Bilingualism and Betrayal in Chaucer's Summoner's Tale

Published in Speaking in the Medieval World, ed Jean Godsall-Myers (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 125-44 BILINGUALISM AND BETRAYAL IN CHAUCER'S “SUMMONER'S TALE” In 1936 J.R.R. Tolkien delivered his famous lecture to the British Academy on “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.” It changed the entire course of Beowulf criticism, and became one of the most frequently cited articles of all time. Two years previously, however, Tolkien had read an even longer paper to the Philological Society, on “Chaucer the Philologist,” which met a very different fate. Rarely cited at the time, it has since all but vanished from scholarly memory, and would not be remembered at all if it were not for the later fame of its author. In this paper Tolkien put forward the consciously anachronistic argument that in the “Reeve's Tale” Chaucer had been thinking and writing like a linguistic scholar of the 19th or 20th centuries. Part of the ongoing humor of the tale is the clash between Northern students and the Southern miller, and in order to make the clash more marked and more amusing for his predominantly Southern audience, Tolkien argued, Chaucer had identified the Northern dialect most obviously different from the developing Southern standard, noted the phonological and lexical features most evidently discrepant in it, and made a conscious decision to mark these as strongly as possible. Both the unexpectedness of Chaucer's decision and the thoroughness with which it was carried out could be seen from the tale's scribal history. In manuscript after manuscript, scribes who did not understand what Chaucer was doing had consistently modified the students' language back towards what they regarded as normal - something which, by a further irony, would later happen to Tolkien himself as modern printers “corrected” the language of non-standard speakers in Tolkien's own fiction back to what they in their turn regarded as “correct English.”[1] The contrast between the reception of the 1936 and 1934 papers perhaps indicates only the power of academic fashion. For all Tolkien's assaults on “the critics” in his 1936 paper, he was in fact attacking scholars of earlier and in some ways pre-critical generations: men like W.P. Ker and R.W. Chambers, with behind them the long German tradition of Beowulf scholarship of Müllenhoff, Sarrazin, Schücking etc. The time was ripe to challenge their belief in the poem as a stratified compilation of no great intrinsic merit, and to offer it instead as an “organic unity” and the product of a single authorial intention. Beowulf was, in short, rendered acceptable to the New Criticism then emerging, and Anglo-Saxonists followed Tolkien's lead with enthusiasm and relief. The case was entirely different with “Chaucer the Philologist.” Presenting Chaucer as a philologist was in effect to remove him from the discourse of New Criticism, to make it look as if he might sympathise with their professional rivals, and this was not welcome at all. What was wanted, and what has remained dominant in Chaucerian criticism ever since, was Chaucer the ironist, Chaucer the social commentator, Chaucer the bookworm, Chaucer the translator, Chaucer the littérateur, and so on. Nevertheless, and after seventy years, it may be possible to reflect that perhaps Tolkien was right. I would like in this article to extend his argument and suggest that, just as in the “Reeve's Tale” Chaucer played on his audience's awareness of dialect geography, so in the “Summoner's Tale” he exploited strong contemporary awareness of linguistic class markers. If Chaucer was in some sense a philologist, he was also an efficient and deliberate sociolinguist. To understand this, one has to note first that England in the later fourteenth century was still in some ways a multilingual society. By Chaucer's time it is probable that almost everyone born in England, with the exception of some of those on the Celtic marches of Wales and Cornwall, grew up with English as their main and native language. The upper reaches of society might however be virtual bilinguals in French, with strong correlation between fluency in that language and social rank. This situation had its root, of course, in the Norman Conquest of 1066, after which for perhaps a generation one might have landowners who spoke only French, and lower classes who spoke only English.[2] In his interesting book Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter Michael Richter notes that when William the Conqueror wished to converse with St Wulfstan of Worcester, the only Anglo-Saxon bishop to retain his see for any length of time, he had to do so through translators and the common medium of Latin; for William's efforts to learn English had failed, and Wulfstan had made no effort at all to learn French, being dismissed as a result as an idiota.[3] This situation of co-existing monoglots cannot have lasted long, but the sense of linguistic stratification was much more enduring. French outranked English. Latin, the international language of the Church, in some ways outranked even French. And on the Celtic marches English was allowed to outrank Welsh, and with many local adjustments Cornish, Irish and Scots Gaelic too. Richter notes again that the detailed records of the beatification commission for Thomas Cantilupe, held in Hereford near the Welsh border, show witnesses addressing the commissioners not in their native language, almost always English but occasionally Welsh, but in the highest-ranked language they could manage.