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Imperial Tongue
The Language of Dominion
By KENNETH COUESBOUC
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
--William Shakespeare, Henry V
The nation is a fairly recent concept. It is a hybrid of the medieval feudal kingdom and the city state of Antiquity. So, vassalage and citizenship are in continuous contradiction. And equality is reduced to the formality of the ballot.
Trained for combat from the earliest age, European chivalry was either crusading against heretics and heathens, or warring over matters of suzerainty. Who believed what and who was whom's vassal were the obsessions of the times. Suzerainty often opposed the sovereigns of England and France. A cross-Channel quarrel started by Norman William, that was to last eight centuries. And, on either side of this narrow stretch of sea, the two nations constructed themselves on the basis of this opposition to one another.
The historian G. Duby sees the first signs of an appeal to the French nation at the battle of Bouvines (1214) where Philip II of France beat English John's continental allies, thanks to a large contingent of commons. This was turned around at Crecy (1346), when Edward III's English longbows outshot the Genoese mercenary crossbows of Philip VI. Myth and poetry have glorified these alternate victories and have put words into the antagonists' mouths. Heart-swelling harangues precede the onslaught and can seem to determine the outcome. This is habitual. Bolstering morale before a mêlée was already standard practice for the heroes of the Iliad. But, notwithstanding the poets' rendering, there is always uncertainty as to the language actually used.
Some two hundred years after the event, Shakespeare had Henry V speaking Elizabethan English on St. Crispin's day (Oct 25, 1415). That is the same as having Wellington speaking today's idiom on the field at Waterloo.
At Crecy, seventy years before Agincourt, how did Edward address the yeomanry who were about to win the day? Among themselves, he and his court and his knights spoke the form of French that was their Norman and Angevin heritage. His archers, however, and the artillerymen firing the first rudimentary canons to be used in battle were composed of and manned by freemen, whose heritage was Anglo-Saxon and who spoke an evolving language similar to the English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If, as was the custom before battle, Edward said something to his army, it had to be understood by all. His appeal to common England would have been in English.
The French king at Bouvines faced a different situation. At the beginning of the 13th century, the kingdom of France was split by a linguistic North/South divide, named oïl and oc after the two different ways of saying yes. A split that can still be heard when French is spoken today. This was (is) due to the particular history of the Mediterranean coast. The Greeks settled in Marseilles in the 6th cent. BC, and later the Romans built cities in the South, long before Julius Caesar's conquest of « hairy » Gaul. The South was more Latinized and more densely populated than the North and the Germanic influence was proportionally less.
Philip II's Frank ancestors had been counts of Paris and Dukes of France (the region around Paris is still called Ile-de-France), before founding a kingdom and a royal dynasty. He would have addressed his freemen in his own Northern dialect.
The protracted dispute over who owed fealty to the other and the changing modes of warfare obliged the rulers of England and France to rely increasingly on the willing support of urban and rural commons. The result of this dependency was the recognition of a cultural and linguistic ascendancy. On the one hand, London, the surrounding counties and Anglo-Saxon English. On the other hand, Paris, the surrounding dukedoms and Frank langue d'oïl. Language and ethnicity became the basis of a new power structure. Christendom's mythic unity of clerical Latin and the universal Church of Rome was shattered. The energy of numbers was perceived and harnessed, held by the mental reins of words. A control that was to intensify with the arrival of paper and the printing press, from China via Constantinople, and the invention of movable metal types by Gutenberg.
The permanence of the written word has long been recognized. Litera cripta manet. Printing was to multiply this permanence and the written word was to have an unprecedented impact on the human thought process. From the start, printing was competing with the monastic copyists. From the start, it involved entrepreneurship and mass production. From the start, the printed word showed a preference for the vernacular speech.
In his classic book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan studies how a new medium changes the way reality is perceived. From the "hot" media of talking, shouting, singing and chanting, to the "cool" medium of the printed page read in silence, from hearing to seeing. The Athenian contemporaries of Plato were probably all literate. But under the Roman Empire and, consequently, in the Middle Ages writing was a specialized craft. And reading (deciphering) was practiced out loud for an audience. Printing broke what had become a carefully censored monopoly held by the clergy. The result was a radical transformation of society. Common people were reading for themselves and imagining the sounds and their signification. And, as much and more than the content, the form of the new medium was installing a new world order.
The Greeks and the Romans had been there before. McLuhan sees a chain of cause and effect going from the phonetic alphabet and literacy to the phalanx and the legion. The letters of the alphabet are all different, but each has its precise place in the written word. And, notwithstanding the first and the last or their frequency, each individual letter is equally essential to the whole. The poster, the handbill, the printed page in general with its perfect margins accentuates this impression. A motley crowd of equals joined together by language. The letters lined up in a rectangle are a representation of the citizen army. And, as the sequence of letters depends on the idiom used, their assembly depicts the nation.
