Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TimeGhost History"
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William's army was not Scandinavian in any meaningful sense, nor, by 1066, were the Anglo-Saxons. Linguists may speak of proto-Germanic language, but even by Caesar's time there was no culturally or linguistically united German people, if indeed there ever had been. Gothic, Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, none of these were mutually intelligible even to the extent Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are today. Old English had changed under the influence of 270 years of Danish incursions, and lost some of the features that made it less intelligible to Norsemen, but it was still a distinct language. And the Normans had completely lost their original language by 1066 and spoke a local dialect of Old French. Most of William's army wasn't even Norman, he recruited large numbers of mercenaries from Brittany and the rest of France, and others from all over Europe, who fought purely for personal gain in the form of lands and titles redistributed from English nobles who were killed or dispossessed during the conquest.
There wasn't that much intermarriage, either, outside the royal houses and a few of the very great houses. Very few if any of the men in William's army had a drop of English blood in them. Of course that changed rapidly after the conquest, but the linguistic difference lingered for generations.
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@guillaumedeschamps1087 "Course, most of their armies were by definition part of the warrior elite."
Not Harold's, most his army were fyrd , a citizen militia of freeholding farmers. However, he had dismissed most of the fyrd so they could harvest their crops and his much smaller remaining force was mostly his warrior elite, the housecarls, supplemented by the few local fyrdmen he could recall on such short notice. The housecarls were less like feudal knights than personal retainers/household troops like you saw in the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages, or after the real feudal period in the Wars of the Roses, and most of them were either English, or Danes who were born in England and Anglicized to a greater or lesser degree. They were not a polyglot, international mix like William's mercenary army, nor were they feudal vassals like the armies of France or the HRE at this time.
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@TimeGhost Very little of that is true. German languages were not all mutually intelligible after, and possibly not even during, the Migration Period. Pan-Germanism is just as much a Victorian myth as Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. An 11th century Londoner and an 11th century inhabitant of Cologne or Nuremberg wouldn't have been able to understand each other much better than their modern equivalents could.
English was a distinct language in the 11th century just as much as it is today, and the fact that it changed during the Middle Ages makes that no less true than it is of German (that is, High German), which also underwent dramatic changes in the Middle Ages.
Old English was not mutually intelligible with Old Norse at first, but the basic vocabulary was mostly the same, and Old English changed over the 200 years or so before the Norman conquest to be less different from Norse, mostly by simplifying and dropping most of its inflections. This is a major component of the change from Old to Middle English.
France and England were not one linguistic melting pot; there was almost no Romance influence on English before the Norman conquest and there was almost zero influence of English on France at any time (although the early French language was influenced by the Germanic language of the early Frankish rulers of France). The melting pot was almost exclusively due to the introduction of French to England after the Norman conquest when the upper classes of Anglo-Saxon England were almost entirely replaced by William's followers, most of whom were not even ethnically Norman but almost all of whom did speak some form of French.
Old English is absolutely recognizable as English once you learn what to look for, the changes from one to the other were regular and systematic and it is much easier for a modern English speaker to learn Old English than it is for a modern native speaker of French or [High] German or Irish.
Middle English is much closer to modern English than to any modern German language other than Dutch or Frisian; educated modern English speakers can usually read Chaucer more or less accurately, if slowly. It may sound more like German in some ways, but that has little to do with the underlying structure or vocabulary and a German-speaker cannot understand it - nor read it as easily as a modern English speaker. Sindarin sounds a lot like Welsh, but try speaking Sindarin to a Welsh speaker and see how much you manage to get across.
And French was NOT the lingua franca of European courts until around the time of Louis XIV, before that it was Latin and then Italian. The term "lingua franca" doesn't even refer to French, it originally referred to a Mediterranean pidgin and trade language that was mostly based on Italian with a bit of every other language spoken around the Med thrown in; it meant "language of the Franks," not of the French, and "Frank" in that context was the word people in the Eastern Med (mostly the Byzantines and Arabs) used to refer to anyone from western Europe, i.e., any European who wasn't a Slav or Greek.
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@alisilcox6036 Generally no, but like everything in history, it's complicated. Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon king between Cnut's dynasty and Harold Godwinson, had been brought up in exile in the Norman court (because his line had been usurped by Cnut, who systematically exterminated the other survivors of the Royal House of Wessex while at the same time marrying Edward's mother to give his heirs some legitimacy on the English throne, which he taken purely by conquest) and was probably a native speaker of Norman French, and when he finally became King of England after Cnut's son died without issue, he brought some of his courtiers and officials from Normandy to England, where they were highly influential at court. I wouldn't go so far as to say Norman French became the main language of Edward's court, but it was certainly spoken there, and there was significant resentment by native Englishmen of the power and influence of those foreigners, which eventually had a part to play in the choice of Edward's successor, Harold.
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@rockybalboa5743 Old Norse and Old English had evolved to the point of not being mutually intelligible by the 8th century, but Old English changed considerably under the influence of the Danish incursions, and the Norse spoken in Britain likewise changed under local influence, and by 1066 an English-speaker from what is now Yorkshire could probably understand a Dane from the same region better than either could understand an English-speaker from the Thames Valley. The changes were mostly to grammar and syntax since the basic vocabulary of all Germanic languages was pretty similar.
The Normans had become entirely French speakers by 1066 so their language was completely different from anything spoken natively in England at that time, although there were doubtless plenty of people in England who could speak Norman French because of the widespread contact between England and the continent. In fact Edward the Confessor, the king before Harold II, had been brought up in the Norman court (because Knut and his sons still ruled England during Edward's youth) and spoke Norman French better than he spoke English, and since many of his courtiers came with him from Normandy when he became king they were also native French speakers. However, many of the native English nobility resented the influence of people they viewed as foreigners and this tension was one of the factors leading to the Norman conquest.
Of course the language of the Church, and thus of diplomacy, science, and most law and written literature, was still Latin for most of western Europe at this time.
Curiously, Norman French, known as Law French, hung on for several centuries in England for legal purposes long after the language had merged with English as Middle English for all other uses. Anglo-American law still contains technical phrases that preserve this distinctively Norman and medieval form of French long after it disappeared entirely everywhere on the continent.
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