THIS LITTLE BRITAIN

How one small country built the modern world

HARRY BINGHAM

To my beloved N

‘Teach me thy love to know;

That this new light, which now I see,

May both the work and workman show:

Then by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee.

See that ye love one another.’

CONTENTS

Introduction

LANGUAGE

Shaw’s Potato Declining to Conjugate A World of Squantos

LITERATURE Lashings of Pop Of Cows and Beef Half-chewed Latin A Wilderness of Monkeys

LAW The Rustics of England ‘No Free Man…’ A Handful of Feathers From the Same Mud

THE LAWMAKERS A Bettir Lawe No Remote Impassive Gaze Good King Frank A Most Strange and Wonderfull Herring Clean Hands, Dirty Money

WARFARE Invasion The Mighty Monmouth How to Be a Superpower Lacking Elan President Monroe’s Trousers

SCIENCE The First Scientist Ex Ungue Leonem The Last Scientist A Painful Admission

TECHNOLOGY Raising Water by Fire The Horse, the Car, the Pogo Stick Colossus

ECONOMY Whose Land? The Monster with 10,000 Eyes Wheat without Doong A Wave of Gadgets The Food of the People

EMPIRE And Like a Torrent Rush The Gates of Mercy The Reluctant Father Bombay Direct Soldiers and Slaves

LIFESTYLE The British Way of Death Yobs Clouds of Feculence Greeks Very Fine Linen

CONCLUSION Age and Liberty

Acknowledgements Sources Also by Harry Bingham Copyright About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Who are we?

For we British, that’s an oddly difficult question. Although our national self-assessment usually notes a number of good points (we’re inventive, tolerant, and at least we’re not French), it lists a torrent of bad ones too. Our society is fragmented, degenerate, irresponsible. Our kids are thugs, our workers ill educated, our managers greedy and incompetent. We hate our weather. Our public services are abysmal. Our society is rude and unfriendly. We drink too much and in the wrong way. Our house prices are crazy, our politicians sleazy, our roads jammed, our football team rubbish. When The Times invited readers to put forward new designs for the backs of British coins, one reader wrote in saying, ‘How about a couple of yobs dancing on a car bonnet or a trio of legless ladettes in the gutter?’

All this denigration may not be good for our self-esteem, but it does at least suggest the existence of some sort of national identity, however humble. But scratch below the surface and that identity quickly starts to unravel. Take the nationality issue, for example. How many countries are there whose name is as confused as ours? Are we best called Great Britain? The British Isles? The United Kingdom? Or none of these? The technically correct title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — a composite term which makes reference to a second composite term (Great Britain) and a chunk of land (Northern Ireland) that was until recently claimed by another sovereign state.

Confused? It gets worse. Take sport. The English mostly cheer the team of any ‘home nation’, including the Republic of Ireland, which isn’t a home nation at all. Meanwhile the Scots cheer the Welsh and vice versa, while both will cheer anyone at all if they’re playing against England. Ryan Giggs, the best Welsh footballer of his generation, once captained the English Schoolboys. One of the leading ‘English’ bowlers is Simon Jones, a Welshman. In rugby, Ireland plays as one team, in football as two, in cricket as one team occasionally masquerading as an English county.

It’s sometimes said that our identity confusion has been exacerbated by today’s multicultural society. Anyone reading today’s newspapers would almost certainly come away with an impression of a society uneasy with itself, a land where racial and religious tension seethes only inches beneath the surface. But if this is the case — and I doubt it — it’s certainly nothing new. Contemporary multiculturalism may pose challenges, but infinitely fewer than it posed in the past. The Viking version of multiculturalism generally involved a sword in the belly. The sixteenth-century version of a multi-faith society involved bonfires, stakes and heretics.

In any case, our national confusion goes far wider and deeper than simply national, ethnic or religious issues. Recent reactions to the war in Iraq exposed long-standing divisions about the country’s attitudes to its past. When the British government chose to go to war, was it acting in its old role of imperialist bully? Or in its equally old role of global policeman and bringer of freedom? The national debate displayed both responses, both equally impassioned. The rise of the British Empire is arguably the most salient fact in the history of the modern world. Should we be proud of it or ashamed? Or perhaps the empire has nothing to do with us any more? For all our love of military adventure, are we perhaps just a glorified adjunct of the United States, a kind of East Atlantic Puerto Rico?

