Popular Speech

Language most shewes a man: speake that I may see thee.
Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (1641), in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (11 vols., Oxford, 1925-52), viii. 625.

Q: What makes languages change so often, so that scarce any nation understands what their ancestors spoke or writ 2 or 300 years ago?

A: The same that makes the fashion of cloaths alter. When the vulgar are got into the fashion, the gentry invent somthing new to diversifie and distinguish themselves from them.
Cumbria Record Office, D Lons/W1/14, 135 (Sir John Lowther's Memorandum Book, 1677-89).

The starting point for a discussion of the oral culture of any society must be the very language itself. The spoken word, in particular, provides a more immediate and sensitive insight into the mental world of a people than perhaps all other forms of expression. Language is a product of the environment in which it evolves, a reflection of its social constructs, an articulation of its beliefs and values. It is also a powerful determinant of that environment, helping to structure its individual relationships and give vent to its group identities.

In early modern England there was far greater linguistic diversity than today. One of the most striking aspects of life in 'the world we have have lost', though one of the least recognized by social historians, is the rich and variegated nature of popular speech. The varieties of English were so copious that it is scarcely possible to speak of a national language or native tongue. There was instead a multiplicity of different dialects, based upon geographical, occupational, and social allegiances, which divided up the country into a complex configuration of overlapping 'speech communities'. They could be markedly different in vocabulary, grammar, and phonology, each one expressing and encompassing quite distinct cultural contexts, the variety of the one reflecting the variety of the other. Commentators on the language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fond of quoting the classical dictum that 'speech is the picture of the mind'. As such, the spoken word, in so far as it can be retrieved from written sources, promises to reveal much about the normative values and basic assumptions of contemporaries. For students of popular culture, the dialects of the period offer a point of entry into the frame of reference of that majority of people whose words are usually hardest to recover. In some of their now opaque terms and obscure phrases, they suggest alien world views, ways of perceiving and behaving now lost, the ideas and practices they conveyed as redundant as the means by which they were then expressed. Dialect speech was, as E. P. Thompson once remarked, 'studded with words which point not only towards forgotten tools, measures, things, but also towards forgotten modes of thought and habits of work'.

For those concerned with the relationship between oral and literate forms of culture, the linguistic change of this period affords equally revealing insights. Thanks to the influence of print culture and the cross-fertilization in European intellectual life during the Renaissance, English was enormously enriched and expanded by the infusion of words and phrases from other languages. There are few better examples of the stimulation and invigoration of oral communication by written forms than the transformation of the vernacular vocabulary at this time. In parallel with this process, the early modern period also witnessed the consolidation of something like a standard or authorized version of the mother tongue. This had the effect of throwing into relief the idiom of the majority who remained less affected by the rapidly changing influences which informed the 'best speech'. What came to be known by the later sixteenth century as 'dialects', or alternative and subordinate strains of the language, were relatively untouched by the rules and conventions shaping the literary and courtly variant. Instead, dialects continued to express and reflect a popular culture in which literate habits of mind and national processes of incorporation had scarcely undermined oral traditions or subsumed local identities.

The dominance of a single variety of spoken English also had significant implications for social relations more broadly. For 'received speech' became not only the medium of the learned elite but also of the social elite. In this period, to a much greater extent than ever before, language came to underpin social hierarchies, to provide a litmus of rank and degree, and a vehicle for status differentiation. In this context as in others, the unevenness of cultural change was a function of the inequalities of wealth and power within society. The way in which people spoke was not merely determined by their place in the order of things, but it came to ratify and confirm it in new and subtly pervasive ways. On the one hand, vowel sounds and vocabulary might facilitate a common identity and interest among certain individuals and groups; on the other hand, they might serve as an agent of exclusion and social differentiation. 'Language', it has justly been said, 'is an instrument of both communication and excommunication'.

The King's English

The rise of a 'standard' form of written English has been much discussed by historians of the language. It appears that in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the variety of Middle English then commonly used in London began to gain ascendancy over the other forms. In 1417 it was this strain of the vernacular which replaced Latin and French as the usual medium of government business and by 1430 a clearly identifiable 'chancery standard' had emerged. Crucially, this was the form of English adopted by Caxton for the printing press introduced to London in 1476. Meanwhile, the fragmentary evidence suggests that a standard spoken English can be traced back at least as early. At the end of the fourteenth century Chaucer was imitating some unspecified northern dialect to comic effect in The Reeve's Tale, while the affectation of a southern dialect by the shepherd Mak in one of the Wakefield mystery plays, indicates that this form may already have been regarded as superior.

