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The History of English Podcast
Episode 73: Possession, Power and Checkmate
01:02:12
In this episode, we explore the connections between possessions and power – especially political power. No Medieval king exemplified that connection better than Henry I of England. Henry valued his possessions,
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- [00:01]
Robin Pearson
Hello, everyone. This is Robin Pearson from the History of Byzantium podcast. My show is a continuation of the Narrative of the History of Rome podcast. The later Roman Empire that stretches on into medieval times is called the Byzantine Empire to distinguish it from the Rome that Julius Caesar knew. You, as a lover of the English language, may think of the word Byzantine as characterized by elaborate scheming and intrigue, especially for the gaining of political power, which, to be fair, is not a bad description of the narrative of my podcast. So if dramatic scheming by entertaining characters sounds good, check out the history of Byzantium. But for now, stay tuned to the History of English podcast.
- [00:54]
Kevin Stroud
Welcome to the History of English podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language. This is episode 73, possession, power, and Checkmate. In this episode, we're going to explore the connections between possessions and power, especially political power. And no king of the Middle Ages exemplified that connection better than Henry I. So we'll also explore the events of Henry's reign. We'll see how much he valued his possessions, and we'll see how he made sure to collect every penny that was owed to him. And speaking of possessions, this was also a period during which the English language was starting to change the way it indicated possession. So this time we'll explore those various aspects of possession and power. But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com and you can always reach me directly by email@kevinistoryofenglishpodcast.com Also, a quick thanks to Robin from the History of Byzantium podcast for the introduction. If you want to learn everything you need to know about the Eastern Roman Empire, be sure to check out Robin's podcast. So with that, let's turn to this episode about possessions and power. I thought it might be a good idea to begin this episode with the Golden Rule. Treat others as you want them to treat you. It's sage advice from the oldest religious traditions. But in 1965, the American comic strip the wizard of Id gave us a comical and perverse take on the Golden Rule. In the comic strip, a king addresses his subjects from the balcony of his castle. He tells them that the kingdom needs peace and harmony and that they all need to live by the Golden Rule. Now, this statement is met with some confusion by those standing in the crowd, and a peasant asked, what the heck is the Golden Rule? To which another observer replies, whoever has the gold makes the rules. This twisted take on the Golden Rule has survived, and it's actually become a common saying in English. But this 1965 comic strip is the first known use of that phrase. So the saying whoever has the gold makes the rules is a relatively new phrase, but it's not a new idea. It's probably as old as the Golden Rule itself. And it's the ultimate theme of this episode, the connection between possessions and power, especially political power. In fact, the link between possessions and power is so fundamental that both words come from the same root. The word possession is a French word that entered English after the Norman Conquest. It's based on the root word possess, and possess comes from the Latin word potus, which meant potent or powerful. And in fact, the words potent and power also come from that same Latin root. So potent, power and possess are all cognate. So in that history, we see the fundamental link between possessions and power. I should also note that the Indo European root that gave us the words possession and power also produced the Persian word pasha. That word meant a high ranking government official, and it ultimately passed to the Ottoman Empire, where it was widely used. So between possession, power and pasha, we see that there is historical truth to the statement that whoever has the gold makes the rules. This same idea can also be found in the ultimate roots of the word prince. Today, we tend to think of a prince as the son or grandson of a king or queen. So it's someone below the king in power and authority. This idea goes back to the early 1600s in Britain, when that title was given to the sons of the king. But before that, the word prince was really synonymous with the king himself. It was another term for the primary leader of a country or region. We still see that original sense in older phrases, like the prince of peace in reference to Jesus, or the prince of darkness for Satan. So if we look closely at the word prince, we can see that it once referred directly to the king or sovereign. Prince comes from Latin via French. It has the same Latin root as words like prime, primary and principal. In fact, we can hear the word prince in principal. So the prince was the first or primary leader. And when the word passed into Middle English, it still had that original meaning. But let's look a little closer at that Latin root. The original Latin version of prince was princep P R I N C E P. The P sound at the end was dropped over time and princep became prince. That development took place within French. But if we go back to that original Latin word, princep, we have to keep in mind that the letter C was always pronounced as a K in Latin. So in Latin, the word was pronounced as princep. It was originally a combination of two separate roots. Prin meant first, and it shares the same root as prime and primary. But what about the second part, kep? Well, it has the same Latin root that gave us words like capture and captive and catch. The root word was actually capera and it meant to take. So the prince or princep was literally the primary taker, the person who took possession before everyone else. So once again, he who has the gold makes the rules. So in the linguistic connection between words like power, possession and pasha, and words like prince, catch and capture, we see that possessions can lead to power, and the person with the most possessions can have the most power. No one in medieval England understood this connection more than Henry I, the youngest son of William the Conqueror. As we saw last time, Henry secured his position as the King of England after he fended off a challenge from his brother Robert, who was the