William Tyler
The Discovery of Englishness: Saxons and Normans

William Tyler - The Discovery of Englishness: Saxons and Normans

- So that’s it, so whenever you’re ready, over to you, William.

• Thank you very much, Wendy. Thank you.

• Thank you.

• Ladies and gentlemen, today I’m looking at Norman and Saxon and the concept of Englishness. So let me begin by reading you from the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”: Then came, William, Earl of Normandy, into Pevensey on the eve of Saint Michael’s mass. And soon after they were on their way, they constructed a castle at Hastings Port. This was then made known to King Harold, and he then gathered a great force and came to meet William at the old apple tree. And William came against him unawares before his people were set in order. But the king nevertheless strenuously fought against him with those men who would follow him. And there was great slaughter made on either hand. There was slain King Harold, and Leofwin the Earl, his brother, and Girth the Earl, his brother, and many good men. And the Frenchmen had possession of the place of carnage, all as God granted them for the people’s sins. So reported the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” on that extraordinary date in English history. Saxon England had fallen in a mere few hours in the autumn Sussex countryside of October 1066. We became a country ruled by a foreign king who did not speak our language and made no effort to learn it. And he brought with him and they, others followed from Normandy and from France, a new elite, a new nobility who regarded the English Saxon as quite, quite beneath them. We became therefore a divided nation, Norman and Saxon, the haves and the have nots. Kipling captured this in his poem, “Norman and Saxon.”

And Kipling put the date 1100 i e. a few decades after the Battle of Hastings. And Kipling wrote: “My son,” said the Norman Baron, “I’m dying. And you’ll be heir to all the broad acres in England that William gave me for my share when we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is. But before you go over to rule it, I want you to understand this. The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own, when he grumbles, ‘This ain’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.” And somehow Kipling captures in those two stanzas a great deal of the history between the Norman and the Saxon post-1066. Even today, if you ask an English person if they feel more Saxon or more Norman, they will inevitably answer Saxon. I’ve only in my life met one person who described themselves as Norman, and they did indeed come from a Norman-landed noble family. But I’ve never met anybody else. We regard ourselves as Saxon. Being Saxon is wired into our DNA. Because over the course of roughly 350 years after Hastings, we Saxons had not become Norman, nor indeed had the Normans become Saxon. Instead, we Saxons had melded the Normans into a new English.

We were still English, but not the English of pure Saxon England but the England and English of a Saxon Norman or Norman Saxon England. The Saxons themselves have called themselves English by the eighth century and had a concept of a country called England, or as they called it, Englalond, by 1000. It’s fascinating to know that in recent decades when supporting the English football team, soccer for the Americans listening, when supporting the England football team, English fans don’t shout England, they shout in pure Anglo-Saxon, “Englalond! Englalond!” Professor Robert Tombs in his book on the English writes this: The concept of an English people in Latin gens and norm emerged in the eighth century, an English kingdom with its own land on earth, eard, in the ninth. And that land acquired a name England, or rather Englalond, around the year 1000. There are few much older states in existence. We were a nation before the Norman’s ever reached us. And that’s the story I have to tell today. How two peoples, Saxon and Norman, became one people. And how so much of Saxon England survived the conquest. And as a result of that, how much of Saxon England is in the DNA of Americans, as it is here. Bereft of their own Saxon leadership, you might think that all traces of Saxon England would simply have been erased and a Norman England erected in its place. Again, Robert Tombs writes this, on how the nobility of Saxon England disappeared almost, almost overnight: The conquest annihilated, he writes, England’s ruling class, physically and genetically. Some 4 to 5,000 Saxon thegns, Saxon nobles, were eliminated by battle, exile or dispossession in the biggest transfer of property in English history.

In the words of an English chronicler, in other words, a Saxon chronicler, some were slain by iron, others placed in prisons. Many were driven from their native land, and the rest oppressed. Some fled to Scotland or Denmark. Others become mercenaries as far afield as Byzantium, Constantinople, where they served in the Imperial Guard and set up a small English colony near Nicea. King Harold’s daughter married a Slavic prince. The last English Earl, Waltheof, was behead in 1076. Most simply sank in society. English widows and heiresses were forcibly married to William’s followers. Others entered nunneries, quote, out of fear of the French, including the future Queen Edith, wife of Henry the First, who said “to preserve me from the lust of the Normans which was rampant.” We lost our leadership. And yet we didn’t lose a sense of whom we were. And although the Normans replaced our Saxon nobility, we never ever gave up our language, our customs, and our belief that we were Saxon or they might well have said English as opposed to the Norman French. We rose to the challenge of occupation and perhaps became typically English, bloody-minded. And we talked of rights and freedoms. And if we reached court, we often talked about the rights and freedoms that had existed before the conquest of 1066. And thus grew up, the English founding myth of the Norman yoke. A yoke placed on our necks by the Normans. Depriving us of freedom. But we wouldn’t accept it. In here, we didn’t accept it. And more importantly, here, we didn’t accept it. Now, of course, myths can be powerful things in the history of nations and often are made more powerful than real factual history. And so it was in England after 1066.

