Explain why Roger Asham wrote Toxophilus is written in English

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R. A. Russell        Q1053 Resit

In Passage 2 on Page 423 of Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language, Roger Ascham is explaining why he is writing Toxophilus in English.

Explain why he thought it necessary to do this.

Roger Ascham, born in 1515, wrote Toxophilus in the early 1540’s as a justification of the art of the  English Longbow – hence the Greek title, which translates as ‘the lover of arrows’. Yet to the linguistic scholar, the most fascinating part of the book, lest he also be an enthusiast in late mediaeval weaponry, is Ascham’s defence of his use of English to write the book, despite its Greek title. Ascham, who was at the time reader of Greek at Cambridge, could easily have written Toxophilus in Latin or Greek, and says as much in the introduction to the King:

“to haue vvritten this boke either in latin or Greke (vvhich thing I vvold be verie glad yet to do, if I might surelie knovv your Graces pleasure there in)

Yet having chosen to write in English, he prefaced his work with a justification of his writing in the vernacular.

In this essay, I shall try to explain why. I shall briefly chart the rise of English back to prominence after the Norman Invasion, which banished English to a level lower even than the other vernaculars for some centuries. I shall expound upon each of the reasons Ascham himself gives for, as well as describing the arguments more commonly made against the use of the vernacular for scientific and learned purposes in Ascham’s day that might have caused him to try and justify his writing in English.

As every Englishman is brought up knowing, 1066 was the year that the struggle for the succession to the crown of Edward the Confessor came to a head at the battle of Hastings. William, Duke of Normandy, defeated and deposed Harold from his short-lived Kingdom of England. Almost at a stroke, the Anglo-Saxon ruling class was removed from its position of power, many having been killed at Hastings or in the campaigns of subjection waged by William, and Norman nobles supplanted them.

French, then was the language of the ruling nobility, first by necessity, the Norman lords not having been in England long enough to have learnt the language of the commoners and the nobles they supplanted, and later by social choice. This social divide between the nobles, and ruling classes, that spoke French (even if they were not necessarily French) and the masses, who spoke English, continued for around two centuries after the Norman Conquest. There was also a significant amount of bilingualism. A petty noble, a knight who was sometimes not much more than a rich peasant who tilled his own land but rode to war at the bidding of his overlord, would be very likely speak both English and French. Even the higher ranks of the nobility at least understood some English after a while. It was partly and artificially kept in place by the continental ties of many of the Nobles, who held lands in fief of both the English and French Kings.

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By the 13th Century, English was again on the rise towards its rightful place as first language of the Kingdom, something that was hastened by the breaking of the ancient feudal ties that bound the ‘English’ Nobility to that of France in ties of language and blood. In 1204, the French Crown confiscated the dukedom of Normandy from King John, after he refused to appear in front of the French King, his liege-lord, and in the years that followed, many nobles that held lands on both sides of the Channel were forced to choose between their overlords. As Baugh and ...

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