Duke of Normandy. Henry was a grand administrator who understood the power of money and property. And during his reign, he expanded the English bureaucracy and in part, to ensure that his tax collectors could collect every penny that was owed to his government. In the past couple of episodes, I've alluded to the fact that Henry understood that fundamental link between money and power. When his father, William the Conqueror, was lying on his deathbed, he decided to divide his realm between his sons. The eldest son, Robert, got Normandy. The middle son, William Rufus, got England. So there wasn't a kingdom to leave to Henry as the youngest son. Instead, Henry got money, £5,000 of silver. And I noted that Henry made sure that he got his full share because he proceeded to count every penny while his father lay on his deathbed. A few years later, Henry was hunting with his brother William Rufus in the New Forest when William Rufus was struck by an arrow and killed. So what did Henry do? Well, he left his brother on the ground and headed straight for the treasury at Winchester. He understood a very basic idea. Whoever has the gold makes the rules. And three days later, Henry was crowned as the King of England. We have another story from Henry's early life that sheds light on his personality. The 18th century historian Thomas Carte wrote about a trip that Henry and his brother Robert made to the King of France shortly before their father William died. Cart wrote that Henry was playing a game of chess with the king's son, Louis. They were playing for money and Louis kept losing to Henry. After a while, Louie lost so much money to Henry that he got upset and he started cursing at Henry. He said that Henry was the son of a bastard, and he threw the chess pieces at Henry. But Henry retaliated. He grabbed the chessboard and he hit Louis over the head with it. He then proceeded to batter Louis with the chessboard until Robert finally stepped in and broke up the fight. We're told that Louis was left bloody on the floor, and he would have been killed by Henry had Robert not intervened. I mention this story for a couple of reasons. First, it shows young Henry as a skillful chess player, using his skills to win money from the French king's son, Louis. But I also mention that story because it shows that the game of chess was popular in the royal courts of Europe. And there's an interesting parallel between the game of chess and the themes we've been exploring. The game of chess was a microcosm of medieval society. It featured a king and knights and bishops and castles. It also featured pawns who represented peasants, by the way, there was no queen. Yet the piece that later became the queen was actually considered an advisor or minister to the king during this period. So each piece represented a specific social class. It was a game of strategy, and it mirrored the strategy of warfare. One player captured or took possession of an opponent's pieces, and the ultimate object was to capture the opponent's king. The game actually ended when the king had no other options but capture. The size of the pieces represented the relative status of those roles in medieval society. So the king was the biggest piece, the most important. The pawns or peasants were the smallest pieces. And military terminology was even incorporated into the game. When troops were arranged on a battlefield, each line of soldiers was called a rank. So the troops were arranged in successive horizontal ranks, but they were also aligned, one soldier behind the other. So from front to back, each vertical line was called a file. So the foot soldiers were arranged in ranks and files, and that created the term rank and file to describe the common foot soldiers in an army. And that term has been expanded over time to refer to common people. Well, that same terminology was used on the chessboard. The horizontal lines were called ranks, and the vertical columns were called files. So in many respects, the game was a symbol of medieval warfare and, to a certain extent, even a symbol of medieval society. Young nobles were encouraged to learn the strategies of chess, and it became very popular among the nobles. Chess actually has its origins in India several centuries earlier. The the original chess pieces had different meanings in the original game. So the bishops were originally elephants and the knights were originally horses. In fact, they're still represented by horses in the modern game. The game spread from India to Persia and then to the Arab world and then into parts of Europe. Around the 9th or 10th century in medieval Europe, the pieces were altered to reflect the culture and society of Europe. So the elephants became bishops and the horses became knights, and the pieces that once represented chariots were changed to rooks, meaning a tower or castle. Originally, the popularity of chess in Europe was confined to a handful of nobles, but then the First Crusade took place. Remember that Henry's brother Robert was the Duke of Normandy and he left Normandy to fight in the First Crusade? Well, when those knights returned to Europe from the Middle east, many of them brought the game of chess back with them. And the game exploded in popularity over the next couple of centuries, even among the rank and file in Europe. So what does this discussion of chess have to do with our theme of possession and power? Well, just about everything. You remember how the Turkish word pasha, meaning a high official, is cognate with words like possession and power. And you remember how the word prince or princep meant the first taker, and it's cognate with words like capture and captive. Well, the word chess is derived from the word shah, which was the Persian word for king, and it's ultimately derived from an Indo European root word that meant power. So chess is a game of capture or taking possession, and it's derived from words that meant power and king. I noted that the game of chess began in India, and as we know, a large part of India spoke Indo European languages. There was an Indo European root word that meant power or to gain power, and it was pronounced something like tkh. And that word passed into Persian as shah. And shah meant king in Persian. In fact, the title of shah existed as recently as 1979, when the last Shah of Iran was deposed. I noted earlier that Turkish also had that word pasha, which meant a high ranking official. Well, there's a link between shah and pasha. Pasha is actually a compound word. It combines that root we looked at earlier that gave us words like power and possession with this word shah. So pasha is literally the