What I did yesterday
Apr. 21st, 2008 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsidheYesterday was the Mediaeval Faire at the State Library, to ring up interest in the exhibition of Manuscripts which is on at the moment (and I still haven't seen...). I was there as an exhibit, as part of the SCA's cohort. I brought along some of my calligraphy gear, expecting to be a little contextually appropriate colour.
I found myself, instead, talking to a three-deep crowd for six hours straight.
I now have a sore throat, for some reason.
I should point out that the girls were there in garb, Abi in a brand new dress made specially, and they were photographed like it was going out of fashion. They were both very chuffed at how pretty they were looking, and did really well until they started to crash and burn.
Another lady was there who does Illumination properly, with glair and powder pigments and sheet gold and everything. I was the scribe, writing things down and demonstrating different hands, the minim problem, that sort of thing. As I knew that I'd need something to copy, I brought along Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer. Thus, I got to answer questions about English, and its development, and why do we spell things like we do, and ‘I'm learning Latin, and this is latin, why can't I read it?’, and such things.
The ‘Why can't I read this Latin’ was easy: I just explained the development of Latin into Ecclesiastic Latin from the Classical they were learning (almost universally out of the Cambridge Latin Series), and when they complained that Church Latin pronounced things funny, I pointed out that Cicero might have called himself \Kikero\ in the Senate, but his mates would have called him \Chichero\ down the taberna.
Anyway: I gave the History of English several times, and I've got it down fairly pat by now. So, here it is:
You go back to the first inhabitants of Britain that we know about: the Britons. The Britons were Celtic, and spoke a language we now call Brythonic, which is close to Welsh. (Indeed, once upon a time, there was no difference.)
Then, about the time Jesus was being born, Julius Caesar found out about the existence of Britain, decided he liked it, and went to move in. He didn't succeed, but one of his successors did, and thus you have the Romano-Britons. They spoke Latin, and usually British as well, but Latin was winning.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years, and the Roman Empire was in trouble. In an effort to keep Rome safe, the legions were pulled out of Britain. It was around this point that a group of Germans decided they liked the look of Britain.
There were three tribes of Germans here: The Jutes from Jutland, the Saxons — named after their swords which were called sæxes, and a tribe who came from an area where two rivers split, leaving an angle of land... the Angles. And they all got together and went over the Channel to move into the poorly defended Britain. You may have read about this in your books about King Arthur.
So now we have the Anglo-Saxons living in their conquered territory. They forced out a lot of the original Britons. Many west into what is now Wales, some down into Cornwall, many fled back over the Channel and set up a home in exile, which they called “Little Britain”... Brittany.
The Anglo-Saxons split up and named the areas where they settled quite logically. There were the West Saxons and the East Saxons (Wessex and Essex), the Northern Folk and the Southern Folk (Norfolk and Suffolk), the area where most Angles had settled (Anglia, East and West), and the whole place was now known as ‘Angla Land’, the land of the Angles: England.
And they had a little project, called the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, and in this they did a pretty good job of writing down a lot of their history, as it happened. And so, not only can we see names and dates, but we can see how words changed over time, and what they originally meant. Words like cyning [pronounced roughly ‘ker-ning’] you can see change to cyng, and then to king. If you know the German word ‘König’, it's the same word.
An interesting couple of words are ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’. If you go back, the original forms were hlaf-weard and hlaf-dige, which mean “Guardian of the Loaf” and “Kneader of the Loaf”. Originally, the Lady was the one who made the bread, and the Lord was the one who defended it.
Fast forward another couple of hundred years, and we meet a group of sailors from Scandinavia who decided that it would be fun to go and kill foreigners and take their stuff. The Vikings. Originally, though, ‘viking’ was a verb. It's not that you were a viking, you were someone who went viking. It's a subtle difference. They went everywhere — Russia, the Mediterranean, probably America, and the north of England, which they liked and decided to stay. This is the Danelaw, an area where Norsemen lived and settled, and got the English kings to pay them protection money to not keep raiding the rest of the place. You'll see in the north of England place names like Grimsby, or Thorsfell, and you know that back in the Danelaw, a Norseman called Grimmr or Thorr lived there.
And so things continued for a while, until we come to an English king called Harold, who had some family trouble. One of his cousins, from Denmark, decided that he had a better claim to the throne of England, and invaded. Harold had some warning, so he marched his army all the way up England, met the Viking invader army, and beat them. At which point he got notice that another of his cousins was invading in the south. So he gathered his army, and without a break they force marched all the way back down to the south of England, to defend against this other army. And lost.
