mediaeval multilingualism at noon – a preliminary report on insufficiency

Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik

Mediaeval Multilingualism at Noon – a Preliminary Report on Insufficiency

1. Introduction

The objective of the paper is to shed new light on the issue of linguistic borrowings and semantic changes attested in the Middle English period and the sociolinguistic circumstances in which these changes are traditionally assumed to have taken place. By making recourse to interdisciplinary evidence, I intend to show the cracks in the received picture neatly dividing the labour between the languages taken for granted for Norman England. Most importantly, the allegedly obvious languages do not represent separate entities: the level of their mutual interference often makes it impossible to draw sharp dividing lines between them. So, as remarked by Trotter (2000, 2), “bringing together specialists in the various languages of medieval Britain, together with lexicographers currently preparing dictionaries of their respective languages, and scholars with an interest in phenomena such as language contact and language mixing” is a necessary prerequisite for a proper understanding of the multilingual character of medieval England.

The picture is even more complex when it comes to examining the functions and contexts in which language users resorted to a particular linguistic variety. Here, too, as I intend to show, one must turn to diverse fields of inquiry to properly interpret the data.

The study of the linguistic situation of medieval Britain cannot be carried out by specialists working in isolation, but requires a convergence of attention, and a determined refusal to hide behind the artificial barriers of either allegedly separate languages, or (perhaps above all) conveniently separated academic disciplines, each hermetically sealed against the dangers of contamination from adjacent fields of inquiry, and each buttressed by its own traditions and (less charitably) insulated by its own uncritical and self-preserved misconceptions.

Trotter (2000, 2)

152 Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik

However, although the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the languages used in medieval Europe has been voiced by a growing number of researchers, truly interdisciplinary studies have not yet become a standard approach and a lot of data remain to be reinterpreted from this new angle. In this paper I will apply this perspective to a study of the word noon as it was used in England in the post-Conquest period. Direct evidence from accounts revealing the contemporary perception of the linguistic situation, historical data concerning the relevant aspects of the new political situation, augmented with modern sociolinguistic views on the properties and mutual relationships obtaining between languages in multilingual communities will together provide a suitable backdrop for the analysis. The choice of the item is not accidental as noon perfectly represents the complexity of the medieval linguistic situation: an adaptation of the Latin nōna < nōna hora, it is borrowed independently by (varieties of Old) English and French. So, apart from being present in the two vernaculars and their dialects, it was present both in English Medieval Latin and in French Medieval Latin, which were by no means identical entities: each was to a considerable extent influenced by the native language of its users. It is, therefore, an oversimplification to say that after the Conquest it is only English and French that vie with each other. So do the varieties of Medieval Latin associated with the two countries. This naturally leads to some mixing between the two varieties of Latin, but, even more importantly, as a result of the contact between French and English a new form of French emerges in England, traditionally referred to as Anglo-Norman, which additionally reflects the rather complex internal dialectal sub-divisions of the French spoken by the inhabitants of the isle. These languages, or linguistic varieties, coexist side by side in post-Conquest England performing various social functions but the particular context in which the word noon is used – the monastery – encompasses all of them. An additional ingredient in this linguistic melting pot is a system of signs introduced as a way of complying with the rule of silence imposed on monastic houses by the Rule of St. Benedict.

The article commences by presenting the received picture of the linguistic situation in Norman England (Section 2) and moves on to historical facts concerning the social and administrative aspects of the Church in England after the Conquest and their linguistic consequences. We focus in particular on the monastic environment and the fine details of its everyday routine scheduled by the Rule of St. Benedict (Section 3). The presentation is enriched by glimpses into the linguistic situation of post-Conquest England as seen by contemporaries. The picture that emerges from these accounts is surprisingly vivid and converges

Mediaeval Multilingualism at Noon – a Preliminary Report on Insufficiency 153

with the well-studied reality of modern multilingual communities. All of these considerations prepare the ground for a case study of the word noon, presented in Section 4. Conclusions following from this analysis concerning the nature of the linguistic relationships between the relevant languages and the barriers between them are formulated in Section 5.

2. Mediaeval multilingualism – the deconstruction of the received picture

The general view holds that the languages of post-Conquest England are Latin, French and English; with Latin being the language of the Church and learning, an exclusive mark of the educated; French the medium of matters of state (such as the court, administration) and literature, associated with the nobility and elites; and English the language of the general populace, the only language of the uneducated. This categorical division perfectly exemplifies the characteristic of diglossia,1 defined as a situation “[w]hen different varieties or languages co-occur throughout a speech community, each with a distinct range of social functions in complementary distribution” (Hamers and Blanc 1983/2003, 294). The received picture presented above, however, suffers from a major drawback: it is not just that it oversimplifies the situation, which general pictures tend to do; it does much more than that: it severely distorts the medieval multilingual reality of Norman England.

