Intoduction

1.2.Consequences of Norman Conquest.

Since the Norman Conquest in 1066 the French language became more and more important.English nobility and other important positions in the church,mili-tary and other institutions were newly occupied by the French invaders.Now the upper class in England was replaced by Normans and French became their dominant language.However,the new ruling class formed only a minority of the population and the language existed side by side.The new kings of England spoke French,took French wives and lived mostly in France.

In the following years,the new order was accepted by the English people and as a result the English and Normans formed a new assorted society.

The most immediate consequence of the Norman domination in Britain is to be seen in the wide use of French language in many spheres of life.For almost three hundred years French was the official language of administration:it was the language of king’s court,the law courts,the church,the army and the castle.It was also every day language of many nobles,of the higher clergy and of many townspeople in the South.The intellectual life,literature and education were in the hands of French-speaking people;French,alongside Latin,was the language of writing.Teaching was largely conducted in French and boys at school were taught to translate their Latin into French instead of English.

It was not the case that Norman and Central French annihilated existing English words. Instead, these sources plus Latin created registers; i.e. styles of speaking and vocabularies that could be distinguished in terms of how polite or formal they are. So English suddenly has twins or even lexical triplets of words with the same referents, but different social connotations.

kingly (O.E) royal (Fr.) regal (L.)

rise (O.E.) mount (Fr.) ascend (L.)

ask question interrogate

fast firm secure

holy sacred consecrated

fire flame conflagration

How do we distinguish these words? While they have the same reference or meaning, the Old English source is more down-to-earth and common than the more polite French-based word, and the more ornate or sophisticated Latin-based one.

Let’s try to figure out which is the word that is native—Old English—and which is originally a French borrowing:

ox beef

pig, swine pork

infant child

judgment doom

freedom liberty

felicity happiness

help aid

conceal hide

holy saintly

love charity

meal repast

aroma stench

wedding marriage

desire wish

It was in this period that Parliament began its gradual evolution into the democratic body which is it today. The word “parliament”, which comes from the French word parler (to speak), was first used in England in the thirteenth century to describe an assembly of nobles called together by the king. In 1295, the Model Parliament set the pattern for the future by including elected representatives from urban and rural areas.

Many food names in English are French borrowings. After the Norman Conquest under William the Conqueror (1066) French words began to enter the English language increasing in number for more than tree centuries. Among them were different names of dishes. The Norman barons brought to Britain their professional cooks who showed to English their skill.

Learners of the English language notice that there is one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another for the same beast when it is killed and coked. The matter is that English peasants preserved Anglo-Saxon names for the animals they used to bring to Norman castles to sell. But the dishes made of the meat got French names. That is why now we have native English names of animals: ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, and French names of meals from whose meat they are cooked: beef, veal, mutton, pork. (By the way “lamb” is an exception, it is a native Anglo-Saxon word). A historian writes that an English peasant who had spent a hard day tending his oxen, calves, sheep and swine probably saw little enough of the beef, veal, mutton and pork, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters.

The French enriched English vocabulary with such food words as bacon, sausage, gravy; then: toast, biscuit, cream, sugar. They taught the English to have for dessert such fruits as: fig, grape, orange, lemon, pomegranate, peach and the names of these fruits became known to the English due the French. The English learned from them how to make pastry, tart, jelly, treacle. From the French the English came to know about mustard and vinegard. The English borrowed from the French verbs to describe various culinary processes : to boil, to roast, to stew,

to fry.

One famous English linguist exclaimed: “It is melancholy to think what the

English dinner would have been like, had there been no Norman Conquest!”.

For all that, England never stopped being an English-speaking country. The bulk of the population held fast to their own tongue: the lower classes in the towns, and especially in the country-side, those who lived in the Midlands and up north, continued to speak English and looked upon French as foreign and hostile. Since most of the people were illiterate, the English language was almost exclusively used for spoken communication.

At first the two languages existed side by side without mingling. Then, slowly and quickly, they began to permeate each other. The Norman barons and the French town-dwellers had to pick up English words to make themselves understood while the English began to use French words in current speech. A good knowledge of French would mark a person of higher standing giving him a certain social prestige probably many people become bilingual and had a fair command of both languages.