Michael Wood, the historian of Saxon England, has written: All cultures make their myths from their history. Absolutely true. A way for rulers to create a sense of a shared past. But not in the case of Saxon and Norman. It was not the Normans that created a sense of a shared past. It was the English, the Saxons, that imposed that upon the Normans in the three and a half centuries after 1066. And Michael Wood goes on to say: And myth is one of the ingredients of national allegiance to a culture, as well as to rulers, for all societies use their past to define themselves in the present. Now, I find it quite interesting in this Woke age in which we live that both in Britain or England and in America, we had waves of immigrants over the centuries. And those immigrants have wished to become English or those immigrants have wished to become American. Many of you will have read the novels of Leo Rosten telling the story of the Jewish immigrant, Hyman Kaplan, who wishes to be more American than the Americans. And that’s been the story in both countries, whether Italian immigrants and German immigrants into America; Polish Jewish immigrants into America; Huguenots French Protestant immigrants into Britain; Jewish immigrants into Britain; they’ve wanted to become British, English, and they’ve wanted to become American.

Only in more recent decades have we had a problem with immigration from other parts of the world, particularly the Islamic world, in which there is a rejection of British and American values. And this is proved quite difficult for our societies to deal with because we’ve never had to deal with it before. We’ve had immigrants who wish to come for whatever reason and therefore accepted the status quo, if you like. I find that a fascinating thought. So what did the Saxon peasantry guard so carefully after 1066, other than this sense of freedom? By the way, note please, freedom is an English word. That is, a Saxon word. Whereas liberty is a Norman French word. And you may say, well, that’s a silly distinction to make. No, it isn’t. There is a subtle difference between an idea of freedom and an idea of liberty. It’s not the same. But the English language gives us the opportunity to choose which words we use. Freedom, liberty. Freedom is my freedom, your freedom. A concept imported into America from those founding Puritan fathers. Liberty, the American word of the American Constitution and the revolution against Britain is not an individual word so much as a national word. America broke away as a nation with liberty. But individual Americans preserve their own freedom. The Saxons in England overwhelmingly kept their own place names. If you travel around England, the parishes, the villages are mostly Saxon in name.

There are very, very few Norman names in the names of our villages or towns. There’s an interesting and true story, excuse me, in the city of Nottingham, in the Midlands, East Midlands in England, the Saxons called that city Snotingham, the place of the people of a early Saxon warrior called Snot. Snotingham. And when the Normans arrived and they said, “What you call your city?” They answered, “Snotingham” in a very East Midlands dialect. And the Normans said, “Can you repeat that?” “Snotingham.” And the Norman’s interpreted it as Nottingham. And so Snotingham became Nottingham because the Norman French couldn’t pick up the accent in Nottinghamshire. One of the things we did lose was our personal names, our Christian names. And for my shame, my name is not Saxon, but Norman; William, Guillaume. And we adopted those names. Although I was at school with a boy called Edgar, and you can’t get more Saxon than Edgar. And now we’re seeing a rebirth in Saxon names amongst our young children or boys in particular. And we have many Alfreds, for example.

Our greatest folktale in English, of which there are more stories than of anything else, is that of Robin Hood, the Saxon lord who fought Norman oppression in the form of the Norman Sheriff of Nottingham and the Norman Prince John, Regent of England. And he fought for the Saxon peasant from the freedom, the freedom of Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood is our national hero. And he’s Saxon. But above all, our Saxon peasantry kept the language which linguists now call Old English. Old English. Some of you may remember a few weeks ago I was talking about the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds when I was talking about Jews in England in the Middle Ages and the Jews who were doing deals in Bury St Edmunds Abbey. But this is a different story from that same chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds that I used then, and I hope this will be of of interest. And it goes like this: The new Abbott Sampson hated liars, drunkards and talkative people; for virtue ever loves itself and spurs that which is contrary to it. He blamed those who grumbled about their meat and drink and especially monks who so grumbled and personally kept to the same manners which he had observed when he was a cloistered monk. “He was an eloquent man,” says Jocelin de Brakelond who wrote this “Chronicle of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds” in the 13th century. Samson, the Abbot, was an eloquent man; speaking both French and Latin, but rather careful of the good sense of that which he had to say than of the style of his words. He could read books written in English.

Because Sampson was the first Saxon English Abbott of Bury St Edmunds at the beginning of the 13th century since the conquest of 1066. So Jocelin, himself an Englishman, says: He could read books written in English very well and was wont to preach to the people in English. They had sermons in French, which none of them would have understood when they allowed the townspeople in at great festivals like Christmas and Easter and Whitsun. They wouldn’t have understood a word of it. Or in Latin. And they wouldn’t have understood. I’ve always thought with that story, when I’ve walked around the ruins of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds, what must it have been on one Sunday morning, we don’t know when; Easter, Whitsun, one of those, to have sat in the congregation with the monks? And the abbot goes into the pulpit to preach and we slump in our pews and then, oh dear, I’m not going to understand a word of this because it’s going to be in French or in Latin. And so this is a moment where I can have a nice quiet doze. And then, I’m shocked to sit up. What do I hear? My text this morning is taken from the gospel of St. John, brothers and sisters in God. We look at our neighbours, he’s talking English. He’s talking English! What must that moment have been to the Saxon peasants in that congregation? This great man, the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds who had a seat in the English House of Lords, is not talking down to us in French or Latin, but is talking in our language. He’s talking in English. My goodness, they must have walked out of the great chapel of the Abbey, floating above the earth. We’ve heard one of the grand of society speak English.