It is likely, therefore, that the idea of 'the King's English' to denote a single standard, authorized by the court in London, was applied to both the written and the spoken language in the late Middle Ages. The phrase itself does not appear to have been used until the mid-sixteenth century, however. 'These fine English clerkes will say, they speake in their mother tongue, if a man should charge them for counterfeiting the kings English,' wrote Thomas Wilson in 1553. 'Still he must be running on the letter', commented Thomas Nashe in Elizabeth's reign, 'and abusing the queenes English without pittie or mercie'. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Quickly accuses her master, the French physician Doctor Caius, of 'abusing of God's patience and the king's English'.

At the same time it became common for writers on the state of the language to uphold the English of the court as the model for all writers and speakers to follow. There were those, John Hart commented, of the 'farre west, or north countryes, which vse differing English termes from those of the court, and London, where the flower of the English tongue is vsed'. Wilson contrasted 'court talke' with 'countrey speech', the one 'learned' the other 'rude'. 'Wee haue court and wee haue countrey English, wee haue northerne and southerne, grosse and ordinarie', agreed Richard Carew in the 1590s.

By this time, and probably long before, there was an apparent homogeneity in the language of the courtly and learned elite, a 'usual speech' which passed for a standard English. 'Among people of learned and civil upringing, there is one ubiquitous speech and pronuncing, and meaning', confirmed Alexander Gil, the Highmaster of St Paul's school in the reign of James I. The idea of a 'received English' in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and pronuciation was already a commonplace in the mid-sixteenth century when Thomas Wilson advised of the necessity to 'speake as is commonly receiued'. It was essential for public speakers, in particular, Robert Cawdrey later affirmed 'to speake so as is commonly receiued . . . vsing their speech as most men doe'.

There always remained disagreement, however, as to what exactly constituted received English and controversy was fuelled by the fact the language was subject to considerable change over the course of the early modern period. In 1490 Caxton had commented on the way in which 'our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne', in the Weald of Kent seventy years before. Thereafter, the pace of change may have been even quicker. In terms of vocabulary the English language was enormously expanded, particularly in the period 1570-1630, and over 30,000 new words were either coined or borrowed from Latin and modern European languages during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pronunciation also developed significantly at the same time, undergoing a 'great vowel shift', or the shortening of most of the long vowel sounds implied by late medieval script. Thus by the end of the sixteenth century William Camden could observe how 'our sparke-full youth laugh at their great grandfathers English, who had more care to do wel, than to speake minion-like, and left more glory to vs by their exploiting of great acts, than we shall do by our forging a-new words, and vncouth phrases'.

In due course, the spoken and written language of Caroline England differed in many respects from that of Camden's day. In 1633 Charles Butler observed that 'wee have generally, or in the more civil parts (as the universities and citties) forsaken the old pronunciation', by which he meant that evidenced by the spellings in The Book of Homilies printed in 1562.

Vowel sounds had been altered since that time, he believed, and accordingly 'wee conform our writing to the nue sound', although not in the north of England. A generation later, John Dryden was among those to analyse the way in which the language of Restoration England differed so markedly from that of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson. Part of the reason, as a chorus of commentators which included John Evelyn lamented, was the way in which religious zealots and mechanic preachers of the Civil War years had corrupted the mother tongue with cant jargon and provincial pronunciation. With predictable circularity, Jonathan Swift would later sum up the view of the early eighteenth century when he condemned the 'licentiousness which entered with the Restoration, and from infecting our religion and morals fell to corrupt our language'.

It was in an effort to keep pace with this linguistic change that the first English dictionaries began to appear in the seventeenth century. Robert Cawdrey published his Table Alphabeticall in 1604 in order to help interpret the many difficult and uncertain new words as well as to demonstrate their true orthography. He was followed in this project by John Bullokar, Henry Cockeram, Thomas Blount, Edward Phillips, and Elisha Coles. Even many London tradesmen 'have new dialects' full of imported terms, noted Blount in the 1650s. Not until John Kersey's New English Dictionary of 1702 was there an attempt made to define not just 'hard words' but the full range of vocabulary in the mother tongue.