Our own government is hardly keen to boast on our behalf. The Home Office recently published a booklet called Life in the United Kingdom, aimed at helping immigrants navigate the path to citizenship. It’s not a bad publication at all. It begins with a twenty-five-page history of the country, from Roman times to the present. The survey is balanced and accurate, if a bit on the bland side. But what it leaves out is peculiar. It does say, ‘British industry came to lead the world in the nineteenth century.’ But that hardly gets the point across. The fact is that at the peak of our industrial power, we dug two-thirds of the world’s coal, refined half its iron, forged five-sevenths of its steel, manufactured two-fifths of its hardware, and wove half its commercial cotton cloth. That’s not simply leading others. That’s being so far ahead of others that we were, in effect, imagining an entire new world into existence, a world that has utterly altered human expectations of health, wealth and technological possibility.

Likewise, the booklet comments that ‘the railway engine [was] pioneered by George and Robert Stephenson’. Well, yes, so it was, but British inventors have also played key roles in developing the steam engine, the telegraph, aeronautics, the steam turbine, the microscope, the screw-driven iron ship, industrial steel, multiple-print photography, the electric light, the chain-driven bicycle, the electric generator, pneumatic tyres, the telephone, television, radar, the fax machine, the computer, the jet engine, the pocket calculator, and the World Wide Web. Those medical and public health innovations which Britons were most instrumental in developing — vaccination, integrated mains sewerage, antiseptic surgery and antibiotics — have saved far more lives than all other medical innovations put together. Are these facts really not worth a mention?

And why stop there? The British empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface, but used an army smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. The world speaks our language. Our scientists have won vast numbers of Nobel Prizes, more than those in any country except the United States. The evolution of such things as habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process, the abolition of torture, and the rule of law aren’t purely British in inspiration, but owe more to us than to anyone else. Our parliamentary democracy has been hugely influential in spreading ideals of liberty and representative government around the world. At the Royal Navy’s peak, it owned more than half of the world’s warships and made possible the nineteenth-century globalization of trade and finance.

These aren’t small things. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the modern world has been more deeply shaped by Britain than by any other country. And we brought some good stuff to the party. Democracy, the limited state, the rule of law, free trade, industrialization, modern agriculture, modern finance, international law — none of these is exclusively British, but they’re all sticky with our fingerprints. To the (very considerable) extent that the world is now shaped by American power and American values … well, we know which country gave her birth. If the modern world is richer, freer, more peaceful, more democratic and healthier than it was, then Britain has played a leading role, often the leading role, in that transformation.

This book is about just that. What follows is a series of observations about very particular aspects of our culture and history. But underlying these observations is a broader theme, that of British exceptionalism: the ways in which our history is most strikingly different from that of our neighbours. This book takes a particular interest in the many things that we did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do. It focuses especially on those of our oddities which spread across the world — everything from football to the rule of law.

This isn’t meant to be a balanced way to view ourselves. A balanced view would take into account the many ways in which we were identical to our neighbours, or borrowed ideas and institutions from them. It would look at the ways in which we were last or worst or feeblest. Yet those viewpoints already have wide expression in our culture. Those ladettes in the gutter or the yobs dancing on the bonnet symbolize all that we already dislike in ourselves. This book is a reminder of the other side, the side that our grumbling too often ignores.

Along the way, a picture of Britain emerges: one possible answer to the conundrum of Britishness, one way of answering that question, ‘Who are we?’ And if the book skates over much of what is least praiseworthy in our culture, then at least it aims to do justice to our joint creation: a world inconceivably better now than it was four hundred years ago. A world that, compared with that earlier age, is (mostly) prosperous, (mostly) free, (mostly) technically advanced. In short, a world that is (mostly) British.

Before proceeding farther, a few caveats are in order. Readers wanting to race straight through to the action should do just that.

The first caveat has to do with the horrendous complexity of the term ‘British’. Britain in its current shape dates from only 1707, and that’s to ignore all the complexities of Britain’s relationship with Ireland, and indeed its relationships with the overseas colonies and dominions. Before the Act of Union, there was a century in which the crowns of Scotland and England were joined, albeit with one or two rude interruptions, yet those two countries and Ireland were all importantly separate from one another. That separateness, indeed, was a crucial complicating factor during the turbulence of that century. Prior to 1603, old-fashioned histories of Britain are generally content to talk about England almost exclusively until a British identity starts to flicker into life in the early-modern era. This approach is a nonsense, of course. If Britain means anything at all prior to 1603, then it designates a geographical area that certainly includes Scotland. The most recent history to take these issues seriously was called simply The Isles, a title that squarely places geography ahead of politics.