But Jocelin, Jocelin goes on to say there’s nothing like the English. We are a peculiar people. And Jocelin said that he preached as he was wont to preach to the people in English. But, and Jocelin comes from Suffolk, and Sampson comes from Norfolk, and everybody else in England thinks people that come from Norfolk are a bit stupid. And Jocelin says “he spoke to the people in English, but he writes in the dialect of Norfolk, where he was born and bred.” It’s a wonderful put down. You can’t be more English than that. A moment of supreme change, a wonderful moment where our language burst out in this great abbey but in the wrong dialect because he had a Norfolk accent. I think that’s wonderful. It tells us that 200 year, or 150 years or so after the conquest, we could still speak and write as Englishmen with still our old quarrels and to hell with the Norman French. I think that’s a great moment. We kept the names of our animals, as we do today. Pig, calf, cow, sheep, hen. They’re all good Saxon names. But the food we get from those animals is French. Why? Well, because we didn’t really care about good food in Saxon England. Some of you may say who aren’t English, well, nothing’s changed then. Well we just had meat. What do you mean? What sort of meat? It’s meat! Just eat it up. Don’t ask questions. Sounds like my mother when I was a child. So pig became pork, or le porc. Calf is veal, veau. Cow is beef, boeuf. Sheep is mutton, mouton. And hen is chicken. English words for the animals, and poncy French words for the food. It’s it’s an extraordinary story really. We make love in English. And most of us still do. “My darling,” we say. Or my, I come from the West of England and we say down there, “Me lover. Me lover. Come on, me lover.” That’s good Saxon. And if I was to drop a heavy book on my foot, do I swear in French?

Of course I don’t! “Oh fuck!” we say. Good Saxon. The good Normans thought we were crude, barbaric people, with the food that we ate, the language that we spoke. Oh, they’re not sophisticated like us. “They’re unsophisticated people,” the Norman said. And Robert Tombs writes this: Robert of Gloucester in about 1290 wrote: Unless a man knows French, he is little thought of. But how low-born men keep up in English and to their own speaks still the low-born English. The snobbery of the Norman French. And that division and that snobbery and that looking down their noses remains the core of the British class system today. An Englishman, they say, only has to open his mouth to speak and you know where you are in relation to him. You have a posh accent. When I was principal of the College of Adult Education in the north of England in the city of Manchester, the educational authority rang up and said, “The local radio station wants someone to go in and talk about the adult education programme for this term.” And I’d done lots of TV and radio so I said, “Well, I’ll go in and talk.” “Oh no,” they said, “we don’t want you to go in. You talk too posh.” So I sent my vice principal in who didn’t speak any differently than I did, but he’d been brought up in Blackpool in the north of England. And he put on this ridiculous accent which went down a storm with the education committee. But whether it did with the people who listened, I’d no idea.

But we did it and we had a good giggle about it. So we are still divided in that sense. But it isn’t only language that the Saxons kept. We kept our parish structure of churches. Many of our parishes, rural parishes today in England, have boundaries which are Saxon boundaries. Not Norman, not mediaeval, not later. Saxon boundaries. We kept our shires. The word shire is a Saxon word, meaning a, it simply means a cutting off, a shearing off. Shearing scissors is a word we use. Shearing it off from the main. The shires we set up. Somersetshire. Nottinghamshire. We had Shires. And then along came the French that had, gave us a nasty creepy Norman word, county. County is not a Saxon word. So we do have counties and we talk about counties. And America has counties. But the English word is shire. It’s interesting that shire is the word that’s used in Tolkien’s Hobbit stories. The Shire. We kept our sheriffs, the king’s representative in the shire. The Sheriff, Shire-Reeve. And we exported that word to the States where it has far more significance today than it does in England. Although we have sheriffs, it’s largely ceremonial; whereas in America, of course, it’s very practical office to hold. We kept the House of Lords, which was the old Saxon Advisory Council to the king, the Witan, and that continued.

We kept a great deal. But the most important thing that we did keep was our concept of freedom. And we would have kept none of these if we had lost our language. Michael Wood wrote: Although English was driven underground as an official and literary language in the Norman period, it resurfaced, and by the 13th century was coming back to prominence with a sense of the Englishness of the English nation. In the 14th century, in the hands of great poets like Langland and Chaucer, and now mingled with French words, the English vernacular was a superb instrument of culture and civilisation. If you visit in London, the cathedral at Southwark, which is on the South Bank, and a good place to visit, if you visit Southwark Cathedral, you will see there a memorial to a mediaeval poet called Gower, G-O-W-E-R. And there is a figure of him on his tomb laying with his head on books. And he’s laying with three books under his head like that. And they have the titles of the books. One is in Latin, one is in French, and one is in English. English had survived not only as an oral language, but as a literary language. And it carried with it, and in it, this concept, Saxon concept, with a Saxon word of freedom.