In particular, employing the term French to denote the language spoken by members of the nobility, aristocracy and army from France, fails to reflect the whole rich dialectal diversity of the language of the new inhabitants of the British Isles. It is often used interchangeably with Norman French – a term meant to reflect the dialectal provenance of the newcomers. This, however, as evidenced in historical details, is not correct. As Wilson (1943, 57) points out, “the army at Hastings contained adventurers from almost every part of France”. The confines of this paper preclude a detailed discussion of the mutual relationships obtaining between the dialects of French. It has to be borne in mind, however, that these relationships were additionally compounded by the emergence of Anglo-Norman, a term I am using here for lack of a better one, a

1 The notion was first introduced by Fergusson (1959) with reference to two functional varieties

within one language: a high and low variety reserved for formal and informal situations respectively. It was further extended to multilingual situations by Gumperz (1971). See also Fasold (1984) for a useful discussion and Hamers and Blanc (1983/2003) for types of multilingual diglossia.


misnomer, in fact, in view of what has just been said above. Rector (2009) replaces it with the appellation romanz, which is a word drawn from the language it describes to denote itself. Importantly, this was not the only linguistic variety of French in use in England, as there were fresh waves of newcomers from France whose language differed markedly from the language of the native speakers of romanz and who constantly influenced it, especially as they were associated with higher prestige – an important aspect in this particular linguistic setting.

Another aspect of the linguistic situation that is ignored in this simplified picture is the impact of the Vikings, or Danes, as some researchers prefer to call them. The relationships of the invaders from the North and East with the English are a complex issue which receives very different interpretations from modern scholars, ranging from assumptions concerning the mutual intelligibility of the two languages2 (Townend 2002; cf. also Dance 2003), through varying degrees of bilingualism “combined with the affinity between the two languages” (Hansen 1984, 88; cf. also Kastovsky 1992), to a supraregional spoken koiné (a Danish-English interlanguage) necessary for the speakers of Old Norse and Old English to communicate (Poussa 1982). The issue is further obfuscated by the lack of written records of Old Norse from before the Viking invasions (Dance 2003, 69) and the scarcity of the extant records of the Old English spoken in the areas of Viking settlements. What also contributes to the complexity of the problem is that the language of the Vikings was not homogenous: the invaders came from various parts of Scandinavia over a long period of time; some of them, to additionally compound the difficulty, came from Ireland, where their ancestors had stayed for a few generations (Kastovsky 1992, 325). Quite obviously, this affected the language they spoke, which further complicates a

2 In this respect it is interesting to reflect upon the absence of a term denoting the language of the

Viking invaders. With reference to the Anglo-Saxon period it is often called Old Norse, Scandinavian or simply the language of the Vikings; the variety, or varieties, spoken in post-Conquest England are usually called Danish or Anglo-Danish. Note that the terminological chaos does not so much represent confusion, as is the case with Anglo-Norman and the related terms, but reflects a problem which is much more profound: insufficient data do not allow researchers to reconstruct a linguistic history which would be acceptable to a wider group of linguists, at least in its broad outlines. Moreover, differences of opinion with respect to the linguistic consequences of the Viking settlement in England are paralleled by archaeological controversies surrounding the settlement; in particular, the scale of the invasion in purely numerical terms, its impact on the social structure of the country, etc. (cf. Hadley 2000). It seems that valuable insights can be gained from adopting a more interdisciplinary perspective to the Viking issue as a whole.


proper assessment of the nature of the linguistic encounters between the English and the Danes.

The legacy of this complex, though ill-understood, linguistic group was strongly felt in the Middle English period, especially in the North and in the Midlands. Due to space limitations, the present article cannot deal with the matter in any detail, but it is important to emphasise that the descendant language of the Vikings is a significant element of the linguistic diversity that existed in the Middle English period, all too often ignored in the descriptions of the period.

There are also the Celtic languages but contacts between these and the major languages discussed above were restricted to the border areas so they do not contribute very much to the picture of linguistic diversity relevant to my discussion here.

In effect, the received view presents us with a simplified picture of the three major distinct languages, each with a clearly delineated area of use, while the reality was very different: the linguistic repertoire of Norman England was much richer and the mutual relationships between these languages were much more intricate.

On the basis of the analysis of vernacular glosses, Hunt (1991, 13) observes that “the common confusion of anglice and gallice in interlinear glossing found in insular MSS, attests the interpenetration of the languages”. The assertion is repeated by Reynolds (1996/2004, 66). In a similar fashion, Rothwell (2000, 51) convincingly argues that “[i]n England in the later fourteenth century, the lexes of English and French were so imbricated as to be distinguishable only at the cost of some artificiality”. The same opinion is expressed by Meecham-Jones (2011), Trotter (2003; 2011) and Wright (2011). This vividly shows that the two languages cannot be viewed as distinct in the pertinent period.

Now, as far as their distinct functions are concerned, it has to be noted that the contexts in which these languages were used were not as clearly divided as the received view suggests. Since it is impossible to discuss all the areas here, I will focus on the language(s) of the Church. On the one hand, it is an issue immediately relevant to our analysis of the word noon; on the other, it vividly illustrates the multiple misconceptions inherent in the received picture presented above. The issue is going to be discussed in some detail in Section 3.