The complications of Britishness are perhaps most evident in relation to Ireland. That country was colonized by the British, and its citizens were for a long time both Irish and British. Which identity is paramount? It all depends on who you ask. When called an Irishman, the Dublin-born, London-dwelling Duke of Wellington is said to have replied that ‘Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.’ On the other hand, the Ulster-born, Dublin-dwelling Seamus Heaney refused to have his work included in a book of British verse, writing, ‘Be advised, my passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen’

In this book, I haven’t attempted to solve this or any other identity problem. Indeed, I’ve simply avoided definitions altogether. If Scottish soldiers in Canada develop the sport of ice hockey, then that, for me, is an example of Britishness in action. If a French-born king of England (but not Wales or Scotland) develops the common law, then that too, for the purposes of this book, counts as an example of Britishness in action. There’s no neat logic in action here, but then if it’s logic you were after, you shouldn’t have bought a book about Britain.

I’ve a further confession to make, namely that Scotland, Wales and Ireland don’t figure much in my account of exceptionalism in the pre-modern era. There are two reasons for that, one good, one bad. The bad one is simply that this is a short book with a lot to do. By focusing on England, I was able to narrow the amount I needed to read about and write about. It was a labour-saving device, and nothing more. The better reason is that, in those earlier centuries, the most important elements of exceptionalism to arise anywhere in the British Isles had to do with the English language, the English common law and the rise of the English parliament. Since England would become the dominant partner in the subsequent political unions, those English oddities would prove more lastingly influential than comparable oddities elsewhere in the archipelago. In any event, it’s possible to get too hung up about all of this. I live in England, but spent huge chunks of my childhood in Wales. My grandfather was Protestant Ulster, his ancestors Scots and his wife Manx. My wife’s maiden name is Moroney, and her father Catholic Irish. I’m hardly exceptional in being this much of a mixture. If football fans of one home nation want to get all steamed up with those of another, then that’s up to them, but it’s not much different from the liver yelling insults at the pancreas, the heart giving aggro to the gall bladder.

Finally, one last caveat. This book is rather unfashionable in celebrating British achievement. It suggests that the nation’s part in shaping the modern world exceeds the role played by any other country, not only in terms of the scale of its impact, but in terms of its benefits too. (That’s not to say there weren’t disbenefits also. There were, and very significant ones at that.) Any such celebratory tone can easily seem rather embarrassing, a display of bad taste akin to having a flagpole in your front garden or enjoying the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. Personally, though, I’m not sure that questions of taste should determine what history to remember. The naval historian, Nick Rodger, had this to say about his own field of expertise:

Many modern writers implicitly assume that the functions of the Navy were essentially aggressive, to win territory overseas. It seems for them to follow that sea power is nowadays both uninteresting, except to specialists in imperial history, and morally disreputable, something that the honest historian ought to pretend does not exist.

A similar comment could be made more broadly about any view of Britain which lays too much emphasis on the positive, on the distinctive and on the world-shaping. This book certainly does lay too much emphasis on these things. I hope I’ve made it crystal clear that it is not intended as an even-handed survey. Yet honest historians ought never to pretend or imagine things away. History, like life, doesn’t make for easy moral conclusions. Any historian wanting to avoid a ‘morally disreputable’ and intellectually shallow patriotism risks biasing the picture in the other direction, overlooking facts that should not be overlooked. If this book has a serious purpose, then it’s this: to thump down on the table a whole collection of such facts. Included in the collection are some obvious but under-emphasized ones, such as British naval predominance, and some less obvious ones too — for example, facts connected with social welfare, homicide, sports or the health transition.

What one makes of this collection is another matter altogether: a business for professional historians, not rank amateurs like myself. Having written a book built entirely on the scholarship of others, I’m as keenly aware as it’s possible to be of how much remarkable work is being done by historians today. I’m not just indebted to their work, I’m in awe of it.