[4] This situation has few readily accessible modern parallels. Europe contains many multilingual societies at present, but overall situations are not similar. In some countries, such as Belgium and Switzerland, there is more than one official language (French and Flemish, French, Italian and German), but the languages exist side by side: any suggestion of a ranking order by class would be firmly rejected. A closer parallel to 14th-century England might be North Italy, also known as the South Tirol, which is under Italian rule, but where the native language is a German dialect. People in this area, then, may well speak German dialect at home; learn Hochdeutsch as their main medium for access to newspapers and TV; and also learn Italian for official and administrative purposes, and as a formal language on public occasions. They may furthermore and quite consciously switch from one language to another to make a point, to establish dominance, or alternatively intimacy.[5] There is a further linguistic point to make, which is that while English remains a “Germanic” language in its core-vocabulary and basic syntax, it often does not seem so to modern speakers of other Germanic languages, who are struck immediately by the extent to which it is marked, or has even been taken over, by words borrowed from French or Latin. The Danish scholar N.F.S. Grundtvig, a linguistic purist, went so far as to describe modern English as Puddervælske, or perhaps “garble-French.”[6] Statistics vary depending on how one makes the count, but one could certainly say that a majority of words entered in a modern English dictionary are non-English and non-Germanic by origin.[7] The simple explanation of this is once again the Norman Conquest, which one will find, in variously qualified form, in any modern history of the language. There is indeed something almost formulaic in the way this is presented. In the most elementary format, a list of loan-words from French into English is presented, and it is noted that these borrowings were caused in part by the need “to supply deficiences in the English vocabulary,” especially in such areas as government and administration, the church, the law, military matters, “fashion, meals, and social life,” “art, learning, medicine.”[8] Lurking in such accounts, though carefully not quite expressed, is a belief in transfer from a higher to a lower standard of culture. Two problems generally noted, however, if to varying extents, are first, that there seems to have been very little borrowing in the hundred years immediately after the Norman Conquest. Our only ongoing work in English from this period, the Peterborough Chronicle, indeed gives us only a score or so of loan words, a couple of nicknames (“Martæl,” “Passeflambard”), a few ranks and occupations (“duc, emperice, cuntesse, clerc, canonie”), most of the rest rather ominous, such as “castel” and “prisun,” “wyrre” and “pais,” “rente” and “tresor,” “wiles” and “fals.” To the Peterborough Chroniclers, doing “iustise” meant hanging people. Loans which have happily not stayed in the language include “crucethur,” a kind of torture, and “tenserie,” a mode of extortion. A castle built by William Rufus is called “Maleuisin,” which the Chronicler glosses with a certain appropriateness as “yfel nehhebur,” evil neighbour. Verbs like “acordeden” and “dubbade” are taken over from the activities of great men, but the latter is used in the phrase “dubbade to ridere”: the Chronicler knows the word adouber, but has not yet borrowed chevalier, nor extended the meaning of Old English cniht, “boy,” to “knight.” David Burnley suggests that such words were used “because they seemed appropriate to the discourse” (1992: 449), but one could put it more crudely. Much of this vocabulary looks like the words inmates of a concentration camp might learn from the guards. Furthermore, once French words did start to enter the language in large numbers, many of them were clearly not there to supply deficiencies, but “replac[ed] English words that would have done for us just as well” (Pyles and Algeo, 1993: 136), “were synonymous with perfectly good words already long established in English” (Strang 1970: 251). Why, then, borrow them? In so many cases it cannot be a matter of a higher culture introducing objects and concepts the lower culture had no awareness of. Can we then guess at the reason for this massive shift in lexis, seen by several commentators (Strang 1970: 252) as a flood-tide reaching its peak in precisely Chaucer's lifetime? Here the “Summoner's Tale,” in my view, gives us skilled and contemporary observation. The “Summoner's Tale” is easily paraphrased. It is told by the Summoner in contempt of his professional adversary the Friar, and in reply to the “Friar's Tale” about a foolish and dishonest summoner. Its main character is a mendicant friar, who is going on his round in an area of East Yorkshire called Holderness.