3. The language of the Church: towards a real picture

3.1. A general overview

As noted above, received wisdom has it that the Church authorities knew and used Latin both in its oral and in its written form. Needless to say, the latter constitutes a direct source of our knowledge, corroborated with indirect evidence coming from contemporary accounts, relating the details of Church proceedings, habits, rules, etc. This view, in its broad outline, is certainly true. Note, however, that the attested use of Latin in the Church context does not automatically imply that it was the only language used in this setting, especially when it comes to the oral mode. So, while not denying the overall correctness of the statement, I want to show how the details of its working in medieval reality diverge from the impersonal sterility of the scholarly view.

First of all, for the claim that Latin was the only means of (official) communication among members of the Church to hold true, one must assume an exceptionless mastery of Latin by the whole of the clergy in post-Conquest England. Although unquestionably correct in the case of high officials at the episcopal level, this view is very far from being true when it comes to the monastic environment and parish priests, as indirect sources vividly illustrate.

Let me start with a pair of concepts seemingly unrelated to the topic of this paper, i.e. the antithesis between literattus vs. illitteratus. Contrary to our modern conviction, illiterati were not people who lacked the basic abilities now associated with literacy. As pointed out by Clanchy (1993), there are fundamental differences between medieval views and our modern approaches to literacy. Namely, “medieval assessments concentrate on cases of maximum ability, the skills of most learned scholars (litterati) [...], whereas modern assessors measure the diffusion of minimal skills among the masses” (Clanchy 1993, 234). Medieval standards of literacy were set much higher than ours: one could be able to read and still be called illiteratus, because to be perceived as a litteratus one had to possess not only the ability to read, which was synonymous with reading in Latin, and to understand the Latin text, but to be able to freely converse in that language.3

3 To be more precise, litteratus was a relative term: not only was it a matter of degree but also of

opinion. Crucially, however, the term is not accurately translated by its modern equivalent and in the Middle Ages it encompassed the ability to express oneself in Latin.


In effect, we find frequent references to medieval monks who, though able to read4 were still referred to as illitterati because, as is now clear, the connection between these abilities and literacy in the Middle Ages was of a different nature than it is today. These references, however, are quite telling in another respect, namely they inform us about the standard of Latin exhibited by members of the clergy. It is clear that an illitteratus was a monk whose Latin was not of a very high standard but the term was not considered derogatory – it was merely a statement of fact. Since there were many monks who were illitterati ,5 the picture of the linguistic abilities of the monks emerging from that description is rather clear.

Another interesting term which reflected a clergyman’s acquaintance with Latin, though in a very specific sense, was psalteratus. The first task entrusted to a novice upon his entering the monastic life was to master the whole Latin Psalter by heart. It normally took around a year, though more apt candidates memorised the whole collection of 150 psalms in 6 months, while those less gifted needed up to two years to commit the psalter to memory. It is important to emphasise that up to around the year 1100 a novice, normally a native speaker of English, had very little acquaintance with Latin. As noted by Orme (2006, 255) and Reilly (2013), the situation changed around the twelfth century, when, on the one hand, child oblation became increasingly rare and, on the other, free-standing schools became more common. In fact, the former was to a great extent a consequence of the latter:6 with the growing number of free-standing schools, boys could be educated there, so on entering the monastery they had already mastered some Latin. Before that time, however, according to Clanchy (1993, 241) and Forgeng and McLean (2009, 45), an average man’s acquaintance with Latin was limited to the Pater Noster and the Credo, possibly also including Ave

4 In our modern understanding of literacy, the ability to read goes hand in hand with the ability to

write, which brings to the fore another important difference between the concept of literacy as perceived by the medieval and the modern world: the latter ability, though often rightly associated with monks, was perceived rather as an artistic skill and was dissociated from the intellectual skill necessary to read.

5 According to Kibbee (1991, 7), “[a]t the time of the Conquest the English church was in a period of decay, a period in which even the highest ranking clergy (such as Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury) were described by later chroniclers as illiterate”. The situation improved with the surge of Church officials from France, but the improvement within the ranks of the lower clergy took much longer.

6 This was an important pragmatic factor: one no longer needed to join a religious order to receive an education; another equally significant factor that contributed to the disappearance of child oblation was, as noted by Orme (2006), a change of attitude to the monastic vocation.


Maria. In addition, they would probably know some odd phrases that would inevitably be picked up from the long church ceremonies conducted in Latin (with the exception of sermons and homilies; cf. Clanchy 1993, 239).

When it comes to parish schools, these offered a chance of acquiring the basics of Latin grammar from local priests, yet the quality of this education differed widely, as will be shown below. In effect, the educational level of a novice joining a religious order changed over time: before 1100 novices generally could not read and had no or almost no background knowledge of Latin, while with the changes introduced in the twelfth century the candidates had (at least theoretically) some acquaintance with the rudiments of reading and the language.