And English as a language, Saxon English, Old English, came back into official use as it slowly metamorphosed into Middle English, a melding of English and Norman French. Linguists call it Middle English, the language of Chaucer. And if you don’t read Middle English, don’t worry, pick up a copy of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and read what you see. Just read what you see. No accent. Just read what you see. And you will understand what he’s writing. Because by Shakespeare’s time, Middle English is turned to modern English, the language of Shakespeare, the language of the authorised version of the Bible, both things being brought to the States, to the American colonists by those founding fathers. So the language of Harold and of Alfred and of Bede crossed the Atlantic as modern English in the 17th century, but its roots were here in Saxon England. And it carried with it, it carried with it this idea of freedom. Why did they go to America? For freedom. Freedom to worship as they wish, freedom away from the government in London, freedom to write, freedom to be. Which they felt was being denied them in England. And that freedom is to lead in the 18th century to the establishment of the United States. And the words of the American Constitution and the words of the American Declaration of Independence are drawn from the words that the English carried into the law codes of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

They were English. And in it, is the English Saxon DNA of freedom. You ask what distinguishes Anglo-American society. It is the language which contains this fundamental idea. It’s not the same as French and Continental democracy based upon liberte. Liberte. Not here. We, Anglo Americans, carry, and anyone from Australia and Canada, South Africa, you understand, it covers you as well, we carry with us this Saxon DNA. This is a book on “The Languages of Britain” by Glanville Price. It was published quite a long time ago now but I always will go back to this book. And Price writes: By the mid-14th century, 1350s, it’s clear that pressures in favour of the use of English at the highest levels of public life were virtually irresistible. In 1356, it was ordered, the proceedings in the Sheriff’s Court of London and Middlesex were to be in English. English has come back. And on one glorious day, I can’t tell you when, and I tell you this as an Oxford man, because it happened in my university where for the first time in either of the universities in England, Oxford and Cambridge, in Oxford, a man got up to give a lecture and he gave it in English. Some time in the 14th century. We don’t know when, we don’t what the lecture was, but it must have been as mind-blowing as that sermon in English at Bury St. Edmunds in the 13th century. And what is interesting is that the man who gave the lecture in Oxford was himself not English but Cornish. And his first language was the Celtic language of Cornish. And English was actually his second language. I don’t know what made him, we have no idea. I wish we knew. Was it a law lecture? I read law, maybe it was a law lecture. And maybe he stood up in front of a group of undergraduates, all male of course. And he said something like, “Good morning, gentlemen. My lecture today is,” and then he goes on in English. They must have been riveted. He was speaking their language. Our language had got into the courts, our language had got into the church, our language had got into universities. And in 1400, our new king, Henry the Fourth, who is, as claimed, was the first king since Harold to have English as his first language, opened parliament in English.

Now, of course, that’s- He’s a politician. This is a political act. Why a political act? Well, because he’d had the previous king, Richard the Second, murdered in Pontefract Castle. And Richard the Second was effete. And the English, the English associated effeteness with the French. That’s also in our DNA. We still have that lingering view of the French as effete. Richard the Second was very effete. And then one of the things that annoyed the English about Richard is he adopted French customs. And oh yeah, Richard needs to blow his nose and he produces, oh no, he produces a handkerchief. Oh, that’s so French. Any decent Englishman knows you do that, to wipe your nose. You don’t use a handkerchief. So Henry opening parliament in English was meant to say, I’m not like Richard. This is a new start. I’m like all of you. I’m English, I speak English, and I’m going to go on speaking English. Around the same time, the first will since 1066 was written in English. Of course, French persisted. And one of the places that French persisted is in government. And when the queen actually has to, as head of state, has to officially approve an act of parliament, technically she can say no but no English monarchy said no since Queen Anne, the queen said it in French. She doesn’t say, “I agree. Oh that’s splendid, Mr. Johnson. I’ll just sign here.” She says, “La Reyne le veult.” The queen wishes it. And she still does it to every act of parliament she signs. But it doesn’t matter. We know she’s English. We know she speaks English. And then Henry the Fourth’s son, Henry the Fifth, is cornered with his army in France near a village called Agincourt.

And Henry knows that it’s a last-ditch defence. If they cannot defeat the French, they cannot reach the coast, they cannot return to England. This is a do or die moment. He knows that the English and Welsh bowmen will stand firm to the end. He knows the English and Welsh foot soldiers will stand firm to the end, the men-at-arms. What he doesn’t trust are the Norman French elite, the knights on horseback. So he orders the knights to dismount and stand with the men. Can you imagine? Imagine the sort of conversations that went on. I say, what’s this man doing? I can’t stand with these peasants. Well you’re going to have to. He’s ordered you to. And my God, look at him. He is dismounted. And Henry stood, the first time since Harold had stood at Hastings, Henry stood next to the banner of England with ordinary men. And he had asked one of his senior knights to pull the English line into order. And we have an account of what happened. And the account is the account of Agincourt. And it goes like this: The king had appointed a knight called Sir Thomas Erpingham to place his archers in front in two wings, trusted entirely to him. And so Thomas to do his part, exhorted everyone to do well in the name of the king, begging them to fight vigorously against the French in order to secure and save their own lives. And thus, the knight who rode with two others only in front of the battalion, seeing that the hour was come for all things were well-arranged, threw up a baton which he held in his hand and shouted, “Now strike!” Which was the signal for attack. He then dismounted and joined the team who was also on foot in the midst of his men with his banner before him.