The loose oral bonds of medieval Europe acquired the permanency of writing. And the language used was imposed by the centre of power. Latin was replaced by French for all official documents in 1539, by a royal ordinance of Francis I. Four years earlier, Henry VIII had declared himself head of the Church of England. This was nation building by absolute monarchs, reducing vassals to mere courtiers and annexing their semi-autonomous territories. Central control was then reinforced by imposing uniformity. One religion, one language, one kingdom, such was the end that justified the means. The ancient Celtic tongues were all but annihilated, while Occitanie, the land of troubadours and amour courtois, was dragooned and its inhabitants sent to the galleys or the gallows. Religion was often the pretext but absolute power was the goal.
The Divine Right of Kings is not in the bible. Though annointed, the Old Testament monarchs had at best a tenuous mandate from the heavens. Their legitimacy depended on decorum, success in war and peace, and the general well being of their subjects. Similarly, Greek and Roman citizens had opposed tyranny in writing and in acts. As printing made this known to a widening public, the status quo seemed ever less tenable. In Protestant England, Bible reading led to the Puritan movement and, ultimately, to constitutional monarchy and the rule of parliament. In Catholic France, where the Bible was proscribed, the belated Enlightenment referred back to Athenian democracy and republican Rome. And, while they remained opposed, both nations were convinced that their particular social model was universal. Monotheistic and humanistic values can both be perceived as identical for all mankind.
The struggles against despotism, in London and in Paris, had drawn their inspiration from different sources. The puritans had striven for a New Jerusalem, whereas the Enlightened referred to the Graccus brothers rather than the Maccabees. Both, however, had consented to colonial empires, showing thereby that their ideals were only ideas. Spreading the word, or the light, justified every conquest, as though Divine Right had simply been transferred from the monarch to his subjects, or, more precisely, to the idealised fiction imagined by the first circle of power, Britannia and Marianne, the commonwealth and the republic. A new despotism emerged, based on ethnicity. The nations of Europe (Spain had flowered and faded, Germany, Russia and Italy were finding themselves) were the chosen few. Their power epitomized their destinies as models for humanity.
The majesty of empire and the white man's burden were exposed as a farce at Ypres and Verdun, at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and at countless other places in between. Europe had given a spectacle of such beastly barbarity that it defied the wildest imaginations, while the subject peoples of the world looked on, incredulous. If the master race could do that to itself, it was disqualified. The exemplary façade was like a Potemkin village, a pretty screen to hide the vicious squalor of its natural inclinations. The tight hold had to loosen, but it could not let go. Empires may be reduce to rubble but their foot prints are too deep to be obliterated. This time the heritage for humanity was a criss-crossing of frontiers drawn by colonial map makers. The arbitrary lines of a planetary cadastre that had been fought and haggled over, bought and sold.
The Language of Dominion
By KENNETH COUESBOUC
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
--William Shakespeare, Henry V
The nation is a fairly recent concept. It is a hybrid of the medieval feudal kingdom and the city state of Antiquity. So, vassalage and citizenship are in continuous contradiction. And equality is reduced to the formality of the ballot.
Trained for combat from the earliest age, European chivalry was either crusading against heretics and heathens, or warring over matters of suzerainty. Who believed what and who was whom's vassal were the obsessions of the times. Suzerainty often opposed the sovereigns of England and France. A cross-Channel quarrel started by Norman William, that was to last eight centuries. And, on either side of this narrow stretch of sea, the two nations constructed themselves on the basis of this opposition to one another.
The historian G. Duby sees the first signs of an appeal to the French nation at the battle of Bouvines (1214) where Philip II of France beat English John's continental allies, thanks to a large contingent of commons. This was turned around at Crecy (1346), when Edward III's English longbows outshot the Genoese mercenary crossbows of Philip VI. Myth and poetry have glorified these alternate victories and have put words into the antagonists' mouths. Heart-swelling harangues precede the onslaught and can seem to determine the outcome. This is habitual. Bolstering morale before a mêlée was already standard practice for the heroes of the Iliad. But, notwithstanding the poets' rendering, there is always uncertainty as to the language actually used.
Some two hundred years after the event, Shakespeare had Henry V speaking Elizabethan English on St. Crispin's day (Oct 25, 1415). That is the same as having Wellington speaking today's idiom on the field at Waterloo.
At Crecy, seventy years before Agincourt, how did Edward address the yeomanry who were about to win the day? Among themselves, he and his court and his knights spoke the form of French that was their Norman and Angevin heritage. His archers, however, and the artillerymen firing the first rudimentary canons to be used in battle were composed of and manned by freemen, whose heritage was Anglo-Saxon and who spoke an evolving language similar to the English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If, as was the custom before battle, Edward said something to his army, it had to be understood by all. His appeal to common England would have been in English.
The French king at Bouvines faced a different situation. At the beginning of the 13th century, the kingdom of France was split by a linguistic North/South divide, named oïl and oc after the two different ways of saying yes. A split that can still be heard when French is spoken today. This was (is) due to the particular history of the Mediterranean coast. The Greeks settled in Marseilles in the 6th cent. BC, and later the Romans built cities in the South, long before Julius Caesar's conquest of « hairy » Gaul. The South was more Latinized and more densely populated than the North and the Germanic influence was proportionally less.