As the dictionaries explained 'hard words', a number of works appeared suggesting the way in which they might best be written and articulated. In the mid-sixteenth century Thomas Smith, John Hart, and William Bullokar were among the first to offer proposals for the reform of orthography, not only in an attempt to achieve a more phonetic written language, but also because of the effect which it was thought to have on speech. In 1586 George Whetstone anticipated a popular eighteenth-century genre when he published one of the first pronouncing manuals, and in the early seventeenth century Robert Robinson continued the attempt to achieve greater conformity between the spelling and sounding of words in the The Art of Pronunciation (1617), considered to be the first scientific treatise on phonetics in English. In 1633, Charles Butler could claim that considerable progress had already been made in this respect since the beginning of Elizabeth's reign.

All of these proposals for reform of vocabulary, pronunciation, and orthography preceded the most radical suggestion of all, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, for the creation of a universal language, derived logically from first principles and the 'primitive roots' of Hebrew.

Whatever the changes in 'received speech' which took place over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the ongoing debate about what constituted best practice, the creation of a more or less uniform standard had the effect of exposing a contrast between it and all other varieties. The term 'dialect' emerged in the last quarter of the sixteenth century to refer to those subordinate variations of the vernacular which did not conform to 'pure', 'common', or 'usual' English.

In parallel with these developments, it became one of the priorities of formal education to expunge non-standard vocabulary and usage from both writing and speech and to inculcate the 'received' pronunciation of the social and learned elite. The best schoolmasters appreciated, with Roger Ascham, that 'all languages' are 'gotten onelie by imitation' and that 'if yow be borne or brought vp in a rude contrie, ye shall not chose but speake rudelie'. Charles Hoole later advised that 'the sweet and natural pronunciation' of letters 'is gotten rather by imitation then precept, and therefore the teacher must be careful to give every letter its distinct and clear sound, that the childe may get it from his voice . . .'. The 'speech of the master authoriseth the childs imitation', confirmed Obadiah Walker in the 1670s.

Educationalists often lamented the way in which either the poor example set by the unlearned women who acted as nurses, or else the unconscious emulation of provincial custom at an impressionable age, formed habits of speech which were very difficult to break later on. As early as 1531 the courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot, advised the nurses of gentle children to 'speke none englisshe but that whiche is cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omittinge no lettre or sillable, as folisshe women often times do of a wantonnesse, wherby diuers noble men and gentilmennes chyldren (as I do at this daye knowe) haue attained corrupte and foule pronuntiation'. In the 1580s the master of Merchant Taylors' school in London, Richard Mulcaster, pitied the poor infants who 'moile themselues sore, with the maners and conditions of the nurse, with the sines or rudenes of her speeche'. William Kempe warned parents against employing 'barbarous nursses' and using 'any rude or barbarous speach' themselves in front of their children, since even a 'small diuersitie of speach . . . being admitted at the first, will hardly afterwards euer ware out of use'. So it was, lamented Thomas Tryon at the end of the seventeenth century, that 'many children have reason to condemn their governors and nurses, all the days of their life, for those manifold inconveniences they are expos'd to by an uncomfortable imperfection in the utterance of their speech'.

It was also such ill-bred people, 'poor women, or others, whose necessities compel them to undertake it, as a meer shelter from beggery', in Charles Hoole's words, who often presided over the parochial schools in which many children received their first, or sometimes their only, instruction. It was for this reason that Edmund Coote, the headmaster of Bury St Edmunds grammar school during Elizabeth's reign, urged 'all carefull ministers, that as they tender the good education of the youth of the parishes, they would sometimes repayre vnto the schools of such teachers as are not grammarians, to heare their children pronounce . . .'. Too often, however, the advice went unheeded or else the task proved simply too difficult and by the time a boy reached the grammar school the die had been cast. Try 'to preuent the griefe and wearisomnesse of teaching them to forget euill customes in pronouncing, which they tooke vp in their first ill learning', John Brinsley encouraged grammar school masters in 1612. 'And so euer in teaching to read, the teachers are to continue the like care of sweete and naturall pronuntiation.'

This method of inculcating correct pronunciation through listening to a child read aloud was a standard pedagogic technique. In the early sixteenth century a Mr Southwell was instructing Gregory Cromwell, the son of Henry VIII's first minister, 'dailie hering him to reade sumwhatt in thenglishe tongue, and advertisenge hime of the naturell and true kynde of pronuntiation thereof '. At the grammar schools this was a principal means of cultivating the best articulation both of the classical and vulgar tongues. The statutes of the King Edward VI school in Morpeth, Northumberland, for example, enjoined the master and ushers to 'take great care that all their scholars read and pronounce articulately with due sound and accent'. The first visitors of Merchant Taylors', London, in 1562 were compelled to upbraid the Cumberland-bred Richard Mulcaster and his ushers for negligence in this respect, 'that being northern men born, they had not taught the children to speak distinctly, or to pronounce their words as well as they ought'.