Then the English seeing this signal, began suddenly to march, uttering a very loud cry, which greatly surprised the French. And Shakespeare turned this into that magnificent play, “Henry V” and Henry the Fifth’s fantastic speech. And Shakespeare was writing in 16th century England when we stood virtually alone against Catholic Europe, and where we had a growing sense of our national identity. And Shakespeare had responded to that. In World War Two, Lawrence Olivier at Churchill’s instigation made the film, “Henry V.” And Churchill himself in 1940, telling the English people that we would fight on the beaches and on the landing grounds and in the fields. Every word in Churchill’s speech is Saxon in origin and not French. Except one word. And Churchill said, “We will never surrender.” And surrender is the only French word Churchill used in that speech. And Churchill didn’t sit down, just think, I’ll write this in Saxon. Churchill sat down and wrote it from the heart. And as we say darling, when we make love, and fuck, when we have an accident, so Churchill wrote that great speech in Saxon. In times of great difficulty or in times of great passion, the English revert to being almost purely Saxon. So what did, so what did the Normans bring to this new nation which they called Les Engleis. Interestingly, they didn’t say Les Anglais. They spelt it E-N-G, Les Engleis. E-N-G-L-E-I-S, they spelt it. What did they bring to the party? Well, I’ve already said they brought a richness to the language.

So we have a choice of what words to use. Is this, is this flower beautiful? Norman. Or is this flower lovely? Are we going to go to the woods? Saxon. Or are we going to go to the forest? French. We have such a depth of language with such subtle meanings. They forged for us a strong link with Europe and Continental European culture. For example, the ecclesiastical architecture, the church architecture of those fantastic parish churches built with money earned from the wool trade. All the great cathedrals of mediaeval England. These fantastic, incredible structures which we admire today were commissioned by the French and they brought over French masons to build them. But the greatest thing they brought was a modified feudal system. Now although in Sax England, we had a king, Edward the Confessor, Harold the Second; the last two Saxon Kings; kings of all England; and England was pretty much the same as England is today in terms of area and geography; all of that is true; but they also had powerful lords. Like Harold’s own family, earls of Wessex. We had these great earls. And the great earls could turn on each other, but they could turn on the king.

And in France, the feudal system threw up huge areas of France which were totally uncontrolled by the King of France, but controlled by feudal lords. William set up something different. He set up a central government. And although he gave lands and titles, the lands were scattered from the north, to the south, to the east and the west so that no single Norman lord could build up a regional power base to threaten the king. It simply couldn’t happen. And that was a great gift because it made us unified. And many of you will know- Oh, the next thing that happened that the Normans did: After William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066, Jews from his realm in northern France followed him across the Channel. These merchants and skilled artisans brought with them new forms of commerce and skills and were to remain here for 230 years before the horror of the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. The Norman did bring things. And, well, what can we say? Today, we are the inheritors of this joint Norman and Saxon melding. But we’re still Saxon. In the 1970s, I was the head of adult education in the English county of Warwickshire. Warwickshire. And I was putting on a big event on adult education and the youth service. And I needed a big place to put it on and somewhere special. And I approached Warwick Castle in the county town, which by then was not owned by the earls of Warwick but by Madame Tussaud’s, the waxworks.

And I said, “Can I borrow?” Well, I was prepared to pay. “Could I use the great hall here for this?” “Oh no,” they said, “we couldn’t possibly do that.” And I happened to mention this to an elderly student as I knew who was a very rural countryman, who would have been called a peasant a hundred years before. And he said to me, “Oh, William, you went to the wrong place.” I said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” He said, “Well, you went to the Norman Castle.” And I said, “Well, yes.” He said, “Well, you should have gone to the Saxon.” I said, “I’m sorry, I’m not following you.” And he said, “The earls, the Norman earls of Warwick didn’t care for people like me and you.” He said, “We have to go to our own lord.” And the story he told was that the Saxon Earl of Warwick had fallen down the pecking order, down to becoming a farmer. But by the reign of Henry the Eighth, the family had built themselves up again and they were given a title, Marquis of Northampton. And they also had a splendid Tudor house in Warwick called Compton Vineyards. And I rang the Marquis up and I said the same stories I told at Warwick Castle. I need the use of a large hall and somewhere grand. And he said, “Oh, that’s fine.” He said, “You’re very welcome. Contact my manager at Compton Vineyards and he’ll arrange it all for you.” And I said, “Well, can you tell me how much the cost will be?” And he said, “But you’re phoning from the county council?” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Of course there’s no charge to the county council. It’d be free for you.” So my friend was right. The Saxon still supported his own and the Norman didn’t. I know that’s a silly story. It’s a true story. And it seemed to me to say something about this division. And I think that’s a rather important division. And then there’s another story I was told. I was giving a evening talk in a local history society in the eastern county of Suffolk. And I was talking about World War I.

And a man said to me: I want to tell you a story, Mr. Tyler. My grandfather came home from World War I in 1918. He’d volunteered in 1914 and he survived. And he came home in 1918, and the first morning home, he was walking down the village street when the squire appeared on a horse. This chap’s grandfather was on foot. The squire was on a horse. And they passed each other without a word. And then the squire turned around and said, “Why didn’t you raise your cap to me?” And his grandfather replied, “I’m done with all that now.” And he said, “We were the only family in the village in the 1920s where the boys and the men did not raise their caps to the squire or the squire’s wife, and where the women and the daughters did not curtsy to the squire through the village.” Norman and Saxon, the bloody-minded English, the bloody-minded Saxon. We hold today, our Saxon past close in our arguments for freedom against governments of whatever political party seeking to impose rules and regulations on us that we disapprove of. Perhaps Thomas Burke captured something of this in a pamphlet that he wrote for the government here in Britain in the war, 1942. And this was a pamphlet produced for our Allies. So they knew something about this funny people called the English. And it was mainly, I think, written for American servicemen who came here to Britain in 1942.

