Basic HTML Version
8
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
class; Anglo-Saxon of the lower class and one result
is that Anglo-Saxon words narrowed in their
meaning to describe only the cruder and dirtier
aspects of life. While the Anglo-Saxons
worked
hard,
the Normans enjoyed the
profit and leisure.
Over the next 300 years ten thousand French words
colonised our vocabulary but as Anglo-Saxon and
the Norman French gradually merged throughout
the later Middle Ages there was some linguistic
reconciliation between the old and the new with the
result that many modern English phrases and sayings
still include a word from Norman French alongside
a synonymous Anglo-Saxon one:
law and order,
lord and master, love and cherish, ways and means.
That Old Chestnut
Incidentally is it gaol or jail? Is the first English and
the second American? Nope. They are both English,
gaol arrived in the 1200s and jail a bit later and here
we really can blame the French for the ensuing
centuries of confusion. The trouble was words were
spelt and sometimes pronounced differently by the
French from Normandy and the posher French from
Paris. Jail has become the much more common
spelling and it’s probably because that’s how it is
spelt on the Monopoly board.
With English no longer the dominant language for
law and government what had been started by
Alfred as a tendency toward standardisation for
Anglo-Saxon writing was all but stopped in its
tracks. Some English was still written, but far less
than before and where it was written down the words
were spelled out just as they as they sounded, with
predictably irregular results.
Cockneys
The term Cockney with its geographic, social and
linguistic associations was coined by the Norman
French when they arrived in, rather than conquered,
London. It is said that the French found the Londoners
with their refined ways to be a bit soppy, weak limbed
and knock kneed and their slang Norman French term
for these London milksops was cockneys. To this
day in London William is William the Norman, not
William the Conqueror for in London he sought the
approval of the City by agreeing to recognise the
ancient rights and customs of the City of London.
The term since time immemorial has its roots in this
Norman recognition of pre-existing laws and it’s
definition in English law is since 1189 in the reign
of Richard the Lionheart.
Richard himself spoke Langue-d’oil, a French dialect,
and Occitan, a Romance language spoken in southern
France and nearby regions which of course is
something of a trend with English monarchs – the
Georgians, I and II certainly spoke little or no English
at all. The notion of our rulers not quite speaking like
the rest of us is extraordinarily pervasive in our culture
and probably accounts for why the joke was always
that the seldom heard but much seen Queen Mother
spoke with an alarming accent – Spitting Image had
her speaking with a Brummie twinge sounding a bit
like the late great Beryl Reid.
Norf & Sarf
Traditionally the Cockney was born within the sound
of Bow Bells but as this today would mean by and
large only loaded Barbican residents would qualify so
the definition is used with a romantic rather than a