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Updated: July 28, 2025
The crier of a country town, in any of England's fertile provinces, never proclaims the loss of a yeoman's sporting-dog, the auction of a bankrupt dealer's stock-in-trade, or the impounding of a strayed cow, until he has commanded, in Norman-French, the attention of the sleepy rustics.
This is shown by the fact that the Brut, a poem of 32,250 lines, translated from a French original into English about 1205, has not more than a hundred words of Norman-French origin. At first the Normans despised the tongue of the conquered Saxons, but, as time progressed, the two races intermarried, and the children could hardly escape learning some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses.
"They call him the Khawadji, and they never use that name for one of themselves." "He's too free with his whip. Yon tall man that tends his horses could tell something of that, I make my guess." One night they came on the Khawadji's stable-man caring for a lame horse with such skill that Nicholas spoke of it. By some instinct he spoke in Norman-French. The other answered in the same tongue.
Daneshold they called it now; that is to say, the home, or hold of the Danes; and since they now spoke Norman-French more often than Saxon- English or Danish, Wulf's son was named Loup, which was pretty good French for "wolf;" and one more generation fled away under his rule, with nothing to record.
There, jumbled together, he will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood Kenward or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister now names of farmers in my own parish or other Norman-French names which may be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll and side by side the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian house-carle, proud of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the Smiter, whose forefather, whether he be now peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own forge.
There Norman-French was for a long time spoken. Though the Franks had supplanted the Romans, the Roman language continued to be spoken.
When Alred approached the Atheling, with a blending of reverent obeisance and paternal cordiality, the boy carelessly cried, in a barbarous jargon, half German, half Norman-French: "There, come not too near, you scare my hawk. What are you doing? You trample my toys, which the good Norman bishop William sent me as a gift from the Duke. Art thou blind, man?"
Between the Saxon contingent of King Richard's army and the French soldiers there could indeed be no quarrel, for the Saxons understood no word of their language; but with the Normans the case was different, for the Norman-French, which was spoken by all the nobles and their retainers in Britain, was as nearly as possible the same as that in use in France.
This book, in Norman-French, contains the results of his survey of England made in 1085-1086, and consists of two volumes in vellum, a large folio of three hundred and eighty-two pages, and a quarto of four hundred and fifty pages. For a long time it was kept under three locks in the exchequer with the King's seal, and is now kept in the Public Record Office.
It is well-known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king's English.
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