Free The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg Page B

even here, even in the heartland of written English, poetry, the French influence would not be denied. It has been suggested it is written in the style of Marie de France.
    There is a song which most refreshingly indicates that English was alive in the fields if not in the court. It was found in Reading Abbey complete with musical notation and is one of the first pieces of English that is still comparatively easy to recognise today. Even the few words which can seem a bit strange — “med” (meadow), “lhouþ” (lows), “verteth” (farts) and “swik” (cease) — fall into place.
    This is the first verse:
    Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing, cuccu.
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ the wude nu.
Sing cuccu.
Awe bleteþ after lomb
Lhouþ after calve cu
Bulluc sterteþ , bucke verteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu
Wel singe þu cuccu
Ne swikþu naver nu.
    The remarkable thing about this song is that there is not a word of French in it. Words like “summer,” “come” and “seed” go directly back to the Germanic. “Spring” and “wood” can be found in Beowulf. “Loud” and “sing” are in works authorised by Alfred the Great. There’s a pure line of Old English vocabulary and a taste for English song that comes from the land as far from the chivalric songs of Bertrand de Born as can be imagined. The French culture of Henry and Eleanor has not eliminated the common tongue.
    It was always bound to be a race against time. The longer Norman French dominated all the heights of communication, the weaker English would become.
    In the first hundred fifty years or so, the system of feudalism, introduced by William, defined all economic and social relations, expressed in French words like “villein” and “vassal,” “labourer” and “bailiff.” In the countryside, where ninety-five percent of the population lived in the Middle Ages, still speaking in a language oppressed or ignored, 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 subsistence level, for themselves.
    While the English-speaking peasants lived in small, often one-roomed mud and wattle cottages, or huts, their French-speaking masters lived in high stone castles. Many aspects of our modern vocabulary reflect the distinctions between them.
    English speakers tended the living cattle, for instance, which we still call by the Old English words “ox” or, more usually today, “cow.” French speakers ate 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” became “venison,” “pig” “pork,” English animal, French meat in every case.
    The English laboured, the French feasted.
    This cut-off, though, may well have worked to English’s advantage. A more extreme — though not too dissimilar — case would be that of slaves taken from their country of origin and holding on to their own language for identity, for secret communication, out of love and certainly out of stubbornness. The feudal system had cut-offs at several points, spaces between functions, between classes, gaps which were very rarely bridged. Conquered English could hunker down, brood on the iniquity of the French and the injustices of the world, cosset the English language as the one true mark of identity and dignity, bide its time, stealthily steal from the rich foreigners.
    Sport unsurprisingly provides proof of that. French seemed unstoppable everywhere. Falconry, a pursuit of the aristocracy which made many demands on the underlings, provides one example over these early centuries. The word “falcon”