Regardless of these differences, a novice was confronted with the same formidable task of memorising the Latin Psalter. This strongly implies that in the course of becoming a psaleratus one definitely remained an illiteratus; in some cases for a short time only, but in many instances permanently, as we shall see in the course of the paper. Again, the situation changed over time, as, especially with the rise of new orders, a lot of emphasis was put on education, though “[t]he organisation of studies among the early Franciscans is badly obscured by lack of records” (Orme 2006, 263) so such claims have to be based on conjecture rather than on documented data.

An illustrative example of this unusual conjunction of skills and the corresponding terms is provided by Godric of Finchale, a revered English saint and hermit, born in 1085 from poor and uneducated parents. Knowing the whole psalter by heart,7 he certainly was a psalteratus, but his biographer, Reginald of Durham, called him, “without malice” (Clanchy 1993, 241) laicus, illiteratus et idiota.8 Godric’s self-learned Latin (resulting from memorising both the Psalter and parts of the liturgy), allowed him “to cope with the normal uses of Latin in ecclesiastical circles” (Clanchy 1993, 242) but did not earn him the title of litteratus.

In conclusion so far, the distinction between litterati and illitterati did not rest on the ability to read but reflected the level of one’s acquisition of formal instruction in Latin, which was a prerequisite to a fluent conversational 7 His affection for the Psalter is legendary and, as we learn from Shepherd (1969, 370), “Godric,

the recluse of Finchale, acquired a finger permanently curved through constantly holding his psalm-book”.

8 A distinction was also drawn between clericus and laicus, i.e. terms which with time became synonymous with litteratus and illitteratus. For an illuminating history of the origin of the equivalence of the two antitheses, see Clanchy (1993).


knowledge of this language. In effect, while all monastic clergy were familiar with the written form of Latin (through the arduous task of memorising the Psalter)9 and were able to perform the monastic duties requiring a knowledge of Latin (related to the liturgy), few of them could actually boast the title of litteratus. Thus, at the monastery-internal level, a lot of church business could not be performed in Latin. What language it was conducted in will be discussed in more detail in Section 3.2

When it comes to a knowledge of Latin among parish priests in post-Conquest England, opinions tend to differ. Let me start by repeating after Clanchy (1993, 243) that “[v]illage priests became increasingly common from the eleventh century onwards as a network of parish churches gradually replaced and supplemented the centralized minister churches of the missionary period”. Canon law required parish priests to perform elementary instruction in Latin grammar at the village level. Nonetheless, two things need to be noted with reference to this requirement. First of all, the injunction had to be frequently repeated, which indicates a certain reluctance on the part of the priests to perform this duty. Secondly, and more importantly in the context of this paper, the fact that the requirement was translated into English seems to point to a problem much more fundamental than reluctance to comply on the part of the priests and raises the question of their level of mastery of Latin.

Clanchy (1993, 243) notes that although as a result of the Norman Conquest the level of education of village priests deteriorated, “most scholars agree that by the thirteenth century, [...] the standard of learning of the priesthood was on the whole quite high”. The author argues that while generally speaking parish priests were sufficiently educated to perform basic instruction in Latin, a typical village priest “was relatively poor and ignorant himself, [so] he could not have instructed many children at a time, nor have got them beyond the ABC and the bare elements of reading Latin” (Clanchy 1993, 244). The latter opinion clearly suggests that parish priests were not generally associated with high educational standards. This does not mean that the well-known recorded instances of priestly ignorance10 need to be viewed as indicative of this social group as a whole. On the contrary, the fact that they received a record in bishops’ registers implies

9 Cf. Hugh of St Victor’s mnemonics for committing the Psalter to memory, available in the

English translation provided by Carruthers (2002). 10 Quite a few instances of priestly ignorance of Latin were recorded in medieval times and have

been in circulation ever since, as they tally with most of the misconceptions harboured with respect to the Middle Ages.


their rather exceptional status. However, when it comes to assessing the priests’ mastery of Latin and their ability to freely argue and converse in this language, it is worth pointing out that, according to Clanchy’s estimates, only one in a hundred priests actually rose to the level of fluency in Latin qualifying him as a literattus.

Concluding this part of the discussion, it has to be noted that while individual parish priests would certainly have differed very much between themselves as to their actual linguistic abilities in Latin, their functioning among common people rather than in closed ecclesiastical circles makes the issue of the standard of their linguistic skill in Latin much less relevant to my discussion here than that of the other ecclesiastical groups. There is no doubt that the Church elite spoke Latin fluently. When it comes to the monasteries, the issue is far more complex and as it is of immediate interest to us, it is crucial to properly assess the linguistic situation that obtained there.

