BRAGG: This is the South Bank in London.
2,000 years ago, if you'd heard a human voice around here,
the language would have been incomprehensible.
1,000 years ago,
the English language had established its first base camp.
Today English circles the globe.
It inhabits the air we breathe.
What started as a guttural, tribal dialect,
seemingly isolated in a small island,
is now the language of well over a thousand million people
around the world.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media
The story of the English language
is an extraordinary one.
It has the characteristics of a bold and successful adventure...
tenacity, luck, near extinction on more than one occasion,
dazzling flexibility,
and an extraordinary power to absorb.
And it's still going on.
New dialects, new Englishes are evolving all the time,
all over the world.
Successive invasions introduced
then threatened to destroy our language.
Our first programme tells that story.
For 300 years, English was forced underground.
Our second programme tells how it survived
and how it fought back.
Our third programme will tell how the English language
took on the power blocks of church and state.
Our fourth, how it became the language of Shakespeare.
In later programmes,
we're going to leave these shores, as English did,
to tell the story of how, in America,
the language of one great empire became that of another.
We'll go to the Caribbean,
where a variety of new part-English dialects took root.
India, where English became a commanding, unifying language
in a country of a thousand tongues.
And Australia, where a confident new English
was invented by a people,
many of whom had been expelled from their mother country.
We'll travel through time, too,
to explore how English in the 2 1 st century
has become the international language of business,
the language in which the world's citizens communicate.
Over the last 1,500 years,
these small islands have achieved much
that is remarkable.
But in my view,
England's greatest success story of all
is the English language.
These programmes are about the words we think in, talk in,
write in, sing in, the words that describe the life we live.
This is where we can begin...
just after dawn in a foreign country,
on a flat shore by the North Sea,
in what we now call the Netherlands.
[Birds chirping]
This is Friesland,
and it's in this part of the world
that we can still hear the modern language
that we believe sounds closest
to what the ancestor of English sounded like
1,500 years ago.
PAULUSMA: En as we dan Maart noch even besjoche,
Maart hawwe we toch in oantal dagen oan de froast
en friezen diet it toch sa'n njoggen dagen,
dat foaral oan'e grun.
BRAGG: In Friesland, many people start their day
listening to the weather forecast
from popular weatherman Piet Paulusma.
En dan, moandei, tiisdei en woansdei. : it wurden dagen...
BRAGG: Some of his words might sound familiar,
like "three" and "four", "frost" and "freeze"...
In temperatuur sa om en naby de trije of de fjour graden.
Gjin froast, it sil net frieze.
BRAGG: ..."mist" and "blue".
En fierders, de kans op mist.
En dan moarn, en dan mei flink wat sinne.
Blau yn'e loft...
BRAGG: The reason we can recognise these words
is that modern Frisian and modern English
can both be traced back to the same family...
the Germanic family of languages,
and some words have stayed more or less the same
down the centuries.
Butter, bread,
cheese, meal,
sleep, boat,
snow, sea, storm.
[Wind howling]
The West Germanic tribes who invented these words
were a warlike, adventurous people.
They'd been on the move through Europe
for the best part of 1,000 years
and now had settlements
in what we would call the lowlands of northern Europe...
Holland, Germany, and Denmark.
But they were still greedy for land, ready to move on.
This is the island of Terschelling.
The English coast is about 250 miles to the southwest
behind me.
It is from these islands and the low-lying Frisian mainland
that, in the 5th century, a Germanic tribe...
part of the family
that also contained Jutes, Angles, and Saxons...
made sail to look for a better life.
And they took their language... our language... with them.
[Man speaking Germanic language]
The Germanic tribes weren't the first to invade our shores.
More than 500 years before,
the Romans had also come by sea to impose their will.
Now their empire had crumbled
and they'd abandoned these islands,
leaving the native tribes... the Britons or Celts...
to their fate.
This is Pevensey Castle,
an ancient Roman fort that used to stand
on the very shoreline of the south coast.
