CHAPTER III

ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION

Durbeck. Chester. Candle. Cross. Law. Person. Chair. Obligation. Size.

HERE could hardly be a better example of the

TH

uneasy movement of Aryan migrations than the history of the settlement of the British Isles. We find them, first of all, as far back as we can look, inhabited by an unknown population who left their barrows and tumuli dotted about the country, whose society seems to have been matriarchally organized, and who, if the name Pict may be taken as any indication, probably had the habit of painting or tattooing their bodies. At length, several centuries before our era, the first Aryan wave reaches these shores in the persons of the Celts, who spread over England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where they have been pointed out and variously described by historians as Britons, Ancient Britons, Welsh, Gaels, Celts, .. They settle down and live for some centuries the primitive life of savages, till half-way through the first century B.C. they are disturbed by a little Aryan tongue reaching out from the wellnigh spent Italian wave. Pagan Rome establishes a brief dominion over a small portion of Britain, drives roads, builds camps and cities, and after some four hundred years is sucked back again to the Continent. Another century, and the Angles and Saxons, borne forward

on the crest of the Teutonic wave, overrun the main island, driving the Celts into its extremities, whence they regurgitate, before finally settling down, upon various military and missionary enterprises which have played an important part in our history. But already another ripple of the Teutonic wave is upon us, rocking over the seas in the long boats of the Scandinavian Vikings, and almost before they have left their impress on the eastern quarter of the land, a third-the Normans this time-is breaking on Britain once again at Pevensey. The liquid metaphor is unavoidable, for no other image seems adequate to express what actually happened. To watch through the glasses of history the gradual arrival and settlement of the Aryans in this country is to be reminded irresistibly of the rhythmic wash and backwash, the little accidental interplays of splash and ripple, which accompany the tide as it fills an irregularly shaped pool.

Every one of these motions has left its mark on our language, though the traces of the earliest immigration of all-that of the Celts-are rather scarce. The clearest vestiges of it are to be found in the proper names of our rivers, for a surprising number of these contain one or other of the various Celtic terms for 'water' or 'river', e.g. avon, dwr (ter or der), uisge (wye, usk, is, ax), while the other parts of the name are often composed of words for water' taken from another Aryan language, as in Derwentwater, Windermere, Easeburn, Ashbourne, ... An ingenious theory has been evolved to account for this. In the case of the Dur-beck in Nottinghamshire, and the Dur-bach in Germany, it has been supposed that in the first place a body of Celtic immigrants squatted by the side of a stream which, as they were not extensive

travellers, they knew simply as the dwr The Water'. Their Teutonic successors inquired the name of the stream, and on learning that it was dwr, naturally assumed that this was a proper name. They accordingly adopted it, and tacked on one of their own words for water-bach' or 'beck', just as we may speak of the 'Avon River' or the 'River Ouse'. The phenomenon occurs so persistently both in this country and all over Europe that this explanation can hardly be altogether fanciful.

The four hundred years of Roman colonization, following Julius Caesar's landing in 55 B.C.—years which left such permanent and conspicuous vestiges on the face of England-have made little enough impression on her language. Fresh as the memory of that civilization must have been when the Angles and Saxons arrived, they seem to have learnt nothing from it. A few towns, such as York (Eboracum), retain in a more or less corrupted form the particular titles given to them by their Roman founders, but outside these almost the only Latin words which our ancestors can be proved to have taken from the Britons are port and 'castra' (a camp), surviving to-day in Chester and in the ending of many other town names such as Winchester, Lancaster, Gloucester,

Then, during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles and Saxons began to flow in from the Continent, bringing with them old Aryan words like dew, night, star, and wind, which they had never forgotten, new words which they had coined or developed in their wanderings, and Latin words which they had learnt as provincial subjects of the Roman Empire,1 bringing, in fact, that peculiar Teutonic variant of the Aryan tongue which 1 See p. 31.

forms the rich nucleus of our English vocabulary. Their arrival here was followed almost immediately by their conversion to Christianity; and this moment in our history was a pregnant one for the future of Europe. For now the two great streams of humanity— Teutonic blood from the one side, and from the other the old classical civilization, bearing in its dark womb the strange, new Christian impulse-met. The Latin and Greek words which entered our language at this period are concerned for the most part with the dogma and ritual of the Church; such are altar, candle, clerk, creed, deacon, hymn, martyr, mass, nun, priest, psalm, shrine, stole, temple, and many others. Far more important was the alteration which now gradually took place in the meanings of many old Teutonic wordswords like heaven, which had hitherto denoted a canopy', or bless, which had meant to 'consecrate with blood'. But to this we must return later, when we come to consider what is called the "semantic history of English words-that is to say, the history of their meanings.

Although Christianity did not come officially from Rome to England until Augustine landed in A.D. 597, it had already found its way here indirectly during the Roman occupation. Obliterated by the pagan AngloSaxons, it had continued to flourish in Ireland, and the actual conversion of most of the English is believed to have been the work of Celtic Christians, who returned from Ireland and established missionary bases in Scotland and Northumbria. Their influence was so extensive that Scotia', the old name for Ireland, came to be applied to the country which we still know as Scotland. Pat and Taffy, the popular nicknames for an Irishman and a Welshman, are descended from the Celtic saints, Patrick and David,

and it is interesting to reflect that the Celtic missionaries were starting their work in Northumbria at almost exactly the same moment as St. Augustine landed in Kent. Thus Christianity enfiladed England, as it were, from both ends; and while the southern Anglo-Saxons were learning the Greek and Latin words to which we have referred, the Irish Christians in the north had been making the language a present of a few Celtic words, two of which-druid and lough— have survived. Again, although the name for the instrument of the Passion comes to us ultimately from the Latin 'crux', yet the actual form which the word cross has taken in our language is very largely due to these Irish Christians. But for them it would probably have been something like cruke, or cruce, or crose. This word has an interesting history. It was adopted from the old Irish cros' by the Northmen, and it is due to them that the final "s" took on that hissing sound which is represented in modern spelling by "ss". We may suppose, therefore, that but for the Irish Christians the word would have been something like cruce, and but for the Northmen it might have been croz or croy.

In the ninth and tenth centuries these Northmen, the Scandinavian Teutons, whom our ancestors called Danes, established an ascendancy over a large part of England. They seem to have mingled easily with the English, and we can trace back to their dialect some of the very commonest features of our language. Thus, the Scandinavian pronouns, they, them, their, she, gradually replaced less convenient Anglo-Saxon forms, and it is to the Northmen that we owe that extremely useful grammatical achievement which has enabled us to form both the genitive and the plural of nearly all nouns by merely adding the letter "s".