[9] He visits a Yorkshire churl called Thomas, who has given him money before, and talks to him and his wife. He tries to get Thomas to make a further donation, with extensive speeches praising his own order and reproving Thomas, but Thomas, who is sick in bed, becomes annoyed by his importunity. Eventually Thomas says he will give him something which he has kept hidden, but the friar must promise to divide it equally with the rest of his convent. The friar eagerly agrees, and gropes under the bedclothes for the gift, only to have Thomas break wind violently into his hand. The friar is chased away by Thomas's servants - though a churl, he is clearly well-off - and goes to complain to the local lord and his wife. The lord however begins to wonder how the friar can keep his promise to divide whatever he was given. This problem in ars metrica or “arse-metric” - the pun works better in modern English than modern American - is eventually solved by the lord's squire. However, the point under consideration here is simply the way the characters speak to each other. There are six speakers in the tale, and 42 speeches. The friar speaks twenty times, Thomas seven, his wife five, the lord six, his wife twice, the squire also twice. Total lines from the six speakers are, the friar 359, Thomas 27, his wife 18, the lord 42, his wife 7, the squire 39.[10] This count is skewed however by two especially long speeches by the friar, the first (lines 1854-1947) praising friars as the oldest and most venerable of religious professions, the second (1954-2093) turning into a sermon against the sin of Anger.[11] These speeches of course continue the exposé of the friar's character and the tale's other humorous themes, to which the best guide remains Fleming 1966. I do not suggest that the friar moves “out of character” in them. However, as they unfold the sense of dialogue is certainly lost; the friar is lecturing rather than talking, and Thomas responds only to what the friar says at the end of each speech. In what follows I have accordingly concentrated on the shorter speeches and the characters' linguistic interactions. My first point is so obvious that it is already marked typographically in modern editions such as the Riverside Chaucer. The friar has a habit of larding his speech with fragments of Latin or French, which the Riverside Chaucer italicises. When he has finished his sermon at the parish church: With “Qui cum patre...” forth his wey he wente. (1734) And when he arrives at Thomas's farmhouse, the first thing he says is: “Deus hic!” quod he, “O Thomas, freend, good day!” (1770) Some of this could be said to be inevitable. In the church the liturgical language is Latin, so that has to be used in services, and quite likely a blessing given in Latin would be felt to be more efficacious by all concerned. But the friar breaks into French here and there as well. Talking to Thomas, he says reprovingly: “O Thomas, je vous dy, Thomas, Thomas, This maketh the feend - this moste been amended.” (1832-3) A few lines later, ordering his dinner, he says to Thomas's wife: “Now, dame,” quod he, “now Je vous dy sanz doute, Have I nat of a capon but the livere...” (1838-9) The Riverside Chaucer is not absolutely consistent in this respect, however, or perhaps we should say that modern printing conventions cannot cope with the complexities of 14th-century language switching. The edition does not for instance italicise the lord's Latin interjection, “Benedicitee,” nor the friar's French reply to Thomas's wife, “Graunt mercy, dame,” nor the latter's interjection “by my fey,” though this seems to be a partial Anglicisation of French par ma fée. Possibly these were felt by the editors to be words which had established themselves in the language and so should not be counted as foreign any more: a difficult decision to make. But there is no doubt, at any rate, that the friar does use several phrases of French, for no evident reason. My second point is less evident. Medieval scholars frequently translate from Old and Middle English into modern English, but rarely reverse the process. If one starts to do this, though, it becomes evident that Thomas, in complete contrast to the friar, starts off by speaking a Middle English which is as close to Old English as one could possibly get at that date, almost without non-native elements at all. His first speech for instance runs as follows: “O deere maister... How han ye fare sith that March began? I saugh yow noght this fourtenight or more.” (1781-3) This contains two loan-words, from Latin, “maister” and “March,” but both are found in the Old English period. The native names for months disappeared early, while “master” was borrowed from Latin magister to OE mægestre again at an early stage. The latter could in any case be a word Thomas has learned from the friar himself; there is further play on the word later on, at lines 2184-8. If one translates the speech back into OE one can see how little change there has been. (The asterisk before this speech and following ones is to indicate that this is my reconstruction. I do not use runic letters, in order to avoid creating a merely typographic impression of change): *”O leofa mægestre... Hu bist thu gefaren siththan the Martius ongan? Ic ne seah the noght thas feowertyne night oththe mare.” The main difference is in the pronouns. By Chaucer's time the straightforward English habit of using “thou, thee” for 2nd person singular (OE þu, þe) and “ye, you” for 2nd person plural (OE ge, eow) had given way to a French-derived