0:000:00
At the Battle of Hastings, on 14 October 1066, King Harold was killed and his army was defeated by the Normans. On Christmas Day 1066 William was made king of England in London, and over the next four years he completed his conquest of England and Wales. This conquest had a very great effect on the development of the English language. William had large stone castles built, from which Norman soldiers controlled the towns and countryside. He took very large areas of land from rich English families and gave them to his Norman followers. Each of these new landowners had his own group of soldiers, and each gave land to his own followers, so there was usually one Norman family in each English village. Normans worked in the government and business and controlled the Church. Norman French immediately became the language of the governing classes and remained so for the next two hundred years. French and Latin were used in government, the Church, the law, and literature. Very little was written in English, although English monks continued writing The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle until 1154. English was still spoken, however, in its different regional dialects. The use of French continued in England during the twelfth century, partly because many of the Norman kings and landowners also had land in Normandy and other parts of France and they spent a lot of time there. French was not spoken only by people of Norman or French blood. It was also spoken by English people who wanted to be important. Slowly, however, English became more widely used by the Normans. Many of the Normans married English women, so they and their children spoke English. In 1177, one English writer reported that with 'free men' it was impossible to know who was English and who was Norman. In 1204 King John of England lost Normandy to the king of France, and during the next fifty years all the great landowning families in England had to give away their lands in France. They became less involved with France and began to feel that England was their country. The upper classes continued to speak French as a second language, and it was still used in government and the law. However, French started to become less important socially in England, partly because the Norman French spoken in England was not considered 'good' by speakers of Parisian French in France. The upper classes began to feel prouder of their English than of their French. Most ordinary people could not speak French at all. At the end of the thirteenth century, one poet wrote: 'Common men know no French among a hundred scarcely one.' Ordinary people did not need to learn French and probably did not want to. It was the language of the Normans, who had destroyed many English towns and villages. English was the language of the country, and people were proud of it and of their history. A poet in around 1300 wrote in his introduction to the poem Cursor Mundi: 'This book is translated into the English language for the love of the English people, English people of England, and for the common people to understand.' The continuing bad feeling between England and France resulted in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). During this time national feeling grew and the English language was seen more and more as an important part of being English. Between 1348 and 1375 England was hit several times by the illness known as the Black Death and almost a third of the people in England died. Many churchmen, monks, and school teachers died and were replaced by less educated men who spoke only English. There were fewer ordinary working people, so they could ask for better conditions from the landowners. Many left the land and went to work for more money in the towns. As ordinary people became more important, their language — English — became more important too. It was used more and more in government, as fewer and fewer people could understand French. In 1362, English was used for the first time at the opening of Parliament. When Henry IV became king in 1399, England had its first English-speaking king since 1066. In the following century English took the place of French in the home, in education, and in government. It also became the language of written communication so that after 1450 most letters were in English, not Latin. English had survived, but it had changed.