And Thomas Burke wrote in this pamphlet, which many an American and some of you who are American may find hidden away in your father, grandfather’s papers, a copy of this pamphlet. And it ended saying this: It is individualism and the inconsistencies that go with it that make the Englishman rather an enigma to the people of other countries. His logic, his values are not theirs. You cannot tie him down to rigid formulae. You cannot be sure that in given circumstances he will behave thus. And thus, he has always got a surprise and has always surprised himself to find that he is in any way surprising to himself. His proceedings are eminently sensible. And indeed they are, so long as it is remembered that they are based on the logic, not a reason, but a feeling, not of prose, but of poetry. Michael Wood, who is about the same age as me, writes about a comic that I also took when I was a child in the 1950s. It was called “The Eagle.” Any English boy listening tonight will remember “The Eagle.” Michael Wood says: I remember the eagle. I’m so sorry. This cold I’ve had, it’s going, but it leaves you with this nasty cough which sometimes sort of gets you and you can’t speak so clearly. Let me take a mint. I remember “The Eagle,” which was a boy’s comic of the late ‘50s. “The Eagle” ran a wonderful stories for half a year about the Norman conquest. And the story of King Harold and a faithful thane called Ulrich of Glastonbury.

Of course, it all ends in tears with a fascistic crop-haired Norman, the Battle of Hastings, and the tragic death of Harold himself. In the comic strip, there was an impressive last scene in which Ulrich of Glastonbury carried the body of King Harold down to the shore at Hastings. And there he saw a vision in the sky. Thomas on the Somme, and Allemagne, spitfires and hurricanes, the thin red line, drakes drop at Nelson’s victory. And the caption read, and the caption read, “Saxon England was dead. But a greater England would arise. Saxon England was dead, but a greater England would arise.

• William? William, why don’t- I see that you’re struggling.

• No, I’ve just got one thing to do and I’m doing it.

• Okay. I want to save you from yourself!

• Now that’s my myth, if you like. And I’m sticking with my myth. If you’re American, let me read you the final lines of a poem written by an American lady, Alice Duer Miller, in 1940. It’s a very long poem. It’s called "The White Cliffs.” And it’s a poem in which she was seeking to encourage fellow Americans to support Britain against Nazi Germany. And she ends her poem: And were they not English, our forefathers, never more English than when they shook the dust of her sod from their feet for ever, angrily seeking a shore where in his own way a man might worship his God. Never more English than when they dared to be rebels against her, that stern intractable sense of that which no man can stomach and still be free. Writing, “When in the course of human events.” Writing it out so all the world could see whence comes the power of all just governments.

The tree of Liberty grew and changed and spread, but the seed was English. I’m American-bred. I’ve seen much to hate here, in England. I’ve seen much to hate here, much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live. It’s the Saxon in Alice Duer Miller. And it is Saxon, whether you are Christian or Jew or whatever. If you’re English or American, it’s Saxon England which washes through your outlook on life. We are free. We will not be subdued. Thanks for listening. And I’m open to questions and comments. I’m sure there’s lots of comments people want to make.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: What’s the relation to Saxons and Saxony?

A: Well some of them came from that area.

I’m trying to read this. In many of the English detective stories on tv, I notice that a perfectly assimilated England of Africans and Pakistan with white Anglo-Saxons is presented.

Q: Is that really the way it is?

A: It’s the way some of it is but it’s not entirely the way it is.

Q: How free were the English surfs?

A: Well, interestingly, we had slaves in Saxon England. And William abolished slavery, and by, somewhere around, we don’t have exact dates, somewhere around the early 12th century, slavery had finished in England. And of course there were surfs, there were surfs everywhere. But in England, as we shall see when I do Magna Carta, we had access to the law. And even surfs had some rights.

Q: What was the language we spoke before the Saxons came here?

A: Celtic. Celtic. Very like Cornish, like Manx for example, like Welsh.

Q: What happened to the Anglos, as in Anglo-Saxon?

A: Oh, don’t ask that. We were dukes, Anglos and Saxons, according to Bede who came here, who came to Celtic Romano Britain. And they simply dropped. The dukes were in Kent, the Anglos were in east Anglia. They simply didn’t call themselves that. They saw themselves as Saxon, but the Anglos give us the word English. It’s just one of those odd things that happened. But Anglo-Saxon is now disapproved of by some trendy historians. And we’re meant to say Saxon. I’m always amused by this debate because I was always brought up to say Saxon, not Anglo-Saxon. No, it should- It’s just one of those things that the word Saxon dominated. It’s a nice word.

The books are on my blog, if you want to look at the books I’ve mentioned. Yes, lingua franca, as its name implies, is French for language of the world. The French were furious that English has now become the lingua franca of the world. Yes, and only because of America.

Yes, the shire is also a breed of horse bred to carry a knight with his heavy armour. Yes, but they didn’t use the word shire of a horse in the Middle Ages. It’s a more modern terminology, 19th century. And, interestingly, those knights horses came from France. I went to Carcassonne in France in Provence. I went on a ride around the town in a car, my wife and I, in a carriage drawn by a horse. And it was one of these wonderful, wonderful French horses which gave rise later to the shires in England. Absolutely.

