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The History of English Podcast
Episode 45: To Coin a Phrase – and Money
01:05:26
At the end of the 8th century, Western Europe saw its most powerful kings to date. That included Charlemagne in Francia and Offa in Britain. Those kings shared a close relationship which extended to their currency.
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Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language. This is episode 45, to coin a phrase and money. In this episode, we're going to explore the events of the late seven hundreds. This was a period in which both the Anglo Saxons and the Franks were ruled by the their most powerful kings to date. In Britain, it was Offa, King of Mercia, a king who directly or indirectly ruled over most of the Anglo Saxons. In the Frankish kingdom, it was Charlemagne, the most powerful European leader since the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, up in Scandinavia, the Vikings were beginning to set sail. And there was something which connected all of these developments during this period. Commerce, commerce and trade linked all of these peoples. And part of that story is revealed in the coins which survived from that period. But before I begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com and you can reach me by email@KevinistoryofEnglishPodcast.com and you can follow me on Twitter glishhistpod. And I'm still working on that Beowulf project between episodes of the podcast, so I'll keep you updated on that as it nears completion. Now, this time, I want to move the story of English forward through the end of the 8th century. And the one underlying theme of this episode is trade and commerce, and more specifically, the coins used in that trade and commerce. Now, coins are not only currency, they're cultural artifacts. And since they're made of metal, they tend to last a long time, sometimes thousands of years. So unearthed coins are a wonderful resource for historians and archaeologists. They can often be traced back to a specific location and usually a specific time. It was the presence of coins at Sutton Hoo which allowed historians to determine the approximate date of the ship burial. The presence of coins can also reveal trading patterns. A significant increase in coins from a particular region may indicate a period of economic growth. And a sharp decrease in coins may suggest economic decline. And inscriptions on coins can actually tell us a little bit about the language and culture of the people. So coins tell us a lot about a particular time and place. Roman coins had once dominated commerce in Western Europe, but when the Roman Empire collapsed, that coinage began to disappear. The early Franks in Gaul developed their own coins, but in Britain, the early Anglo Saxons weren't as Romanized as the Franks, so they didn't have their own coins at first. And this is kind of important because the lack of coinage limited trade with other regions. Without a coinage, the Anglo Saxons had to rely upon barter or a foreign currency. Whenever it trickled in. The Sutton Hoo ship burial has been dated to the early 600s, thanks to some Frankish coins which were found in the ship. But no Anglo Saxon coins were found there. And that was probably because the ship burial occurred before the Anglo Saxons began to mint their own coins. But a short time later, they did start to mint some very basic, very, very crude coins. Those first Anglo Saxon coins were struck in gold, mainly from mints in London and York. They mimicked Frankish and Roman coins, but those gold coins were short lived. Gold coins also disappeared from the Frankish kingdom around the same time, which suggests that there was a general shortage of gold supply by the late 600s. With the apparent gold shortage, silver became the metal of choice. Throughout northern Europe, silver coins began to replace gold coins. And in Britain, the Anglo Saxons began to produce very crude silver coins called shayatis. An individual coin was called a shayat, which may have been derived from the same word which gave us the modern word sheet. And that was presumably because the coins began as sheets of metal. By the way, the Latin word plate had the same original meaning. It meant a flat sheet of gold or silver. And since coins were made from those sheets, the term plate was sometimes used for a flat round coin. Of course, bowls and dishes were also made from those gold and silver sheets. So over time, the term plate was applied to dishes as well. Those metal sheets were cut into lots of little circular discs. At first, it was just a little plain disk with nothing on it. So it was called a blank or blanc in French. There was actually a French coin introduced in the 1300s called a blanc. By the 1500s, a blank had come to refer to a losing lottery ticket. So if you drew a losing ticket, you drew a blank. By the 1800s, it had come to refer to bullets with no projectile. So you might end up shooting blanks. But originally, a blank was a piece of plain round metal. The piece of metal was then stamped with a wedge shaped tool, which actually created the image on the piece of metal. The Latin word for wedge was cuneus. And since a wedge shaped tool was used to create the image, the word cuneus produced the word coin. Again, coin was a Latin term, so the Anglo Saxons didn't call their coins coins. Remember, they called them schiatis. I should also note here that the Latin word for wedge, cuneos, also gave us the name of the ancient near east writing system, cuneiform or cuneiform. Those Near Eastern scribes also used a wedge shaped stylus to press markings into clay tablets. So both cuneiform and coin come from the name of the wedge shaped instruments used to press inscriptions. By analogy, the process of inventing new words or phrases was compared to the process of minting new coins. And in the 1500s it produced the expression to coin a phrase to refer to the invention of a new word or phrase. Even Shakespeare used the expression when he wrote, so shall my lungs coin words till their decay. Now, I noted that there was an original preference for gold coins. Gold is an Old English word with very deep Germanic roots. In fact, gold can be traced back to the original Indo European word which was gel, with a very aspirated g sound. At the beginning, it meant shiny or bright. And of course, gold is a very bright or yellow metal. And in fact, gold, the word yellow comes from the same root word as gold. As we know, the G sound often shifted to a Y sound in many Old English words. We've seen that before in words like garden and yard. Well, we also have it here. The original Indo European word gel produced gold with its original g sound and yellow with the newer y sound. Another word which comes from the same root as yellow and gold is yolk, which is the yellow part of the egg. Obviously, it has the same Y sound as yellow. But outside of yellow and yolk, most of the words which come from that original root word came in with their original g sound. One of those words was gold. Gold has the O vowel sound between the g and the l, giving us gold gold. But that vowel sound actually disappeared early