Now, those Vikings got everywhere, and some of them had settled in the north of France. This are was called, after them, Normandy, and they were the Normans: the North Men, the Norse. They had long since assimilated, though. They spoke a dialect of French (which was itself a dialect of Vulgar Latin, which was the variety of Latin which the common people (the vulgus spoke). And the leader of the Normans at the time was a man whose birth was somewhat irregular, which is why he was called William the Bastard, of Normandy. Others called him William the Conqueror, and this was the Norman Conquest, 1066 And All That.
The Norman's first job was systematically wiping out the English upper classes, and replacing them with what amounts to William's mates. “You helped me out, you're a friend, here: have Sussex.”
And not long after William had settled in, he wanted to find out what he owned. (That was another new thing: William now personally owned England, and could do what he liked with it. Everyone else had what they had because he allowed them to. Welcome to the Feudal system.) He sent around a bunch of auditors and accountants to take note of everything of worth in England, down to the last sheep. The result is the Domesday Book. It's telling to note that there are places, particularly in the south, where the Domesday Book says “In the time of Harold, this land had umpteen tenants, with mumble acres under plow, and so many oxen, and is worth such and such pounds. Now waste.” This meant that whatever had been there before, William's men had burnt it to the ground and killed or driven away the inhabitants. And there are a lot of places with this notation.
Anyway, the Normans spoke French. And if you wanted to get along, then so did you. But there were too many people to just replace one language with another, so English bubbled away underneath. You can still see the social divide in the language today. The English raised cows and sheep, both Anglo-Saxon words. The Norman Lords, however, ate boeuf (beef) and mouton (mutton). When you went to court, the language was French. You saw Counts (from Comites) and Barons [it does sound different in French, but it's spelled the same.] You saw courtesée from the chevalière in the tournamant. You didn't get a doom, you went to a juge for an arraignment at an assizement.
And still, underneath, English kept going. It was changing, though. There wasn't much chance to speak it to others, so there were actually many englishes, each different from the others. And as they had no connection to the Anglo_Saxon orthography, those who wrote these Middle Englishes down did so perforce in orthographies — spelling systems — that they had to invent from scratch, usually by taking the French spelling system and modifying it as required. Differences in ronunciation are evident by the way it was spelled. Sometimes long and short vowels were shown by the consonants, or not at all, or by writing the vowel twice. And there was writing in Middle English, such as Pearl, or Acrene Wisse, or the writings of a man up north called Orm, but not that much.
Then there was this one guy. He was a poet, a troubadour, he knew the fashionable troubadorean fashion “Oh, the pain of waiting to see my love's face from the window, although I shall never speak a word to her — ah! I have seen her glorious face! My life is complete! Now I can die happy! *erk*” And this was all in French.
And this fellow obviously said to himself, my mates down the pub don't talk like this! I'm going to write something that they'll like. And thus Geoffery Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales. And if you read it, it is a book written for the blokes down the pub. It's rude, full of swearing and bum jokes and people hoppin in and out of each others' beds. And it was written in the vernacular, beginning to end. There are places where two dialects of English are played off against each other for comedic effect: “I shall take this chain and bind him.” “Chine? I dunt wont naow chine abert mui...” — think Kath and Kim.
And yet, still, two people from very close places could be unintelligible. There is a description of a man travelling from London to Paris. On his way to Dover he stops in at a village to buy some food. He hasn't gone far, just a bit down the Thames — maybe Chatham or Sheerness. And he goes up to a farmer's wife and says “Ic wolde lyke for to purchais som eggys”, for in his London dialect, the plural was formed by adding ‘-s’. And the woman looked at him blankly and replied “Wiþ sorrowe, mi Lorde, I speke nou Frensshe”, because in her dialect she still used the old Anglo Saxon mutation called palatalisation, and the suffix ‘-en’ (like in ‘children’, and the word she would have understood was “eyeren”.
We are come to the middle of the 15th Century. A man called William Caxton (the man who described the problem with buying eggs) had just come back from Brussels, and he'd seen this invention of a man called Gutenberg, and though he could make a shilling or two from it. So he had a printing press built and set up next to the door of a cathedral, and put up flyers: “books printed, reasonable rates.” In an effort to have things to sell, to as wide a market as possible, he published a lot of translations into English, many of which he did himself. For a start, he used his own dialect of London English (it being as good as any other), and then he had to decide on his orthography. He basically made arbitrary decisions, based on what looked alright and seemed logical to him. And with a surprisingly small number of variations, his orthography is what stuck.
So when you're complaining about the spelling of English, you can blame the Normans and William Caxton.