complication of deferential and familiar forms, see Strang 1970: 262-3. Thomas accordingly usually uses the polite “ye” to the friar, the friar frequently the familiar, or condescending “thou” in reply (a pattern with some interesting breaches, see further below). OE use of “to be” as an auxiliary with intransitive verbs rather than “to have” has also been weakened; and the adjective leofa has been replaced by “deere,” though this too is an OE word, if semantically shifted. Thomas's second speech makes the same point even more clearly. The friar responds to his greeting with thirteen lines (1784-96) containing by my count twenty loan-words from Latin or French (“laboured, specially, savacion, precious, orison, messe, sermon, simple, text, suppose, glose, glosynge, glorious, certeyn, lettre, clerkes, charitable, spende, resonable, dame”).[12] He then asks where Thomas's wife is, and Thomas replies: “Yond in the yerd I trowe that she be,” Seyde this man, “and she wil come anon.” (1798-9) This shows almost no change from the language of three hundred years before. In OE Thomas would have said: *”Geond on thæm gearde ic truwie that heo beo, ... and heo wile on an cuman.” OE ge- has been re-spelled as ME “y-”, without pronunciational change. OE declines the definite article, which in ME has become indeclinable, and has a dative ending for geard. However the only change of any substance is that the third person feminine singular pronoun in OE, heo, has undergone its Anglo-Scandinavian shift to “she.” That apart, nothing Thomas says would have caused any difficulty to his many times great-grandfather. To a philologist, then, there is an obvious difference between Thomas's idiolect and the friar's, such an obvious difference that it is hard to imagine that Chaucer did not intend it to be noticed by his contemporary audience, who would certainly not be philologists (whether we can rate him as one or not), but who were contemporary native speakers of Middle English, and probably French as well.[13] What would they have thought of the difference? Possibly some would have assumed that the friar's vocabulary was professional and technical, as in large part it is, even if many of the words in it have long-established native equivalents used elsewhere by Chaucer, such as “soules hele” for “savacion,” “bedes” for “orison,” etc. Others might have regarded it as affected. It is hard to see quite why the verb “labour” was imported into English, in view of the perfectly familiar equivalent “werke, werche,” or “suppose,” when “wene” means very much the same thing.[14] Others, meanwhile, may have been impressed. This thought becomes more likely when one considers the language of Thomas's wife. She enters immediately after Thomas's two lines cited above, and greets the friar in much the same way as her husband, though she uses one non-native word in the phrase “by seint John” (OE would have used the word halga, surviving in Chaucer's English as “halwe”). The friar greets her with an embrace, a kiss, and something that sounds very like smooching - he “chirketh as a sparwe With his lippes.” Friars of course already had a reputation, noted repeatedly by Chaucer, for sexual opportunism. His greeting to her is furthermore downright flirtatious, responding to her “How have you been?” with: “Dame,” quod he, “right weel, As he that is youre servant every deel. Thanked be God, that yow yaf soule and lyf! Yet saugh I nat this day so faire a wyf In al the chirche, God so save me!” (1805-9) The only loan-words are “dame” and “servant.” The former is a rank-word of the kind seen already in the Peterborough Chronicle, but the latter, while already ousting the native “hyne,” may carry with it suggestions of polite upper-class courtesy between the sexes. One might compare Sir Gawain's automatic response to the two ladies in Sir Bertilak's castle, “And he hit quyk askez, To be her seruaunt sothly, if hemself lyked” (Tolkien, Gordon and Davis 1968, lines 975-6). A further point[15] is that the friar calls her “ye, yow” here and invariably. Pronoun usage in the tale is not absolutely clear. Everyone who speaks to the lord (friar and squire) uses the polite form “ye.” The lord addresses the friar as “ye” but his squire as “thou.” The friar also calls the lady “ye,” but she does not use either pronoun while speaking to him. All this is predictable enough, as perhaps is the fact that the friar uses both “ye” forms and “thou” forms when addressing Thomas. It looks as if he uses the familiar or condescending forms when he is rebuking Thomas, trying to bully him, or trying to get round him, as in respectively “lef thyn ire” (2079), “Yif me thanne of thy gold” (2099), or “specially for thy savacion” (1785). By contrast it is a danger-sign when Thomas starts, at line 2131, to use “thou” forms back to the friar, which he does five times in ten lines of speech (2131-6, 2140-43). The friar presumably takes these as indicators of familiarity, when they in fact indicate dislike and contempt. But why does the friar always use polite forms to the wife, but not always to the husband, when they are presumably of the same social status? Pronouns are certainly not gender-neutral (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990), one sign of this being the suspicion that in contemporary France adolescent girls cease to be tutoyé and advance