on in another variation of the same root word. The result was a gl sound, Gl. And that sound appears at the beginning of a lot of words in modern English which mean bright and shiny. That includes words like gleam, glimmer, glitter, glint, glisten, glare, gloss, glass, glaze, and glow. All of those are Germanic words which mean bright or shiny, and they all derive from the same root as gold. So all that glitters may not be gold, but glitter and gold are cognate. Having derived from the same root word, something that was covered in gold was gilded from the same root. Mark Twain used that term to describe an early period of US History, which he called the Gilded Age. And we can thank Shakespeare for the phrase gild the lily to mean adorn something with unnecessary decoration. The phrase derives from a line in Shakespeare's King John, which is to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on a violet. So if you guild refined gold, in the words of Shakespeare, you're literally covering gold with gold. So it's unnecessary decoration. So that's gold, which was and still is a very precious and valuable metal. But as I noted, there was apparently a gold shortage by the late 600s, because gold coins were being phased out around that time in both Britain and the Frankish kingdom. And they were gradually being replaced with silver coins. Those early Anglo Saxon silver coins, those shiatas, were thick and crude, and they were initially used for local trade and small scale transactions. And you may be surprised to learn that they weren't issued by kings or kingdoms. They were actually issued by individual moneyers. The moneyers probably paid something to the king for the privilege, and the kingdom probably had some oversight as to the weight and quality of the coins to prevent fraud. But the kingdom itself was not directly involved in the process. So early coins from this period sometimes have the name of the mint or the moneyer, but they don't have the name or image of the king. But all of that started to change in the mid-700s. Around that time, the Frankish kings and the Anglo Saxon kings began to take control of their respective currencies. And for the first time, they started to issue official coins by order of the king. In 755, the denier was made official in the Frankish kingdom. And that innovation soon spread to Britain. In Britain, Kent was the closest region to France, located just across the Channel. So Kent had the closest ties with the Franks and the Frankish traders. So shortly after the Frankish kingdom introduced its official coins, the Kentish king did the same thing. The mint in Canterbury produced the first official coinage in Britain. And those new coins began to replace the crude shayatas which had been minted before. They were also the first Anglo Saxon coins to identify the king who issued them. Now, they may not have realized it at the time, but that new official coinage was destined to have a major impact on the economy. It actually produced a massive increase in trade and commerce. And that's because a standardized currency facilitated trade. It made transactions more efficient. Traders didn't have to rely upon barter or crude coins of questionable value. So standardized coins were a huge boost to traders. And that increased trade led to increased revenue for the king. And that was partly because coins made it easier to collect taxes. One way in which the kings generated revenue was by minting coins which were valid for a limited period of time, say three or four years after that period, you had to bring those old outdated coins back to the mint for new coins. But here is the key. If you brought 100 old coins in, you didn't necessarily get 100 new coins. You might only get 95 in return, the extra 5 coins were kept by the mint to cover the cost of production, and a portion of that went back to the king. So, in other words, the king collected a hefty tax every time the old coins expired. And this could only be done with a standard currency issued under the authority of the kings. The currency also enabled kings to levy direct taxes. For example, Offa's predecessor in Mercia, Ethelbald, levied a toll on ships. But the Anglo Saxons didn't call a payment levied by the king a tax, because tax is a Latin word which came into English with the Normans. The Anglo Saxons called a tax or payment to the king a scot. The word Scot still survives as Scotland in the phrase scot free, meaning penalty free, as in he got away scot free. So two important things were happening throughout the 700s. Trade throughout Northern Europe was exploding and kingdoms were getting wealthier, and a new official, standardized coinage was facilitating that process. By the mid-700s, Offa had emerged as the king of Mercia in the central part of Britain. In the Midlands, the Mercians were the traditional rivals of the Northumbrians. You might remember the pagan king of Mercia named Penda, who fought against those Christian kings in Northumbria, like Edwin and Oswald and Oswi. Well, by this point, Mercia had been converted and it was staunchly Christian, just like the rest of Anglo Saxon Britain. And Offa was actually a relative of Penda within the same ruling family. And in the years after Penda, Mercia had continued to be a formidable power in Central Britain. Offa came to power shortly before Charlemagne emerged as king of the Franks. So they were contemporaries and both kings had very long reigns. Offa was king for about 40 years and Charlemagne was king for about 46 years. So they actually had a long history together. Offa extended the power of Mercia and he quickly became the most powerful ruler in Britain. He's generally considered to be the most powerful Anglo Saxon king before the emergence of the Wessex dynasty under Alfred about a century later. He was also the only Western European king who could deal with Charlemagne on something close to equal footing. Charlemagne famously referred to Atha as his brother in correspondence between the two of them. Unfortunately, most of what we know about Offa comes from outside sources. Offa became king shortly after Bede died, so he wasn't part of Bede's important history of early England. And about a century later, the Anglo Saxon chronicle was started at the direction of Alfred. But by that point, we're well beyond AFA's reign. So AFA lived in that narrow period between our two best, best sources of Anglo Saxon history. The most well known legacy of Offa's reign was the large fortification which was constructed along the entirety of the Welsh border, known as Offa's Dyke. A large portion of that fortification still exists today. And since the Mercians and the Welsh spoke different languages, it was not only a political barrier, it was also a linguistic barrier. Shortly after he became king, Offa set his sights on Kent, the kingdom in southeastern Britain. That was the kingdom where Canterbury was located. And at this point, Canterbury was home to two things which are important to our story. One was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was not at all happy with Offa's attempts to control the region. And that will become important a little bit later in our story. The