I also talked about how there was no such thing as The Renaissance. There were several, in various places, at various times, such as Alfred's English renaissance, the Carolingian renaissance (with the assistance of the English bishop Alcuin), the Arabic renaissance, which led to the preservation of some of the great works of antiquity, translated from Greek to Arabic, then from Arabic to Latin and re-learned by Europe.
The other lady and I talked about pigments, and how the Earth colours were basically dirt, usually from Italy (Sienna is dirt from Sienna, Umber is dirt from Umbria), how Ultramarine was the most expensive pigment you could get, more expensive even than gold, and why, and how the brightest colours, Orpiment and Cinnabar, could kill you if they weren't prepared carefully enough, and ruin the painting if you didn't know how to apply them. And how you could write with carbon ink, made from lampblack, or bone black, or just finely crushed charcoal, or you could use Oak Gall ink, where the tannic acid starts pale watery yellow, then oxidises in front of your eyes into a rich black, but unfortunately could leave sulphuric acid behind which attacked the parchment.
Oh, and how transcription errors could screw your history books. For a long time the introduction to the Anglo Saxon Chronicles was taken as gospel, where it said that the Irish had moved there from Armenia. It made no sense, but the source book had it thus, and thus it must have been. Until someone thought to see where the authors of the ASC had got it from, and found that section almost verbatim in Bede's History of the English People. Only he says that the Irish came from Armorica, in what is now Spain. (And that actually does make sense, that the Irish were originally Iberian Celts, who migrated around to the west of the British Isles). It does mention Armenia, though, a couple of lines down. What we think happened is, the scribe who was composing the ASC was reading from his copy of Bede, looked away to write, and lost his place when he looked back. He probably didn't even notice. And thus the history books were wrong for a thousand years.
And also there was discussion on various other topics, but these above were the lion's share of those six hours. And my throat hurts, and my back aches.
But still, not bad for no warning or preparation, purely off the top of my head, eh?
I found myself, instead, talking to a three-deep crowd for six hours straight.
I now have a sore throat, for some reason.
I should point out that the girls were there in garb, Abi in a brand new dress made specially, and they were photographed like it was going out of fashion. They were both very chuffed at how pretty they were looking, and did really well until they started to crash and burn.
Another lady was there who does Illumination properly, with glair and powder pigments and sheet gold and everything. I was the scribe, writing things down and demonstrating different hands, the minim problem, that sort of thing. As I knew that I'd need something to copy, I brought along Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer. Thus, I got to answer questions about English, and its development, and why do we spell things like we do, and ‘I'm learning Latin, and this is latin, why can't I read it?’, and such things.
The ‘Why can't I read this Latin’ was easy: I just explained the development of Latin into Ecclesiastic Latin from the Classical they were learning (almost universally out of the Cambridge Latin Series), and when they complained that Church Latin pronounced things funny, I pointed out that Cicero might have called himself \Kikero\ in the Senate, but his mates would have called him \Chichero\ down the taberna.
Anyway: I gave the History of English several times, and I've got it down fairly pat by now. So, here it is:
You go back to the first inhabitants of Britain that we know about: the Britons. The Britons were Celtic, and spoke a language we now call Brythonic, which is close to Welsh. (Indeed, once upon a time, there was no difference.)
Then, about the time Jesus was being born, Julius Caesar found out about the existence of Britain, decided he liked it, and went to move in. He didn't succeed, but one of his successors did, and thus you have the Romano-Britons. They spoke Latin, and usually British as well, but Latin was winning.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years, and the Roman Empire was in trouble. In an effort to keep Rome safe, the legions were pulled out of Britain. It was around this point that a group of Germans decided they liked the look of Britain.
There were three tribes of Germans here: The Jutes from Jutland, the Saxons — named after their swords which were called sæxes, and a tribe who came from an area where two rivers split, leaving an angle of land... the Angles. And they all got together and went over the Channel to move into the poorly defended Britain. You may have read about this in your books about King Arthur.
So now we have the Anglo-Saxons living in their conquered territory. They forced out a lot of the original Britons. Many west into what is now Wales, some down into Cornwall, many fled back over the Channel and set up a home in exile, which they called “Little Britain”... Brittany.
The Anglo-Saxons split up and named the areas where they settled quite logically. There were the West Saxons and the East Saxons (Wessex and Essex), the Northern Folk and the Southern Folk (Norfolk and Suffolk), the area where most Angles had settled (Anglia, East and West), and the whole place was now known as ‘Angla Land’, the land of the Angles: England.
And they had a little project, called the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, and in this they did a pretty good job of writing down a lot of their history, as it happened. And so, not only can we see names and dates, but we can see how words changed over time, and what they originally meant. Words like cyning [pronounced roughly ‘ker-ning’] you can see change to cyng, and then to king. If you know the German word ‘König’, it's the same word.