to the dignity of the formal vous several years earlier on average than adolescent boys - probably because adolescent girls are more likely to be sexually interesting to older men, and therefore worth flattering, than their teenage brothers. The same may well be true in the “Summoner's Tale.” The friar is “trying it on” with Thomas's wife, as may be his normal practice, and she responds. To the friar's compliment she replies: “Ye, God amende defautes, sire,” quod she, “Algates, welcome be ye, by my fey!” (1810-11) To which he in turn replies, “Graunt mercy, dame.” Her twelve words contain four loan-words, all immediately replaceable. She might just as well have said: *”Ye, God bete that is agylte, fadere... Algates, welcome be ye, by my trothe.” One might expect that native English would come more naturally to a Yorkshire farmer's wife, and in fact her speech is sometimes even more rustic than and just as close to Old English as her husband's. When the friar says that he wants to press Thomas on the subject of his conscience, she agrees heartily and, one has to say, rather disloyally: “Now, by youre leve, o deere sire,” quod she, “Chideth him weel, for seinte Trinitee! He is as angry as a pissemyre. Though that he have al that he kan desyre; Though I hym wrye a-nyght and make him warm, And over hym leye my leg outher myn arm, He groneth lyk oure boor, lith in oure stye. Other desport right noon of hym have I; I may nat plese hym in no maner cas.” (1823-31) “Sire,” “seint” and “Trinitee” are loan words. On the other hand, lines like “He is as angry as a pissemyre” are very low on the linguistic prestige ladder, “angry” from Old Norse angr - the friar, one might note, uses the French word “ire” - and “pissemyre” a strange compound of very vulgar French, pissier, and ON myrr.[16] As for “He groneth lyk oure boor, lith in oure stye,” this is almost perfect OE, compare *”He granath gelic urum bare, lith in urum stige.” The omission of the relative pronoun also sounds casually demotic. Yet the wife is doing something else besides complain. Surely she is hinting at her own dissatisfaction with Thomas's lack of response to her sexual overtures in bed, which may indicate a certain readiness to look elsewhere, triggered by the friar's flattery and smooching. As she does this, though, she uses markedly French vocabulary: “desyre, desport, plese, no maner cas.” Her last two lines could again easily be translated into native English: *”Other game of him have I right noon. I may nat liken him on none wise.” But perhaps that would not sound sufficiently flirtatious. Modern sociolinguists have reported something like this from English evidence. In an interesting experiment in East Anglia (Trudgill 1974) a team of linguists tested male and female awareness of their own rating on a scale of “correctness” versus use of dialect. The linguists already knew how far their subjects did or did not speak dialectal English, by direct observation. What they were interested in was what people thought about themselves. The results indicated that both men and women were unreliable informants about their own speech, but in different directions. Men tended strongly to overrate their own use of East Anglian local dialect. They claimed to use features (like the dropping of the -s ending in the third person singular present verb, “he go” instead of “he goes”) which in fact they did not. Women meanwhile tended to claim a standard of “correctness” or grammatical English which they did not reach. The conclusion was that both sexes were trying to gain prestige, but that women thought this was achieved by imitating what they took to be upper-class English, while men tried to gain “negative prestige” by associating themselves with a local community, perceived as tougher, more genuine, more masculine, etc. Much the same seems to be true of the 14th century, as exemplified by Thomas's wife. She is presented as no more of a French speaker than her husband (just as one would expect, see note 4). When she has anything important to say, her speech is almost shockingly plain, as in her last speech to the friar: “Now, sire,” quod she, “but oo word er I go. My child is deed within these wykes two, Soone after that ye wente out of this toun.” (1851-3) This too would need very little change to be comprehensible to her many greats-grandmother: *”Nu, fæder,” cwæth heo, “butan an word aer ic ga. Min bearn is dead binnan thissum twam wucum, Sona æfter thæm the thu eodest ut of tune.” Apart from the usual dative endings and pronoun changes, and the selection of “wente” for eodest (but “yode” remained present in ME if not in Chaucer), the only change would be “child” for bearn; and “bairn” remains normal in Northern English to this day, while cild existed in Old English, and would be pronounced “child,” if with short vowel and slightly different meaning. But her by-play with the friar is meant to show an urge towards social climbing, a readiness to side with, and flirt with, what she takes to be the upper classes. She uses the French vocabulary of romantic involvement not because she needs it or has no other words available, but to indicate, or to pretend, that she is, or was, or one day will be, something better than a farmer's wife in a barnyard. The friar responds to her news of the child's death with a speech evidently designed to ring