The Adventure Of English - Episode 1 Birth of a Language - BBC Documentary

Full Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0&list=PLbBvyau8q9v4hcgNYBp4LCyhMHSyq-lhe
The modern Frisian language is the closest sounding language to the English used approximately 2000 years ago, when the people from what is now the north of the Netherlands travelled to what would become England, and pushed the Celtic language - ancestor of modern Welsh - (Celts) to the western side of the island. Words like "blue" can be recognised in the Frisian language.

Bragg then discusses how English dialects in certain areas of the United Kingdom were heavily influenced by historical events such as the invasion of the Vikings in the east, contributing words such as "sky" to the English language.

Short video clips of discussions with language expert Kathryn A. Lowe appear a number of times during the episode; she offers wonderful insight into the evolution of Anglo-Saxon and Old English.

[♪ choral music]

Narrator: 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 has established it's 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 1,000 million people,

around the world.

[♪ instrumental]

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.

[♪ instrumental]

Successive invasions introduced,

then threatened to destroy our language.

Our first program tells that story.

For 300 years,

English was forced underground.

Our second program tells how it survived,

and how it fought back.

[♪ instrumental]

Our third program 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 programs,

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 1,000 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 21st century

has become the international language of business.

The language in which the world's citizens communicate.

[♪ instrumental]

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 programs are about the words we think in,

talk in, write in, sing in.

The words that describe the life we live.

[♪ soft, ethereal music]

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.

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 the English sounded like,

1,500 years ago.

(man speaking in foreign language)

Narrator: In Friesland,

many people start their day,

listening to the weather forecast,

from popular weatherman,

Piet Paulusma.

(man speaking in foreign language)

Narrator: Some of his words might sound familiar,

like three and four,

frost and freeze.

(man speaking in foreign language)

Narrator: Mist and blue.

(man speaking in foreign language)

The reason we can recognize 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.

[♪ ethereal music]

The west Germanic tribes

who invented these words

were a war-like, adventurous people.

They'd been on the move through Europe

for the best part of a 1,000 years,

and now has 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 Saxon's,

made sail to look for a better life.

And they took their language,

our language, with them.

[♪ adventurous music]

(man speaking in foreign 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 Britains, 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,

reported 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 tribe

used to describe them.

It was "walhaz,'

a name that lives on in our modern language as Welsh,

1500 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 invader's tribes.

To adopt their culture, and their language.

[♪ meditative music]

The Celt's and their language were pushed to the margins.

Only a handful of words from the Celtic language

has survived into modern English.

In the north, where I come from,

we have crag, meaning rock,

combe, meaning deep valley,

and dialect words like brat and brock for badger.

[♪ meditative music]

There are traces in place names,

the "tor" in Torpenhow,

spelled as tor-pen-how,

a neighboring village to my own,

that comes from the Celtic for peak.

The "caer" of Carlisle, means a fortified place.

In the south, they left us the names of

Thames and Haven, 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, names after the Angles

who gave England it's name.

Mercia in the 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, everyday.

[♪ pop music]

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.

[♪]

[♪ Battle Hymn of the Republic tune]

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.

Man: They've got five strikers,

none of them can really finish

(mens voices overlapping)

Man: We just need some youth from (overlapping voices) really.

Narrator: Examine the language you use today,

and you'll still find hundreds of words

from a language over 1500 years old.

Keywords, ranging from the names we give family members,

to numbers.

(male voices overlapping)

Man: I think we'll win 2-1 today.

Man: I'll drink to that.

Man: I live in like a Westham area,

and I've got a lot of Westham friends,

but for this game, we'll be enemies.

Man: The home games,

I would go with the guys,

we meet up from the (indecipherable) website,

or with my daughter, to other games,

she's five at the moment,

she loves it, she loves singing the songs,

the nice ones anyway.

Man: I was coming with my son,

so we just go in to get something to eat first,

go into the grounds, stay with 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.

Narrator: 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 ask language expert Katie Lowe.

Katie: They sound a little different,

I mean the Old English for "son"

is (pronunciation) "sunu."

