might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the
Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of
its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and
character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it.
Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race,
from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour,
and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced
presently), descend to us from them--'sovereign,' 'sceptre,' 'throne,'
'realm,' 'royalty,' 'homage,' 'prince,' 'duke,' 'count,' ('earl' indeed
is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his 'countess' from the Norman),
'chancellor,' 'treasurer,' 'palace,' 'castle,' 'dome,' and a multitude
more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of 'king' would
make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the
chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as
overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line
of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in
fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due
time to assert itself anew.
And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all
articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry,
with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of
the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great
features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the
divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and
winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest
childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social
relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother,
sister,--these are of native growth and un-borrowed. 'Palace' and
'castle' may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe
far dearer names, the 'house,' the 'roof,' the 'home,' the 'hearth.'
His 'board' too, and often probably it was no more, has a more
hospitable sound than the 'table' of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the
soil; he is the 'boor,' the 'hind,' the 'churl'; or if his Norman
master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and
more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain.' The instruments
used in cultivating the earth, the 'plough,' the 'share,' the 'rake,'
the 'scythe,' the 'harrow,' the 'wain,' the 'sickle,' the 'spade,' the
'sheaf,' the 'barn,' are expressed in his language; so too the main
products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, grass, flax, hay,
straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will
remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester
in _Ivanhoe_, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his _Grammar_,
p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all
animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and
prepared for food become Norman--a fact, he would intimate, not very
wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and
feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his
Norman lord. Thus 'ox,' 'steer,' 'cow,' are Saxon, but 'beef' Norman;
'calf' is Saxon, but 'veal' Norman; 'sheep' is Saxon, but 'mutton'
Norman: so it is severally with 'swine' and 'pork,' 'deer' and
'venison,' 'fowl' and 'pullet.' 'Bacon,' the only flesh which perhaps
ever came within the hind's reach, is the single exception. Putting all
this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been
indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are
manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for
a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of
English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their
claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after
language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic
records, and the present social condition of England, consent in
bearing witness.
Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically
attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the
chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that
from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them-
'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,'
'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,'
'zero '?--for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they
reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit
cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on
the matter, we might conclude, and we know that we should rightly
conclude, that the origins of the monastic system are to be sought in
the Greek and not in the Latin branch of the Church, seeing that with
hardly an exception the words expressing the constituent elements of
the system, as 'anchorite,' 'archimandrite,' 'ascetic,' 'cenobite,'
'hermit,' 'monastery,' 'monk,' are Greek and not Latin.
But the study of words will throw rays of light upon a past infinitely
more remote than any which I have suggested here, will reveal to us
secrets of the past, which else must have been lost to us for ever.
Thus it must be a question of profound interest for as many as count
the study of man to be far above every other study, to ascertain what
point of culture that Indo-European race of which we come, the _stirps
generosa et historica_ of the world, as Coleridge has called it, had
attained, while it was dwelling still as one family in its common home.
No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us
from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other
voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell
us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate
some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that
they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the
object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the
Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one
undivided family together. Now they have such common words for the
chief domestic animals--for ox, for sheep, for horse, for dog, for
goose, and for many more. From this we have a right to gather that
before the migrations began, they had overlived and outgrown the
fishing and hunting stages of existence, and entered on the pastoral.
They have _not_ all the same words for the main products of the earth,
as for corn, wheat, barley, wine; it is tolerably evident therefore
that they had not entered on the agricultural stage. So too from the
absence of names in common for the principal metals, we have a right to
argue that they had not arrived at a knowledge of the working of these.
On the other hand, identical names for dress, for house, for door, for
garden, for numbers as far as a hundred, for the primary relations of
the family, as father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, for the
Godhead, testify that the common stock, intellectual and moral, was not
small which they severally took with them when they went their way,
each to set up for itself and work out its own destinies in its own
appointed region of the earth. [Footnote: See Brugmann, _Grundriss der
vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen_ (1886), Section
2.] This common stock may, indeed, have been much larger than these
investigations declare; for a word, once common to all these languages,
may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all.
Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote:
Ozanam (_Les Germains avant le Christianisme_, p. 155): Dans le
vocabulaire d'une langue on a tout le spectacle d'une civilisation. On
y voit ce qu'un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de
Dieu, de l'âme, du devoir, sont assez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir
que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses institutions par
le nombre et la propriété des termes qu'elles veulent pour leur
service; la liturgie a ses paroles sacramentelles, la procédure a ses
formules. Enfin, si ce peuple a étudié la nature, il faut voir à quel
point il en a pénétré les secrets, par quelle variété d'expressions,
par quels sons flatteurs ou énergiques, il a cherché à décrire les
divers aspects du ciel et de la terre, à faire, pour ainsi dire,
l'inventaire des richesses temporelles dont il dispose.]
This is one way in which words, by their presence or their absence, may
teach us history which else we now can never know. I pass to other ways.
There are vast harvests of historic lore garnered often in single
words; important facts which they at once proclaim and preserve; these
too such as sometimes have survived nowhere else but in them. How much
history lies in the word 'church.' I see no sufficient reason to
dissent from those who derive it from the Greek [Greek: kyriakae],
'that which pertains to the Lord,' or 'the house which is the Lord's.'
It is true that a difficulty meets us at the threshold here. How
explain the presence of a Greek word in the vocabulary of our Teutonic
forefathers? for that _we_ do not derive it immediately from the Greek,
is certain. What contact, direct or indirect, between the languages
will account for this? The explanation is curious. While Angles, Saxons,
and other tribes of the Teutonic stock were almost universally
converted through contact with the Latin Church in the western
provinces of the Roman Empire, or by its missionaries, some Goths on
the Lower Danube had been brought at an earlier date to the knowledge
of Christ by Greek missionaries from Constantinople; and this [Greek:
kyriakae] or 'church,' did, with certain other words, pass over from
the Greek to the Gothic tongue; these Goths, the first converted and
the first therefore with a Christian vocabulary, lending the word in
their turn to the other German tribes, to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers
among the rest; and by this circuit it has come round from
Constantinople to us. [Footnote: The passage most illustrative of the
parentage of the word is from Walafrid Strabo (about A.D. 840): Ab
ipsis autem Graecis Kyrch à Kyrios, et alia multa accepimus. Sicut
domus Dei Basilica, i.e. Regia à Rege, sic etiam Kyrica, i.e. Dominica
à Domino, nuncupatur. Si autem quaeritur, quâ occasione ad nos vestigia
haec graecitatis advenerint, dicendum praecipuè à Gothis, qui et Getae,
cùm eo tempore, quo ad fidem Christi perducti sunt, in Graecorum
provinciis commorantes, nostrum, i.e. theotiscum sermonem habuerint. Cf.
Rudolf von Raumer, _Einwirkung des Christenthums auf die
Althochdeutsche Sprache_, p. 288; Niedner, _Kirch. Geschichte_, p. 2.
[It may, however, be as well to remark that no trace of the Greek
[Greek: kyriakae] occurs in the literary remains of the Gothic language
which have come down to us; the Gothic Christians borrowed [Greek:
ekklaesia], as the Latin and Celtic Christians did.]]
Or again, interrogate 'pagan' and 'paganism,' and you will find
important history in them. You are aware that 'pagani,' derived from
'pagus,' a village, had at first no religious significance, but
designated the dwellers in hamlets and villages as distinguished from
the inhabitants of towns and cities. It was, indeed, often applied to
_all_ civilians as contradistinguished from the military caste; and
this fact may have had a certain influence, when the idea of the
faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of
men. But it was mainly in the following way that it grew to be a name
for those alien from the faith of Christ. The Church fixed itself first
in the seats and centres of intelligence, in the towns and cities of
the Roman Empire; in them its earliest triumphs were won; while, long
after these had accepted the truth, heathen superstitions and
idolatries lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages; so that
'pagans' or villagers, came to be applied to _all_ the remaining
votaries of the old and decayed superstitions, although not all, but
only most of them, were such. In an edict of the Emperor Valentinian,
of date A.D. 368, 'pagan' first assumes this secondary meaning.