3.2. Monastic life in linguistic focus

Considering the fact that the language of the Scripture and the liturgy was Latin but monks typically could not fluently communicate in it, the question is: what language or languages did they actually speak? It seems that the question should receive a straightforward answer: the monks communicated in the vernacular. But the monastic reality after the Norman Conquest was much more complex than that. First of all, there is the Rule of St. Benedict,11 which prohibits conversations apart from specified periods.12 The general place and time for communication is, thus, the daily chapter meeting. It is an official assembly devoted to reading “a chapter of the Rule [of St. Benedict], confession of faults

11 The Rule of St. Benedict was originally formulated in the sixth century for the monastery St.

Benedict founded on Monte Cassino, but it soon became universal across Europe. The Rule specified the content and timing of the daily horarium using the system of unequal hours (also known as seasonal), i.e. longer in the summer and shorter in the winter, and counted from sunrise to sunset. The length of the hours in this system changes not only with the seasons of the year but it also differs from place to place. Hence, the system devised for Italy was not particularly suitable in England but it was still followed to the dot.

12 The Rule of St. Benedict prohibited unconstrained speech. In effect, as shown in Bruce (2007), individual houses had their own systems of signs and some of these lists of words with accompanying gestures have actually come down to us. It is believed that the master of novices was responsible for teaching the newcomers not only Latin but also the arbitrary gestures to be used when speech was prohibited (for example during meals).


and impositions of penance” (Burton 1994, 269). The meetings were held by the abbots or priors of individual monastic houses. Before 1066, they would be of the same linguistic background as an average monk, i.e. speakers of English, while as a result of the Norman Conquest all of the heads of the religious houses in England had been substituted by Norman abbots and priors by the end of the eleventh century (Kibbee 1991, 7 after Berndt 1965, 149). The replacement appears to have generally been performed peacefully,13 with only a few cases of enforced substitutions of living English abbots and priors by their Norman successors. On the whole, most heads of religious houses remained in office until their death (Burton 1994, 23). In contrast, “[t]he lower levels of the clergy probably remained English, except in some orders of monks of continental origin”, as noted by Kibbee (1991, 7).

In effect, the heads of the religious houses spoke a variety of French, while (most) monks were native speakers of English, with both parties possessing some linguistic abilities in Latin. Moreover, as extant glosses show, Latin was acquired through French (and its varieties) rather than through English, at least during the initial period of Norman rule.14 This to a large extent determined the language of the chapter meetings.

So, the major languages of post-Conquest English monasteries were: English, varieties of French spoken by abbots and priors, Latin and, as stated in Section 1, arbitrary signs devised by individual monastic houses to facilitate communication during times when speech was prohibited by the Rule of St. Benedict. With respect to Latin, it has to be remembered that the conversational Latin possessed by the monastic authorities represented the Medieval Latin spoken in France, i.e. the words and their senses were influenced by (broadly understood) French. It is, therefore, very likely that the monks learning Latin in monasteries under French and Norman abbots and priors also acquired the peculiarities of Latin typical of French medieval Latin, at least in the early period of Norman rule rather than exclusively those of English

13 It is detailed in a study by Knowles, Brooke and London (2001). 14 Legge (1941) claims that monastic schools offered instruction in Latin via French – a claim

Kibbee (1991) disagrees with on the basis of insufficient evidence and the presence of mixed language glosses in Latin textbooks. Whichever stance is more correct, both authors agree that Latin was taught in England via French (at least to some extent). At the same time Kibbee (1991, 22) agrees that “knowledge of French was clearly a boon to the ambitious clergyman” and that “contact with French clergymen, either in the hierarchy or in the monasteries, leads to the introduction of a number of French terms concerning religion into English” (1991, 23), thus testifying to the importance of French as a language of this social group.


Medieval Latin, as would have been the case before the Conquest. This kind of influence is only to be expected in closed communities where linguistic features would spread rather predictably from the heads of religious houses to their rank and file inhabitants.

The real question, then, is: what was the actual (in contrast to the official) language of daily communication in a monastery? And what kind of evidence can be consulted with reference to the form of communication which is ephemeral by definition? It seems that no direct statements concerning the issue can be expected to have been recorded – the matter was not prescribed in the Rule of St. Benedict. So, while every single aspect of monastic life is regulated by this rule, there are no instructions as to what language is to be used on those occasions when speaking is allowed. What other sources can we resort to, then?

As noted above, the Rule does not specify the language of conversation, but it demands from monks obedience to their superiors. In effect, a superior can impose a regulation that is not contained in the Rule and the regulation has to be obeyed. So, a place to look for injunctions concerning the language to be used for conversation on specified occasions is in the rules imposed by abbots. There are in fact some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century monastic documents which explicitly deal with linguistic matters and, as it appears, they prohibit the use of English. A companion rule for novitiates of some monasteries openly gave preference to French over English and Latin: “In qua quidem scola, sicut nec alibi in claustro, debet Anglico ydiomate aliquid preferri; sed neque Latino, nisi prior aut idem magister vel aliquis strenuus frater, docendi aut exortandi gracia, Latine aliquid velit exprimere; sed Gallice jugiter, sicut et in capitulo, ab omnibus et a singulis in claustro est loquendum” (Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of St. Augustine, Canterburry and St. Peter, Westminster II: 164).15

It seems that a lot of information concerning the actual linguistic situation in monasteries in post-Conquest England can also be provided by the contents of the monastic library, admission requirements concerning the linguistic skill of a candidate, informal notes taken in monasteries, injunctions written by the heads of religious houses to the lower clergy, etc. This information, though obviously indirect, is very telling, as will soon become clear.