other thing in Canterbury was that mint where those first official coins were produced. Well, within the first decade of Offa's reign, he had assumed effective control of Kent, and that meant he had assumed control over that mint at Canterbury. And once he got control over it, he had the name and image of the Kentish king removed from the coins, and he had his own name and image inserted in its place. And this is another important legacy of his coins. The silver coins produced during Offa's reign became the standard for Anglo Saxon currency for the next five centuries, until the late Middle Ages. The new coins were of very high quality and very artistic. His coins have been found throughout Europe and even beyond into the Middle East. The widespread distribution of office coins indicates how powerful his kingdom was, and it also illustrates how extensive the trade was during this period. Apha's silver coins were called pennies, and there is considerable debate about the origin of that name. Many scholars think the name of the penny was derived from the name of Ofa's ancestor, Penda, who was that earlier king of Mercia. Another theory links the word penny with the word pawn, thanks to a proto Germanic word, pande. But the etymology is still a matter of dispute. And with respect to Offa's coins, we once again find a connection between the events in the Frankish kingdom and events in Britain. During this period, Charlemagne reformed the official coinage in the Frankish kingdom. He decided to tie everything to a pound of silver, or livres of silver. In French, a pound of silver was divided into 20 equal parts to create a solidus, and a solidus was divided into 12 equal parts to create a denier, and that became the standard French currency. The plural form of solidus is solidi, and solidi were used as standard Currency for paying mercenaries and other fighters. And in French, a fighter who was paid with solidi became known as a soldier or soldier today. Now, it's important to note that the decimal system was not in use when Charlemagne reformed and standardized the Frankish currency. So they didn't use the modern increments of 10 that we use today. It took 12 deniers to make a solidus and 20 solidi to make a pound or livre of silver. So by that math, it took two hundred and forty deniers to equal a pound of silver. So the math was a little more complicated. But the Anglo Saxons apparently decided that Charlemagne had the right idea, because Offa's coins were soon reformed to copy the new Frankish system. Offa's penny was the equivalent of the French denier. The English shilling was the equivalent of the French solidus. And the English pound was a direct translation of the French livre. And the same increments were used for the new English coinage. It took 12 pennies to make a shilling and 20 shillings to make a pound. And that type of coordination helps to illustrate how close the trade was between the Franks and the Anglo Saxons. They each had their own currencies, but they were both designed around the same basic formulas, and they were both based on the same fixed silver standard. So the respective coins were somewhat interchangeable. And again, that made trade between the two kingdoms much easier and more efficient. So all of that means that the British pound once equaled a pound of silver. It also meant that the silver penny was the basic unit of English currency. And just like in France, penny math was done in increments of 12. 12 pennies was a shilling and two hundred and forty pennies was a pound. And since it took 12 pennies to make a shilling, half a shilling was sixpennies or sixpence. And the sixpence became its own coin. In the 1500s, the term pence, as a plural form of penny really emerged. In the Middle English period, you might have six individual pennies, and collectively they would be worth sixpence. And both sixpenny and sixpence found their way into modern English. Since sixpennies were half of a shilling, the term sixpenny came to mean something cheap or low quality. Meanwhile, sixpence was used as a standard unit of currency. Again, half a shilling. Of course, in American English, we know that term sixpence primarily through a nursery rhyme. Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye, four and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie, and so on. That Nursery rhyme dates from the 1700s, but that particular rhyme didn't coin the phrase Sing a song of sixpence. It had actually been around for a while. Shakespeare had used a variation of it in the 1600s. It was used in the context of giving someone a sixpence coin in exchange for a song. By the way, have you ever wondered why that nursery rhyme says 4 and 20 blackbirds instead of 24 blackbirds? Well, here's the answer. Because that's the way the Anglo Saxons counted. As we've seen before, the Anglo Saxons use the same basic words for numbers that we use today. They just used an older pronunciation, but instead of 21, they would say 1 and 20. And instead of 35, they might say 5 and 30. So they would put the smaller number first. And this was actually the standard Germanic way of formulating those numbers. And it's still the way those numbers are formed in many modern Germanic languages. But after the Normans arrived in 1066, English was influenced by French, which puts the larger number first and the smaller number second. So 4 and 20 became 24. But it took a long time for that old English formulation to die out. And it was apparently still lingering around in the 1700s when sing a Song of Sixpence was composed. So that was the sixpence. But let's go back to office pennies. I noted that his pennies were of a very high quality, and that was especially true for the designs of the coins. They often contained an image of Offa, or at least a rudimentary design which was supposed to be him. They were usually inscribed with Offa Rex, which meant King Offa in Latin, and Latin was still considered the international language of Europe. But the X in Rex was sometimes rendered in the form of a Christian cross. It was sometimes moved to the other side of Appa's image to stand out. So the coin would say AFA Re on the right side, and the X was rendered as a cross on the left side. And that may not seem impressive by today's standards, but that type of artistic design was really unusual in the 700s. Remember, official coins were still a relatively new concept for these kingdoms. AFA also issued coins in the name of his wife, the Queen of Mercia. And those were the only coins minted during the entire Anglo Saxon period with a queen on them. His coins also give us a sense of the limitations of language in the 700s. That growing international trade was bringing in coins from Arab traders in the Middle east and Northern Africa. AFA's mentors were apparently Fascinated by those exotic coins because they decided to issue their own copies. They just added the standard rex offa to them. But apparently very few Anglo Saxons had any knowledge of Arabic because the Arabic coins contained an inscription written in Arabic. And the Anglo Saxons either didn't care what it said or they just thought it was a decoration, because Atha's version of those coins