Philip II's Frank ancestors had been counts of Paris and Dukes of France (the region around Paris is still called Ile-de-France), before founding a kingdom and a royal dynasty. He would have addressed his freemen in his own Northern dialect.
The protracted dispute over who owed fealty to the other and the changing modes of warfare obliged the rulers of England and France to rely increasingly on the willing support of urban and rural commons. The result of this dependency was the recognition of a cultural and linguistic ascendancy. On the one hand, London, the surrounding counties and Anglo-Saxon English. On the other hand, Paris, the surrounding dukedoms and Frank langue d'oïl. Language and ethnicity became the basis of a new power structure. Christendom's mythic unity of clerical Latin and the universal Church of Rome was shattered. The energy of numbers was perceived and harnessed, held by the mental reins of words. A control that was to intensify with the arrival of paper and the printing press, from China via Constantinople, and the invention of movable metal types by Gutenberg.
The permanence of the written word has long been recognized. Litera cripta manet. Printing was to multiply this permanence and the written word was to have an unprecedented impact on the human thought process. From the start, printing was competing with the monastic copyists. From the start, it involved entrepreneurship and mass production. From the start, the printed word showed a preference for the vernacular speech.
In his classic book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan studies how a new medium changes the way reality is perceived. From the "hot" media of talking, shouting, singing and chanting, to the "cool" medium of the printed page read in silence, from hearing to seeing. The Athenian contemporaries of Plato were probably all literate. But under the Roman Empire and, consequently, in the Middle Ages writing was a specialized craft. And reading (deciphering) was practiced out loud for an audience. Printing broke what had become a carefully censored monopoly held by the clergy. The result was a radical transformation of society. Common people were reading for themselves and imagining the sounds and their signification. And, as much and more than the content, the form of the new medium was installing a new world order.
The Greeks and the Romans had been there before. McLuhan sees a chain of cause and effect going from the phonetic alphabet and literacy to the phalanx and the legion. The letters of the alphabet are all different, but each has its precise place in the written word. And, notwithstanding the first and the last or their frequency, each individual letter is equally essential to the whole. The poster, the handbill, the printed page in general with its perfect margins accentuates this impression. A motley crowd of equals joined together by language. The letters lined up in a rectangle are a representation of the citizen army. And, as the sequence of letters depends on the idiom used, their assembly depicts the nation.
The loose oral bonds of medieval Europe acquired the permanency of writing. And the language used was imposed by the centre of power. Latin was replaced by French for all official documents in 1539, by a royal ordinance of Francis I. Four years earlier, Henry VIII had declared himself head of the Church of England. This was nation building by absolute monarchs, reducing vassals to mere courtiers and annexing their semi-autonomous territories. Central control was then reinforced by imposing uniformity. One religion, one language, one kingdom, such was the end that justified the means. The ancient Celtic tongues were all but annihilated, while Occitanie, the land of troubadours and amour courtois, was dragooned and its inhabitants sent to the galleys or the gallows. Religion was often the pretext but absolute power was the goal.
The Divine Right of Kings is not in the bible. Though annointed, the Old Testament monarchs had at best a tenuous mandate from the heavens. Their legitimacy depended on decorum, success in war and peace, and the general well being of their subjects. Similarly, Greek and Roman citizens had opposed tyranny in writing and in acts. As printing made this known to a widening public, the status quo seemed ever less tenable. In Protestant England, Bible reading led to the Puritan movement and, ultimately, to constitutional monarchy and the rule of parliament. In Catholic France, where the Bible was proscribed, the belated Enlightenment referred back to Athenian democracy and republican Rome. And, while they remained opposed, both nations were convinced that their particular social model was universal. Monotheistic and humanistic values can both be perceived as identical for all mankind.
The struggles against despotism, in London and in Paris, had drawn their inspiration from different sources. The puritans had striven for a New Jerusalem, whereas the Enlightened referred to the Graccus brothers rather than the Maccabees. Both, however, had consented to colonial empires, showing thereby that their ideals were only ideas. Spreading the word, or the light, justified every conquest, as though Divine Right had simply been transferred from the monarch to his subjects, or, more precisely, to the idealised fiction imagined by the first circle of power, Britannia and Marianne, the commonwealth and the republic. A new despotism emerged, based on ethnicity. The nations of Europe (Spain had flowered and faded, Germany, Russia and Italy were finding themselves) were the chosen few. Their power epitomized their destinies as models for humanity.
The majesty of empire and the white man's burden were exposed as a farce at Ypres and Verdun, at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and at countless other places in between. Europe had given a spectacle of such beastly barbarity that it defied the wildest imaginations, while the subject peoples of the world looked on, incredulous. If the master race could do that to itself, it was disqualified. The exemplary façade was like a Potemkin village, a pretty screen to hide the vicious squalor of its natural inclinations. The tight hold had to loosen, but it could not let go. Empires may be reduce to rubble but their foot prints are too deep to be obliterated. This time the heritage for humanity was a criss-crossing of frontiers drawn by colonial map makers. The arbitrary lines of a planetary cadastre that had been fought and haggled over, bought and sold.