The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (24 page)

Misunderstanding these words presumes that you can hear them correctly in the first place. The range of local accents is far greater in the sixteenth century than it is in the modern world, with its relatively homogenised tones after decades of long-distance migration and communications. Sir Walter Raleigh never loses his broad Devon accent, despite being educated and spending much of his time at court or at sea. English-speaking Cornishmen have an equally ‘broad and rude’ accent, according to Carew, complicating their speech with certain local
words, among them ‘scrip’ (escape), ‘bezibd’ (fortunate), ‘dule’ (comfort), ‘thew’ (threaten) and ‘skew’ (shun). Move further up the country and you will find different accents and local expressions. And if you visit London you will find all these regional accents coexisting. As you will see from listening to Henry Machyn (originally from north-east Leicestershire), or from reading his phonetic ‘cronacle’, a man might speak with a strong regional accent all his life, even though he moved to the capital as a boy and rarely (if ever) goes home.
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These are just the difficulties you will have with English-speakers. There are many Welsh-speakers still in Wales, despite Henry VIII’s legislation and Edward VI’s Act of Uniformity, which stipulated that English has to be used in all official walks of life. There is little secular Welsh literature. However, the tireless scholar William Salesbury tries to resuscitate the language through a Welsh translation of the Prayer Book in 1551 and, along with Richard Davies, bishop of St David’s, he petitions parliament to publish a Welsh translation of the Bible. You might think that Elizabeth’s government would pour scorn on such a proposal, but it realises that the native language may be an important instrument in converting the Welsh to Protestantism. When William Morgan’s Welsh Bible is finally printed in 1588, it is as if the language has finally received divine approval. Moreover, the Welsh Bible has much the same effect on the language as its English equivalent has on the English tongue: it standardises many phrases and expressions and, in a manner of speaking, acts as a channel for the wide river of the language. It encourages people to learn to read too. Salesbury, Davies and Morgan save the Welsh language, giving it both spiritual and cultural meaning at precisely the time that the English government is considering eradicating it altogether.

The same cannot be said of other Celtic regions. In Ireland and the independent kingdom of Scotland, an exchangeable Gaelic is spoken by the majority. Consequently a Scots Gaelic Prayer Book is published in Edinburgh in 1567 and a Gaelic translation of the New Testament appears in Dublin in 1602. The Cornish language is still holding on – but only just. Shortly before the start of the reign Andrew Boorde comments that ‘In Cornwall is two speeches; the one is naughty English and the other Cornish speech. And there be many men and women the which cannot speak one word of English, but all Cornish.’
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The Cornish rebels of 1549, protesting against the introduction of the new English Prayer Book, declare, ‘We the Cornishmen (whereof certain of us understand no
English) utterly refuse this new English.’
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But it seems the language collapses like the Prayer Book Rebellion. No Cornish translations of the Bible and the Prayer Book appear; in fact, nothing at all is published in Cornish and the language quickly withers away. In addition, Cornish gentlemen and scholars are keen to demonstrate their sophistication by distancing themselves from spoken Cornish. By the end of the reign you will have to travel westwards of Truro to hear it spoken regularly.
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Even there the language is fast dying, as Carew reports:

English speech doth still encroach upon it, and hath driven the same into the uttermost skirts of the shire. Most of the inhabitants can [speak] no word of Cornish but very few are ignorant of English: and yet some so affect their own as to a stranger they will not speak it; for, if meeting them by chance, you inquire the way or any such matter, your answer shall be
mees navidua cowzs sawzneck
(I can speak no Saxonage).
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To a traveller, this is not very helpful. You might want to respond in like manner, with a suitable riposte in Cornish: perhaps a sarcastic
da durdalathawhy
(well, I thank you) or the pointed
molla tuenda laaz
(ten thousand mischiefs in thy guts).
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These phrases appear alongside the above passage in Carew’s
Survey of Cornwall
, where he also points out the closeness of the Cornish for ‘sister’ (
whoore
) and for prostitute (
whorra
). One wonders if his dislike of the Cornish language might be rooted in some embarrassing confusion between those two words.

The other languages still spoken in the realm, Latin and French, have fairly specific uses nowadays. Elizabethan courts still record everything in Latin, and some parish registers are kept in Latin too; so to some extent the language is still used throughout the country. Boys learn Latin at grammar school; you may recall Claudius Hollyband’s private school, where Latin is taught in the morning and French in the afternoon. However, it is unusual to find anyone speaking Latin outside the rarefied circles of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court in London, some senior members of the clergy and the odd occasion, such as conversations with foreign ambassadors or addresses to the queen. While it will stand you in good stead if you can speak Latin, as most well-educated people will understand you, it will not be a hindrance if you can’t.

Many aristocrats and members of the gentry still use French in daily discourse. Hollyband himself publishes popular tuition books in French
and Italian, and even one in four languages: Italian, French, Latin and English.
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Interestingly, many educated Englishmen feel obliged to learn one of these tongues. In London and the other southern towns and cities there are a great many French and Italian immigrants, and for many the easiest way to earn a living in England is to teach their native tongue. When the Italian humanist Giordano Bruno visits England in 1584 he does not bother to learn more than a handful of words in English. As he puts it (writing of himself in the third person): ‘All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilised if they knew no other tongue than their own.’
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Therefore, if you can’t understand a regional accent on your journey, you could take a leaf out of Bruno’s book and try to make use of your French or Italian.