The chronicle of the period reports that in the year 491,
Germanic invaders laid siege
and slaughtered the Celts who had taken refuge here.
Not one of them was left alive.
Other Celts did survive the invasion,
a million or more of them in England.
But they were a broken people.
The clue to their fate lies in the word the Germanic tribes
used to describe them.
It was "wealas",
a name that lives on in our modern language as "Welsh".
1,500 years ago, it meant both "foreigner" and "slave".
The Celts became servants and followers,
second-class citizens.
The only way up was to become part of the invaders' tribes,
to adopt their culture and their language.
The Celts and their language were pushed to the margins.
Only a handful of words from the Celtic languages
survive into modern English.
In the north, where I come from, we have "crag", meaning "rock",
"coombe", meaning "deep valley",
and dialect words like "brat" and "brock" for "badger".
There are traces in place names.
The "tor" in Torpenhow, spelled as Torpenhow,
a neighbouring village to my own,
that comes from the Celtic for "peak".
[Sirens wailing]
The "car-" of "Carlisle" means "a fortified place".
In the south, they left us the names of Thames and Avon,
Dover and London, but these were fragments.
The language that prevailed was that of the victors.
By the end of the 6th century,
these Germanic tribes occupied half of mainland Britain.
They had divided into a number of kingdoms.
Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Wessex,
denoting the settlements of southern, eastern,
and western Saxon tribes;
East Anglia,
named after the Angles who gave England its name;
Mercia in midlands; Northumbria in the north.
Throughout these areas,
many modern place names come from that settlement
or use the words they brought.
We live with them. We live in them every day.
The "-ing" in modern place names means "the people of".
"-ton", as in Wigton, where I come from,
means "enclosure" or "village".
"-ham" means "farm",
which might surprise one or two Tottenham supporters.
MEN: # Glory, glory, Tottenham Hotspurs #
# Glory, glory, Tottenham Hotspurs #
# And the Spurs go marching on #
# Tottenham are the greatest team the world has ever seen #
The Germanic tribes, now settled around the country,
all spoke their own dialects.
From among them would emerge one language...
Anglo-Saxon, or Old English...
and we all speak it every day.
I mean, out of five strikers,
none of them can really finish, Armstrong...
Not natural-born, are they?
We just need some youth and pace, really.
BRAGG: Examine the language you use today,
and you'll still find hundreds of words
from a language over 1,500 years old,
key words ranging from the names we give family members
to numbers.
What are we drinking to?
I think we'll win 2-1 today.
I'll drink to that.
I live in like a West Ham sort of area
and I've got a lot of West Ham friends,
but, for this game, we'll be enemies.
For the home games, I would go with the guys we meet up
from the Topspurs website
or with my daughter to other games.
I mean, she's 5 at the moment. Loves it.
She loves singing the songs. The nice ones, anyway.
I was coming with my son.
So we just go and get something to eat first,
go into the grounds,
savour the atmosphere, and watch the game.
There has been a few high-scoring games
over the years.
I think the highest we ever beat them was 6-1.
A repeat today wouldn't go amiss.
BRAGG: Most of those words were from Old English,
nouns like "youth", "son", "daughter", "field", "friend",
"home", and "ground",
prepositions like "in" and "on", "into", "by", and "from".
"And" and "the" are from Old English.
All the numbers and verbs like "drink", "come", and "go",
"sing", "like", and "love".
But would these words have sounded different
all those years ago?
In a slightly quieter pub,
I asked language expert Katie Lowe.
They sound a little different.
I mean, the Old English for "sun" is "sunu".
That's not so very different.
"Game" is "gamen".
"Ground" is "grund".
And I notice that Steve says his daughter loves singing songs.
If you said that in Old English,
it would be "His dochter luvath tha sange singen".
And you can see that that sounds pretty much like modern English.
So, in fact, you can have a good conversation in Old English.
Oh, yes, you can, indeed.
I mean, each word I'm saying now is from Old English.
Have you any estimate how many words there were swirling around
compared with how many words we have now?