Just as reading aloud was believed to aid good pronunciation, it was generally agreed that only by speaking properly could youngsters learn to write 'true' English. In the 1560s John Hart asserted the commonplace that people wrote as they spoke, and spoke as they wrote. Thus 'if any one were minded at Newcastle uppon Tine, or Bodman in Cornewale, to write or print his minde there, who could iustly blame him for his orthographie, to serue hys neyghbours according to their mother speach . . .'. For those aspiring to the best pronunciation of London, however, the phonetic spelling of such local dialects had to be reformed. The aim of the English-Latin dictionary published in 1570 by Peter Levins, a product of Beverley grammar school, was 'that as wel children and ruder schoolers, as also the barbarous countries and ruder writers, may not a little . . . well and easily correct and amend, both their pen and speache'. Francis Clement advised Elizabethan petty school teachers that in order for a child to be able to 'write truely' it was necessary for him 'to know at the least rightly to pronounce his word'. To grammar school masters, Brinsley offered this example: 'aske the child how he spells a "strea" (as in many places the country manner is to pronounce it), he will spell "strea" or "stre": but ask him how hee spels a "strawe" and so pronounce it and he will spell "strawe"'.

A number of schoolmasters published spelling-books during the seventeenth century which were as much guides to correct forms of pronunciation as they were textbooks on orthography. Simon Daines urged his pupils in Suffolk during the reign of Charles I to make their writing and speaking conform and to 'follow the custome of the learned' in this, although he accepted that a logical method of doing so had yet to be devised. The schoolmaster at Salisbury and later of St Dunstan's-in- the-East, London, Thomas Hunt, produced another example of this genre in 1661, unusually in the form of a dialogue. He was followed by Elisha Coles whose Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674) was based on the premiss that 'all words must so be spell'd, as they are afterwards to be pronounc'd'. And just before the Glorious Revolution, Christopher Cooper, the headmaster of Bishop's Stortford grammar school, Hertfordshire, published an equally influential textbook in this vein: 'He that would write more exactly, must avoid barbarous pronunciation', he reaffirmed, considering that 'many words are not sounded after the best dialect.'

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, therefore, the expurgation of traces of local dialects in both writing and speaking was an imperative of formal education. The enormous expansion of grammar schools clearly had a significant effect in helping to homogenize the speech of the social elite and in organizing a self-conscious attempt to distance the language of the learned gentility from that of the lower orders. At Bury St Edmunds, Edmund Coote told his Elizabethan pupils to avoid 'imitating the barbarous speech of your countrie people' and held up many of their 'absurdities' to ridicule. Similar warnings were later offered by Alexander Gil at St Paul's, who disparaged by example the various regional dialects, including that of his native Lincolnshire and those of the West Country which he considered to be particularly 'barbarous'. Simon Daines was to concur in condemning 'the absurdities used among the vulgar in Somersetshire, and other remote places, as not worth the nominating, so much by way of reprehension'.

The evidence offered by the letters and private papers of the educated classes suggests that certainly by the seventeenth century this pedagogic effort had been reasonably successful in removing any grammar or vocabulary derived from local or regional speech. Standard written and spoken English was clearly normal among the social elite by this time and probably before. As for pronunciation, or accents, there seems to have been much more variety of practice.

Many products of provincialschools were never able to shed the cadences of home, no matter how they widened their horizons subsequently. Famously, it was said of Sir Walter Raleigh, a product of local schools around Budleigh Salterton in the mid-sixteenth century, that 'notwithstanding his great travells, conversation, learning, etc. yet he spake broade Devonshire to his dyeing day'. Thomas Hobbes began his academic career at the small village school in Westport, Wiltshire, and 'though he left his native countrey at 14, and lived so long, yet sometimes one might find a little touch of our pronunciation'. Sir Isaac Newton, who received his first formal education at Grantham grammar school, always betrayed his Lincolnshire origins in this respect. Even Samuel Johnson, that seminal figure in English lexicography, had to guard against lapsing into the pure Staffordshire which must still have been common at Lichfield grammar school early in the eighteenth century.