'Heathen' has run a course curiously similar. When the Christian faith
first found its way into Germany, it was the wild dwellers on the
_heaths_ who were the slowest to accept it, the last probably whom it
reached. One hardly expects an etymology in _Piers Plowman_; but this
is there:
'_Hethene_ is to mene after _heth_,
And untiled erthe.'
B. 15, 451, Skeat's ed. (Clarendon Press).
Here, then, are two instructive notices--one, the historic fact that
the Church of Christ planted itself first in the haunts of learning and
intelligence; another, morally more significant, that it did not shun
discussion, feared not to encounter the wit and wisdom of this world,
or to expose its claims to the searching examination of educated men;
but, on the contrary, had its claims first recognized by them, and in
the great cities of the world won first a complete triumph over all
opposing powers. [Footnote: There is a good note on 'pagan' in Gibbon's
_Decline and Fall_, c. 21, at the end; and in Grimm's _Deutsche Mythol_.
p. 1198; and the history of the changes in the word's use is well
traced in another interest by Mill, _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 271.]
I quoted in my first lecture the saying of one who, magnifying the
advantage to be derived from such studies as ours, did not fear to
affirm that oftentimes more might be learned from the history of a word
than from the history of a campaign. Thus follow some Latin word,.
'imperator' for example; as Dean Merivale has followed it in his
_History of the Romans_, [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will
own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out
of number, such as 'barbarous,' 'benefice,' 'clerk,' 'common-sense,'
'romance,' 'sacrament,' 'sophist,' [Footnote: For a history of
'sophist' see Sir Alexander Grant's _Ethics of Aristotle_, 2nd ed. vol.
i. p. 106, sqq.] would prove the truth of the assertion. Let us take
'sacrament'; its history, while it carries us far, will yet carry us by
ways full of instruction; and these not the less instructive, while we
restrict our inquiries to the external history of the word. We find
ourselves first among the forms of Roman law. The 'sacramentum' appears
there as the deposit or pledge, which in certain suits plaintiff and
defendant were alike bound to make, and whereby they engaged themselves
to one another; the loser of the suit forfeiting his pledge to sacred
temple uses, from which fact the name 'sacramentum,' or thing
consecrated, was first derived. The word, as next employed, plants us
amidst the military affairs of Rome, designating the military oath by
which the Roman soldiers mutually engaged themselves at the first
enlisting never to desert their standards, or turn their backs upon the
enemy, or abandon their general,--this employment teaching us the
sacredness which the Romans attached to their military engagements, and
going far to account for their victories. The word was then transferred
from this military oath to any solemn oath whatsoever. These three
stages 'sacramentum' had already passed through, before the Church
claimed it for her own, or indeed herself existed at all. Her early
writers, out of a sense of the sacredness and solemnity of the oath,
transferred this name to almost any act of special solemnity or
sanctity, above all to such mysteries as intended more than met eye or
ear. For them the Incarnation was a 'sacrament,' the lifting up of the
brazen serpent was a 'sacrament,' the giving of the manna, and many
things more. It is well to be acquainted with this phase of the word's
history, depriving as it does of all convincing power those passages
quoted by Roman Catholic controversialists from early church-writers in
proof of their seven sacraments. It is quite true that these may have
called marriage a 'sacrament' and confirmation a 'sacrament,' and we
may reach the Roman seven without difficulty; but then they called many
things more, which even the theologians of Rome do not include in the
'sacraments' properly so called, by the same name; and this evidence,
proving too much, in fact proves nothing at all. One other stage in the
word's history remains; its limitation, namely, to the two
'sacraments,' properly so called, of the Christian Church. A
reminiscence of the employment of 'sacrament,' an employment which
still survived, to signify the plighted troth of the Roman soldier to
his captain and commander, was that which had most to do with the
transfer of the word to Baptism; wherein we, with more than one
allusion to this oath of theirs, pledge ourselves to fight manfully
under Christ's banner, and to continue his faithful soldiers and
servants to our life's end; while the _mysterious_ character of the
Holy Eucharist was mainly that which earned for it this name.