LANGUAGE

SHAW’S POTATO

The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti:

F: gh as in rough I: o as in women SH: ti as in nation

Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato:

P: gh as in hiccough O: ough as in though T: bt as in debt A: eigh as in neighbour T: pt as in pterodactyl O: eau as in bureau

Other languages have their eccentric spellings, of course, but English is in a league of its own. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian all spell more or less as they sound. English just isn’t like that. If you heard individual words from this paragraph and were asked to write them out, how would you know to choose more rather than moor or maw? Know rather than no? Would rather than wood? Write rather than right or rite? Or rather than oar, ore or awe? Their rather than they’re or there? You rather than ewe? Course rather than coarse? But rather than butt? In rather than inn? For rather than four, fore or even (for those acquainted with the archaic term for Scottish gypsies) faw? The answer is that, of course, you couldn’t. But nothing happens without a reason, and the strange spellings of English have their reasons too, lurking deep in the heart of Shaw’s potato.

P as in hiccough

The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time.

O as in though

Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth.

English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to re-emerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch.

This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including:

Scae Sse Sche Shae Se Che Shee Zhee Sheea Sheh Shey Sha Sso Sco Scho Schoe Show Sho Shoy Schew Schw Shoe Shou She Su Scheo Sheo Zhe

If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough, London, home to the court and the senior echelons of the national bureaucracy, became dominant in imposing its spellings, in particular through the most senior bureaucrats of them all, the Masters of Chancery. Over time, they began to stamp their authority on the chaos. Out went all those scheos and sheeas and zhes, to be replaced by she. Out went ich (and many others) to be replaced by I. Because the movers and shakers of London spoke an English drawn mostly from London and the Midlands, our spelling is based largely on those accents.

Those early bureaucrats did a good job. Fifteenth-century English spelling was increasingly systematic and rational—a typical European language. Alas, however, no sooner had the spellings been fixed than pronunciations shifted. The spelling of words like through, rough and right is a perfectly accurate guide to the way these words used to be spoken. But the language has moved on, leaving these old medieval relics behind.

T as in debt

The silent B in debt is another tree ring.

When the Masters of Chancery were working to fix the language, there was a debate between those who thought that all spellings should be phonetic, and those who wanted them to be based on sound etymology. The phonetic camp won out in most cases, but not in all. Debt has a silent B, simply because medieval scholars wanted to point out that the word has its origins in the Latin debere, to owe. So a silent B was added—and never mind the fact that the word actually came from the French dette, which never had a B anywhere near it.

This was a quirky way to justify introducing a totally needless letter, and it was based on a more than generous interpretation of etymology, but there was, at least, an etymological connection, however thin. Medieval scholars were, however, prone to finding connections to the Latin where none actually existed, so our language is littered with plenty of spellings that are unjustifiable on any level. Island doesn’t come from the Latin insula; it comes from an s-free Germanic root. (Compare modern German Eiland.) Anchor, rhyme, scythe, island, numb, ghost and many others derived their oddness from other errors fixed and perpetuated by Renaissance dictionaries.

A as in neighbour

All the problems so far mentioned fade into insignificance compared with the one identified by the A in Shaw’s potato.

Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame—my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm—mee coo toe’

This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on.

The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country—Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall—they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that—and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes.

On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things.

The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word—police—which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it.

T as in pterodactyl

The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The pterodactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’ Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one of the biggest creators of new words is science.

Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class—and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t.

O as in bureau

The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings.

That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language—for example, nation, another French borrowing—and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia.

Potato as in

That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this:

(That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will.

In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to?

DECLINING TO CONJUGATE

For English speakers, one of the most striking facts about learning other languages is how bloomin’ complicated they seem to be. A perfectly regular French verb has five different forms in its present tense alone. Adjectives have to vary depending on whether a noun is singular or plural, masculine or feminine. And French is easy. German has three genders, five cases. The Polish struggle with three genders and seven cases, and if that weren’t enough, their nouns, adjectives, numbers and pronouns all decline differently. Italian has fifty forms for each verb, ancient Greek more than three hundred, modern Turkish an eye-popping two million.

For we Brits, this complexity seems simply astonishing. We have two standard noun forms, singular and plural—dog and dogs, for example. We have four standard verb forms: bark, barks, barking and barked. Our adjectives don’t vary at all.* When we encounter a language with the complexity of Polish or Turkish, most of us find it simply stunning. It seems a wonder that Polish or Turkish toddlers ever manage to master the tongue at all.