We think it was in the region of 25,000 words.
Compare that with an average desk dictionary,
which maybe contains something like 1 00,000 words.
It sounds pretty small.
But if you think about the fact
that an averagely educated person
would probably have about 1 0,000 words
in their active vocabulary,
there are plenty of words to go round.
[Chanting]
BRAGG: English took its first steps away from its tribal roots
with a revival of Christianity.
[Man speaking Old English]
MAN: Let us praise the king of Heaven,
the power of the Creator and His conception,
the work of the glorious Father,
who created every wonder, the eternal Lord.
BRAGG: In 597, the monk and prior Augustine
led a mission from Rome to Kent.
Around the same time,
Irish monks of the Celtic church
were establishing a presence in the north.
Within a century, Christians built churches and monasteries.
This is St. Paul's in Jarrow,
parts of which date from the 7th century.
Faith and stone weren't the only things
the Christian missionaries brought to the country.
They brought the international language
of the Christian religion... Latin.
Latin terms became part of the English word hoard.
"Altare" became "altar".
"Apostolus" became "apostle".
"Mass", "monk", and "verse" and many others
all come from the Latin.
This would become a pattern of English,
the layering of words, taken from different source languages.
And from Latin, too, the English took their script.
The Angles, Saxons, Frisians,
and Jutes who would become the English
hadn't brought script as we know it with them,
but runes.
The runic alphabet was made up of symbols
formed mainly of straight lines
so that the letters could be carved into stone or wood.
Those were their media, rather than parchment or paper.
Though this is a short poem,
most examples of runic writing that survive
suggest runes were mainly used for short, practical messages
or graffiti.
[Man singing in Latin]
The Latin alphabet was different.
With its curves and bows,
it allowed words to be easily written, using pen and ink,
onto pages of parchment or vellum,
which, gathered together into a book,
could be widely circulated.
Christianity brought the book to these shores.
"Verbum" ..."the word".
Soon, a native culture of scholarship began to flower,
a culture based on Latin and on writing.
The magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels
were created in the 8th century
on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the northeast coast.
A few miles south,
at the monastery of St. Paul's in Jarrow,
the great English monk and scholar Bede,
born and educated in Northumbria,
began writing the first-ever history
of the English-speaking people.
He wrote, of course, in Latin, the language of scholarship.
The prevailing language among the people
was still Old English,
but Latin, this powerful medium, was now amongst them.
Now Old English was written down using the Latin alphabet,
while retaining some of the old runes as letters.
From the 7th century,
we find English itself written on parchment
in a language and a script
which we can just about recognise as our own.
[Man reciting "The Lord's Prayer" in Old English]
With writing, Old English stole a march
on other languages spoken in Europe at the time.
Prayers were recorded and books of the Bible translated.
The laws of the land were written down,
and the language soon became capable
of recording and expressing
an increasingly wide and subtle range of human experience.
And in the right hands,
Old English was now powerful and supple enough
to take you to imaginary worlds, fire the blood, be poetry.
[Man speaking Old English]
MAN: So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
BRAGG: No one knows who composed the epic "Beowulf"
sometime between the mid 7th and end of the 1 0th century.
It's the first great poem in the English language,
the beginning of a glorious tradition
which will lead to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond.
The poem celebrates the glory days of the Germanic tribes,
epitomised in the heroic warrior who gives the poem its name.
The power of the language can be heard in this passage,
which introduces Beowulf's archenemy, the monster Grendel.
[Man speaking Old English]
MAN: In off the moors, down through the mist bands,
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
[Man speaking Old English]
The bane of the race of men roamed forth,
hunting for a prey in the high hall.
[Man speaking Old English]
Spurned and joyless,
he journeyed on ahead and arrived at the bawn.
[Man speaking Old English]
Then his rage boiled over.
He ripped open the mouth of the building, maddening for blood.
He grabbed and mauled a man on his bench,
bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood,
and gorged on him in lumps,
leaving the body utterly lifeless,
eaten up hand and foot.