That's not so very different.

"Game" is (pronunciation) "gamen,"

"ground" is (pronunciation) "grund."

And I notice that Steve says that

his daughter loves singing songs,

if you said that in Old English,

it would be

[speaks sentence in Old English]

and you can see that sounds pretty much like modern English.

Narrator: So in fact, you can have a good conversation in Old English.

Katie: Oh, yes you can indeed.

I mean, each word I'm saying now,

is from Old English.

Narrator: Do you have any estimate of how many words

there were swirling around,

compared with how many words we have now?

Katie: We think it was in the region of around 25,000 words.

Compare that with an average desk dictionary,

which maybe contains something like 100,000 words,

it sounds pretty small.

But if you think about the fact that

an average educated person

would probably have about 10,000 words

in their active vocabulary,

there are plenty of words to go round.

[♪ choral music]

Narrator: English took it's first steps away from it's tribal roots

with the revival of Christianity.

(man speaking in foreign language)

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.

[♪]

Narrator: 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 alter,

apostulus 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.

[♪ choral music]

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 survived,

suggests Runes were mainly used for

short, practical messages, or grafiti.

(Gregorian monk chanting)

The Latin alphabet was different,

with it's curves and bows,

it allowed words to be easily written using pen and ink

onto pages of parchment or velum,

which gathered together, into a book,

could be widely circulated.

[♪]

Christianity brought the book to the east shores.

Verbum, the word.

Soon a native culture of scholarship began to flower,

a culture based on Latin and on writing.

[♪ chanting continues]

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.

[♪ chanting continues]

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,

we can just about recognize as our own.

[♪ chanting continues]

(man speaking in foreign language: The Lord's Prayer]

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

and increasingly wide and subtle range of human experience.

[♪ intense music]

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 in foreign language: Beowulf)

Man: So, the Spear-Danes, and days gone by,

and the kings who rule them have courage and greatness.

We have heard of those prince's heroic campaigns.

[♪ death-like music]

No one knows who composed

the epic Beowulf, sometime between the

mid 7th and the 10th century.

It's the first great poem in the English Language.

The beginning of a glorious tradition

which would lead to Chaucer,

Shakespeare and beyond.

The poem celebrates the glory days

of the Germanic tribes,

optimizing the heroic warrior who gives the poem it's name.

The power of a language can be heard in this passage,

which introduces Beowulf's archenemy,

the monster Grendel.

(man speaking in foreign language: Beowulf)

Man: In off the moors, down through the mist-bands,

God cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

(man speaking in foreign language: Beowulf)

Man: The bane of the race of men roamed forth,

hunting for a prey in the high hall.

(man speaking in foreign language: Beowulf)

Man: Spurned and joyless, he journeyed on ahead,

and arrived at the bawn.

(man speaking in foreign language: Beowulf)

Man: Then his rage boiled over,

he ripped open the mouth of the building,

maddening for blood.

[♪ dramatic music]

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.

Narrator: What does that tell us about English at that time, Seamus?

What kind of language was it when you came to it?

Do you think this is a fully developed poetic language?

Seamus: It's certainly a fully developed poetic language.

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.

[♪ light chords]

There's a wonderful forthright capacity to make up

extra language in Anglo-Saxon.

The words are very clear and direct,

"ban and hus" for example, bone-house,

there you have the house for the body,

the word for the body.

Beautiful words for instruments,

the harp is called "gleo-bem", the glee-beam.

The happy wood, or else the joy wood,

"gomen-wudu."

Swords, or shield, a 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,

it gives it a great beauty.

Narrator: How extensive is the vocabulary?

Seamus: I think there are 40,000 words recorded in Beowulf.

But, a lot of the words repeat themselves,

in this is more in the poetry than in the prose,

if we heard an Anglo-Saxon speaker speaking,

under his roof to his companion,

we'd probably hear a very quicker,

a different less elaborate language from Beowulf.

Narrator: Would you say it is very clearly written to be read aloud?