We have already found history imbedded in the word 'frank'; but I must
bring forward the Franks again, to account for the fact with which we
are all familiar, that in the East not Frenchmen alone, but _all_
Europeans, are so called. Why, it may be asked, should this be? This
wide use of 'Frank' dates from the Crusades; Michaud, the chief French
historian of these, finding evidence here that his countrymen took a
decided lead, as their gallantry well fitted them to do, in these
romantic enterprises of the Middle Ages; impressed themselves so
strongly on the imagination of the East as _the_ crusading nation of
Europe, that their name was extended to all the warriors of Christendom.
He is not here snatching for them more than the honour which is justly
theirs. A very large proportion of the noblest Crusaders, from Godfrey
of Bouillon to St. Lewis, as of others who did most to bring these
enterprises about, as Pope Urban II., as St. Bernard, were French, and
thus gave, in a way sufficiently easy to explain, an appellation to all.
[Footnote: See Fuller, _Holy War_, b. i. c. 13.]
To the Crusades also, and to the intense hatred which they roused
throughout Christendom against the Mahomedan infidels, we owe
'miscreant,' as designating one to whom the vilest principles and
practices are ascribed. A 'miscreant,' at the first, meant simply a
misbeliever. The name would have been applied as freely, and with as
little sense of injustice, to the royal-hearted Saladin as to the
vilest wretch that fought in his armies. By degrees, however, those who
employed it tinged it more and more with their feeling and passion,
more and more lost sight of its primary use, until they used it of any
whom they regarded with feelings of abhorrence, such as those which
they entertained for an infidel; just as 'Samaritan' was employed by
the Jews simply as a term of reproach, and with no thought whether he
on whom it was fastened was in fact one of that detested race or not;
where indeed they were quite sure that he was not (John viii. 48).
'Assassin' also, an Arabic word whose story you will find no difficulty
in obtaining,--you may read it in Gibbon, [Footnote: Decline and Fall, c.
64.]--connects itself with a romantic chapter in the history of the
Crusades.
Various explanations of 'cardinal' have been proposed, which should
account for the appropriation of this name to the parochial clergy of
the city of Rome with the subordinate bishops of that diocese. This
appropriation is an outgrowth, and a standing testimony, of the
measureless assumptions of the Roman See. One of the favourite
comparisons by which that See was wont to set out its relation of
superiority to all other Churches of Christendom was this; it was the
hinge, or 'cardo,' on which all the rest of the Church, as the door, at
once depended and turned. It followed presently upon this that the
clergy of Rome were 'cardinales,' as nearest to, and most closely
connected with, him who was thus the hinge, or 'cardo,' of all.
[Footnote: Thus a letter professing to be of Pope Anacletus the First
in the first century, but really belonging to the ninth: Apostolica
Sedes _cardo_ et caput omnium Ecclesiarum a Domino est constituta; et
sicut _cardine_ ostium regitur, sic hujus S. Sedis auctoritate omnes
Ecclesiae reguntur. And we have 'cardinal' put in relation with this
'cardo' in a genuine letter of Pope Leo IX.: Clerici summae Sedis
_Cardinales_ dicuntur, _cardini_ utique illi quo cetera moventur,
vicinius adhaerentes.]
'Legend' is a word with an instructive history. We all have some notion
of what at this day a 'legend' means. It is a tale which is _not_ true,
which, however historic in form, is not historic in fact, claims no
serious belief for itself. It was quite otherwise once. By this name of
'legends' the annual commemorations of the faith and patience of God's
saints in persecution and death were originally called; these legends
in this title which they bore proclaiming that they were worthy to be
read, and from this worthiness deriving their name. At a later day, as
corruptions spread through the Church, these 'legends' grew, in
Hooker's words, 'to be nothing else but heaps of frivolous and
scandalous vanities,' having been 'even with disdain thrown out, the
very nests which bred them abhorring them.' How steeped in falsehood,
and to what an extent, according to Luther's indignant turn of the word,
the 'legends' (legende) must have become 'lyings' (lügende), we can
best guess, when we measure the moral forces which must have been at
work, before that which was accepted at the first as 'worthy to be
read,' should have been felt by this very name to announce itself as
most unworthy, as belonging at best to the region of fable, if not to
that of actual untruth.