An interesting couple of words are ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’. If you go back, the original forms were hlaf-weard and hlaf-dige, which mean “Guardian of the Loaf” and “Kneader of the Loaf”. Originally, the Lady was the one who made the bread, and the Lord was the one who defended it.
Fast forward another couple of hundred years, and we meet a group of sailors from Scandinavia who decided that it would be fun to go and kill foreigners and take their stuff. The Vikings. Originally, though, ‘viking’ was a verb. It's not that you were a viking, you were someone who went viking. It's a subtle difference. They went everywhere — Russia, the Mediterranean, probably America, and the north of England, which they liked and decided to stay. This is the Danelaw, an area where Norsemen lived and settled, and got the English kings to pay them protection money to not keep raiding the rest of the place. You'll see in the north of England place names like Grimsby, or Thorsfell, and you know that back in the Danelaw, a Norseman called Grimmr or Thorr lived there.
And so things continued for a while, until we come to an English king called Harold, who had some family trouble. One of his cousins, from Denmark, decided that he had a better claim to the throne of England, and invaded. Harold had some warning, so he marched his army all the way up England, met the Viking invader army, and beat them. At which point he got notice that another of his cousins was invading in the south. So he gathered his army, and without a break they force marched all the way back down to the south of England, to defend against this other army. And lost.
Now, those Vikings got everywhere, and some of them had settled in the north of France. This are was called, after them, Normandy, and they were the Normans: the North Men, the Norse. They had long since assimilated, though. They spoke a dialect of French (which was itself a dialect of Vulgar Latin, which was the variety of Latin which the common people (the vulgus spoke). And the leader of the Normans at the time was a man whose birth was somewhat irregular, which is why he was called William the Bastard, of Normandy. Others called him William the Conqueror, and this was the Norman Conquest, 1066 And All That.
The Norman's first job was systematically wiping out the English upper classes, and replacing them with what amounts to William's mates. “You helped me out, you're a friend, here: have Sussex.”
And not long after William had settled in, he wanted to find out what he owned. (That was another new thing: William now personally owned England, and could do what he liked with it. Everyone else had what they had because he allowed them to. Welcome to the Feudal system.) He sent around a bunch of auditors and accountants to take note of everything of worth in England, down to the last sheep. The result is the Domesday Book. It's telling to note that there are places, particularly in the south, where the Domesday Book says “In the time of Harold, this land had umpteen tenants, with mumble acres under plow, and so many oxen, and is worth such and such pounds. Now waste.” This meant that whatever had been there before, William's men had burnt it to the ground and killed or driven away the inhabitants. And there are a lot of places with this notation.
Anyway, the Normans spoke French. And if you wanted to get along, then so did you. But there were too many people to just replace one language with another, so English bubbled away underneath. You can still see the social divide in the language today. The English raised cows and sheep, both Anglo-Saxon words. The Norman Lords, however, ate boeuf (beef) and mouton (mutton). When you went to court, the language was French. You saw Counts (from Comites) and Barons [it does sound different in French, but it's spelled the same.] You saw courtesée from the chevalière in the tournamant. You didn't get a doom, you went to a juge for an arraignment at an assizement.
And still, underneath, English kept going. It was changing, though. There wasn't much chance to speak it to others, so there were actually many englishes, each different from the others. And as they had no connection to the Anglo_Saxon orthography, those who wrote these Middle Englishes down did so perforce in orthographies — spelling systems — that they had to invent from scratch, usually by taking the French spelling system and modifying it as required. Differences in ronunciation are evident by the way it was spelled. Sometimes long and short vowels were shown by the consonants, or not at all, or by writing the vowel twice. And there was writing in Middle English, such as Pearl, or Acrene Wisse, or the writings of a man up north called Orm, but not that much.
Then there was this one guy. He was a poet, a troubadour, he knew the fashionable troubadorean fashion “Oh, the pain of waiting to see my love's face from the window, although I shall never speak a word to her — ah! I have seen her glorious face! My life is complete! Now I can die happy! *erk*” And this was all in French.
And this fellow obviously said to himself, my mates down the pub don't talk like this! I'm going to write something that they'll like. And thus Geoffery Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales. And if you read it, it is a book written for the blokes down the pub. It's rude, full of swearing and bum jokes and people hoppin in and out of each others' beds. And it was written in the vernacular, beginning to end. There are places where two dialects of English are played off against each other for comedic effect: “I shall take this chain and bind him.” “Chine? I dunt wont naow chine abert mui...” — think Kath and Kim.