powerful king. So as the game of chess spread from India to Persia, the Persians called the piece that represented the king the Shah. The goal of the game was to capture the shah, or at least to hem the shah in and give him no other option but capture. So when one player attacked the other player's king or shah, they would call out shah. And when the shah was hemmed in and couldn't escape, they would yell shamat, which literally meant the king is helpless in Persian. So shamat became the Call of victory. As the game spread into Europe, the word shah passed through Latin as chacus and then into French as eschek. And that winning call of shamat became eschecmat or checkmate. So the word shah, meaning king, evolved into the French word eschec. And that word passed into English as check. But the plural form of eschec was esches. So the various pieces on the board were called the esches, and that word passed into English as chess, and that became the name of the game itself. In English, of course, the other version of the word eschek passed into English as checkers, a variation of chess that's commonly known as draughts in the uk. So that's how we got the words chess and checkers, from the Persian word for king, and ultimately from an Indo European root word that meant power. So in chess, you acquire power over your opponent by capturing or taking your opponent's pieces, and ultimately by capturing or trapping the opposing king. If a king lost his pawns and rooks and knights, he was left vulnerable. So chess was the ultimate game of capture and possession. And since the word chess originally meant shah or king, we once again see the connections between possessions, power and kingship. And as we know, Henry I of England was well aware of those connections and he was very familiar with the game of chess to the extent of beating his opponent with the chessboard itself, if necessary. But Henry was actually playing a larger game of chess, a real life game. When William Rufus died in the New Forest, he took possession of the treasury, then he took possession of the crown, then he fended off a challenge from his brother Robert by marrying Edith, an Anglo Saxon princess. That gave him support in England. So these were all calculated moves. One move led to the next. And what was the ultimate goal? Well, checkmate. Whether or not Robert over in Normandy realized it, he was playing a real life game of chess against Henry, and Henry was winning the game one strategic move at a time. Henry had outmaneuvered Robert in England and he had essentially stolen the English crown right out from under Robert. And we know that Henry was always looking to increase his possessions, so he wasn't going to be satisfied until he had Normandy as well. So the game of chess continued. Henry tried to undermine Robert's position in Normandy. He paid bribes to the barons in Normandy and also the barons in the neighboring provinces. He encouraged them to challenge Robert's rule. Those barons had their own grievances against Robert, so Henry gave them support and encouragement. Normandy soon fell into rebellion and anarchy. It was another strategic Move by Henry. In the year 1105, five years after Henry became King of England, he crossed the Channel to intervene in Normandy. He campaigned in Normandy for a while, but there was never a conclusive battle, so Henry returned to England. But the next year, Henry decided to head back across the Channel. And this second trip was intended to be a full conquest of Normandy. Henry arrived in Normandy and met with the barons who supported him. Henry's forces actually included a lot of Anglo Saxon soldiers who had traveled in support of Henry. In the late summer of 1106, Henry's forces confronted Robert's forces at a castle near the town of Teachin Bray, south of Bayeux. A great battle ensued and Henry emerged victorious. Robert was hemmed in after the battle and he couldn't escape. It was checkmate. Of course, a game of chess would have ended at that point, but since this was a real life game of chess, Robert was captured and placed in prison. Henry then put down the remaining resistance and he captured the rest of Normandy. It was a complete victory. Henry now had possession of England and Normandy, and he also had possession of his brother Robert, and he never let Robert go. Robert spent the next 28 years in prison until he finally died at the age of 80 in the year 1134. The net result of all of this was that Henry had reunified the two realms that his father had once governed. It should be noted that many Anglo Saxons considered the victory over Robert to be revenge for their loss at hastings back in 1066. They considered it to be an English victory over the Normans. Of course, that was a bit of a stretch because the English King Henry was very much a Norman himself, but it shows how much Henry was embraced by the English people during his reign. Of course, Henry may have been accepted as an English king, but he spoke French just like most of the other nobles. And French influence was still very heavy in England. And the reunification of England and Normandy ensured that that French influence would continue to flow into England. So this was actually an important development for the English language. Had Henry not conquered Normandy, he would have just ruled England. And it's very possible that the Norman influence in England would have weakened and started to disappear. The Norman aristocracy in England may have been assimilated much more quickly, but this reunification with Normandy delayed that process. The nobles and aristocrats in England continued to embrace French influences because they were once again subjects of a combined and Anglo Norman realm. And that realm would remain unified for another century. So Henry's victory over Robert may have been seen as an English victory over the Normans. But ironically, it was really a victory of French over English. It ensured that English would continue to be relegated to second class status in England, and arguably it was relegated to third class behind both Latin and French. So while some Englishmen may have cheered the victory, it ensured that their native language would have no official status for the foreseeable future. Under Henry, all official scribes in England wrote in Latin. And by the end of the century, French was also being used. But English continued to be relegated to merely a spoken language. Within Henry's court, professional scribes produced all kinds of official documents. They wrote down charters and writs and other official correspondence. The office expanded quite a bit after the Norman Conquest, and