I1
Folk, State, and Speech
England and the English, state and folk,2 are not old as historians reckon time. Tacitus set down the English name, it is true, as early as A.D. 98, but the Anglii of the Germania3 were only a Germanic tribe of the Jutland peninsula, politically independent but culturally part of a nationality, not yet a nationality in their own right. They won cultural independence and national status by migration. In the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles, like many another Germanic tribe of that day, gave up their old seats and sought land and loot within the bounds of the Roman Empire. If Bede is right, the whole tribe left home in this migration, and parts of at least two neighboring tribes, the Saxons and the Jutes, took ship in the same move.4 All three tribes settled anew in the Roman province of Britannia, the eastern half of which they overran, from the Channel to the Firth of Forth. The western half held out longer against them, though without help from Rome, who had withdrawn her legions from Britannia one after another until, early in the fifth century, the land was left stripped of troops. Not until the ninth century did Cornwall yield to English arms, and further north the Welsh kept their freedom, more or less, until 1282, over 200 years after the English lost theirs at Hastings. But by the end of the sixth century most of the geographical area now known as England had fallen into the hands of the Germanic tribesmen, and these, whatever their tribe, had begun to think of themselves as members of a larger unit, a new nationality which went by the English name. The old tribal name Angl(i)i in its extended or generic sense, denoting the Germanic inhabitants of Britain irrespective of tribe, first appears in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (d.604).5 The rise of this national name marks the beginnings of English national (as distinct from tribal) feeling.
By this time, indeed, the tribes no longer existed as such. When the Roman mission which Gregory had sent out reached England in the year 597, the missionaries did not find any tribal organizations of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; they found a number of kingdoms, each autonomous but those south of the Humber drawn together, loosely enough, through their recognition of the imperium or overlordship of the reigning king of Kent. Earlier holders of such a personal imperium had been a king of Sussex and a king of Wessex, and later holders would be kings of various realms north and south of the Humber, until in the ninth century King Egbert would win it permanently for the royal house of Wessex.6 We know nothing of the political connections of the various Germanic settlements in Britain before the rise of the first imperium, but we have little reason to think that any tribal organization, as such, outlived the migration from Germany. It seems altogether likely that the settlements started their respective careers as mutually independent political units, and that the tribal affiliations of given migrants or groups of migrants had little practical importance even at the time of migration, and soon became a matter of antiquarian and sentimental interest only.7 No tribal loyalties, therefore, stood in the way of the English nationalism which, by virtue of geographical and cultural community, early came into being. On the religious side, moreover, this nationalism was fostered, not hindered, by the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century: the Roman missionaries organized a Church of England, not separate churches of Kent, Wessex, and the like, and in the year 664, at the synod of Whitby, the Romanizers, led by Wilfrid of York, won the field over their Irish rivals, ensuring thereby the religious unification of all England in a single Church.8
On the political side, it is true, English nationalism could hardly win much ground so long as the various kingdoms kept their autonomy, subject only to the shifting imperium of one or another of the many royal houses. But this particularistic system of government broke down for good and all in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the ninth Egbert set up and Alfred clinched the overlordship of the kings of Wessex, while in the tenth these kings took for title Rex Anglorum “King of the English.” The other royal houses died out or lost their kingly rank and function; Alfred’s followers on the throne won back the Danelaw; the former English and Danish kingdoms in Britain became mere provinces of a kingdom of England; in sum, an English nation replaced the old imperium. The political nationalism which grew up hand in hand with the new nation found focus, naturally enough, in the person of the king, and to this day English patriotism has not lost its association with the crown. But this is not the place to tell the tale of English nationalism in the tenth and eleventh centuries.9 It will be enough to mention one of its many fruits, the “King’s English” or standard written speech which had grown current all over England by the end of the tenth century. In this form of Old English nearly all the vernacular writings of the period were set down, and the scribes, in copying older writings, usually made them conform to the new standard of speech, though they might let an old spelling, here and there, go unchanged.
Rise of the Unified State
England, with its national king (descendant of Alfred, the national hero), its national Church (founded by a papal mission and in communion with Rome), its national speech (the King’s English), and its old and rich national literature, stood unique in the Europe of the year 1000. No other modern European state reached full nationhood so early. And yet this English nationhood did not come too soon. Indeed, if it had not been reached early it might not have been reached at all, for the eleventh was a century of political disaster. The state succumbed to foreign foes, and for more than 200 years of French rule the only weapon left to the English was the strong nationalism handed down to them from the golden days of the past. But for this nationalism, the English language in particular would hardly have survived as such, though it might have lingered on for centuries in the form of mutually unintelligible peasant dialects, and with the triumph of French speech England would have become a cultural if not political province of France, doomed to a fate not unlike that which in later times actually befell Ireland at English hands. The nationalism which saved England from such a fate owed much of its strength, of course, to the rich literary culture of the centuries before Hastings, a culture marked from the beginning by free use of the mother tongue (alongside Latin) as a medium of expression. To this mother tongue, and to the literature of which it was the vehicle, let us now turn.10
English history (as distinguished from prehistory) begins in the year 597. The Roman and Irish missionaries taught the English to make those written records from which the historians glean their knowledge of early England and the particular records written in the vernacular give us our earliest documentation of the mother tongue. Then as now this tongue went by the English name.11 Its nearest kinsman was the speech of the Frisians. Closely kindred tongues, too, were Saxon and Franconian (or Frankish), the two main dialects of Low German.12 The dialects of High German, and those of Scandinavian, had features which made their kinship to English less close. English was akin to all these neighboring tongues, and to Gothic, in virtue of common descent from Germanic, a language which we know chiefly through its offspring, as it had split up into dialects at a date so early that the records of it in its original or primitive state are few. Germanic in turn was an offshoot of Indo-European, a hypothetical tongue which we know only through the many languages which are descended from it. To the Indo-European family of languages belonged, not only English and the other children of Germanic, but also Latin (with its offspring, the Romance languages), Greek, the various Celtic and Slavic languages, Persian, Sanskrit (with other languages of India), Armenian, Albanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.13 Here, however, the kinship is so remote that it is overshadowed by a connection of another kind: a fellowship, so to speak. Latin, for instance, is only remotely linked to English by common descent from Indo-European, but it is closely linked to English by common participation in European life. The fellowship between English and Latin, it must be added, has always been one-sided; Latin has done the giving, English the taking, and this because Latin, the language of the Church and the vehicle of classical culture, had much to give and found little if anything that it needed to take.14
That English has many words taken from Latin is a fact familiar to everyone. Such words began coming in even before the migration to Britain (e.g., street and cook), and they have kept coming in ever since. Less familiar, perhaps, are the so-called semantic borrowings: native words with meanings taken from Latin. Two examples will have to serve: god-spell (modern gospel), literally “good news,” is a translation of Latin evangelium (itself taken from Greek), and its meaning is restricted accordingly; þing (modern thing) originally had in common with Latin res the meaning “(legal) dispute, lawsuit,” whereupon, in virtue of the equation thus set up, other meanings of res came to be given to the Old English word, including the meaning most common today.15 But the fellowship with Latin affected English idiom and style as well as vocabulary; thus, the Latin mundo uti “live” reappears in the worolde brucan of Beowulf.
The fellowship of English with French began much later (toward the end of the Old English period), but has proved just as lasting, and French comes next to Latin in the list of foreign tongues that have set their mark on English speech. The only other important medieval fellowship was that with Danish (as it was then called) or Scandinavian (as we call it now). Here matters were complicated by the kinship of the ...