completely false - he pretends to have seen the child borne to heaven, when he has obviously only just heard about it - while being at the same time strangely beautiful. It is full of loan-words of the most elevated kind, “revelacioun, avision, jubilee, effectuel,” etc., as well as further fragments of Latin, Te deum, cor meum eructavit. It does not have its effect, though, for Thomas ignores claims that the convent is praying for him, and triggers a sermon against Ire (the sin of which Thomas's wife accused him), together with a recommendation that he should treat his wife better. Somewhere in this stretch we must imagine Thomas losing his temper, and he has a good deal to lose his temper about: the friar's evident greed and self-interest, his assumption of moral superiority, his open flirtation, the way in which he and the wife seem to be “ganging up” on the husband. However, one could argue that the final straw is linguistic. Thomas does not like the way the friar talks. I have already suggested that it is a danger-sign when Thomas starts to say “thou” back to the friar, at line 2131. He also starts to use non-native words in unexpected concentration. His first four speeches, sixteen lines in total, contain ten loan words, but they are nearly all either old and familiar, like “seint,” or “maister” and “March” discussed above, or ecclesiastical words, “curat, estat, humylitee.” He uses the native “shryven” for “confessed,” and says “if me list” where his wife uses the word “please.” At lines 1949-50 he says, however, that he has got little good from his money, “As I in fewe yeres Have spent upon diverse manere freres Ful many a pound.” One wonders whether “spent upon diverse manere freres,” with four loan-words out of five, is sarcastic: he could have said (see note 14 below) “laid out on sondrye wise brether” with the same meaning. Be that as it may, Thomas is definitely losing his temper by line 2121, when he “wax wel ny wood for ire,” he uses the “thou” form ten lines later, and his language in his last two speeches, 2129-36 and 2140-43, is unmistakably sarcastic - or would be if the friar did not mistake it. Thomas says he will give something to “youre hooly covent”: “And in thyn hond thou shalt it have anon, On this condicion, and oother noon, That thou departe it so, my deere brother, That every frere have also muche as oother. This shaltou swere on thy professioun, Withouten fraude or cavillacioun.” (2131-6) The six loan-words in six lines have been italicised above, and the last five at least have replaced Old English words, respectively dele, brothor, had, swicdom and perhaps wrenc (wrench). The OE word for “condicion” is not so easy to trace.[17] But the last word, “cavillacioun,” seems in Middle English only to be used contemptuously. One might compare the Green Knight's jeering words to Sir Gawain, when he flinches from the feigned blow: “Nawþer fyked I ne flae, freke, quen þou myntest, Ne kest no kauelacion in kyngez hous Arthor.” (2274-5) “I threw up no quibbles in the house of King Arthur” - “cavillation” is quibbling, hair-splitting, playing with words. In Thomas's view, this is what the friar and his like are doing all along. There is a violent contrast, then, between the vulgar plainness of Thomas's last direction, “grope... Bynethe my buttok,” and the coyness of his very last word, “A thyng that I have hid in pryvetee.” And an even more violent contrast, of course, between the flurry of long words Thomas has started to use and the immense fart which is his last “utterance.” Thomas is “saying,” so to speak, that he regards the friar's whole way of talking as just wind, and is replying in kind.[18] One might go further and say that if Thomas had ever been taught any Latin, he could have added, with this time entirely literal meaning, “if you're so clever, then parse that!”[19] The last linguistic point I would make about the way people talk in the “Summoner's Tale” stems from an apparent contradiction. Both Thomas and his wife greet the friar in their opening lines with the word “maister,” and he makes no objection, When the lord to whom he rushes with his complaint sees him, he too greets him with “Now, maister,” but the friar immediately cuts him off: “No maister, sire,” quod he, “but servitour, Thogh I have had in scole that honour. God liketh nat that Raby' men us calle...” (2185-7) Yet this discrepancy too may fit the pattern of a contest for linguistic dominance. We may assume, and Chaucer's multilingual upper-class audience would assume, that the likes of Thomas the churl and his wife would be effective monoglots, and also illiterates, without Latin, French, or access to books. They are therefore rather easy to impress. A few tags, some high-sounding words, and the occasional Je vous dy sanz doute to suggest that French comes so naturally to the friar that he cannot stop using it, and they are overawed. This will not work on the lord and his lady, who may well speak French themselves and probably are not illiterates. While the friar uses rather impressive vocabulary to the lord, “abhominacioun,” “blasphemed,” and one Latin tag, per consequens, the lord replies easily on much the same level. He uses “confessour” as opposed to Thomas's “shryven,” he quotes the Bible back at the friar (Matthew 5: 13, mentioned at line 2196), and his internal monologue (2218-27) and