it continued to expand during Henry's reign. The official writing office had once been part of the royal household during the time of Edward the Confessor, but by this point it had grown so much that it had become an independent department called the Royal Chancery. Now, Henry was regarded as a great administrator. He expanded the bureaucracy and he was a diligent tax collector. And all of that bureaucracy required lots of paperwork. So during Henry's reign, the Chancery had to expand to produce all of that paperwork. When Henry took office, there were two scribes. By the end of his reign, the number had doubled to four. We know that those scribes were producing lots of documents because a lot of them have survived the centuries. From the time of Henry's father, William the Conqueror, there are about 300 surviving royal actions. But from the period of Henry's reign, there are about five times as many surviving actions. So from 300 a few years earlier to around 1500 during Henry's reign, I noted that the office that produced these documents was called the Chancery. And the name of that office has some interesting etymology. It was a French term, and like most French terms, it came from Latin. The ultimate Latin root meant lattice, the criss cross material used for screens and barriers and such. The word lattice also came in from French around this time, but it's ultimately a Germanic word that came from the Franks or some other Germanic source. The native Latin word was consulus, so the Romans used that word consulus to refer to lattice or lattice work. And during the Roman period, it was common to use lattice barriers to separate part of a church or court. The attendants or ushers were typically stationed behind those lattice barriers. So that type of attendant became known as a consularius, literally a keeper of the barrier. As we know, in the standard French of Paris, that hard K sound of the letter C shifted to a Ch sound at the beginning of many words. So consularius evolved into chancellor or chancellor in Old French. And chancellor is still used as a term for a specific government office in parts of Europe. Within England, the term evolved into the office of the attendants who kept official documents, thus producing the term chancery. So the chancery was the office of public records, but it literally meant the attendants behind the lattice barriers. Now, I noted that the original Latin word for lattice was consulus, and that root also produced another English word, the word cancel. When scribes wanted to delete some part of a document, they would mark through it with criss cross marks, sort of like we do today when we write an X over something to mark it out. Since those criss cross marks resembled lattice, they used that Latin term for lattice, which was consulus, and that produced the English word cancel. And since cancel retains the hard k sound at the beginning, we know that that version of the word came in with the Normans. Remember that the Normans didn't make that sound change at the beginning of words, they retained the hard k sound. So he ended up with Norman cancel and French chancellor and chancery. So the chancery was an important office during the reign of Henry I. In fact, it was one of the two main offices during Henry's reign. The other was Henry's auditing and tax collection office, because, of course, Henry would have an office to calculate and collect every penny of tax that was owed to him. The office itself may have existed in some form prior to Henry, but Henry developed it into a tax collecting machine. It really came into its own during his reign. So Henry is typically given credit or blame for the office. For a king who had shown a propensity to count every penny before he became king, it was no surprise that he continued to do so after he became king. And for a king who loved the art of capture and power in the game of chess, it's probably no surprise what this office was called. It was called the exchequer, and exchequer is the French word for chessboard. So let's look a little closer at that office and that name. As I noted, the exchequer was basically Henry's tax collection office. Over time, it became somewhat synonymous with the treasury. But the exchequer was a distinct department early on. Twice a year, the sheriffs and royal officials from the shires were called to Westminster. They had to bring their money with them to be checked and counted. The income was audited and the taxes were determined and collected. Now, this seems straightforward, but we have to keep in mind that Western Europe was still using Roman numerals The Arabic numerals that we use today hadn't been adopted yet. In fact, there's an interesting parallel between Arabic numerals and chess. Both were invented in India around the same time, and both passed to Persia around the same time, and then both passed to the Arab world and then to Europe. But by this point, chess was becoming very popular in Europe. But those Arabic numerals were not Europeans. And in particular, the English were still using those older Roman numerals. One of the big problems with Roman numerals is that there was no zero. But Arabic numerals did have a zero. And that's one of the reasons why Arabic numerals became so popular over time. It was much easier to do complicated math with a zero. By contrast, Roman numerals were bulky and difficult to work with. Even simple arithmetic could be challenging with those numerals. So Henry's auditing and tax collection office had to find another way to do all of that math. One way to do it was to use an abacus. But the other way was to use a checkered cloth that resembled a chessboard. And that's what the office of the Exchequer used. Using this grid pattern, each of the boxes represented specific amounts of money. Pounds, shillings and pence. The auditors would use counters to keep track of the amounts being added. The counters were sort of like chips on a gaming table. So the auditors could add counters or chips to a stack and then they could move them around to keep track of the amounts being audited. Since this auditing cloth was checkered and resembled a chessboard, the office became known as the exchequer, which meant chessboard in French. So chess, checkers and exchequer all derive from the game of chess, and all ultimately come from that Persian word shah, meaning king. Now, when the office of the Exchequer audited the various sheriffs of England, they checked their accounts. And that sense of the word check also comes from the game of chess. The goal of chess was a check, as in checkmate. It meant that the other player couldn't move his king, so