What does that tell us about English at that time, Seamus?
What sort of language was it when you come to it?
Do you think this is a fully developed poetic language?
It's certainly a fully developed poetic language.
It's very... It's capable of great elaboration.
But what struck me generally about Old English,
from the moment I read the bits
of "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" right through to "Beowulf",
is it's terrific for telling what happened.
It's a wonderful sense of the indicative mood all through it.
It's terrific for action, terrific for description.
There's a wonderful forthright capacity
to make up extra language in Anglo-Saxon.
The words are very clear and direct.
"Bone" and "house", for example.
"Bone-house"...
There you have the house for the the body, a word for the body.
Beautiful words for instruments.
The harp is called "gleo-beam", the glee beam,
the happy wood,
or else the joy wood, I think "gomen-wudu".
Swords or shields... The shield is the war-board, "wig-bord".
That is a specific poetic energy that's in the language,
the ability to make compounds,
which is still in German, I guess,
that gives it great beauty.
How extensive is the vocabulary?
I think there are 40,000 words recorded in "Beowulf".
But a lot of the words repeat themselves in...
Now, probably this is in poetry more than in prose.
If we heard an Anglo-Saxon speaker speaking
under his roof to his companion,
we'd probably hear a very... a quicker, a different,
less elaborate language from "Beowulf".
Would you say it is very clearly written to be read aloud?
It's certainly written to be read aloud.
The question that agitates some scholars
is whether it was written, you know?
But I think the general consensus now
is that by the time you get to "Beowulf",
you have a writer dealing with a traditional oral language.
[Man speaking Old English]
Certainly, you open the book.
"Hwat! We gardena inyear dagum" asks to be uttered,
and there are many speeches in it.
And it comes off the tongue with terrific directness, I think.
Latin and Greek had created great bodies of literature
in the classical past.
In the East, Arabic and Chinese were being used
in the 8th and 9th century
as languages of poetry.
But at that time,
no other language in the Christian world
could match the achievement of the "Beowulf" poet
and his anonymous contemporaries.
Old English was flourishing.
The adventure was under way.
But while the seeds of English
had come from these Frisian shores in the 5th century,
so, now, in the late 8th century,
a potential destroyer was preparing his battle fleet
500 miles or so to the north.
In the late 8th century,
the Latin-based culture of scholarship,
which had grown up in places like Lindisfarne
and which had also been the cradle of Old English,
faced extinction from across the sea.
These ruins are of the medieval monastery
that stood on the island of Lindisfarne.
[Birds chirping]
It was the Vikings who sacked and burned the religious centre
that stood here before.
To these pagan pirates rampaging out of their longships in 793,
this great centre of Christian piety and scholarship,
a pivotal place in the survival of the Word and the gospels,
was no more than an undefended treasure house.
The jewels that graced the books of the church
became baubles around a Viking's neck.
Today the Vikings may seem romantic,
re-enacting their rituals a good day out.
Over 1 2 centuries ago, their arrival was not so cheerful.
To many, it seemed to signal the end for civilisation.
A year after razing Lindisfarne,
the Vikings returned and sacked Jarrow,
the abbey where Bede had been the greatest scholar
in one of the finest libraries in Christendom.
This stronghold of the Latin word,
where English was also being written down
uniquely among European dialects,
was burned to the ground, its books with it.
[Man singing in Latin]
It was the start of 7 0 years of attack
during which the Vikings savaged
this eastern half of the country.
Few stories survive of exactly where and when they attacked,
perhaps, chillingly, because few were left to tell the tale.
At first, the raiders went home with their plunder.
Then, they decided to take the land itself.
In 1 865, the Vikings landed a great army south of here,
in East Anglia.
Within five years, the Viking invaders,
who were now called Danes,
controlled the north and east of the country.
Of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, only Wessex still held out.
Old Norse, the language of the conquerors,
was spreading throughout the land.
Old English potentially faced the same fate
as the Celtic language it had supplanted... virtual oblivion.