I can’t tell you about German words. I thought that our short words emanate from Saxon, the longer words from French.

Hm, that’s, that’s, I think, oh, that’s an interesting thought. I think the answer is that’s only partly true. No, no. The Saxons were all invaders. Before them were, as I say, Celts who were here when the Romans came. After the Romans left, there were Romano British. If you cut me and I bleed, my DNA, my blood is almost certainly heavily Celtic. Since we’ve been able to trace people’s DNA, most of us have Celtic blood. I’m ever so ashamed to say there will be, I can’t do anything about it, I can’t get rid of it, there’s some French blood in me because part of my family were called Marles, M-A-R-L-E-S, and they fled to Devon as Protestants, as Huguenots. And somehow or other, some good Saxon girl got herself into trouble with one of the Marles in the 18th century. And so I do have some French blood. I can do nothing about that. The Vikings, interestingly, the Danes who were in the northern part of Britain, there’s a lot of Danish blood. As some historian, one historian’s put it, “They put it about a bit, did the Danish invaders in the north, in the northeast.” And there’s a lot of people with DNA which is Danish, much more than you’d think. But interestingly, the division between Viking and Saxon, the languages were very similar, the differences disappeared after 1066. And they saw themselves as English against the Norman French. It’s one of the very odd things that happened. No, Cockney is just a dialect in London.

Q: Was the success of Brexit partly due to the country’s love for freedom from rule by London?

A: No, freedom from rule by Brussels, unfortunately, says he voted to remain. It was, um, no, it was an anti-European move, an anti-French, anti-Brussels move.

Oh, Canadians do not think of ourselves as American. Of course not. I had lots of Canadians work for me when I was a principal in London. Outside, you say, they only seemed to recognise American. I’m pleased to say that a great friend of mine who was my head of drama was Canadian. And I got so used to her accent, I’m pretty good at spotting the difference between American, Canadian accent. My simple point was that Canadians, Americans and Africans, Australians, New Zealanders and us, all share this concept of freedom. We have a concept of democracy which is not based upon that of Continental Europe and the French Revolution. The Americans were very lucky to escape that. A lot of stuff being written about Lafayette at the moment. The Americans were too sensible to adopt French ideas of constitutions. And if you look at the American-written constitution, which is the earliest English-written constitution we can find or that of Massachusetts and Connecticut, it doesn’t look anything like French constitutions. The other thing to say about constitutions is the American Constitution, okay, with changes, but has remained settled, for what, 300-odd years. So it shows the strength of that constitution. And the strength of that constitution owes to its English clarity. And when the EU started drafting constitution for the EU, it made you want to despair. It was full of- It was just a awful, awful stew of words. Very unlike the American-written constitution. If Britain has a written constitution in the forecoming future, it will be like the American. It has to be because that’s where it comes from. That’s where it all relates to.

Was Saxon related to- I’m not a linguist, I can’t answer your most difficult question.

Q: Should 2066 be a celebratory year?

A: No. I shan’t be here, so I shan’t need to worry about it.

Oh the Queen, we know she’s English. Oh well yes, we do know she’s German. You know, we’re only nasty about the royal family when we’re crossed with them and say they’re German. “The Times” newspaper always used to refer to the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, as a Hanoverian Princess.

Q: What’s the series, “The Last Kingdom”?

A: I can’t watch it. Oh, “The Last Kingdom,” hang on. No, I don’t. No, no. That’s fiction. That’s fiction.

Yes, you can always find Saxon equivalence of Norman French words. No, you’re right about snobbery and deference, it’s not good. And this deference is something that’s gone in my lifetime. When I was in my 20s, I was head of adult education in Warwickshire, which I mentioned, and I had to go and inspect a centre which was not doing well. And I was met by a school teacher in the school where the centre was, and who also looked after the adult education in the evenings. I was in my 20s, he was in his 60s, and he called me sir. And I felt very uncomfortable. By the time I left the City Lit in the middle of the 1990s, young girls who were secretaries in the general office would always say, “Oh, hello William. I’ve got a telephone call for you.” And no, we don’t, I don’t like deference. And what was the other word you used? Yeah, no, it still goes on and we need to get rid of it. No, that’s a lovely story.

Q: Does the V sign come from the English, not Roman?

A: I would love to say that. It’s untrue, but it’s a lovely myth. The myth is that if a English bowman was caught by the French, they took his two fingers off. And to show that they’d won, they put two fingers up, you haven’t taken them off. But it’s a lovely story but it’s a real myth and not true.

I don’t quite understand that question.

Q: How did English become a language based both in Latin, brackets, French, yes, and German?

A: Well, it’s because of 1066. It’s the melding that I’ve been talking about.

Q: Do not the elite French look down on the Normans?

A: Yeah, it’s very interesting. We’ve always called it the Norman Conquest, but there were lots of French here. In fact, William could not have invaded without French support. But the French support only came when the Pope said it was a Holy War against the barbaric English who’d appointed an archbishop of Canterbury as head of the church without informing him. So he gave the French carte blanche to join William’s campaign. Yeah, George the First didn’t speak English. It’s why we landed up with Cabinet government. Because Walpole, the Prime Minister, very cleverly said, “Look, and we are boring you” because everything had to be translated into German at Cabinet meetings which the king chaired. And Walpole said that, “Look, we don’t wish to impose upon you, your majesty. We’re meeting at number 10 Downing Street and you needn’t bother to attend.” Which was splendid. Yeah, William of Orange addressing people in- William of Orange had the benefit of having one of those beautiful- Stuart women were beautiful. And his wife Mary, Mary the Second, was beautiful. And very English.