his movement was restricted. And it also meant the end of the game. So from this usage in chess, the word check came to mean a sudden stoppage, and from there, it came to mean a way of stopping or preventing something. A bank check was a check or stop against forgery or fraud. And that gave us the word check, as in a way of paying for something. You might write a check to pay a bill. The word check also passed into English in the phrase checks and balances, which meant a check or Stop against someone's actions. Sometimes you have to make a brief stop to report in. You might stop and report in at the doctor's office for a checkup. You might stop and report in on your way out of a store or hotel. That's the checkout. Of course, that process of reporting to someone is sometimes called the check in. This sense of reporting to someone led to the sense of the word check as an audit or report or observation. You might check on somebody to see how they're doing, and a teacher might check your work to make sure you did your homework correctly. Sometimes the person doing the checking had a list to go by to make sure everything on the list was completed correctly. That was a check list. And as the person went through the list, they would put a little mark beside each entry to make sure that the entry was completed. Those marks became known as check marks. So all of these senses of the word check go back to that French word excheck. So Henry's Office of the Exchequer forced sheriffs to check in to have their accounts checked using a checkered board or chess board. That way, Henry made sure he got every penny that was owed to him. And it also extended his authority over the sheriffs by expanding the bureaucracy and making them keep proper account. It's also interesting to note that two main offices during Henry's reign were named for things with criss cross patterns. The Chancery was named after laddis, the and the Exchequer was named after a chessboard. The other connection between those two departments is that they show the importance of writing and literacy. In Henry's court, when the Exchequer checked or audited all of those accounts, the results were recorded on long rolls of parchment. Those rolls resembled pipe and they came to be known as the pipe rolls. For the first time since the Roman occupation, government accountings were written down and maintained for posterity. So from all of this, we get a sense of how Henry governed England. He was a diligent administrator and record keeper. He was also a very effective tax collector. He recognized the importance of money and he made sure that his government did everything it could to collect every single penny that was owed to it. The Office of the Exchequer and all of those annual pipe rolls allowed Henry to maintain a firm grip on England's finances. Nothing was going to get by him. As a result, Henry was able to collect more and more taxes and that meant larger revenues. By the end of Henry's reign, he was regarded as the wealthiest monarch up to that point in English history. In fact, he was the last king for the next 400 years to die without owing any debts. Henry didn't let anything affect his wealth or the wealth of the country. Late in his reign, he discovered that many of the moneyers around the country were debasing the coinage. He had silver pennies shipped over to Normandy to pay his troops there, but the pennies were well below the required standard. So Henry summoned all of the moneyers in England to come to Winchester at Christmas time. And when they arrived, each one was taken out one by one, and each one had his right hand and testicles chopped off. The message was clear. It didn't mess with Henry's money. And Henry needed that money. He needed it to build castles and he needed it to bribe barons and feudal princes back in France. Henry was also involved in a lot of wars in France, and he needed money to fund those wars and hire mercenaries. But in the year 1109, he needed that money for something else. He had emerged as such a rich and powerful king that the Holy Roman Emperor sought to make an alliance with him. And that meant a marriage alliance. I mentioned last time that Henry had two children and they were both given very common Norman names, William and Matilda. And in the year 1109, Henry agreed to a marriage between Matilda and the Holy Roman Emperor, who was also named Henry. Henry V, to be precise. So Henry, the English king, had to come up with the money to pay that substantial dowry. Matilda's marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor was recorded in that sole surviving English version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the one that was being maintained at Peterborough for the year of the Marriage, the year 1110. The Peterborough Chronicle contains the following entry. This year sent the king before lent his daughter Diesesheris senda sekung to Forin Langtine, his doctor with manifold treasures over the sea bin manifold and mothman over say, and to the Kaiser she was given and he them cassara for a gaf. So Henry had to part with his daughter and many manifold treasures, and he wasn't accustomed to giving away his possessions. The entry for that year also tells us something else very interesting. As we know, Henry controlled England and Normandy. And to the southwest of Normandy was the French province of Anjou. And between Normandy and Anjou was a buffer region called Maine. And both Normandy and Anjou claim that region. But much like everything else, Henry controlled that buffer zone. He had his own earl there. But the chronicle tells us that the earl died in that year, 11 10, and the count of Anjou rushed in and took control of the region, essentially taking it away from Henry. And you can probably guess what came next. Henry headed to Normandy and went to war with the Count of Anjou. And he remained there through the following year. By this point, the King of France was Louis, specifically Louis vi. Remember him? He was the son of the prior French King Philip, and he was the one that got in a fight with Henry while playing chess at the French court when they were both younger. Henry had bashed him over the head with a chess board and nearly killed him. Well, now Henry ruled England and Normandy and Louis had succeeded his father as the King of France and there was no love lost between those two rulers. And now it was Louis turn to play a little real life chess against Henry. He formed an alliance with Anjou and also with Flanders. It was a three way alliance against Flanders in the northeast, France in the southeast and Anjou in the southwest. But there was