Seamus: 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 in foreign language: Beowulf)

Seamus: Certainly, you open the book,

[speaks the first lines of Beowulf]

asks to be uttered,

there are many speeches in it,

and it comes off the tongue with terrific directness.

[♪ dramatic music]

Narrator: Latin and Greek had created great bodies of literatiure

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 underway,

but while the siege 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.

[♪ ominous music]

[♪ music becomes motivated]

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.

It was the vikings who sacked and burned

the religious center that stood here before.

To these Pagan pirates,

rampaging out of their longships in 793,

this great center 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 barbells around a viking's neck.

[♪ intense, motivated music]

Today, the vikings may seem romantic,

reenacting their rituals a good day out.

Over 12 centuries ago,

their arrival was not so cheerful.

(bell ringing)

To many, it seemed the signal to the end for civilization.

(fire crackling)

A year after raising 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,

it's books with it.

(fire crackling)

[♪ haunting voices]

It was a start of 70 years of attack,

during which the vikings savaged this easten 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 865, the vikings landed a great army

south of here, in East Anglia.

[♪]

Within 5 years, the viking invaders who are 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 of the Celtic language

it had supplanted,

virtual oblivion.

English, was in need of a champion.

And it found one.

[♪ triumphant music]

King Alfred's statue stands here in Winchester,

the capital of his aged 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 savior 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.

[♪ somber music]

It was the Victorians who 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 878, the Danes won what appeared

to be a decisive battle at Chippenham in Wiltshire.

[♪ mischievous music]

Alfred, with only a few followers,

went on the run into the marshes of Somerset.

Moving as a contemporary wrote,

"Under difficulties, through wood,

and into inaccessible places."

Legend has Alfred, unrecognized,

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 cozy.

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 guerrilla attacks against the occupying

forces of Guthrum, 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 878,

Alfred sent out a call for the men of the Shirefords,

the county armies, to join him.

Around 4,000 men, many 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 rigdeways 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 route of the Danes,

by the West Saxons.

Modern historians question that,

but there is no doubt that Alfred prevailed.

His crown, and his kingdom were secure,

and more importantly for our story,

so was the English language.

[♪ triumphant music]

The Danes surrendered,

their leader was baptized as a Chrisitan,

and Alfred's crucial victory

was memorialized 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 the 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.

(street life sounds)

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.

Communities mixed,

and so did the languages,

English, rather than being engulfed by the Dane's language,

began to absorb it.

I'm in the market town of Hexum,

in the Northeast of England.

Maps of the area,

show just how widespread the Danish settlement was.

[♪ pompous music]

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 was 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 the school where I was,

just across the country,

there was a Patterson, a Johnson,

a Rolandson, and another Dickinson.

Outside of 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 in the

North and West in area, and the South and the East.

Above all, you can hear the echos of the

Danes old Norse language,

in the way people speak.

(man speaking indecipherable)

Man: It's a little field on it's own,

Willy says there's a deck down by the side of it,

goes down through a little wood.

Man: ...down by, down in that little guard thing is it...

Man: It's like a little isolation,

feel it's only, it's only a couple of acres the whole thing.

Man: Interesting to see if your sheep sort of..

[indecipherable]

Narrator: 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 Wickham,

I remember hearing amusing dialect words like,

slattery for shower, slape for slippery,

yet for gate, lub for leap, yeck for oak, and yam for home,

as in "I's going yam."

Pure Norse, heard in Wickham, 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 everyday.

The 'sk' sounds are characteristic of old Norse,

and English borrowed words like,

skor, and sky, and skifa,

as well as perhaps a thousand others,

including anger, bowl, freckle, knife, neck, root, scowl, and window.

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 hyde, 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.

Katie: I think that the point about vocabulary,

is how much it astonishes by its ordinary nature,

words like, lore, egg, husband, leg, ill, die, ugly,

all these words are from old Norse,

and yet you wouldn't necessarily think they were foreign at all.

Most astounding of all,

I think are the pronouns: they, there, and then.

Those are also from old Norse.

Narrator: And in terms of grammar,

in a way, they simplified English, didn't they?

They took it away from its Germanic roots.

