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 Cable put it, ‘England was on the way to becoming not merely a geographical term but once more a nation’, as the nobilities, rather than just the common people of the two kingdoms became distinct from each other. Over the next two hundred years, factors including the Hundred-Years War, which caused a great deal of anti-French patriotic feeling, and the rise of an English Middle Class, meant that by the end of the fourteenth century, English had regained much of the status it lost with the Norman Conquest. In 1362, the courts of the land held all proceedings in English, and by the fifteenth century, even many of the nobles had an imperfect command of English. All this meant that by the time Ascham wrote Toxophilus, English was once again the premier language of the realm, for both the common people and the nobility alike. As Ascham himself wrote:
“whan the beste of the realme thinke it honest for them to vse, I one of the meanest sorte, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write”.
Ascham obviously felt that if the nobility and ruling classes, and even the King himself had no qualms about using English, nor should he, or other writers.
Further, Ascham himself says he was writing his book for the ‘gentlemen and yeomen of Englande, for whose sake I tooke this matter in hande’. He was writing not for the people, not for the scientific community, which continued to discourse, both in writing and in speech, primarily in Latin, or Greek and French. So Ascham is justifying himself by saying is writing for the people, who do not understand Latin, Greek or French, and had no need to understand it.
Ascham was writing during what is now called the Renaissance. Many of the scholars of the time saw themselves as the bearers of the torch of knowledge lit by the ancient civilisations of Rome and Greece, and relit in the 15th century after being extinguished in the dark and middle ages. Whole new worlds of knowledge and thought were being re-discovered by the scholars of the day. There were germinating beginnings of a new ‘classical education’, with a more widespread use for Latin outside of the church, which in England at any rate was now Anglican and not as reliant on the Latin as the Catholic Churches of the continent. For years, Latin had been seen as the language of the church. It was also almost exclusively used for what academic writing there was outside of the church. Yet as most philosophical thought and writing took place inside the church, Latin was the predominant language of thought. By the 16th Century, there were translations into English, and into other vernaculars, of the works of Ovid, Virgil, Aristotle, Homer, Herodotus, and the other ancient philosophers, dramatists, poets and historians. Original works too, were being written in the vernacular for the first time, Toxophilus among them. So in conjunction with the re-discovery of Latin and Greek texts and the veneration of Latin and Greek scholars, there was the rise of English as a language for serious scholarly thought. Baugh and Cable hold that in part, this rise of English as a language acceptable for scholarly use was in part a consequence of the veneration of Latin by certain parts of the Renaissance scientific community. Indeed, Ascham himself mentions the unrivalled, and not by him to be rivalled, primacy of the Latin and Greek languages:
“And as for ye Latin or greke tonge, every thing is so excellently done in them, that none can do better”
While in a different way from those that believed that Latin or Greek were the only tongues in which to write intelligently, Ascham is still of the opinion that Greek or Latin cannot be equalled, and therefore should not be used by, their use by ordinary men as being almost sacrilegious to the ancients who created them.
Strangely, while venerating it, many renaissance scholars tried to adjust, and ‘purify’ Latin, and it is this factor, mentioned earlier, which Baugh and Cable believe contributed to it’s eventual demise as an academic language, or at least, speeded up the process. ‘Ciceronianism’ was a movement that tried to reform Latin to the mode of Cicero. Baugh and Cable say it was ‘slavish imitation’ instead of the ‘natural and spontaneous form of expression’ that had been Latin in the Middle Ages, as well as criticising Cicero’s Latin for being ‘inadequate for the conveyance of modern ideas’.
Between these men, who saw learning as something too pure for the English language, and those who sought to banish Latin to the recesses of the Catholic Church at best, lay those who, as Ascham puts it ‘[use] straunge wordes as latin, French and Italian, [and] do make all thinges darke and harde.’ These men like Elyot and More, tried to tread the middle ground between Ciceronians and English purists.
Among the other factors that contributed towards scientific use of English was becoming more acceptable was a commercial one. The percentage of the population that could read English, and wanted to read English was far higher than that that could read Latin and wanted to read Latin, or that that could read and wanted to read Greek. It follows, then, that publishing a book in Latin or Greek would not be as profitable as publishing one in English on the same subject. This was a fairly obvious point to those writing and publishing populist literature for that part of the masses that could read, and since John Wyclif nearly two hundred years before, in the 1370’s, and certainly since the Reformation on the continent and the conversion of England to Anglicanism, the idea of the Bible written in English or other vernaculars was gaining currency. So publishing populist works, and Bibles in English was profitable. And by the mid-16th Century, publishing scientific and academic works in English was becoming profitable as well. The academic, scientific and philosophical markets were no longer solely for academics, scientists and philosophers. Many of the ruling classes wanted to be, or at least seem cultured and educated, despite an ignorance, or imperfect knowledge of Latin. To quote Ascham again, ‘whan the beste of the realme thinke it honest for them to vse, I one of the meanest sorte, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write’. And despite Ascham’s claim that ‘in the Englysh tonge contrary euery thinge [is done] in a maner so meanly’, there was no shortage of books in English.
So while Ascham himself notes that his book might have been more suited to be written in Latin than in English - “to haue vvritten this boke either in latin or Greke … had bene more easier & fit for mi trade in study” – writing, especially scientifically, in English was now a practice tolerated by some, and accepted by many.
In conclusion then, in 1545, when Ascham published Toxophilus, English had been the first language of the realm for nearly two centuries. The rediscovery of ancient knowledge outside the field of the church had both enhanced the prestige of Latin and Greek, made knowledge and learning in vernacular more accepted. The Reformation had brought the world of the day’s primary work of fact, fiction, science and philosophy into the hands of those who did not have what would these days be called a ‘classical education – the Bible. Despite the debate that continued over the use of vernacular versus the use of Latin and Greek in scientific work, it was acceptable and profitable, as well as desirable from an ideological standpoint for Ascham to write his book in English – but he still needed to justify the fact that he did so to his detractors, and the detractors of the English language as a tool for scientific thought, maybe not in spite of, but because of the fact that English in that context was still in the process of becoming accepted, and thus a controversial subject.
In the end, Ascham uses the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the Renaissance thinker to justify himself and his choice of language – Greek philosophy. He claims he is ‘[following] thys councel of Aristotle, to speake as the somon people do, to thinke as wise men do’.
Bibliography
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Aldis Wright, (ed.) The English Works of Roger Ascham, Cambridge, 1904
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Baugh & Cable, A History of the English Language 5th Ed., London, 2002
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Tuchman A Distant Mirror: The calamitous 14th Century, London 1979
Aldis Wright, (ed.), p.x The English Works of Roger Ascham, Cambridge, 1904
Baugh & Cable, pp. 109-126, A History of the English Language 5th Ed., London, 2002
Baugh and Cable, op.cit. p.206
Tuchman, p.287 A Distant Mirror: The calamitous 14th Century, London 1979