no checkmate. Warfare between Henry and his French rivals dragged on and on for much of the next nine years. And Henry increasingly spent most of his time in Normandy, trying to hang on to his possessions there. As the battles raged on in France, the monks at Peterborough continued to maintain the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. And in the year 1116 we find an entry describing Henry's wars in France. But the entry concludes with the following. In this same year was consumed by fire the whole monastery of Peterborough on Tisum Jorgenier Berende, all that Minster of Berg and all the houses except the chapel house and the dormitory and Eltha Husses butten se Captelhus and se and therewith also all the most part of the town in der te berunde el ta master del of the Tuna. So a large portion of the monastery at Peterborough was destroyed in a fire that also destroyed much of the town. And when the monastery burned, many of the manuscripts maintained there were lost. And that included the version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle that was still being kept by the monks in English. So if that version of the chronicle was destroyed, how do we have it today? Well, we don't actually have the version that the monks had been keeping. But thankfully the monks didn't give up. They began to replace the manuscripts that had been lost and they decided to continue the chronicle. They tracked down and borrowed a version of the chronicle from another monastery, probably from Canterbury, and then they copied it to recreate all that had been lost. It appears that a single scribe copied all of the entries around the year 1121, and he brought the entries up to date to that year. And based on the handwriting, it appears that each year after that, the same scribe continued to add new entries up through the year 1131. Then there was an extended break and another scribe added entries through the year 1154, when the Chronicle finally ended. What's so fascinating about these particular scribes is that they broke with some of the traditional Wessex writing conventions. And over time, it appears that they wrote in their own local vernacular. So these last few years of the Peterborough Chronicle captured the English language as it was changing from Old English to Middle English. When the first scribe copied the entries from the borrowed Chronicle around the year 1121, it appears that he generally maintained the language of that borrowed version. So the language remains very traditional in the pre 1121 entries. Then, when he started to compose his own entries after 11:21, the language started to change. We will look at some of these changes next time, but for now, I want to focus on some of those copied entries for the earlier years. Specifically for the year 1116, the year the monastery burned. It appears that the scribe that copied that entry for that year may have added the language at the end about the fire at Peterborough. After all, that would make sense. A copy from Canterbury might not have bothered to mention a fire at Peterborough, but that fire was a big deal in Peterborough. So the Peterborough scribe may have added that part about the fire at the end after the copied part. And there's some linguistic evidence to support that theory, because that sentence breaks from the Wessex standard in two places. First, the scribe wrote that all of the monastery houses were destroyed, except for the chapel house and the dormitory. In Old English, the word house was hus, and it was an old noun that fell into a special class that had the same form for both singular and plural. So you could have one hus or several hus. So it was kind of like deer or fish. It didn't change in its plural form. So when the scribe composed that passage, he used a new plural form, literally houses. So he used a plural ending with s, just like we do today. In fact, it's the same ending we used today. It was one of several plural endings in Old English, but it was rapidly becoming the primary plural ending. And here we see the scribe using it for a noun that didn't normally take a plural ending at all. So this is the first evidence of a change from many hoos in Old English to many houses in modern English. This is also important because it confirms that Old English inflectional endings were breaking down, and in fact, they had probably already broken down in places like Peterborough. The scribe probably wrote that passage in his own dialect, since he composed it himself. And remember that there had not been any education in English for quite some time. So the scribe may not have even known that housas or houses was grammatically incorrect at the time. But then the sentence shows another new development, and that development has to do with possession. The scribe wrote that the fire burned the most part of the town, the mastodal of Fatuna. The word dal meant part or portion. So again, he wrote that the fire destroyed the mastodal of thutuna, the most part of the town. Now you say, so what? That sounds perfectly fine. Well, it does today. But it didn't really make sense in Old English. And that's because Old English didn't use the word of to show possession. So you wouldn't refer to a portion of the town. You actually had to say the town's portion. In other words, you had to use an inflectional ending, not a prepositional phrase. Now, I know this gets confusing, because today we can do it either way. If we want to show possession today, we can either add an apostrophe s to a word or we can use a prepositional phrase with the word of. So we can have a hornet's nest or a nest of hornets. We can have a country's leader or the leader of a country. We can have God's wrath or the wrath of God, the world's population or the population of the world. Of course, sometimes one construction works better than the other. For example, with people, we tend to use apostrophe s, so we refer to Mike's car, not the car of Mike. But even though certain situations call for one version over the other, we generally have two different ways of expressing possession. But if we were to go back to Old English, things were quite different. First of all, there was no apostrophe in Old English. The apostrophe wasn't introduced until the 1500s, and the prepositional phrase using of to show possession didn't exist. Yet. If you wanted to show possession, you had to add an ending to the word that had possession. Of course, we know those endings are called inflections or inflectional endings. That was the way Old English worked. Now, the actual endings for possession varied. It depended on whether the noun was considered a