included the same inscription. And the inscription reads, there is no God but one, and Muhammad is his prophet. Those coins were actually issued during Appa's reign. Now, modern scholars are in pretty much universal agreement that that was an oversight. No Christian king of that period would have knowingly issued a coin with an Islamic inscription on it. But ultimately, it was a case of no harm, no foul. The Anglo Saxons apparently weren't bothered by it because they couldn't read it. They I didn't know what it meant. As I noted earlier, Appa's very advanced and very widespread coinage suggests that there was a considerable amount of wealth flowing into Britain during this period. Much of that coinage was being used to buy goods from foreign traders, especially those from Scandinavia and the Frankish kingdom. With the growth of trade, new trading centers were also starting to pop up throughout the region. In Britain, a trading center of this type was called a week. And thanks to that old English sound shift where the k sound sometimes becomes a ch sound, that type of trading center was also sometimes called a weatch or witch. So weak and witch were variations of the same word. This was an old Germanic word which meant harbor. But as traders began to arrive in increasing numbers, those harbors emerged into trading centers. And many of those early trading centers in Britain use week or which as part of their name. The major trading center in Wessex was Ham Week, later known as Southampton. In Northumbria, the major trading center was Eafroik. That may seem a little strange, but it was later shortened to York. London also started to emerge as a major trading center. It was called London Week. In the late 600s, most of the other trading centers used the other version of the word witch. The port at Canterbury was called Fordwich. The major trading center in East Anglia was called Ipswich. The town of Sandwich also emerged as a trading center in Kent on the southeastern coast. Sandwich was literally the sandy trading center, or the trading center built on sand. And since the sandwich which you have for lunch was supposedly named for the Earl of Sandwich, it means that that old English word for a trading center is still a part of our modern diet. But there's another interesting aspect of that word, witch or wik, meaning a Harbor or trading center. As I said, it was an old Germanic word. And the Scandinavians had their own version of the word, which was vik. The word vik had a meaning which was similar to the original Old English meaning, which was harbor. In Scandinavia, it meant an inlet or small bay. We see that Norse ending in the name of the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik. The first part of the name meant smoke in Old Norse, and it's actually cognate with the Old English word reek, which originally meant the smell or stench which came from something that was burning. The original settlement of Reykjavik was built near natural hot springs, which produced steam. So it was called Reykjavik, which meant Bay of Smoke or the Smoky Cove. But Reykjavik was just one of many Vics or Viks throughout Scandinavia. And the people who inhabited those Viks were called the Vikings, or as we know them today, the Vikings. And this little linguistic note is important to our overall story, because the Scandinavians were also benefiting greatly from all of that increased trade in northern Europe. And that was largely because Scandinavian furs were in demand throughout Europe. They'd been trading furs for centuries. Even Tacitus had mentioned the Scandinavian fur trade. But all of that economic growth and new money in northern and Western Europe meant that those furs were in even greater demand. But the Scandinavians didn't just trade with other northern Europeans. They traveled down the rivers from the Baltic through Eastern Europe all the way down to the Black Sea. A group of Swedish traders established a settlement around Kiev in the eight hundreds. These settlers were called the Rus, from an old Norse word meaning to row, as in row a boat. And the Rus gave their name to the new trading settlements which started to pop up in that region, which became known as Russia or Russia. So the Russian state actually owes its ultimate origin to the Vikings. But the key to this Scandinavian trade is that those traders actually needed stuff to trade. And most of those traders weren't really artisans or manufacturers. They got most of their furs and other inventory from raiding, piracy, threats, and extortion. So, for example, as the Scandinavians traveled through the Baltic and Eastern Europe, they would threaten to destroy settlements and farms along the way unless they were paid off. And very often, they were paid off in furs. And they would take those furs and trade them far and wide for money or luxury goods. So now we can start to see these pieces coming together. In order to continue and expand their trading networks, and in order to expand their wealth, they needed new places to plunder and raid, and they needed new people to extort. Now, the traditional View has been that the Viking expansion was the result of population growth in Scandinavia. And other theories attribute expansion to the fact that the oldest son inherited his father's wealth. So that left the younger sons without wealth or inheritance. And those were also important factors here. But the key to the expansion was the growing trade networks. Whether it was due to overpopulation or just the bad luck of being the younger brother, those trading networks created new opportunities for those young Vikings. They could make their wealth through trading and plunder. Those traders were coming into contact with new centers of wealth, especially in Britain and the Frankish kingdom. And they had access to lots of new wealth in those regions as well as lots of old wealth. Those trading networks gave them new people to trade with and new places to plunder and plunder gave them new goods to sell elsewhere and so on. So it became a general way of life. It was how they made their living within Scandinavia. Denmark was quickly emerging as the wealthiest and most powerful region because of those trading networks and because of Denmark's strategic location between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. But while the Danes kept one eye on those trading networks to the north, they kept the other eye on the increasing power of Charlemagne to the south. The Frankish kingdom was still expanding to the east, into Germany. So the Danes were concerned about that threat to the south. But between the Danes and the Franks were the Saxons, who had remained on the continent in what came to be known as Old Saxony. So Old Saxony was essentially a buffer zone between the Danes and the Franks. But Charlemagne was busy trying to conquer the Saxons. In the last episode, I mentioned that Charlemagne's great grandfather, Pepin II, had become mayor of the palace in the late 600s, about a century earlier. He was the leader who wanted to convert the Germans east of the Rhine to Christianity so it would be easier to conquer them and and bring them within the greater Frankish