English was in need of a champion,
and it found one.
King Alfred's statue stands here in Winchester,
the capital of his ancient kingdom of Wessex.
He's the only monarch in our history
to be known as "the Great",
and he's often been hailed as the saviour of England.
That may be debatable,
as the idea of a single, unified England didn't really exist
in Alfred's day.
What is certain
is that he was a great defender of the English language.
It was the Victorians who had dubbed Alfred "the Great".
He was one of their darlings,
an English hero whose exploits were enthusiastically woven
into the fabric of national myth.
But he very nearly didn't make it.
He'd come to the throne of Wessex
within a year of the first Danish attacks in the southeast,
and, at first, he could hardly hold them back.
In 8 7 8, the Danes won what appeared to be a decisive battle
at Chippenham in Wiltshire.
Alfred, with only a few followers,
went on the run into the marshes of Somerset,
moving, as a contemporary wrote,
"under difficulties, through woods,
and into inaccessible places".
Legend has Alfred, unrecognised,
taking shelter in a poor woman's cottage
and being scolded for burning the wheaten cakes
he'd been set to mind.
But the reality was less cosy.
His situation was desperate, and if Alfred's kingdom fell,
the whole country would be controlled and settled
by conquerors whose language would inevitably crush English.
But Alfred proved to be an enterprising warrior
and strategist.
Running free in the Somerset Levels,
he discovered the arts of irregular warfare
and mounted guerilla attacks
against the occupying forces of Guthrun,
the Danish invader.
But he knew that wasn't going to be enough.
For Wessex to be regained,
the Danes had to be brought to battle and defeated.
The fighting men of Wessex had been scattered.
But in the spring of 8 7 8,
Alfred sent out a call for the men of the Shire Fyrds...
the county armies... to join him.
Around 4,000 men, mainly from Wiltshire and Somerset,
armed only with battle-axes and throwing spears,
responded to the call.
They mustered at Egbert's Stone,
where trackways and ridgeways met.
48 hours later, they advanced,
shields drumming against the Danish army of 5,000,
holding high ground at Ethandune
on the western edge of Salisbury Plain.
Contemporary English accounts
describe the battle that followed as a slaughter
and a rout of the Danes by the West Saxons.
Modern historians question that,
but there's no doubt that Alfred prevailed.
His crown and his kingdom were secured.
And, more importantly for our story,
so was the English language.
The Danes surrendered,
their leader was baptised as a Christian,
and Alfred's crucial victory
was memorialised here in Wiltshire
in an earlier version of a Great White Horse,
carved into the land he'd saved.
Alfred left an even more significant mark on the country.
He signed a peace treaty with the Danes
which established a border running up through the country,
from the Thames to the old Roman road of Watling Street.
The land to the north and east, to be known as the Danelaw,
would be under Danish rule.
The land to the south and west would be for the English.
No one was to cross the line unless to trade.
In the course of time, because of Alfred's peace treaty,
when Danes and English met, they didn't do so to fight,
but to do business, even to intermarry.
- I'd have to see. - Oh, yes.
BRAGG: Communities mixed, and so did the languages.
And English, rather than being engulfed by the Danes' language,
began to absorb it.
I'm in the market town of Hexham in the northeast of England.
Maps of the area show just how widespread
the Danish settlement was.
Place names ending in "-by"
reveal the Danish name for "farm".
"-thorpe" denotes a village, "-thwaite" a portion of land.
The Births, Marriages, and Deaths pages of the local paper
feature lots of names ending in "-son".
That was a Danish way of making a name
by adding to the name of the father.
Just on this page, I can see
Harrison, Gibson-Hudson, Robson, Sanderson,
Dickinson, Simpson,
Dickinson again, and Watson.
In school where I was, just across the country,
there was a Pattinson, a Johnson, a Rawlinson,
and another Dickson.
Outside on the street,
you can see the same thing on shop signs everywhere.
Even given centuries of people moving around the country,
names ending in "-son" are still far more common in what were
the Danish territories of the north and west
than they are in the south and east.
