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country were copied using the West-Saxon dialect.
This was a key policy of Alfred the Great - to use a
common language to unify the English and build a
nation. This standard written language is sometimes
referred to as 'Classic West-Saxon'.
The Many Merry Old Englands
We know about this because of the differences in
spelling. Words were written just as they sounded,
there are no silent letters in Old English and this gives
us clues to how people sounded in different areas of
the country. Take merry, a good Old English word
first seen in a 9th century manuscript written in the
time of, and probably for, King Alfred the Great.
It was spelled myrige and we think it was probably
pronounced mi-ree-yuh but how that the
y
was
pronounced varied according to locale which is
reflected in how it was written down.
I don’t want to make your head spin but in total there
are 50 different spellings of merry. The scribes who
used the letter
i
to represent the
y
sound were based
in the South around Winchester. Further west it was
written down as a
u
and in Kent it was an
e
and
although for a time Winchester prevailed it is
ultimately this last use that gradually became the
norm reflecting, of course, the fact that what went on
in London and the South East eventually dominated
the rest of the country or at least became the norm of
the ruling elite.
More Norsemen only this Time They’re French!
The Anglo-Saxons all but wiped out the language of
the Celts and within just a few centuries we all began
to sound Friesian as we spoke regional versions of
Old English. The Viking Danes came within a
whisker of ousting Old English but their impact was
largely restricted to the old kingdoms of East Anglia
and Northumbria where the sound of the Vikings
lives on to some degree. But in 1066 English was
in danger again. The Norman French arrived and
conquered. How many today realise that William’s
Normans were themselves Norsemen by blood?
But although the Normans conquered Britain, their
Norse language had long ago been conquered by the
French and the language they spoke, the sound they
brought with them, was a variety of French. William
never learned English, his coronation in Westminster
Abbey on Christmas Day was conducted in English
and Latin but William answered in French.
The Norman French brought their war words – army,
archer, soldier and created and named their new
social order – crown, throne, nobility, duke, peasant,
servant. Instead of the French word Count they had to
use Earl, for
Count
to the English sounded perilously
close to a good old Anglo-Saxon word that would
never do for the new rulers! The Normans looked
upon the conquered Anglo-Saxons as social
inferiors. French became the language of the upper