Katie: I think it's probably true to say that

old Norse effects 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 to the ends of things like,

articles and pronouns, and nouns,

and 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.

Narrator: Can you give us a very simple example of that?

Katie: Yes. Let's take a simple sentence like,

The king gave horses to his men.

That would be something like in old English,

(speaking 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 be have an "an" on it,

so it would be "blancan."

Now fortunately, 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

more horses to his men, than men to his horses,

but you can see that there is a potential there for difficulties.

And so we start to see prepositions being used,

in place of those endings which had become indistinct.

Narrator: 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 150 years had passed since the high days of Bede,

and the scholarly tradition had declined,

hastened on its way by a century of Viking reign.

In all the country,

Alfred could barely find a handful of priests

who could read and understand Latin.

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 has 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 needed a more radical solution,

a solution that hinged not on Latin,

but on English.

And he took English to new heights of achievement.

[♪ choral music]

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 Englands,'

"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."

[♪]

Narrator: Their own language was of course English.

Alfred didn't want to do away with Latin,

but he realized that it would be far easier

to teach people to read books written in the language that they spoke.

The best scholars,

could then go on to learn Latin,

an join Holy orders.

The rest, would still have access to scholarship

and spiritual guidance,

but it would be written in English.

[♪ triumphant music]

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,"

"will have the means to be able to devote themselves to it,"

"maybe set to study, for as long as they are of no other use,"

"until a time, they're able to read English writing well."

Narrator: Alfred had 5 books of religious instruction,

philosophy, and history,

translated from Latin into English.

A laborious and costly undertaking.

Copies were sent out to the 12 bishops of his kingdom,

for their wisdom to be spread as widely as possible.

To each bishop,

to emphasize 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, and enameled in gold,

it was discovered in 1693, in Somerset,

and is now on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

It's inscribed, "Alfred had me made,"

in English.

Alfred the great, had made the English language

the jewel in his crown.

(church bells ringing)

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 11th 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 land form in the 5th century,

and introduced their own language.

Now, in 1066, another wave of invaders was landing

the Normans.

When in 1066, 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,

has 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.

[♪ battle music]

The armies met here, near Hastings.

This is the spot, where traditionally,

Harold fell, fatally pierced through the eye with an arrow.

[♪ somber]

The site was later named after the engagement.

But, it's name, 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 3 centuries.

On Christmas day, 1066,

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.

[♪ dramatic music]

By blood, the Normans were from the same stock

as the Norse men, who'd invaded in earlier centuries.

But, they no longer spoke a Germanic language,

rather what we 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, vessel, 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, jury,

all come from French.

And so do accuse, acquit, sentence, condemn, prison, and jail.

It's been estimated,

that in the 3 centuries after the conquest,

about 10,000 French words colonized the English language.

They didn't all come in immediately.

But, the conquest opened a conduit of French vocabulary,

that should remain open, on and off, ever since.

Today, French words are all around us.

[♪ Parisian music]

City, market, porter,

Man: Here we are, we've got one fabulous salmon.

Weighs about 14 pounds.

He's a fabulous fish.

We've got some fabulous mackerel,

they've come out from Aberdeen.

Next, over to the oysters, they come from the Essex coast,

Sole.

[♪]

Narrator: Pork, sausage, bacon.

Man: Fruit, oranges, the juicy lemons.

Narrator: Grape, tart, biscuit, sugar.

Man: Creme.

Narrator: 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.

[♪ Parisian music continues]

When in 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.

[♪ somber music]

The Doomsday book, there are in fact 2 volumes,

show us how complete the Norman takeover

of the 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 favor of William's followers.

Half of the country was in the hands of just 190 men,

half of that was held by just 11 men.

And not one of these great land owners spoke English.

(man speaking in foreign language)

When this record of the country was drawn up,

it was written in Latin,

not Norman French,

and certainly not English.

(man speaking in foreign language)

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

gutted into silence.

(man speaking in foreign language)

The language of Alfred and the Beowulf poet,

had lost all prestige that it had slowly built up.

In a country of 3 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 dramtically.

[♪]