Above all, you can hear the echoes
of the Danes' Old Norse language
in the way people speak.
- What breed did you say it is? - Charollais.
Out of?
[Speaking indistinctly]
It's a little field on its own.
As Willy says, there's a beck down by the side of it.
It runs down through a little wood.
But it's such a lovely setting down by the...
you know, down by that garth, isn't it?
It's like a little isolation field.
It's only a couple of acres, the whole field.
It would be interesting to see a few sheep sold with lambs.
Are they allowed to be sold?
BRAGG: Some Old Norse words
stayed in the local dialects of the north,
words like "beck" for "stream" and "garth" for "paddock".
As a boy in Wigton, I remember hearing and using dialect words
like "slattery" for "shower", "slape" for "slippery",
"yet" for "gate", "lap" for "leap",
"yek" for "oak", and "yam" for "home",
as in "I's gangen yam."
Pure Norse, heard in Wigton every night of the week.
And there were many others.
But the influence of Old Norse wasn't just local.
All around the country, over time,
hundreds of Norse words entered the mainstream of English,
and we still use them every day.
The s-k sound is a characteristic of Old Norse,
and English borrowed words like "score" and "sky" and "skive",
as well as perhaps a thousand others,
including "anger", "bull", "freckle", "knife", "neck",
"root", "scowl", and "window".
[Indistinct speaking]
BRAGG: Sometimes where both Old Norse and Old English
had a word for the same thing,
both words lived on in English,
each taking on a slightly different meaning.
Where Old English said "craft", Old Norse said "skill".
For an English "hide", the Norse said "skin".
In Old English, you were "sick". In Norse, you were "ill".
Here was another example
of English's extraordinary ability to absorb,
to take in words from other languages,
adding them to its word hoard,
increasing the richness and flexibility of the vocabulary.
I think the point about vocabulary
is how much it astonishes by its ordinary nature.
Words like "law", "egg",
"husband", "leg", "ill", "die", "ugly"...
all these words are from Old Norse,
and yet you wouldn't necessarily think
that they were foreign at all.
Most astounding of all, I think,
are the pronouns "they", "their", and "them".
Those are also from Old Norse.
And in terms of grammar,
in a way, they simplified English.
They took it away from its Germanic roots.
I think it's probably true to say
that Old Norse affects the English language
more than any other
because it actually leads to a restructuring of the language.
Old English forms sentences not by word order, as we do,
but by tacking on endings onto the ends of things,
like articles and pronouns and nouns.
What happens is, through contact with a pretty similar language,
a lot of these inflectional endings
start to lose their distinctive nature.
And, actually, this is a process we can see happening
fairly early on in the Anglo-Saxon period.
So the language is prone to do that,
but contact with Norse languages speeded it up,
gave it a shove towards modernity.
Can you give us a very simple example of that?
Yes.
Let's take a simple sentence
like "The king gave horses to his men."
That would be something like, in Old English...
Now, in Old English,
you didn't tend to have a preposition like "to".
Instead, you could use a special ending,
which kind of meant "to his men".
And that would be a "-um" ending,
and you just tack that onto the end of the noun for "man".
So you'd have "gumum"... "-um" ending.
Now, the plural for the word for "horse",
if you want to say, "Gave horses to his men,"
would have an "n" on it.
So it would be "blancan".
Unfortunately, towards the end of the Old English period,
we start to see that "-um" ending
becoming more and more indistinct.
And we see spellings like "guman" ..."- An"...
just the same as "blancan"... "-an".
It's obvious that the king is more likely
to give horses to his men than men to his horses,
but you can see that there's a potential there
for difficulties.
And so we start to see prepositions being used
in place of those endings, which had become indistinct.
[Indistinct speaking]
BRAGG: Spoken English survived the Danish invasion.
But as the 9th century drew to a close,
the written culture was in a ruinous state,
and King Alfred was concerned.
When Alfred looked at the state of his kingdom, he was appalled.
