Hastings: The Battle That Changed the English Language Forever
On 14 October 1066, Harold Godwinson, the last Saxon king of England, led his footsore troops into Pevensey in Sussex. A week or so earlier, they had defeated the invading Danes at Stamford Bridge, in what is now Lincolnshire, in the north-east of Harold‘s kingdom. The weary warriors had then been obliged to make a forced march of around 200 miles south to attempt to repel a second invading army under the command of William, Duke of Normandy, illegitimate son of Robert the Magnificent.
Despite their exhaustion, the Saxon housecarls fought the Normans from around nine in the morning until the evening of that fateful day. The battle seemed to be going in the Saxons‘ favour, until a stray arrow from a Norman archer struck Harold in the eye, mortally wounding him. With that chance shot, the tide of the battle turned, William the Bastard received a rather more flattering nickname – and the English language changed forever.
In the centuries that followed the Battle of Hastings, all the levers of political power were taken over by William, his successors, and the descendants of the Norman knights that had fought in 1066. And this had linguistic repercussions.
A scene in the novel Ivanhoe by Walter Scott describes the situation around 100 years after the Norman Conquest, by which time the old English language, predominately Germanic, had started to change irrevocably. Scott’s character, Wamba the jester, jokes that the animals that are being herded in the fields by the downtrodden serfs all have Saxon names: cow, calf, swine, sheep. As soon as these same animals are put on the table to be eaten by the Norman overlords, the names become French: beef, veal, pork, mutton.
Thus, a century after the Battle of Hastings, the basic words in English remained Saxon, but there had been a huge influx of Norman French. This phenomenon is with us to this day and is a gift to English-speakers who wish to learn the Romance languages.
This is an extract from our must-read book about language learning, THE LANGUAGE SECRET.
