Free The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg

Francien, contributed to the speech of the country. So “catch,” “real,” “reward,” “wage,” “warden” and “warrant” from Norman French sat alongside “chase,” “royal,” “regard,” “gauge,” “guardian” and “guarantee” from Francien (all given Modern English spelling).
    Perhaps more important than the vocabulary were the ideas which winged in beside them. This is a clear example of what happened time and again: new words seeded new ideas. In the palace, new ideas from across the Channel were now in the air. The new words that expressed them included “courtesy” (cortesie), “honour” (honor), “damsels” (damesieles), “tournament” (torneiement). The vocabulary of “romance” and “chivalry” brought the biggest culture shock to England since Alfred set out to re-educate the people: but where Alfred did this for God and for unity, the court of Henry and Eleanor did it for culture and pleasure. Eleanor was considered the most cultured woman in Europe. She attempted to change the sensibility of this doom-struck, crushed, occupied outpost of an island and it was she more than anyone else who patronised poets and troubadours whose verses and songs created the Romantic image of the Middle Ages as the Age of Chivalry — a glorious vision, little, if at all, realised outside the beautifully illustrated and ornamented pages of medieval literature.
    But the new ideas came in and they bedded themselves in England and worked their way through the culture for at least seven centuries to come, as the gentle knight became the gentleman. Before Eleanor arrived in England the word “chevalerie,” formed around the word for horse, had simply meant cavalry. It was the fierceness of the mounted warriors that had carried the day at Hastings and since then many of the English knew the Norman chevalerie as little more than mounted thugs and bullies.
    Now, under the influence of Eleanor, mounted horsemen began their transformation into knights. The word “chivalry” came to mean a raft of ideas and behaviour, infused with honour and altruism. Words that prescribed how to act towards one’s liege-lord, friends, enemies and, most of all, towards fair, cruel ladies. This, the preserve of the court, took the preoccupations of the state even further away from English, which had no place in the throne room. The way the society regarded itself had been pointed in a dramatically different direction, and initially it was nothing to do with Old England or Old English. Neither was needed.
    It was in Eleanor’s reign that poets brought the stories of Arthur and his Knights out of history or legend into poetry and a strengthening of the legend. There was a growing poetic tradition in this newly enriched language. The twelfth century saw the flourishing of the great Arthurian Romance poet Chrétien de Troyes and the poetess of magical fables Marie de France. Both were writing courtly verse in French; Marie by her own account was writing it in England.
    Interestingly there is some evidence that both these writers plundered the riches of the locals as all colonisers do. Chrétien derived his material from England — possibly through Wace’s French translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae. Marie de France tells us that she translated some of her stories from English into French (“de l’engleis en romang”).
    The language was cultivated for itself and became far richer than that of the first Norman settlers. 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 courtly love. That too had and still has a tremendous influence on poetry and songs of affairs of the heart, of the joy and pain of love. It propelled