masculine noun or feminine noun or a neutral noun. It also depended on whether the noun was singular or plural. So sometimes the ending was or a, but the most common was es. That ending was used for masculine nouns and neutral nouns when they were singular. So take the masculine word man, the original version of our word man. A man's home was manish. Ham, a man's daughter was manish. Doctor. A man's ship was manascipu, but the ending was different for plural noun. So the men's ship was manashipu. It took an a ending instead of an s ending. But as we know, these endings started to break down and become simplified in late Old English. And part of this process was the simplification of all those various inflectional endings for possession. All of those different endings merged into the very generic s ending. And that s ending is the original version of the ending that we still use today and that we typically represent in writing with an apostrophe s. So it's the original version of the s ending in Mike's car, or the z or z ending in the dog's collar. And it's one of those few inflectional endings that survived into Modern English. So what about that other option, the prepositional phrase using the word of like the leader of the pack or the window of the building, or as the scribe wrote, the most part of the town? Well, that type of phrase to show possession wasn't found in Old English because the word of didn't indicate possession. The word of is an Old English word, and today it can be used in a lot of different ways. But originally it had a very limited meaning. It meant from or away or away from. So it was often used to indicate where somebody was from. So you might say William of Normandy, which was literally William from Normandy. And Leofrich of Mercia meant Leofrich from Mercia. So it represented a point of origin. I should also note that the word of actually produced the word off, and off first appeared as a distinct word. Around this point in our overall story of English, off began as just another way of spelling of. Sometimes you spelled it of, and sometimes you spelled it off. But I noted that the word of meant from or away or away from. So it could have a passive sense and it could have an active sense. You might be of Normandy, meaning you were from Normandy in a passive sense, or you might leave of from Normandy to travel to England. So that had a more active sense. And that distinction produced the difference between of and off. So whereas before you might have said that the leaves fell of the tree, meaning from the tree, now you would say the leaves fell off the tree. So off acquired an active sense of something in motion. So today you might jump off a cliff or break off a relationship or drive off the road. So off has that active Sense. By contrast, the word of tends to have a more passive sense, peace of mind, time of year, tired of waiting. And, of course, in its original sense in Old English, the word of was used to describe a location, point of origin. So we had William of Normandy and his son Robert of Normandy, but you didn't use the word of to show possession. So when the Peterborough scribe wrote that a fire burned the most part of the town, he was doing something very unusual, at least for traditional Old English. But it must not have been unusual in his local dialect. This is actually further evidence that Old English inflectional endings were being confused and disappearing. A few words earlier, he had written housas instead of house, so he put a generic S ending on a word that wasn't supposed to have it. And here he dropped the traditional ending used to show possession, and he used a prepositional phrase instead. Both of those changes show a move toward Modern English. But the question remains, why did the scribe use the word of to show possession? Well, we know that that construction became common in English over time, so this scribe wasn't just making it up, he was reflecting the way people were speaking at the time. And it appears that people were starting to use of to show possession for a couple of reasons. First, since the word of referred to a point of origin, like William of Normandy, it came to have a sense of belonging or ownership. William of Normandy was from Normandy, and in a sense, he belonged to Normandy. He was part of Normandy, so he was Normandy's William. And it's believed that the use of the word of to show possession may have come out of that use to show a person's place of origin. But there was another factor at work at the same time, and if you guessed that other factor had something to do with French, you would be correct. French showed a person's place of origin in much the same way as English, except French used the native word de and English used the word of. So Robert of Normandy in English would have been Robert de Normandy in French. So the two words work the same way in this context, French de and English of meant the same thing. But in French, duh was also used to show possession. There was no inflectional ending for possession in French. So in French, I wouldn't say Mark's house or Marc's maison. I would say la maison de Marc, literally the house of Marc. And I wouldn't refer to William's car or voiture. I would say la voiture de Guillaume, literally the car of William. And with that heavy influence of French. In the 1100s, this type of construction was passing into English and it was being embraced by some English speakers. So English started to mimic French and of was extended to show possession in the same way that French used d. But we couldn't see that development before now. Very few documents were being composed in English, and the ones that were being composed used the traditional Wessex dialect. But now, in the entry for the year 1116 in the Peterborough Chronicle, we have a scribe who was writing in his own local dialect, and we see a new form of English emerging. Now, that entry for 1116 contains one other interesting tidbit. In describing Henry's battles in France, the scribe wrote that Henry was engaged in wir. That's the word war, and it's the oldest surviving use of the word in the English language. We've actually seen that word before. It's a Norman French word that was now starting to pass into English. It was originally a Germanic word that had been borrowed into late Latin. It had an initial W sound that was common in the Germanic languages at the time, but was very unusual in late Latin and French. So this was one of those words that was pronounced with an initial g sound in the Romance languages. So it gave us French guer and Spanish guerrilla, as in a guerrilla war. But the Normans were