• Magna Carta and the beginning of Parliament

After Richard’s death, when John became lawful king of England, he lost Normandy and other territories in the wars against the king of France. His vassals came over to England to receive lands and titles. John began to give the lands and castles of the first Norman barons, who had come with the Conqueror, to the newcomers. Hatred for King John united the old barons, bishops and the Anglo-Saxons in their almost open struggle against the king. In the civil war which broke out, the barons worked out a programme which King John was finally forced to sign and seal. Magna Carta, or the Great Charter, was signed on June 10, 1215. The document was a detailed statement of how the king’s government ought to work and what kind of relations there ought to be in a feudal state between the monarch and his vassals. Instead of paying their lords in services, some vassals paid them in money. Vassals were beginning to turn into tenants. Feudalism, the use of land in return for service, was weakening. But it took three hundred years more to get rid of feudalism.

Magna Carta was the first document to lay the basis for the British Constitution.

When the throne went to Henry III, he tried to centre all power in his hands. Several times he demanded money from the Great Council but the barons refused to grant money. The first attempt to curb the power of the king and his foreign advisers was made by Simon de Montfort, the leader of the lesser barons and the new merchant class and poorer clergy. In 1258 they took over the government and elected a council of nobles which de Montfort called parliament (from the French word “parler” - “to speak”). The nobles were supported by the towns, which wished to be free of Henry’s heavy taxes. In 1264 a civil war began and the incompetent king was defeated. In 1265 de Montfort became the virtual ruler of the country and called “two knights from every shire, two burgesses from every borough” to his parliament The first Parliament was quite a revolutionary body. It represented the interests of barons, the clergy and the new class of merchants.

During the reign of Henry III’s son, Edward I, it was granted by the king that no new taxes would be raised without the consent of Parliament. At the end of the 13^th and the beginning of the 14^th centuries, Parliament was divided into the Lords (the barons) and the Commons (the knights and the burgesses). The alliance between the merchants and the squires paved the way to the growth of parliamentary power. Edward I conquered Wales and made it a principality of England (1284), passed exclusively to the heir to the English throne (Prince of Wales; 1301).

4. Language of the Norman Period

The Norman period in the English language, which lasted from the 11^th to the 15^th century, is known as Middle English. The Conquest was not only a historical event, it was also the greatest single event in the history of the English language.

One of the most significant consequences of the Norman domination was the use of the French language in many spheres of English political, social and cultural life. But though the court and the barons spoke Norman-French and the clergy spoke and wrote Latin, the invasion of these two Romance languages could not subdue the popular tongue spoken by peasants and townsfolk all over England. The two main languages, French and English, intertwined and by the end of the 14^th century made one language, which was used both in speech and in writing. English was bound to survive and win in this linguistic battle as it was the living language of the people in their native land, and part of their culture. At the same time, Norman-French was torn away from its roots and had to surrender, although it greatly influenced English.

Three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, in 1258, Henry III issued a “Proclamation” to the counsellors elected to sit in Parliament from all parts of England. It was written in three official languages: French, Latin and English. This was the first official document to be written in English. In 1349 it was ruled that schooling should be conducted in English and Latin. In 1362 Edward III gave his consent to an act of Parliament proclaiming that English should be used in the law courts because French had become “much unknown in the realm”. In the same year Parliament, for the first time, was opened with a speech in English.

But the three hundred years of French domination in many spheres of life affected the English language more than any other single foreign influence before or after. The impact of French upon the vocabulary can hardly be exaggerated: the numerous borrowings reflect the spheres of Norman influence on English life.

The phonetic structure of the language was, naturally, affected. It is, however, controversial whether it was only the French language that affected the grammatical structure of English. The need to bring together the language of the new lords of the land and the language of those who cultivated the land brought about considerable changes in the grammar of the Old English language. Endings began to give way to auxiliary verbs. Thus Middle English is known as the period of levelled endings, a transitional period from synthetic forms (with various endings) to analytical forms (the use of auxiliary verbs).

In its turn, the French language brought in a number of new suffixes and prefixes:

• -ance, -ence: ignorance, experience

• -ment: government, agreement

• -age: village, marriage

• -able: available, admirable

• dis-: disbelieve, disappear, distaste.

The suffixes gave an abstract meaning to the words and were also used to form new words from the English roots: unbearable, readable, etc.

It was during the Middle English period that the indefinite article a/an, stemming from the Old English numeral an (one), came into use. Spelling changed altogether. Instead of the Germanic runes Þ and T the Normans introduced the digraph th. The Old English u was changed into ou or ow as in hus>house, mus>mouse, cu>cow. It should be noted that at the time ou/ow was pronounced as [u:] and the diphthongs [ou]/[au] appeared later.

The Norman period enriched the English language with synonyms. Linguistic practice shows that words denoting the same object or the same idea cannot coexist in the same language, that is why there practically can be no full synonyms in a language. With the inflow of French words into the language, English retained the Anglo-Saxon words denoting things or concepts that the language had had before, and borrowed the French words which gave a new idea or a new shade of meaning. Thus the words ‘to eat, land, house’ come from Old English, but ‘to devour, territory, building’ come from French. The words describing feudal relations or related to the law courts and governing were borrowed from French: to command, to obey, baron, council, to accuse, court, crime, arms, guard, battle, victory, etc.

Even if both Anglo-Saxon and French words remained in the language, they were at least slightly different in meaning. This was illustrated by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe: a domestic animal in the charge of a Saxon serf was called by its Anglo-Saxon name, but when it was sent to the table of a Norman baron it changed it name into French. Thus the English language still has such pairs of words as ‘ox – beef’, ‘calf – veal’, ‘sheep – mutton’, ‘swine – pork’.

Some synonymous words are used in different styles. The English words usually give a homelier idea, while the French ones are mostly used in formal speech: ‘to give up – to abandon’, ‘to give in – to surrender’, ‘to come in – to enter’, ‘to begin – to commence’, ‘to go on – to continue’.

As a result, the stock of synonyms in English is larger than in any other European language, and the English word-stock is the largest in Europe.