kingdom. And you might remember that he relied heavily upon Anglo Saxon missionaries because they spoke a language which was very similar to the continental Germans. Well, those missionary efforts had mixed success in southern and central Germany. The people were converted without too much difficulty. But it was a different outcome in the north. In places like Saxony, some of the missionaries there were killed and became martyrs. When Charlemagne became King of the Franks, the missionary activity was still ongoing in that region, and the Franks were still relying upon the Anglo Saxons for much of that missionary work. Shortly after Charlemagne became king, he was able to bring Frisia under Frankish control. But Saxony continued to be his nemesis. His initial effort to conquer the Saxons began in 772, just four years after he became king. And the invasion of Saxony was largely successful at first. But a couple of years later, there was a Saxon resurgence, and this would establish a theme. For the next 30 years or so, the Franks would invade and put down an uprising, and they would bring in missionaries. And as soon as the Franks were distracted by events elsewhere, the Saxons would rise in rebellion. A second invasion led to a third invasion, and a fourth and a fifth, with additional smaller incursions after that. During the early part of this period, the Saxon rebel leader would flee to hide in Denmark while the Franks invaded. And as soon as the Franks let up pressure, he would return to lead another uprising. As I noted, the Danish king was consumed with the Frankish threat, and the Saxons provided that convenient buffer zone. So the Danes continued to let the Saxon rebels hide in Denmark, waiting for the next opportunity for an uprising. And we get a sense here of just how brutal Charlemagne could be. After that fifth incursion, he had 4,500 Saxon prisoners beheaded. And after that, Saxony was officially annexed into the Frankish Empire. There were still some uprisings, but for the most part, Saxony was finally brought under Frankish control. The conquest of the Saxons, combined with the conquest of Bavaria and a large part of Northern Italy, helped Charlemagne to emerge as the most powerful leader Europe had seen since the Roman Empire. His kingdom eventually encompassed most of Central and Western Europe. But for our purposes, the most notable legacy of Charlemagne was the so called Carolingian Renaissance. And the origins of that intellectual renaissance really began with the attempts to convert the Frisians and the Saxons. And it had a direct connection to the Northumbrian Renaissance in Britain. Those Anglo Saxon missionaries may have shared a more or less common language with the Germans, but that language was not the language of the Church. The language of the Church was Latin. And the missionaries realized that the native German clergy had to be educated in Latin if the missionary work was to have any permanent success. That was the only way the clergy could read the Scriptures and interpret the Scriptures to the people. So the German clergy had to be taught Latin. But it wasn't just the new German clergy that was the problem. Even within the Frankish kingdom, much of the clergy there no longer spoke Classical Latin. As we saw last time, the Gallo Roman dialect had diverged greatly from Classical Latin. And when Charlemagne came to power, he realized that many of the clergy in his own kingdom didn't read or speak the classical Latin used by the Church. Most of them either spoke the local vulgar Latin dialect or the native Germanic language of the Franks. So what Charlemagne needed was A scholastic revival to train the clergy in Germany and retrain the clergy in the Frankish kingdom. To carry out this revival, he began to establish new schools throughout the Frankish kingdom. Monks and abbots were directed to establish places within the monasteries so the clergy could be educated there. The most prominent school established by Charlemagne was a palace school established for Frankish nobles at his court at Aachen. But those new schools needed teachers. So he invited famous scholars to his court to help establish the schools and to help develop the curriculum. And perhaps the most important person which he invited was an Anglo Saxon scholar named Alcuin. Alcuin quickly emerged as an absolutely essential figure in the emerging Carolingian Renaissance. Alcuin had been a student of Bede in Northumbria. He was apparently in charge of the library at York, which had emerged as the center of scholarship in Northumbria. It was one of the great European libraries at the time. Alcuin had also been involved in the missionary efforts in Frisia and other parts of Europe. And while assisting the missionary efforts there, he met Charlemagne. And Charlemagne invited him to join the other scholars at his court. Once he joined the other scholars, he became the virtual head of the palace school at Charlemagne's court. And he also attracted other Anglo Saxon scholars to join him at the court. Alcuin helped to develop the curriculum in all of those new Carolingian schools. In keeping with the Northumbrian tradition, he played a critical role in introducing the seven liberal arts to the curriculum. So the education mixed secular studies with religious studies, and he later became a prominent advisor to Charlemagne himself. Charlemagne continues to fascinate scholars of medieval history because he was a very effective military and political leader, but he also placed a strong emphasis on education and scholarship. He was considered a very well spoken leader, and by all accounts, he loved books. But interestingly, most historians think that Charlemagne was illiterate. He reportedly had books read to him during meals, and he tried to learn how to write, but he was too old to learn. He actually slept at night with a slate containing the letters under his pillow so he could learn them by osmosis. But it didn't work. I should note that some historians dispute these claims, and they assert that he could actually read Latin on some basic level. But regardless of his actual ability to read and write, it does appear that he was frustrated by the level of his own education. And that was probably a big reason why he felt education was so important and why he became such a major proponent of education. So I know what you're thinking. What does all of this have to do With English. Well, if you read and write English, you can thank Charlemagne and Alcuin for the letters which you use, at least the lowercase letters. We know that the uppercase letters came from the Romans, but all of those lowercase letters, which is what we mostly use when writing, they came from Charlemagne's court. When Charlemagne became King of the Franks, not only had the classical Latin speech of the Romans largely disappeared, the Classical Latin script had also fallen out of use. There was no standard script in the kingdom anymore, and writing had become increasingly illegible. So one of the items on the reform agenda was the development of a new standardized script. The new script needed to be easy to read and write, and it needed to be made standard throughout the