To a linguist, however, the puzzle is a rather different one. English is a Germanic language, and the only one of its family to have lost almost all inflections. English is, in fact, about the least inflected language ever known. The reason for this has nothing to do with some form of linguistic evolution, from ‘primitive’ inflected languages to ‘modern’ uninflected ones. Rather, the answer has to do with that most English of solutions to precarious situations: muddle, fudge and compromise.

Back in 878, Alfred the Great defeated the Danish army at Edington. The battle checked the hitherto unstopped Viking advance, and enabled Alfred to go on to negotiate a peace agreement which divided the country into two. A line was drawn diagonally across England, running roughly from Chester to London. The area to the south of the line would remain under English rule; the northern part (the ‘Danelaw’) would be ruled by the Danes (though most of those ruled, of course, would be English).

Trade carried on across the line, very much as before. After Alfred’s son, Edward, had won back the Danelaw, then a common authority existed across the whole country, though pockets of Danish settlers were still widespread. Although frustratingly little is known about the pattern of Danish settlement, the likelihood is that significant numbers of Danes contined to come and settle across the eastern seaboard for the next two hundred years or so. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, linguists were recording language communities in Lincolnshire whose speech contained entire sentences that were effectively in Danish, not English. Old habits die hard.

Under these conditions—and largely in the east—Danes and English came into regular, daily, routine contact. The two communities would have been able to communicate with relatively little difficulty. Although the English spoke Old English and the Danes spoke Old Norse, the two languages were extremely close, rather in the way Norwegian and Swedish are today. The sentence ‘I’ll sell you the horse that pulls my cart’ translates as:

OLD ENGLISH: Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn

OLD NORSE: Ek mun selja ther hossit er dregr vagn mine

The main words of this sentence are pretty close. Sell translates as selle / selja. Horse is hors / hossit, and so on. The speakers of one group could fairly easily have guessed the broad meanings of the other party’s words. But what about all those word endings? The cases and genders, tenses, moods and the rest? The chances of a non-native speaker being able to guess the subtle implications of all those word endings would have been approximately nil.

So—and still only in the east—the word endings started to disappear. As traders and others sought to do business, Dane with English and vice versa, they simply started to drop the parts of the language that didn’t function for them. The process moved furthest and farthest in the areas where Dane and English lived closest together. In the west of the country, where Danish influence was minimal, a highly inflected version of English lasted right into the fifteenth century.

In the end, though, the Easterners had the advantage of geography. London, Oxford and Cambridge all fell, more or less, into the eastern zone, and those three centres of cultural power ended up dictating the language the rest of the country would speak. In consequence, English went from being an ordinarily inflected language to one with almost no variation at all: the pidgin product of an uneasy peace.

How should one interpret this change? Almost certainly as a historical-linguistic quirk. Just one of those things. Yet it’s hard to avoid a nagging sense of something further. There have been plenty of instances in which two similar linguistic communities have travelled and traded, mixed and mingled, yet English is exceptional in its lack of inflection. Were those early English exceptional in their desire to trade rather than fight, in their willingness to rub along with alien folk? The evidence falls a mile short of being conclusive, yet those same traits would prove to be reasonably prominent national characteristics many centuries down the road. Possibly, and only just possibly, those same traits were present way back in Anglo-Saxon times; that linguistic oddity their only surviving trace.

Whatever the answer to that particular conundrum, the inflections never came back. They are still eroding, very slightly, today. Whom has almost given way to who. The regional dialect thou makes(t) for the standard you make has just about vanished too. Those wonderful Danish-speaking Lincolnshire folk have been obliterated by the BBC and universal education and the internal combustion engine. (Though Lincolnshire dialect is still rich in words and phrases from Old Norse.)

This simplified, simplifying language offers one huge benefit to the world. To its billion and a half non-native speakers, English spelling is nothing but a plague and a torment. English inflections, by contrast, are now so simple you could learn them all in a minute, and still have time to put the kettle on.

* With one exception: blond and blonde.

A WORLD OF SQUANTOS

In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford:

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again:

Whilst we were busied hereabout, we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in…He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’.

The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat.

The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony.

The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost anywhere—any country, any coast, any continent—and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers—from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman—who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time.

It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today.

Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms, Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionary-based word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000.

The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms—bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Académie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too.

What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible.

Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student café, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in.

Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled. What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance.

There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean café. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos.

LITERATURE

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