of a more stylish French borrowing.
So, English had the perfectly good "hard" as a noun.
Chaucer borrowed the French word "difficulte".
In place of "unhap", he gave us "disadventure".
For "shendship", "dishoneste".
For "building", "edifice".
For "unconning", "ignoraunt".
And for "meaning", "signifiaunce".
But Chaucer wasn't just ensnared with the elegance of French.
He also cherished the directness and earthiness of English
and used it, for example, in "The Miller's Tale",
where the student Absolon's midnight assignation
with a neighbour's wife
doesn't go quite according to plan.
This Absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie.
Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,
And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,
And Absolon, hym fil ne bet ne wers,
But with his mouthe he kiste hir naked ers.
The language, of course, is predominantly Old English,
and, again, Chaucer is aware
of what linguists would call register.
He knows that you have to have a particular style
for a particular purpose.
With "The Miller's Tale", we have both the miller himself,
who is a man of extraordinary qualities,
so he opens doors simply by running at them with his head,
which was a clever trick.
And the story itself is, as you know,
about bottoms out of windows and other such things,
and, of course, in that case,
it's appropriate to have a simple, earthy style.
He knows that if he's talking about basic earthy stuff,
he might as well use good Old English words.
And I think it's actually marked that use
by not using many French words.
I think people would have picked up on that.
We certainly do.
The style seems very direct, almost colloquial.
Of course, that's literally artifice,
but it does seem direct and colloquial,
and that's as a complete result
of the way in which he's using the language,
the language he'd have heard on the streets.
Words like "ers" meaning "arse", I'm afraid,
and other such rude words.
BRAGG: Scholars dispute how much vocabulary
Chaucer actually introduced into English.
With Old English, he certainly reintroduced words
which hadn't been written down since before 1 1 00,
probably because they weren't considered important
or seemly enough.
Words like "cherlish", "ferting", "frendli",
"lerninge", "lovinge",
"restless", "swiven",
"wasp", "wifli", and "willingli".
[Choir singing]
This is where the pilgrims who had beguiled the miles
with their various tales would have been making for,
the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
The brilliant archbishop, son of a French merchant,
had been brutally murdered in 1 1 7 0
by knights acting on the wishes, if not instructions,
of Henry Il,
that first Plantagenet whose wife, Eleanor,
had done so much to promote the courtly French language
which Chaucer was now mining so expertly.
[Bells chiming]
In Chaucer's day, this area around the Cathedral
and the nearby streets would have been thronged with pilgrims
from all over the country.
Well, the thronging hasn't changed.
But they would have been speaking
in the dialect of their homes.
English wasn't uniform in the way it was spoken,
and Chaucer himself, in "The Reeve's Tale",
gives us literature's first "funny Northerner"
who speaks with flat vowels.
He says "heem" for "home", "knau" for "know",
"gang" for "gone" and "nan" for "none".
All pronunciations that would be quite understandable
in the northeast of England today.
Chaucer himself worried about whether his work
would be mispronounced or wrongly copied
or just misunderstood in other parts of the country.
He bids one of his poems, "Troilus and Cressida",
a rather worried farewell,
voicing a concern he must also have felt
for "The Canterbury Tales".
Go, litel bok.
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey God that noon myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde
I God beseche!
BRAGG: Of course, Chaucer's books,
particularly "The Canterbury Tales",
were understood.
His language, the language of late 1 4th century London,
would become, with some later modifications,
the standard form of English.
And his genius in harnessing that language
to serve his vision as a writer
would guarantee that it lived on.
A century and a half after his death,
Geoffrey Chaucer was famous enough
for this tomb to be put in Westminster Abbey.
In the intervening years,
his tales had spread round the country
and delighted listeners and readers
ranging from London merchants to the future Richard III.
Before the 1 5th century was out,
"The Canterbury Tales" had been printed by William Caxton,
ensuring the future of Chaucer's work
and furthering the process by which southern English,
Chaucer's English,
would become the standard.
Chaucer was the first poet to be buried here
in what's become Poet's Corner.
It's appropriate for the man who not only entertained
and delighted in his own work,
but who, through expanding the capabilities
of the English language,
created a standard and a platform
for those who followed.
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