kingdom. And Alcuin was a key figure in developing that new script. He turned to the script which had been used in Northumbria. And the new script combined the Anglo Saxon version with an earlier Roman version. And the result was the script which came to be called, appropriately enough, the Carolingian script. The key to that new script is that it allowed the letters to be written very easily and quickly. Most of the letters could be written in one motion without lifting the pen. Compare the old Roman uppercase e with the Carolingian lowercase e. Uppercase e requires four distinct strokes, whereas lowercase e only requires one stroke. Think of uppercase e as a little line in the middle surrounded by a box on three sides. Well, the new script would begin with that little middle line written from left to right, and then curve that line around in a C shape to represent the surrounding box. And that's how we got from old blocky uppercase e to the newer, quicker, more efficient line, lowercase e. And that type of simplification was important to all of those scribes who were busy copying books by hand. So, not surprisingly, book production exploded after the new script was introduced. And these educational reforms and language reforms and script reforms meant that there was a brand new generation of literate and educated scholars, including poets, historians and philosophers. And all of this is really the essence of the so called Carolingian Renaissance. But that Renaissance sometimes created its own problems. As I noted, part of the educational reforms involved getting the clergy to speak proper classical Latin, not the local vulgar Latin. And to facilitate that process, Alcuin developed his own textbook on Latin pronunciation. And all this education meant that the clergy started to speak proper classical Latin, which was just fine in the palace school and all of those monasteries, but what about the actual people who they were supposed to be preaching to? When the clergy began to conduct services in classical Latin. The congregations couldn't understand it. So the French Church began to have the same problem that the Anglo Saxon Church had once had. The people couldn't understand the message. So in the last episode, I noted that the Council of Tours had to issue an edict encouraging priests to deliver sermons in the rustic Roman language, by which they meant the regular language of the people. So, in essence, they actually had to backtrack on some of those reforms, because the reforms were moving the language of the Church away from the language of the people. By the end of the 8th century, the Carolingian Renaissance was well underway. Over the next few years, the literary power of the Frankish kingdom began to eclipse the scholarship of Northumbria in Britain. The death of Bede was a huge loss for Northumbria, and Northumbrian scholars like Alcuin had started to relocate to France. So there started to be a general decline in scholarship in northern England. Northumbria was also starting to experience a political decline. Internal political divisions and feuds sat in. The Picts in the north started to experience a resurgence, and that drained additional resources and energy away from the kingdom. But one of the biggest factors in the decline of Northumbria was the rise of Mercia under the leadership of Offa. Mercia had always been a rival of Northumbria, going all the way back to Penda and his battles against the Northumbrian kings. So as Mercia became richer and more powerful under Offa, the relative power of Northumbria began to decline. Having expanded into Kent in the southeast, Atha later assumed control of Sussex in the south and East Anglia in the east. He effectively ruled all of England except Northumbria and Wessex in the southwest. And when he later married his daughter to the Wessex king, he had indirect power and influence over that kingdom as well. Offa's predecessor, Ethelbald, had declared himself king of all South England, but Offa took that title one step further. He was described in some charters as Rex Anglorum, King of the English, but he was never actually king of Northumbria, and he only had indirect control over Wessex. So we're almost to a leader that we can call the first king of England, but we're not quite there yet. Now, very little is known about the overall quality of scholarship in Offa's kingdom, but modern scholars have noted that the scripts used by the scribes in Mercia during this period were actually very advanced and well practiced. The scripts from some of the other regions were very crude by comparison. So from that, scholars have concluded that the Mercian court was actually quite advanced. There's also a popularly held belief that Beowulf was composed in Aphi's court. The best evidence for that is the fact that the poem features a digression about a distant ancestor of Offa, who was the King of the Angles back on the continent and who was also named Offa. The poem praises this earlier Offa with a passage that doesn't really have any other purpose in the poem. And so some scholars think Beowulf may have been composed by a poet in office court. And this passage was intentionally inserted as indirect praise of the Mercian king. The time frame works, but there's no way to know for certain if the poem was actually composed there. As I noted earlier, AFA had extended Mercian rule into Kent very early on. That's where he took control of the mint at Canterbury. And I noted that the Archbishop of Canterbury was none too happy with those developments. The Archbishop apparently hated Offa and the feeling became mutual. The Archbishop continued to oppose AFA's excursions into Kent and he remained a thorn in Offa's side. In addition to this problem, AFA was getting older and he saw how other kingdoms had fallen apart when the King died, as the King's heirs battled each other for power. So in the year 786, a great church conference was held in Britain, and Offa used that conference as an opportunity to solve some of these problems. Papal delegates traveled from Rome to attend the meeting and Anglo Saxon dignitaries from other kingdoms were also in attendance. One item on the agenda was to get the Church in Rome to sanction Offa's son Ecgfroth as his successor. Now, this had been done on the continent, but no Anglo Saxon king had ever had his heir consecrated in advance by the Church. The other item on the agenda was to weaken the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury down in Kent. So Atha announced the establishment of a new archbishopric to be created for Mercia at Lichfield. This was intended to deprive the Archbishop of Canterbury of some of his standing and power. Unfortunately for Offa, both of his objectives at the conference ultimately failed. When Offa died about a decade later, his son only survived him by five months and his son didn't have any children. So all that advanced planning for an orderly and long term succession went out the window. And Mercia experienced the very succession problems which Offa had sought to avoid. And that new archbishopric at Litchfield was established. But it only had one archbishop, and when he died, it was completely abandoned. But