IN THE 1380s, half a century after King Edward II’s painful demise—rectally impaled on a red-hot poker—John Trevisa, a Cornish scholar, was trying to translate a Latin account of the incident into plain English. He settled on a delicate formulation (“sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posteriale”) but as he did so was troubled by his reliance on French loan words. English, he fretted, was under threat from such terms, because ordinary folk were copying the speech of their Norman masters. But as time went by, Trevisa changed his tune. He later wrote that “schoolchildren are turning from French, and this is a harm for them if they should cross the sea and travel”.
His volte-face on French, and with it the importance of Britain’s links to the continent, recently popped up in a spat between two groups of academics. “Historians for Britain” is the smaller but has more stardust, counting among its supporters the likes of David Starkey, a dyspeptic television personality. Looking ahead to Britain’s referendum on its EU membership and citing its global links, its legal system and its “milder...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, The psychology of a peninsula
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