The scholars in the monasteries had once made England
the greatest powerhouse of Christian teaching in Europe.
But 1 50 years had passed since the high days of Bede,
and the scholarly tradition had declined,
hastened on its way by a century of Viking raids.
In all the country,
Alfred could barely find a handful of priests
who could read and understand Lain.
And if they couldn't understand Latin,
they couldn't pass on the teachings of the religious books
that told people how to lead virtuous lives.
They couldn't save souls.
Where the written word had once flourished,
Alfred now found only chronic spiritual sickness.
He looked for a cure.
One way was to educate more clergy in Latin.
But that wasn't enough.
He hit on a more radical solution,
a solution that hinged not on Latin, but on English,
and he took English to new heights of achievement.
In the preface to his own translation
of Pope Gregory's "Pastoral Care",
Alfred wrote, "I remembered how,
before it was all ravaged and burned,
I'd seen how the churches throughout all England
stood filled with treasures and books.
And there was also a multitude of God's servants
who had very little benefit from those books
because they couldn't understand anything of them
since they were not written in their own language."
Their own language was, of course, English.
Alfred didn't want to do away with Latin,
but he realised that it would be far easier to teach people
to read books written in the language they spoke.
The best scholars could then go on to learn Latin
and join holy orders.
The rest would still have access
to scholarship and spiritual guidance,
but it would be written in English.
Here in his capital city of Winchester,
Alfred drew up a plan.
It was an extraordinarily imaginative project
to promote literacy and restore the English language.
"We should," he wrote,
"translate certain books
which are most necessary for all men to know
into the language that we can all understand
and also arrange it, as with God's help
we very easily can if we have peace,
so that all the youth of free men now among the English people
who have the means to be able to devote themselves to it
may be set to study for as long as they're of no other use,
until the time they're able to read English writing well."
Alfred had five books of religious instruction,
philosophy, and history
translated from Latin into English,
a laborious and costly undertaking.
Copies were sent out to the 1 2 bishops of his kingdom
for their wisdom to be spread as widely as possible.
To each bishop,
to emphasise the importance and value of the project,
Alfred sent a costly pointer, used to underline the text.
This is the Alfred Jewel.
Many historians believe
that it formed the head of one of those pointers.
Crafted in crystal enamel and gold,
it was discovered in 1 693 in Somerset
and is now in show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
It's inscribed "Aelfred had me made" in English.
Alfred the Great had made the English language
the jewel in his crown.
[Bells chiming]
Here in Winchester,
Alfred had established what was, effectively, a publishing house.
Other projects he undertook
included the commissioning of "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle",
detailing hundreds of years of history.
Alfred died in 899.
One of his legacies was an English language
which was more prestigious and widely read than ever before.
There was nothing to compare with this range
of written vernacular, history, philosophy, poetry
anywhere else in mainland Europe.
English was out on its own.
By the middle of the 1 1th century, English seemed secure.
But now other invaders were waiting in the wings,
and English was about to face its greatest threat ever.
This place, the old Roman fort at Pevensey,
was a fateful one for the English language.
It was here, among other places,
that the Frisians and other Germanic tribes
had made landfall in the 5th century
and introduced their own language.
Now, in 1 066, another wave of invaders was landing...
the Normans.
When, in 1 066, William, Duke of Normandy,
sailed with his army to claim the English throne,
he was sure he had right on his side.
The English king, Edward the Confessor,
had spent many years in Normandy
and, in that time, contemporary sources say,
had come to regard William as a brother or even a son
and had named him as his successor.
Sensing his impending death and fearing rebellion at home,
the childless Edward had dispatched Harold Godwinson,
his wife's brother,
and his Earl of Essex,
the richest and most powerful of the English lords,
to Normandy to pledge loyalty to William.
This Harold did, swearing on two caskets of holy relics.
But when Edward did die,
Harold, supported by the English nobility,
had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey
on the very day that Edward was laid to rest there.
To the truculent and ruthless William, this was an affront,
invasion with maximum force the only possible response.