let's Go back to that religious conference for a minute. It was apparently a really big deal at the time, because a short time later there was correspondence between Charlemagne's court and the Pope about that conference. And the reason why that conference is important to our story is because it mentions the languages which were spoken at the conference. Specifically, it says that the Anglo Saxons spoke Theodicea. And this reference is actually kind of important. Note that the conference doesn't say that the Anglo Saxons spoke English, they spoke Theodice. And that's because English wasn't a widely accepted term yet, certainly not outside of Britain. So what was Theodice? Well, theodice was the general term used during this period for the language of the Germanic peoples. So it was used to refer to the language of the peoples east of the Rhine, and it was used to refer to the native Germanic language of the Franks, which was still spoken in part of the Frankish kingdom. And here we see that it was also applied to the Anglo Saxons. So this really illustrates how similar all of those languages were at this time from the perspective of Charlemagne's court and the church in Rome. The Anglo Saxons spoke the same language as the other Germanic peoples on the continent. It was all Theodice. So this suggests that the various Germanic languages were still intelligible to each other throughout most of Europe, including Britain. The Anglo Saxons also used that term in Old English. It was Theodish. So we can say that the Anglo Saxons spoke the English dialect of Theodish. But the reason why that term, Theodish, is kind of important to our story is because it eventually evolved into the words Deutsch and Dutch. The history here gets a little bit complicated, but within most of modern day Germany, the term evolved from Theodisch to Deutsch, which is still the name for the German language in Germany. And of course, Deutschland is the name of Germany in German. But in northern Germany and the Netherlands, the word Theodish developed different pronunciations over time, and those variations were sometimes applied to specific Germanic dialects. But one of those variations was Dutch, which passed into English as Dutch in the 1300s. By that point, Theodish had largely disappeared from English, having been replaced with, well, English. But now English took in this new word, Dutch, which was really just a later version of Theodish. At first, Dutch had the same general sense as Deutsch or Theodish. In other words, it meant German. And that original sense still survives in the name of the Pennsylvania Dutch, who settled in the United States from Germany, not the Netherlands. So Pennsylvania Dutch really means Pennsylvania Germans, using the original meaning of Dutch. So how did Dutch come to refer to the language and people of the Netherlands specifically? Well, in the 1600s, the distinction between the language of the Netherlands and the language of Germany began to be better defined. Of course, there was no such nation as Germany yet, just a bunch of independent provinces and city states. So there was no standard word for the region. And that's why the name of Germany varies so much in other languages today. In French and Spanish, the name is based upon the Alemanni tribe. In Finnish, the name of Germany is Saxa, based on the name of the Saxon tribe. In modern English, we use the name Germany, ultimately based on the old Germani tribe and on the Latin term Germania. But the name Germany wasn't really used in English until the 1500s and 1600s. Prior to that, it was still Dutch. But around the 1600s, several different terms started to emerge to distinguish the dialects of that region. It was around this time in the 1600s that Dutch, Deutsch and Dutch really began to become distinct. Also, sometimes the Low German dialects of Germany were called Netterdeutsch. Netter meant low, and it's actually cognate with the Old English word nether, still found in words like netherworld for hell. So Netterdeutsch literally meant Low German. But the other dialects spoken around the mouth of the Rhine were called Nederlandish, which was literally Lower Landish. Of course, that term produced the modern term Netherlands. In Britain, these High and low distinctions also started to be made. The language of the Netherlands started to be called Low Dutch, and the language of the German regions was called High Dutch. So High Dutch was basically what we know today as German. But all of this coincided with the rise of the Dutch colonial empire in the 1600s and 1700s. So the British found themselves in constant contact with the Low Dutch of the Netherlands. They traded with them, they fought against them, and they were rivals for the same territory in the New World and beyond. As you might know, New York City was originally a Dutch fur trading settlement called New Amsterdam. And because of that close contact and rivalry between the Dutch and the British, the term Low Dutch started to become simply Dutch. And from that point on, the term Dutch became associated exclusively with the Netherlands. And with respect to the rest of the Germanic regions, the term High Dutch just fell out of use, and it started to be replaced with the newer word German. So English basically narrowed the meaning of Dutch over time to this one specific region. The rivalry between the British and the Dutch during this period was actually reflected in the English language. Dutch became a negative word in English. And during the 1600s and 1700s, English speakers began to invent a lot of new expressions with the word Dutch. And most of them had a negative or pejorative connotation. Double Dutch was double talk or gibberish. Suicide was called the Dutch Act. A Dutch bargain was a one sided bargain. Dutch courage was courage or bravery inspired by liquor or booze. Dutch luck was undeserved luck. Dutch praise was a euphemism for condemnation. And Dutch treat was a date or outing where you had to pay your own way. So a Dutch Dutch treat wasn't really a treat at all. A Dutch uncle was a very critical person. And if you were in Dutch, it meant that you were in trouble, probably in jail. And that's just a few of the common expressions at the time. This pejorative use of Dutch in English wasn't lost on the Dutch themselves. They spoke English well enough to know what was going on. And in the early 1900s, Dutch officials were so aware of this connotation that they ordered the government to stop using the term Dutch altogether. It was decided to use the official term Netherlands instead. So I hope you found that interesting. But the main point is that Dutch was once a general term for German, and it's a later version of the word theodish, which was also a general word for the Germanic languages, including English. And it was in fact a term used by Charlemagne for the English language. So let me return briefly to Charlemagne and Offa. About three years after that big church conference in Britain where Offa tried to deal with some of his local problems, he was contacted by Charlemagne. Charlemagne wanted to show his respect for Offa by trying to arrange a marriage between Charlemagne's son Charles and one