15 The essence of this injunction is given here in English after Bond (1909, 105): “The English is

not to be spoken in the school of the novices or anywhere else in the cloister; nor is Latin to be employed, unless the Prior wishes to say something in Latin; but French is to be employed at all times in the cloister as in the Chapter house by each and all.”


Let me start with the contents of monastic libraries. These need to be examined both in terms of the language(s) of the manuscripts and the type of texts typical of individual languages as well as from the point of view of the combinations of texts bound together as one book. I will not focus here on the obvious: the obligatory Latin canon and texts written in English (often mixed with Latin) are only to be expected in such a setting, so they will not be commented upon. It turns out, however, that monastic libraries contained a lot of mixed texts with Latin and French (which I will use here as a cover term for all its varieties) bound together, texts with prayers in French added to Latin liturgical books and many books written exclusively in French. There were also Latin texts which were glossed into French. Moreover, there are French books with inscriptions indicating that they be read aloud during meals (in accordance with the Rule), testifying to the status of French as an important language in the monastery.

An examination of the extant accounts of the Campsey Ash monastery (Oliva 2009) shows notes in French with code-switching to English, while joint evidence of the daily diet and names of its inhabitants indicates that the monastery was not inhabited by descendants of the French nobility. This is further supported by evidence of a request for exceptional admission to a convent of a lady without a knowledge of French. These records are quite telling with respect to the status and importance of French in English monastic houses.

When it comes to injunctions written by the heads of religious houses to the lower clergy, Walter of Wenlock, an abbot of Westminster in the fourteenth century, is known to have written letters directed at the congregation and documents in Latin, while his correspondence with the brethren was conducted in French. The use of these two languages is indicative: we know that Walter of Wenlock was competent enough in Latin to use it in situations which required it. But we also learn that French must have been a more suitable means of communication in the monastic context.

The final piece of evidence that I would like to present here concerns miracle accounts, which medieval sources abound in. Various saints are reported to have intervened in the miraculous endowment of the gift of languages to lay people and to members of monastic houses as well. While the nature of the data might be considered anecdotal and hence deprecating the argument itself, there is an important point to be made relating to the matter at hand: in these accounts French is rated highly among the granted languages. There is an interesting story about Wulfric of Heselbury, a twelfth-century anchorite, who is reported to have healed a mute man. Interestingly, the healed person was able to speak not just


English but French as well, testifying to the multilingual character of contemporary society: miraculous interventions were certainly well-aimed. Wulfric’s close friend, an English priest of Haselbury – Brihtric – complains that in spite of being Wulfric’s close friend for years, the saint has never helped him to obtain the ability to speak French (Kibbee 1991, 23). In effect, Brihtric is embarrassed whenever he meets the French-speaking bishop and cannot talk to him. Note that stories of this type offer an interesting spotlight on the linguistic relations of the period.16

To summarise, all the evidence presented here, which, as can be expected, is selective by necessity, points to the same conclusion: French was an important language of monastic communities in post-Conquest England. Certainly, the level of mastery of the language differed significantly between individuals, as was the case with Latin, but it is beyond doubt that French has to be considered an important ingredient in the linguistic melting pot that obtained in monastic houses in Norman England. And it is in this linguistic context that the change within the word noon takes place.

4. Noon – a case study

The semantic change observed in the word noon is one of the most frequently quoted instances of unexpected shifts. At the same time, it seems to be one of the most ill-understood changes. Standard accounts (cf. Skeat 1888; Partridge 1958; Klein 1971; Room 1986; the Oxford English Dictionary) uniformly point to the Latin etymology: nōna hora, i.e. the ninth hour of the day, a time when the office of the ninth hour was scheduled in the daily monastic horarium, explaining that it was counted from sunrise, hence was roughly equivalent to three o’clock. The sources agree that this denotation started to change around the twelfth/thirteenth century and the change was complete around the fourteenth/fifteenth century, when the modern sense of the word – ‘midday’, was firmly established. The change is seen as a result of the advancement of the first meal of the day with respect to prayer times.

This account is oversimplified in too many respects to be accepted.17 Firstly, it is true that the office of the ninth hour took place during the ninth hour of the

16 For another account of a miraculous gift of languages, see Richter (2000), who also presents

other invaluable evidence concerning the multilingual character of medieval England. 17 The contents of this and the next paragraph were first presented in a lecture given at the

habilitation colloquim on October 23, 2013 (cf. also Charzyńska-Wójcik in press).


day counting from sunrise, but the time cannot be equated with three o’clock. The system of time keeping which counted the hours starting from sunrise originated in Egypt (North 2007, 207; Blackburn and Holford-Strevens 1999, 662) or Assyria and Babylonia (Lippincott 1999 in Glennie and Thrift 2009, 25) and was adopted in ancient Greece and Rome (Blackburn and Holford-Strevens 1999). It was based on unequal hours, also known as seasonal. It divided the period of daylight into twelve equal units, which, at higher latitudes resulted in hour length differing drastically depending on the time of the year, with winter hours being significantly shorter than the hours in the summer. As argued conclusively in Charzyńska-Wójcik (in press), day times given in this system cannot be translated in any way into the modern system of equal hours, which was introduced with the invention and popularisation of the mechanical clock. So we cannot talk about the change of denotation of the word noon from three o’clock to twelve o’clock because the sense was never associated with three o’clock.