Thanks for nice comment. Yes. In 1940, Churchill offered France union. It was a temporary union for the period of the war. And the French rejected it. Perhaps that’s not surprising but, um, yeah, I’m afraid, I’m afraid it, no, Brexit is a problem area for us. No, the people that voted Brexit was across classes but in the main it was older people, it was less educated people. And that’s another story about who voted Brexit and the danger of that. The problem was that England or Britain never took any leadership role in Europe, which it was, which it jolly well- Oh, well, thanks for everyone who said they enjoyed it.

Q: What about the German influence on England through the Saxons?

A: Zero. The German influence comes from the Hanoverian royal family later. Absolutely.

Q: Who’s that?

A: Maxine O'Neil, you’re absolutely right. Do you- Well, in my view, you’re right.

Q: Do you agree that a strong tendency to favour individualism is more apparent in England and America whereas there was a greater regard for society and government on the Continent?

A: Absolutely. There is a big difference. And it’s why being members of the European Union were so difficult for us because our way of looking at things is so different. I chaired a committee on older learners for the Council of Europe, Conseil de l'Europe. Not the EU. The Council of Europe. And I was elected by my fellows to be the chair. And a French Eurocrat young lady said, “I’m so glad you were elected,” she said, “because we get on much better when there’s an English chair because they get everyone to agree and everyone knows what they’ve agreed.” And I said, “Well, what about the French? She said, "Oh, the French,” she said, “never come to an agreement at all and we have to write it afterwards and hope no one objects.” And I said, “What about the Germans?” And she said, “Oh, the Germans have decided what the answer is before the meeting opens.” She said, “Only the English chair meetings properly.” Interesting thought. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know but I think we are gifted to chair. Maybe it’s the way we run things, we chair things. And maybe that’s American as well.

Q: Can you clarify what you meant by Churchill using only Saxon?

A: Every word that Churchill spoke had its origin in Saxon English. It was not Norman French. The only Norman French word was the word surrender. But he did it, importantly, he did it naturally. He didn’t set out to write it like that.

Q: Don’t you think the richness of the English vocabulary is due to the mixture of invaders?

A: No, it’s only really the Normans and English that make it rich. True, we’ve adopted words from other, like chocolate from the Aztecs, for instance, but every society does that. No, it’s the Norman French that’s given us this richness. We’ve added words. Well, chocolate we didn’t know in Norman England. And so when we get it, we adopt the word from the Aztecs, as I say. So we adopted words like laager and veld from South Africa, from the Boers.

Q: Were the Normans not of Viking background?

A: Yes, interestingly, they were. But strangely enough, they jettisoned their Viking background pretty quickly and they became, as it were, French, and not Viking. That’s another story, but it’s an intriguing one, that they just-

Q: Am I descended from Wat Tyler?

A: I would love to think I was but I don’t expect so.

Oh what a lovely story, Robin. So glad to be descended from the Normans. My surname is in the Bayeux Tapestry. Wow. I’m descended from the English, namely John Howland, who came to America on the Mayflower with a handout by William Bradford. From Normandy and Oxfordshire, and totally American. What a fantastic story that is. I resent you think I’m not educated. Oh dear. I don’t know what that relates to. I would never think anyone was- What did I say? Oh, the people who voted! Oh, I see. Yes. No, I just said that a lot of them were.

• You have to be careful, William. Well, you have to be careful but there are consequences.

• There are. Always, always, always. The wonderful thing about adult education is you walk on ice and very often you fall, you fall through the ice. I think we should stop there. I think I’ve come to the end of the things I can answer.

• I think that’s a good case to stop and, um-

• That’s wonderful. I’m sorry.-

• I think the Tory should’ve- I think the Tory should have gone, they should have taken more time to explain to the population what the consequences were going to be.

• Oh, the politicians on both sides were absolutely appalling in Britain. There was no education put into it at all. And there was no planning for either case. No, the whole thing has been a quite a disaster.

• Well, it was completely disingenuous as well.

• Yes, and it’s going to leave a terrible mark for a long, long time in this country. And it’s made us more divided than we have been in my lifetime. Not good.

• No, not good. Not good. Very, very complicated. Anyway, what can I say? Thank you very much for an outstanding presentation as always and I would like to thank everybody for joining us.

• Thank you.

• When are you on again, William?

• I think I’m on next Monday and I can’t think what it is. It’s Magna Carta and Peasants’ Revolt. I think it’s Magna Carta, then Peasants’ Revolt, so. Magna Carta is, of course, links us on both sides of the Atlantic, and links all the English speaking nations.

• Right. Good. All right, well thank you very, very much. Judi and I are off to Baku tomorrow and we will be back on Sunday. So we will be back on air on Monday.

• And I will be back at five o'clock next Monday, um, British time.

• Looking forward to it. Exactly. Thank you very much. So to all of you, thank you-

• Bye, Wendy!

• For joining us.

• Bye all. Bye-bye.

• Bye-bye. Feel better! Go and have a hot drink. William.

• Yeah, I will.

• [Wendy] Bye.