of Offa's daughters. Charlemagne assumed that Offa would eagerly accept the offer. But Offa actually made a counter offer. He would agree to Charlemagne's proposed marriage alliance only if Offa's son Ecgfroth could marry one of Charlemagne's daughters. In other words, quid pro quo. Charlemagne was apparently shocked and taken aback by this counter offer, and the warm relationship between the two leaders suddenly became really cold. Charlemagne refused the counter offer and the marriage alliance never happened. And going back to our original theme, the two leaders started to quibble over trade. They each imposed an embargo on traitors from the other country. And it was during this period that Offa drove out the rival king in Wessex and imposed his protege there. But Charlemagne gave refuge to the rival claimant to the Wessex throne. Egbert, by this point Offa had become convinced that Charlemagne was trying to disrupt his kingdom. But this is when Alcuin stepped in. Remember Alcuin, the Northumbrian scholar who helped to spur the Carolingian Renaissance and gave us our modern lowercase letters? Well, he helped to mediate the dispute between Charlemagne and Offa. He wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury to try to assure Offa that Charlemagne had no intention to threaten Mercia or the surrounding regions. And it actually worked. Afterwards, the Cold War began to thaw and the two leaders started to get on again. The respective trade embargoes were dropped. In 796, about seven years after the dispute started, Charlemagne sent a letter to Offa and he once again referred to Offa as his dearest brother. He agreed to allow Anglo Saxon traders to enter his kingdom and he assured their protection while they were there. His letter indicates that there was a mutual agreement in place and that Offa was to offer the same protection to Frankish traders. And this is considered one of the first trading treaties between kings in Western Europe. And this development brings our discussion full circle. We once again see the overriding importance of trade. In the old days, a rejected offer for a marriage alliance might lead to war, and harboring a rival's political enemy could definitely lead to conflict. But this was the 8th century, the era of traders and tremendous wealth and all of that political back and forth was fine, but it couldn't jeopardize those lucrative trading networks. The old Germanic notions of might makes right were giving way to notions of diplomacy and negotiated settlements. And there was another factor bringing these two leaders back together. And that was a common shared threat. During that period of brief Cold War between Atha and Charlemagne, something happened which likely stunned and shocked both leaders. According to the later Anglo Saxon Chronicle, in the year 789, three ships of Scandinavians arrived on the Wessex coast. An official went out to meet the ships to see what they wanted, but the so called Northmen killed him. The Chronicle then says that those were the first ships of Danes to come to England. Now, Danes was a generic term for Viking in Britain, so the fact that they were initially referred to as Northmen has led many scholars to conclude that these were ships from Norway. And that is all we really have from that Chronicle entry, just a couple of lines. But those lines suggest that the era of the Viking invasions had arrived. Those Scandinavians had made a living out of trade and plunder, and now they found their way to Britain. They'd been trading there for some time, but this type of aggressive activity was usually reserved for their neighbors in Scandinavia and the Baltic. But now it was moving westward. Other sources tell us that Offa began to arrange coastal defenses. The natural conclusion is that those defenses were intended for those Scandinavian pirates. Three years after that first skirmish, the Vikings returned for the year792. The Anglo Saxon chronicle gives us the following. In this year, true dreadful foreboding warnings came over the land of Northumbria, terrifying the people most woefully. There were excessive whirlwinds and lightning storms. Fiery dragons were seen flying across the sky. These signs were soon followed by a great famine. And shortly after, on January 8th, the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne through brutal robbery and slaughter. Now, this is typically cited as the first official Viking raid in Britain. And the effect of that surprising attack can't be overstated. The Lindisfarne monastery was looted. Many of the monks and much of the cattle were killed. The Vikings sailed away with gold jewelry and sacred items. Though we know virtually nothing about the raiders, some scholars believe that they were Norwegian traders who had been in Britain for a while before they turned on the local populace and attack the monastery. But for the people of Christian Europe, it really didn't matter who they were. They couldn't believe that a monastery of all places had been looted. That was considered completely out of the realm of possibility and down in Charlemagne's court. Alcuin wrote a famous letter to monks in Britain after that attack. He stated that the Anglo Saxons had never seen such a terror in their entire 350 years in Britain. But the terror was just beginning. The next year, the Viking raiders returned and they attacked Bede's monastery at Jarrow. The Anglo Saxon chronicle says that the Northumbrians were a little better prepared that time. Some of the Viking war leaders were killed in the attack, and some of their ships were broken up in bad weather. When the Viking sailors from the sinking ships made it to shore, they were promptly killed. But that was little consolation. Another prominent monastery had been looted and plundered. The next year, the raiders returned again and sacked the monastery at Iona on the western coast of Scotland. So the raiders were beginning to focus on the regions around Scotland and Ireland. And Offa actually died the next year. But the raiders kept coming. Three years after Offa's death, in the year 799, the last year of the 8th century, the first Viking raids took place in Charlemagne's Frankish kingdom. And now Charlemagne began to fortify river defenses to prevent inland incursions. Now thanks to the Old Norse influence on English, we can describe these Viking raids with their own words. And those words enable us to express the horror of those raids. The words raid and ransack come from the Vikings. Burn, scathe and scorch are Old Norse words. Lift, drag, lug, thrust and take reflect the activity of the raiders. And even though the Vikings took gold and valuables from Britain, they left behind several words which reflect the general sentiment at the time. Those words were scare, shriek and die. In the next episode, we'll explore how the Viking raiders eventually became the Viking conquerors. We'll examine the rise of Wessex and the beginnings of England. And we'll look at how Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, became Emperor of the Romans. And along the way, we'll see how those events impacted the English language. So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.