ultimately a Germanic people from Scandinavia, so they had no problem pronouncing that initial W sound. So the version that passed into English was the Norman version war. And English borrowed the word again as guerrilla in the 1800s from Spanish. One other quick note about the word war. The traditional Latin word for war was bellum, which we still have in a word like antebellum, meaning before the war. It also shared the same root as words like belligerent and belong, bellicose. But bellum was very similar to the Latin word bello, which meant beautiful. And one theory is that Latin speakers dropped the word bellum for war because they didn't want to use a word for war that sounded like beautiful. And since they were in constant conflict with the Germanic tribes at the time, they borrowed this Germanic word, which became war in English. Interestingly, the word war is cognate with Old English words like worse and worst. So within the Germanic languages, all of those words had to do with bad things. As the word war came in, most of the native Old English words for war disappeared. That included words like wig, guth, heedo and heald. The word winon also meant war in Old English, and it survives as the word win. So the meaning of win changed over Time, as the word war became the more dominant word in English. By the way, the word battle was another French borrowing, but it didn't come in for another century or so. Now, speaking of war and battles, Henry continued to be consumed with his wars in France as he fought against the triple alliance that had been formed by the French King Louis. But as we know, Henry was a great chess player. He had beaten Louis at chess before when they were both young men. He had beaten Louis both figuratively and literally, and now he was going to try to do it again. Henry's first move was to break up that triple alliance. He approached the Count of Anjou in the southwest and offered to marry his son William to the Count's daughter. By the way, her name was Matilda. Apparently, that was the only popular female name during that period. So In May of 1119, Henry's son William married the Angevin Matilda and Anjou broke its alliance with the French King Louis. Later in that year, Louis tried to invade Normandy with a small force, but Henry intercepted Louis forces at a place called Bramule in eastern Normandy. A battle ensued and Henry's forces routed Louis forces. So was it checkmate for Louis? Well, not according to Louis. The historian John of Salisbury reports that during the battle, the fighting was so close that one of Henry's knights was able to grab the bridle of Louis horse. The knight yelled out, the king is taken. But according to the story, Louis grabbed his sword and struck the knight, knocking him to the ground. Louis then yelled out in French, don't you know that in chess the king is never taken? And technically, Louis was right. A game of chess ends when the king is trapped before he's actually captured. But in this case, it didn't matter. Henry won the battle. And that victory effectively ended the ongoing war between Henry and Louis. For the following year, the year 1120, the Peterborough Chronicle records the this year were reconciled the King of England and the King of France. Diesis jeres wirin seichte SEO King of Engelande and Sale, France. In order to make a peace with Louis, Henry had to swear an oath of homage and loyalty to Louis. Remember that the Duke of Normandy was technically a vassal of the French king, but Henry wasn't willing to do that. He was a king in his own right. So in that year, 1120, Henry named his son William as the Duke of Normandy and he let William pay homage to Louis. It was a technicality, but it worked. So everything was looking up for Henry. England was stable and well run. His expanded bureaucracy was generating a lot of revenue for the Crown. The wars in France appeared to have been settled. His daughter was married to the Holy Roman Emperor, and his son was married to the daughter of the Count of Anjou. His son was also invested with Normandy, and he was Henry's clear successor. So Henry was probably very optimistic late in the year 1120, as he and his son headed back to England. But fate played a cruel trick on Henry. Henry and his son William boarded their respective ships and they set sail for the English coast. Young William was just 17 years old, and the ship he boarded was called the White Ship. And just off the coast of Normandy, the White Ship struck a rock and it started to sink. Almost all on board the ship drowned, but William was able to get on a small lifeboat and it looked like he would survive the disaster, but he decided to turn back to rescue some of the people who were fleeing the sinking ship. The lifeboat was suddenly swamped and it also sank into the water. Henry's only son, William, drowned in the water off the coast of Normandy. As Henry sailed back to England, he was unaware that the White Ship was lost at sea. After arriving in England, his messengers brought him the bad news. By all accounts, Henry was absolutely devastated by the loss. Though Henry lived for 15 more years, it's said that he never smiled again. It was an obvious personal loss, but it was also a political loss. William was Henry's only legitimate son, and an orderly succession was dependent on William's surviving Henry. Next time, we'll look at the period after 1120, as Henry desperately tried to avoid a succession crisis and anarchy. Those efforts involved having his daughter Matilda named as his successor, thereby making her the first queen to rule England. But as you may know, those efforts largely failed, and a period of anarchy did follow Henry's death. These events were captured in the continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle. As these events played out, the Peterborough scribes recorded them in their own local dialect. And those final entries in the Peterborough Chronicle are considered some of the earliest examples of Middle English. So next time, we'll look at these developments through the language of the Peterborough Chronicle. And in many ways, this next episode represents the formal beginning of the Middle English period. So as we turn our attention to a new period of English, let me thank those of you who've supported the podcast over the years by making donations and by writing reviews on itunes. Those donations allow me to dedicate more time to the podcast and to produce episodes more frequently. So I welcome that support, and I look forward to exploring the Middle English period with all of you. So until next time. Thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.