English: A Language Of Culture And Learning?
ENGLISH: A LANGUAGE OF CULTURE AND LEARNING?
It will be obvious that there were powerful vested interests within the Church that opposed the “Englishing” of the language of religion. Indeed, one of the most significant developments of the fourteenth century is the association that came into being between the deliberate decision to use English and opposition to the religious status quo. Opposition to translating the Bible into English rested on real fears that the English peasantry might be encouraged to rise against their masters. After all, had not the peasants of the south of England, angered by the imposition of additional taxes in 1381, captured London and beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury? The religious establishment spoke Latin and French; English was the language of its potential opponents.
Alongside such fears on the part of the religious establishment, however, was a more complex anxiety within English academia concerning the very nature of the English language itself. To its Latin-and French-speaking critics, English was a barbarous language, lacking any real grammatical structure, incapable of expressing the deep and nuanced truths of the Bible in particular, and the Christian faith in general. This complaint, which had been implicit in much fourteenth-century dismissal of English as a serious language of faith, became explicit in an important debate at Oxford in 1401. Richard Ullerston defended English against its critics valiantly, but ultimately in vain. The debate concluded that English was not an appropriate language for the translation of the Bible. It was but a small step from this literary judgment to the essentially political decision to ban the English language altogether from every aspect of English church life. This decision, taken in 1407 by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, had special relevance for the issue of biblical translation:
We therefore legislate and ordain that nobody shall from this day forth translate any text of Holy Scripture on his own authority into the English, or any other, language, whether in the form of a book, pamphlet or tract; and that any such book, pamphlet or tract, whether composed recently or in the time of John Wycliffe, or in the future, shall not be read in part or in whole, in public or in private.
English thus became the language of the religious underground. To write in English was tantamount to holding heretical views. Even as late as 1513, John Colet—then dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London—was suspended from his position for translating the Lord's Prayer into English.
Even within official church circles, the serious problems caused by the 1407 decision were acknowledged, even if only in private. Two years later, Arundel himself authorized the English translation of a small book of meditations on the gospels entitled A Mirror of the Life of Christ. The book was not, strictly speaking, a gospel translation, but a rather pious and mawkish work of fiction, which places predictably sentimental—but most emphatically not biblical!—words into the mouths of gospel characters. The New Testament records few words of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Mirror makes up for this deficiency by providing a rich feast of Marian sayings. It is possible that, precisely because the work was so obviously not a biblical translation but essentially a free work of fiction and speculation, that Arundel felt he could authorize it without contradicting himself.
Yet the growth of English as the national language could not be inhibited. Political and cultural factors made its ultimate triumph inevitable. Those who fought the rise of the national language began to find that they were powerless in the face of a major cultural trend. It proved impossible to stop the relentless advance of the tide of English nationalism, increasingly linked with the adoption of the English language. Those who were once apologetic and defensive about the vernacular now used it with pride. Speaking English was an affirmation of national identity. In 1527, John Rastell, one of Henry VIII's advisers, noted that “the universal people of this realm had great pleasure and gave themselves greatly to the reading of the vulgar English tongue.”
A widening gulf began to emerge between the increasingly confident native language of government, law, and business, and the archaic Latin of the Church. Even the clergy were affected by this development, and found themselves increasingly living in two different worlds—the sphere of everyday life, in which English was the language of choice, and the more rarefied world of the Church, in which Latin alone was used. Increasingly, the clergy found mastering Latin to be both tedious and pointless. Linguistically, the Church seemed to be cut off from the life of the English nation. It was an untenable position; the question was not whether but when the Church would abandon its resistance to the relentless Englishing of England.
As the confidence of the laity grew, so did the intensity and depth of their criticisms of the clergy. To add insult to injury, these criticisms went far beyond the traditional litanies of discontent—the clergy were overpaid, underemployed, and greedy—to include allegations of incompetence in the Latin language. As more and more laity mastered Latin, they became painfully aware of the shortcomings of the clergy's grasp of this learned language. The clerical refusal to allow the English people to read the Bible in their own language was now increasingly interpreted as a sign of fear on the part of an embattled Church.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the Church was the last bastion of Latin in an increasingly Anglophone culture. England's two universities—Oxford and Cambridge—remained wedded to Latin as the lingua franca of academic life. The university sector of Paris was widely known as the “Latin Quarter” precisely because Latin was the preferred—indeed, at times the only—language of scholarship and academic debate. An examination of the contents of the main Oxford library at the beginning of the seventeenth century suggests that, even at this late stage, only about one book in every hundred was in English, the remainder being virtually exclusively in classical languages. While English, as we have seen, had made massive inroads as the language of preference in national politics, legal matters, and economics, the academic world remained committed to the use of Latin.
In part, this rested on pure arrogance, and a desire to maintain a cordon sanitaire between the riches of classical literature and the masses. Perhaps more understandably, Latin was seen as the language of a pan-European academic culture, which allowed scholars from one country to discourse with their colleagues from abroad. Erasmus, who spoke no English, was able to spend time at both Oxford and Cambridge, using Latin as the medium of his conversations and lectures. The academic world was thus the last bastion of Latin in England, in that the Church of England ceased to use this language to any significant extent by the 1540s.
In this chapter, we have chronicled the relentless advance of English as a national language. In the sixteenth century, a further factor contributed to the growing prestige of the English language. The movement we now know as “the Reformation” surged into prominence on the Continent of Europe. One of its leading themes was that the Bible ought to be translated into the everyday languages of Europe, including English.
The scene was thus set for a powerful amalgamation of religion and nationalism, which made the production of an English Bible inevitable. Where once an English Bible was derided as crude and potentially heretical, it would now be seen as a symbol of national pride and international status.