following speech (2228-42) contain the words “imaginacioun, demonstracioun, reverberacioun,” and “demoniak,” as well as the half-translated “ars-metryke.” The friar then does not have the linguistic upper hand, and presumably knows it. He tries to retain the initiative by an ostensive show of humility, coupled with a reminder that he is in fact a university man, and a very brief flash of Hebrew, a trump-card indeed. This raises a final thought, and a final possible symmetry. The “Summoner's Tale” is a riposte to the “Friar's Tale,” and I have suggested elsewhere [20] that an unnoticed irony in the latter is the likelihood that while the dishonest summoner in that tale makes his living by threatening people with documents, often literate clerics, he may himself be completely illiterate, just as the pilgrimage Summoner shouts out Latin tags without having any idea what they mean. The literacy joke is repeated in the “Summoner's Tale,” where the friar repeatedly appeals to texts which he knows Thomas has no access to, and which may in fact not exist at all [21]. It would fit this pattern of bullying by means of a literacy which is claimed, but largely or entirely spurious, if the truth of the matter were that people like the friar could often not really speak French or Latin at all. Chaucer's intended audience might be courtly, or administrative-bourgeois like himself, but it was surely literate and multilingual. It might be especially amusing to them and to the poet, then, to observe the ironies of a situation very much further down the social scale, where people struggled for dominance with tactics almost pathetically feeble.[22] What does the “Summoner's Tale” tell us, in the end, about the sociolinguistic situation in late fourteenth century England? One particularly persistent image which it should at least destroy is what one might call the Ivanhoe model of language transfer, in which brutal Norman barons forced their wretched Saxon serfs to learn French words, the better to understand their orders; as a result of which, Scott argued, our words for animals were Saxon while they were being tended (cow, pig, sheep, etc.), but became French once they were being eaten (beef, pork, mutton etc.).[23] The theory bears some relation to the evidence of the Peterborough Chronicle, but does not account for the later flood-tide of largely unnecessary borrowings. Modern experience furthermore rejects it, for a variant of it is in full flower to explain the retreat of the Celtic languages before English. Once again, the model is of brutal English schoolteachers flogging Scots, Welsh or Irish children out of their native languages and into English. But this model has also been shown in some detail to be mythical (see Chapman 1992); the main motor of the spread of English into Celtic-speaking areas has been, not brutal oppressors, but ambitious parents, which also explains the disappearance of the majority of immigrant languages into the USA. Briefly, the “Summoner's Tale” corroborates Chapman, refutes Scott. A major motive for the transfer of French and Latin words into English turns out to be social snobbery. Being multilingual obviously gave cachet in fourteenth-century England, but learning a language properly is a hard business, managed successfully by few after puberty. Much easier to pretend a familiarity, which can be achieved on the basis of a few words, and especially easy in ignorant and unsophisticated surroundings. More interesting than the rather predictable conclusion above, however, are the linguistic shifts which take place within the tale itself. We hear the friar adapting his role to different audiences; we hear Thomas's wife wavering between her natural way of speech and her loyalty to her husband, on the one hand, and her desire to please and impress a distinguished visitor on the other; we hear Thomas also responding to the friar's language and beginning to imitate it, but with sarcastic contempt rather than pleased coquetry; and we do not hear, but we see the friar failing to hear the warning note in Thomas's voice, and the danger signs in his nouns and pronouns. It seems likely that what has had to be demonstrated here with laborious etymologies and translations was recognised much more naturally by a fourteenth-century audience from a multilingual society, accustomed in daily life to rating people by their speech, and familiar no doubt with many shifts, tricks, and self-betrayals. I have not noticed examples of this in the “Summoner's Tale,” but a study of people getting learned words wrong in Chaucer, and producing nonce-words, might be revealing: for instance the unknown speaker's “phislyas” in the “Man of Law's Epilogue” 1189 ─ I believe he is the Yeoman, not the Shipman, see Shippey 2000: 79-82 ─ or the miller's wife's “nortelrie” in the “Reeve's Tale” 3967. These represent a large class, perhaps, of words which have not survived, and like other linguistic features in Chaucer have modern parallels usually felt to be beneath the notice of academics. Finally, one may feel that Chaucer's interest in such features goes far to proving Tolkien's old and forgotten claim for “Chaucer as a philologist.” One thing one can say for the old philologists of Tolkien's generation and the ones before him: they were the least canonical of men, interested in dialects every bit as much as standards, and in language outside and independent of literature. And rightly so, for as the “Summoner's Tale” also proves, it would be a dull world in which everyone talked exactly the same way. NOTES 1. See Carpenter 1977: 217. 