And so English went into hibernation, unrecorded in official documents for centuries, but undergoing profound changes of grammar and vocabulary. But the new landowning class had to communicate with its serfs somehow and, as the years passed, intermarriage took place between conquerors and conquered, and not just between their bodies and estates, but between their words.Īfter King John lost most of his French possessions in the 1210s, the Norman aristocracy had to face the fact that its future lay in this foggy island and reconcile itself to its history and culture.
With the Conquest Anglo-Saxon ceased at a stroke to be the language of court or church, replaced by Norman French and Latin respectively. Whereas a ‘pidgen’ is a simplified form which two language users or groups create with each other on a temporary basis, a creole is a full and stable entity in its own right. The English languageĮnglish can be regarded as a ‘creole’, that’s to say a language created by two or more distinct language groups as a mid-way between them. In this blog post I am summarising the consequences of the Norman Conquest.
I have summarised the main story in another blog post: In the final chapters, Morris weighs the achievements and the costs of the Conquest, some of which are obvious, some less so. In his marvellous book, The Norman Conquest, Marc Morris gives a very detailed explanation of the events leading up to the invasion of 1066, beginning over fifty years earlier with King Ethelred’s marriage to a wife from Normandy – thus introducing the notion of a Norman claim to the throne of England – following the complex story up to the bloody Battle of Hastings, and then a full description of the aftermath, the rebellions and reprisals, the cities and towns and countryside burned and devastated, the gruesome process of colonisation – before a final, sketchier summary of the struggle for the succession after the Conqueror’s death in 1087.
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