The armies met here, near Hastings.
This is the spot where, traditionally, Harold fell,
fatally pierced through the eye with an arrow.
The site was later named after the engagement,
but it's named not with an English word like "fight",
but with a word
from the language of the Norman victors...
"battle".
Harold would be the last English-speaking king of England
for three centuries.
On Christmas Day 1 066,
William was crowned in Westminster Abbey
in a service conducted in English and Latin.
William spoke French throughout.
A new king and a new language were in authority in England.
Enemy.
Castle.
"Castle" was one of the first French words
to enter the English language.
The Normans built a chain of them
to impose their rule on the country.
This magnificent castle at Rochester
was one of the first to be fortified in stone.
By blood, the Normans were from the same stock as the Norsemen
who'd invaded in earlier centuries.
But they no longer spoke a Germanic language...
rather, what we'd call Old French,
which had grown from Latin roots.
Many of the words they spoke
would have been very strange to the native English,
but would quickly become unpleasantly familiar.
Our words "army", "archer",
"soldier", "garrison", and "guard"
all come from the conquering Norman French.
French was the language that spelled out the architecture
of the new social order...
"crown", "throne", and "court",
"duke", "baron", and "nobility",
"peasant", "vassal", "servant".
The word "govern" comes from French,
as do "liberty", "authority", "obedience", and "traitor".
The Normans took the law into their own hands.
"Felony", "arrest", "warrant",
"justice", "judge", and "jury" all come from French.
And so do "accuse", "acquit",
"sentence", "condemn", "prison", and "jail".
It's been estimated
that in the three centuries after the conquest,
about 1 0,000 French words colonised the English language.
They didn't all come in immediately,
but the conquest opened a conduit of French vocabulary
that's remained open, on and off, ever since.
Today, French words are all around us.
City,
market,
porter.
Here we are!
Look, one fabulous salmon, weighs about 1 4 pound.
It is a fabulous fish.
We got some fabulous mackerel. They've come up from Aberdeen.
Next to them are the oysters. They come from the Essex coast.
Sole.
BRAGG: Pork,
sausage,
bacon.
MAN: Nice bit of fruit! Oranges, they're juicy. Lemons!
BRAGG: Grape, tart,
biscuit, sugar.
Cream.
BRAGG: Fry.
Vinegar.
Nearly 500 words dealing with food, cooking, and eating alone
entered English from French...
just a fraction of the imports
which would enrich the English word hoard
in the centuries after the Norman conquest.
Within 20 years of taking control of the country,
William sent his officers out to take stock of his kingdom.
The monks of Peterborough,
who were still recording the events of history in English
in "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle",
noted disapprovingly
that not one piece of land escaped the survey,
"not even an ox or a cow or a pig".
The "Domesday Book"... there are, in fact, two volumes...
show us how complete the Norman takeover of English land was
and how widespread their influence and their language.
The Norman settlement
had concentrated the wealth of England
more than ever before or since.
The native ruling class from before the conquest
had been slaughtered, banished,
or disinherited in favour of William's followers.
Half of the country was in the hands of just 1 90 men.
Half of that was held by just 1 1 men.
And not one of these great landowners spoke English.
MAN: Gisleberti De Gand...
Raoulh De Insula...
BRAGG: When this record of the country was drawn up,
it was written in Latin, not Norman French...
MAN: ...David De Argent...
BRAGG: ...and certainly not English.
MAN: ...Rann Fris Ugeris...
BRAGG: Between them, French and Latin had become the languages
of state, law, the church,
and history itself in England.
The writing of English became increasingly rare.
Even "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" guttered into silence.
MAN: "Hwat!
We gardena inyear dagum feodcyninga, frym gefrunon..."
BRAGG: The language of Alfred and the "Beowulf" poet
had lost all the prestige that it had slowly built up.
In a country of three languages,
English was now a poor third, bottom of the pile.
The English language had been forced underground.
It would take 300 years for it to re-emerge,
and when it did, it would have changed dramatically.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media