And yet, still, two people from very close places could be unintelligible. There is a description of a man travelling from London to Paris. On his way to Dover he stops in at a village to buy some food. He hasn't gone far, just a bit down the Thames — maybe Chatham or Sheerness. And he goes up to a farmer's wife and says “Ic wolde lyke for to purchais som eggys”, for in his London dialect, the plural was formed by adding ‘-s’. And the woman looked at him blankly and replied “Wiþ sorrowe, mi Lorde, I speke nou Frensshe”, because in her dialect she still used the old Anglo Saxon mutation called palatalisation, and the suffix ‘-en’ (like in ‘children’, and the word she would have understood was “eyeren”.
We are come to the middle of the 15th Century. A man called William Caxton (the man who described the problem with buying eggs) had just come back from Brussels, and he'd seen this invention of a man called Gutenberg, and though he could make a shilling or two from it. So he had a printing press built and set up next to the door of a cathedral, and put up flyers: “books printed, reasonable rates.” In an effort to have things to sell, to as wide a market as possible, he published a lot of translations into English, many of which he did himself. For a start, he used his own dialect of London English (it being as good as any other), and then he had to decide on his orthography. He basically made arbitrary decisions, based on what looked alright and seemed logical to him. And with a surprisingly small number of variations, his orthography is what stuck.
So when you're complaining about the spelling of English, you can blame the Normans and William Caxton.
I also talked about how there was no such thing as The Renaissance. There were several, in various places, at various times, such as Alfred's English renaissance, the Carolingian renaissance (with the assistance of the English bishop Alcuin), the Arabic renaissance, which led to the preservation of some of the great works of antiquity, translated from Greek to Arabic, then from Arabic to Latin and re-learned by Europe.
The other lady and I talked about pigments, and how the Earth colours were basically dirt, usually from Italy (Sienna is dirt from Sienna, Umber is dirt from Umbria), how Ultramarine was the most expensive pigment you could get, more expensive even than gold, and why, and how the brightest colours, Orpiment and Cinnabar, could kill you if they weren't prepared carefully enough, and ruin the painting if you didn't know how to apply them. And how you could write with carbon ink, made from lampblack, or bone black, or just finely crushed charcoal, or you could use Oak Gall ink, where the tannic acid starts pale watery yellow, then oxidises in front of your eyes into a rich black, but unfortunately could leave sulphuric acid behind which attacked the parchment.
Oh, and how transcription errors could screw your history books. For a long time the introduction to the Anglo Saxon Chronicles was taken as gospel, where it said that the Irish had moved there from Armenia. It made no sense, but the source book had it thus, and thus it must have been. Until someone thought to see where the authors of the ASC had got it from, and found that section almost verbatim in Bede's History of the English People. Only he says that the Irish came from Armorica, in what is now Spain. (And that actually does make sense, that the Irish were originally Iberian Celts, who migrated around to the west of the British Isles). It does mention Armenia, though, a couple of lines down. What we think happened is, the scribe who was composing the ASC was reading from his copy of Bede, looked away to write, and lost his place when he looked back. He probably didn't even notice. And thus the history books were wrong for a thousand years.
And also there was discussion on various other topics, but these above were the lion's share of those six hours. And my throat hurts, and my back aches.
But still, not bad for no warning or preparation, purely off the top of my head, eh?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Not Bad At All!
Date: 2008-04-21 08:41 am (UTC)Anyway well done you! Top effort!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 08:41 am (UTC)Bravo.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 11:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 11:20 am (UTC)Cheers!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-23 04:50 am (UTC)Although... Being a sometime kneader of loaves myself, I want to know if “Kneader of the Load” is an advanced rank, or something completely different? Something to do with freight transport perhaps? ;)
It may amuse you to know that
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-23 06:32 am (UTC)There are photos of the girls, I know this because Mim has printed them out. I now just have to steal the camera and download them so I can put them up for wider delectation.
I, however, was kind of stuck all day, and so I don't actually know if there are photos of me or not. Well, I know that there exist photos of me somewhere, but most of the time it was that I was doing some scribing and a camera would appear between me and my hands, and a photo would be taken of my work. I can't, however, find any online. This may because no-one has posted the photos they took, or because my google-fu is weak. Well, except for this.
And while you may be able to purchase bows from Amazon, you may also have some fun explaining to Customs what you are trying to import. Even if it is legal.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-23 07:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-23 09:01 am (UTC)http://www.redbubble.com/people/seagull/art/1034932-1-a-wee-lassie
http://www.redbubble.com/people/seagull/art/1037319-1-a-little-princess
http://www.redbubble.com/people/seagull/art/1034961-1-a-wee-laddie
Susi was mistaken for a boy more often than not...