Writing

When it comes to written communication you need to bear in mind that there are several forms of script commonly used. Least common, but by no means unimportant, are the scripts of government. Letters patent, charters and other formal documents of public record are written in ‘court hand’, a descendant of the medieval scripts used within Chancery. These documents will look ‘gothic’ to you: the script seems like an array of up-and-down lines, or minims, which all look the same. Yet as long as you understand the language in which the document is written (mostly Latin, but sometimes English) these scripts are easy to read, for they are so carefully set down. The same cannot be said for most people’s handwriting. If you care to glance over the shoulder of an Elizabethan clerk as he notes down the proceedings of a quarter-session hearing, you will be baffled. You will see that he is hastily writing a series of notes in abbreviated Latin, as required by law, even though he probably does not speak the language. The result is frequently an almost unintelligible mess of flourishes that look as if someone has squashed a thousand small, brown-legged spiders between the pages of the book.

It is not just the haste which makes a court clerk’s writing so different from ‘court hand’; the entire script is different. Like most people, clerks write in ‘secretary hand’ and the shapes of the letters are constantly
changing. Old men born in the last decade of the fifteenth century still write in the 1550s with a long ‘r’ that reaches well below the line, and an ‘h’ that looks more like an old-fashioned ‘z’, again reaching below the line. They still use the old letter ‘thorn’, pronounced ‘th’ and originally written ‘Þ’ but now more regularly appearing like a ‘y’ (hence the frequent appearance of ‘ye’ for ‘the’). Younger men educated in the 1530s or later will use a short ‘r’. Most people write ‘v’ and ‘u’ interchangeably, although ‘v’ is normally used at the start and ‘u’ in the middle of the word, e.g. ‘vsually’ (usually). About half of the letters of the secretary-hand alphabet have no relation to the form of lettering with which you are familiar. Many symbols are squiggles above and below the line, which have been taken from abbreviated medieval Latin script. Two forms of the letter ‘p’, for example, stand for ‘per’ (or ‘par’) and ‘pro’; a line above a letter means an ‘m’ has been omitted; a long curling flourish below the line at the end of a word represents a terminal ‘s’.

Curiously, although it is in universal use in the sixteenth century, secretary hand is never printed. Printed books make use of italic and black-letter type. The former is not all slanting one way, but is called ‘italic’ because it is developed in Italy. It is the script with which you are most familiar – because all modern typefaces descend from it – and is used for most general-interest books by the end of the reign. Black-letter is a printed version of the court hand of official documents. It is normally used for bibles, formal texts and some history and literary books. Horn books, used to teach people to read, are also printed in black-letter script. For this reason, the italic that you are used to will not be the easiest type for everyone to read. Some people who learnt with a horn book never learn to read any of the other forms of writing. This is why you have some books printed in both italic and formal ‘black-letter’ – such as Isabella Whitney’s poetical works: the titles pages and dedications are in the more educated italic and the actual poems are in black-letter type, to make them easier for people with a limited education, especially women, to read.

As for numbers, Arabic figures are increasingly used for dates, which can be very long in Roman numerals – it is far easier to engrave ‘1588’ on a coin die or a date stone than ‘MDLXXXVIII’ – but accounting is still frequently done in Roman numerals. Some well-educated people simply can’t ‘think’ in Arabic numbers: Sir William Cecil translates all the figures supplied to him in Arabic back into Roman numerals when forming government policy.
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When you want to write something, first you need to decide what you are going to write on. This depends on how long the document is supposed to last. A charter or official document, a deed to some land or a court roll, will always be written on good-quality vellum or parchment made from sheep skins. After treatment that removes all the hair, these need to be degreased by adding ‘pounce’ (powdered pumice or cuttlefish bone) into the skin, smoothed with an animal’s tooth, and ‘sized’ by coating with gelatine from the hooves of horses. If what you intend to write is more ephemeral, like a letter that can be discarded after being read once, or a series of accounts that you would not expect to last more than a year, you will write on paper. This can be cheap to purchase, although low-quality paper does not bear writing on both sides, as the ink is absorbed and shows through; it is made for pedlars to wrap their goods in and for toilet paper. High-quality products, such as ‘paper imperial’, is used to print lavish books, and some prefer its smooth qualities for handwriting too. Shopping lists or school exercises will not normally be written on paper, but on ‘tables’: these are wax-coated leaves of ivory, boxwood and cypress which can be written on with a metal point, then scraped and reused.
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Metal pens are called ‘pontayles’. They are made of iron, silver or brass and have one great virtue: they last a long time. However, they are also scratchy, so most people use a quill. Elizabeth prefers to use swan feathers; the most popular alternatives are a goose quill and a reed. You’ll need to keep your penknife handy to trim it every so often, a spare piece of paper to test each newly cut nib, and probably a good few spare quills if you intend writing a book. You will also need an inkhorn. In towns you will be able to buy ready-made ink from an apothecary or a scrivener’s shop, but most people in the country make their own. To do this you will need a quart of wine, five ounces of oak galls, three ounces of copperas and two ounces of gum arabic. To make it last, add bay salt. To make it really black, add ground lampblack. If the ink is too thick, water it down with vinegar.
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