The problem which teachers faced is no more graphically illustrated than in the remarkable account given by Daniel Defoe of his tour through Somerset during Johnson's youth. He paid a visit on a relation who was the schoolmaster at Martock and, coming into the school, I observ'd one of the lowest scholars was reading his lesson to the usher, which lesson it seems was a chapter in the Bible, so I sat down by the master, till the boy had read out his chapter: I observ'd the boy read a little oddly in the tone of the country, which made me the more attentive, because on enquiry, I found that the words were the same, and the orthography the same as in all our Bibles. I observ'd also the boy read it out with eyes still on the book, and his head like a meer boy, moving from side to side, as the lines reach'd cross the columns of the book; his lesson was in the cant. 5. 3. of which the words are these, 'I have put off my coat, how shall I put it on, I have wash'd my feet, how shall I defile them?' The boy read thus, with his eyes, as I say full on the text. 'Chav a doffed my cooat, how shall I don't, Chav a wash'd my veet, how shall I moil 'em?' How the dexterous dunce could form his mouth to express so readily the words (which stood right printed in the book) in his country jargon, I could not but admire.

As this striking example of the simultaneous adaptation of orthodox vocabulary and orthography into dialect in the very act of reading a printed book reveals, the standardization of written English during the seventeenth century was by no means sufficient in itself to effect similar changes in the spoken language. The continued failure of much grammar school education to reform the accents of boys remained conspicuous throughout this period, therefore. An Englishman travelling in Scotland in 1689 commented on the 'misrepresentations in words' and the 'unhappy tone' in pronunciation 'which the gentry and nobles cannot overcome, tho' educated in our schools, or never so conversant with us'. At the same time, he admitted, 'our northern and remote English have the same imperfection'. This is one of the reasons why the socially self-conscious provincial gentry were beginning to abandon such institutions by Defoe's day in favour of the tutelage increasingly on offer elsewhere. In March 1714, for example, Henry Liddell of Ravensworth, County Durham, advised a friend against the grammar school in Newcastle as a suitable place for his son. 'For a polite education I dislike the place intirely', he opined, and the boy was subsequently transferred to Sedbergh school.

This inadequacy in the grammar schools is also evident in the traits of many of those pupils who went on to the universities. In 1540 John Palsgrave commented that certain students, 'partely bycause of the rude language vsed in their natyue countreyes, where they were borne and firste lerned . . . their grammer rules, and partely bycause that commyng streyght from thense, vnto some of [the] vniuersities, they haue not had occasions to be conuersaunte in suche places . . . as the pureste englysshe is spoken, they be not able to expresse theyr conceyte in theyr vulgar tonge . . .'. The enduring regional affiliations of many colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were probably due, in some measure, to the need to find a tutor familiar with a boy's manner of speech. This is certainly suggested in the novella Dobsons Drie Bobbes (1607), the fictional tale of George Dobson, a known resident of Elizabethan Durham. He was a country boy, who 'was so rustike like, that he could not cover his clownish and wayward manners with the habite of civility', and proceeded from the local grammar school to Christ's College, Cambridge, which then took six of its twelve fellows and twenty-three of its forty-seven scholars from the nine English counties north of the Trent. While at Cambridge, Dobson engaged in university debates with both a Welshman and a Kentishman whose regional origins were just as evident as his own.

Over in Oxford, meanwhile, the same situation prevailed. According to John Aubrey, the Exeter College men were conspicuous during debates in the mid-seventeenth century: 'when they allege, "Causae causae est causae causati", they pronounce it, "Caza caza est caza cazati", very un-gracefully'. By the same token, the Welshmen of Jesus College provided the butt of innumerable jokes throughout this period for their manner of speech, among other alleged foibles. Even fellows of colleges were not immune from comment in this respect. The unforgiving Anthony Wood suggested that Dr Robert Morison, the Professor of Botany, spoke better Latin than he did English, the latter 'being much spoyled by his Scottish tone'. It was presumably in order to avoid such censure that John North, a product of Bury St Edmund's grammar school and a future professor of Greek, would, as a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in the late 1660s, seek out in his spare moments 'the best penned English books and read them aloud; which he said he did to form and improve his English style and pronunciation'.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, therefore, something like a received English, in terms of vocabulary and grammar, although to a much lesser extent in terms of orthography and pronunciation, spread through the higher ranks of society. Although this 'usual' or 'common' form was constantly developing and changing over the course of the period, it provided, nevertheless, a shifting standard against which to judge all other 'dialects' as illegitimate and inferior. This process of linguistic incorporation cannot be divorced from the wider trends of political centralization and educational advance which are such prominent features of life in Tudor and Stuart England. The dominance of 'the King's English' is inseparable from the growth of the nation state, the development of national identity, and the fabrication of something like a common culture.