Secondly, as noted above, the accounts of semantic change root it in the change of monastic daily routine. However, a careful examination of the sources presenting the details of the horarium does not warrant such a conclusion (cf. Burton 1994; Burton and Kerr 2011; Clark 2011; Kerr 2009; Knowles 1940/1976; 1955/2004). Every single element of monastic life was scheduled so carefully that even minute changes to this routine had to receive a written form. It could, of course, be suggested that the alleged change in the horarium, namely the rather welcome advancement of the first meal of the day,18 did not follow from the Rule or accompanying documents but represented a breach and as such is not documented in written records. This reasoning suffers from two flaws: first of all, the breach would have to have been country-wide rather than individual to have received recognition in the semantic change. Secondly, if the only trace of the posited change of routine is the observed semantic change allegedly following from it, the reasoning is circular.

Finally, and most importantly for this paper, all of these accounts concentrate exclusively on the English word noon and the senses recorded in its history, while, as I have shown above, the monastic context in which the word was used encompassed more than one language.19 Crucially, each of the relevant

18 Depending on the liturgical season, the first meal of the day was scheduled to follow either the

liturgy of the sixth or the ninth hour (except during Lent, when it was eaten in the evening). 19 It has to be admitted, though, that the latest edition of the OED online (http://www.oed.com)

substantially modifies the information with respect to the previous electronic edition (1989) to


languages contained the word in a more or less similar form and meaning and this coexistence of languages and words extended over a long span of time. To additionally compound the difficulty, the historical dictionaries of each of the languages in question report the existence of more than one noon-like item, with the meanings of the two items at least partly overlapping. The similarity in form and meaning of the items recognised by the dictionaries naturally poses the question of the correctness of the proposed classifications. The question is especially valid in view of the lack of standardised spelling conventions in the vernaculars in the pertinent period, and the fact that the items’ denotations were overlapping. So the available data are multiply ambiguous and often lend themselves to more than one interpretation.

In effect, any analysis of the semantic change recorded in the English word noon should encompass data from Medieval Latin, Old French, Middle French, Anglo-Norman, Old English and Middle English. As transpires from Table 1 below, the dictionary information is extremely confusing. Additionally, the appended examples (not represented here for reasons of space) are frequently misclassified or classified as representing one item or sense rather than the other without sufficient grounds for that labelling. This confusion is augmented by the presence of disparate classifications offered by different dictionaries if more than one is available for a given period of the history of the language.

Table 1. Lexical information on the word noon in the relevant historical dictionaries

Medieval Latin nōna < nōna hora 1. the ninth hour of the day 2. noon 3. nones Latham (1965) Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources. nona the ninth hour, noon nonae prayer at noon, nones Niermeyer (1976) A Medieval Latin-French/English Dictionary. Old French none, nonne, noesne 1. south (direction) 2. midday

the effect that by making reference to Rothwell’s (1991) paper, it does allude to the impact of Anglo-French and continental French on the semantic development of the word in English, which tallies with the interdisciplinary approach discussed here.


3. afternoon Godefroy (1881) Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siecle none 1. a fourth part of the day which begins with the end of the ninth hour of the day (today 3:00) 2. one of the seven canonical hours Godefroy (1881) Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siecle (Complément) none 1. midday 2. afternoon 3. south (direction) Godefroy, Bonnard and Salmon (1901) Lexique de l’ancien français none 1. the ninth hour of the day: - 3:00 PM for the Romans, - 9:00 AM for contemporaries, - 12:00 in the provincial dialect 2. the liturgical hour nonne 1. the first hour of the nones 2. the south (direction) La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1875–1882) Dictionnaire historique de l’ancien langage françois ou glossaire de la langue françoise: depuis son origine jusqu’au siècle de Louis XIV Middle French none, nones, nonus 1. the last of the canonical hours 2. the ninth hour, i.e. 3:00 PM Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330–1500) none 1. the time of the ninth canonical hour (3:00 PM) Dictionnaire Électronique de Chrétien de Troyes nonne 1. one of the seven canonical hours 2. 3:00 PM Huguet (1925–1967) Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle Anglo-Norman none, non, nonne, noon, noone; noun, noune, nounne; nune, noen 1. ninth hour of the canonical day, mid-afternoon (around 3 p.m.) – the sense seems to have persisted all through the Anglo-Norman period a. noon, midday 2. (eccl.) office of Nones (with some flexibility regarding the time of day when these were held) Anglo-Norman Dictionary


Old English nōn 1. the ninth hour 2. the service held at the ninth hour, nones Bosworth and Toller (1898) An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth, Edited and Enlarged by T. Northcote Toller Middle English nōn (n.) Also none, nonne, noun(e, noine, noen. [from Latin nōna] a. The canonical hour of nones; three o’clock p.m.; precisely 3:00; b. the canonical office of nones; c. midday, the period around 12:00 noon; also, 12:00 noon; d. precisely 12:00 noon; the midday period; e. a midday meal; The Middle English Dictionary non, nonne, noun, noune, noyn, noyne, noynne, noen, none, noone, noon, nowne; 1. a. {OE-1420} The ninth hour of the day, reckoned from sunrise according to the Roman method, or about three o’clock in the afternoon. Obs. Chiefly as a direct rendering of Latin nona (hora), and in later use most frequent in accounts of the crucifixion of Christ. b. {OE-1890} Christian Church. The hour or office of nones. Obs. (literary and rare after 15th cent.). 2. a. {1200-} The time when the sun reaches the meridian; twelve o’clock in the day; midday. 3. {1225–1878} A midday meal. Now Eng. regional. The Oxford English Dictionary (latest edition online)20 nōnes (n.) Also nonas, nonus. [from Latin nōnæ & nōnas & OF nones] 1. The ninth day, numbered inclusively, before the ides of the month; either the fifth or the seventh day of the month; the nones; 2. a. The fifth canonical hour, set for the ninth hour of the day (3 p.m.); b. noon; a noon meal; The Middle English Dictionary nones 1. {1420–1870} Rom. Antiq. The ninth day (by inclusive reckoning) before the Ides of each month, being thus the 7th of March, May, July, and October, and the 5th of all other months. 2. {1709–1873} Eccl. A daily office, originally said at the ninth hour of the day (about 3 p.m.), but in later use sometimes earlier. The Oxford English Dictionary

20 Due to the extensive amount of information available in the entry of noon in the Oxford English

Dictionary, I present here only the senses present in the relevant period; the dates of attested uses are given in curly brackets.


As clearly transpires from the table above, the word noon must have constituted a challenge for lexicographers: it is hard, or perhaps almost impossible in some instances, to tell the two noon-like items apart in all of the varieties of French and English, with some confusion also observed in Latin. This results from the fact that the words could not have been clearly separated in the minds of the speakers in England and the intertwining must have affected not only the intralinguistic but also the interlinguistic levels. Consequently, the semantic changes recorded in the English word noon cannot be studied in isolation and their proper analysis must encompass the senses recorded in its French and Latin equivalents.

5. Conclusions

While it is impossible to reconstruct the exact anatomy of the linguistic situation of medieval monasteries in post-Conquest England, modern sociolinguistic frameworks aptly describe the linguistic character of medieval multilingual England as hybridised. Wogan-Browne (2013, 174) notes that “it was indeed possible to hear one language in another and therefore ... crossings from one language to another may on occasion be less sharply experienced and less definitive as markers of identity in medieval texts than we expect”. In effect, medieval instances of code-switching (or macaronic language) were extremely frequent, contrary to the impressions we get from analysing Middle English corpora, which are constructed predominantly of unmixed texts (Schendl and Wright 2011). The reality was very different: code-switching, especially (but not exclusively) in spoken language was the order of the day. Importantly, it needs to be perceived in a different way than modern instances of code-switching: not as a way of injecting prestige from the source language or introducing new distinctions into the recipient language. As noted in Section 1, the languages of medieval England exhibited such a degree of mutual penetration that at least some of their lexes must have represented what is probably best called a panlinguistic word stock. “The extent of this phenomenon is well illustrated by the fact that in the medieval mixed-language business writings analysed by Wright (2000; 2011) abbreviation and suspension marks allowed the text to be decoded in any of the three languages without losing its semantic content” (Lis in prep.). This practice finds an equivalent within the walls of monastic houses, where, as noted in Section 1, a system of signs was used by monks in order to communicate without breaking the silence imposed by the Rule of St. Benedict.


Here, conventionalised gestures used in periods of enforced silence levelled down the differences between the (seemingly) individual languages. “The multilingualism here is not just a matter of different languages alternating in the one text but is arguably of a different conception of how linguistic boundaries matter” (Wogan-Browne 2013, 174).

What this means by way of desiderata for a proper analysis of the word noon (in all its shapes and shades) is that, when used in a monastic context (except for some border cases, i.e. official documents in Latin) it did not specifically represent a particular language. Rather, it should be viewed as belonging to the panlinguistic vocabulary alluded to above. It is clear that much more research is necessary to sufficiently investigate the matter at hand but, as noted at the outset, the research should be interdisciplinary, not only encompassing the data from all the relevant languages but also the extralinguistic reality of multilingual monastic communities both in England and in France.

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mediaeval multilingualism at noon – a preliminary report on insufficiency

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