2. For general accounts of the linguistic state of affairs rather earlier than Chaucer see Ruthwell 1968 and 1975-6, Short 1980, Richter 1995. 3. Richter 1979: 43. 4. Richter 1979: 173-201, esp. 176. On pp. 188-90 Richter gives a breakdown of the languages used by 163 witnesses, with interesting results. No cleric used English: 16 out of 31 spoke Latin, 12 French, three a mixture of the two. No lay person spoke entirely in Latin, but ten used a mixture of French and Latin, 21 French, 100 English and one Welsh. 23 of the 31 French/Latin users among the lay-folk were urban (out of 47 town-dwellers), while only eight of the 85 country-folk spoke French, none of whom were women. 5. I can add one illustration from personal experience. Some years ago I travelled to Basel-Muhlhouse airport by Swissair. I left a book I was reviewing in the seat pocket. When I realised, I went to call the “Lost and Found” department, but my host the much-regretted Dr Steve Tranter of Freiburg University, and the only Englishman I have met who could speak Swiss German like a native, stopped me. “Better let me do it,” he said, adding kindly, “Your Hochdeutsch is OK. A German wouldn't think you were German, but a Swiss might, and they might get awkward.” He went on, “If you talk to them in French, they won't bother to look. If you talk to them in Hochdeutsch, they probably won't look. If you talk to them in English, they might look. If I talk to them in Schwyzertüütsch, they'll go and find it.” He made the call, in the local dialect, and the book arrived by special messenger next morning. Dr Tranter may have been wrong in his general diagnosis, but I doubt it. 6. In Grundtvig's poetic preface to his Beowulfes Beorh (1861), cited by Bradley 1994: 49. Bradley translates the word as “double Dutch,” which catches the sense of “nonsense, gibberish,” but Grundtvig's main complaint is the linguistic alienation of English from Danish. 7. According to Scheler 1977, some 18,000 of the 80,000 words in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary are native AngloSaxon (or 22%), with a further 3,000 other “Germanic” words, mostly from Norse, taking the percentage up to just over a quarter. By contrast at least 44,000 words come from French or Latin (since French is descended from Latin one cannot always tell the two apart), well over double the number and well over half the total. The native Anglo-Saxon and Norse words tend of course to be the ones most frequently used. 8. The phrases are taken from Baugh and Cable, 1978, pp. 168, 171, 172. I would not wish to suggest that Dr Cable falls into any of the errors indicated here; his revision of Albert Baugh's first edition of 1957 remains bound in some respects by Baugh's original layout. 9. The name may possibly be significant. We know now (though Chaucer presumably did not) that it derives from something like Old Norse höldr-nes, “lord-ness, the ness of the lord.” Scandinavianised areas of England seem, for whatever reason, to have had throughout the Middle Ages an unusually high proportion of free peasants and possibly a correspondingly low level of subservience. 10. In these figures I have counted all part lines as one each, and have also included the lord's internal monologue of 2218-27, when he is “talking to himself.” 11. Line numbers and all quotations are taken from Benson 1988, The Riverside Chaucer. 12. One cannot always tell whether a word is derived directly from Latin or indirectly, via French. One of the friar's words, “messe,” was borrowed into OE from Latin as mæsse, but the form here indicates derivation from French, see Burnley 1992: 429. 13. The question of who Chaucer's intended audience was is uncertain, naturally, but see Pearsall 1992: 181-5. 14. It is only when one tries the unfamiliar exercise of translating into OE that one realises the difficulty of rendering such familiar phrases as “to spend money.” Anglo-Saxons must surely have had to say this frequently, but it does not show up in the extant corpus, largely poetical or homiletic. On the analogy of German Geld ausgeben one might suggest OE *giefan ut feoh, or possibly (if one thinks of the word “outlay”) *lecgan ut feoh. 15. Which I owe to Dr Randi Eldevik of Oklahoma State University, who commented on an early version of this article read at the Mid-America Medieval Association conference, Kansas City, MO, 24th Feb. 2001. 16. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the word for “ant” derives from the smell of formic acid, compared to that of urine. 17. On the analogy of German Bedingung one might suggest a noun based on þingian, “to intercede.” 18. It should not be forgotten that one of the friar's claims is that the fraternal orders were founded on the day of Pentecost, the day of the “rushing mighty wind.” For this strand of humor, see Fleming 1966. 19. The verb “to parse,” derived from Latin pars, “part (sc. of speech),” is not recorded before the 16th century, but was once the basis of English education. It meant identifying a Latin word by case, number, tense, mood etc., and identifying the role of each word in the sentence. It also means, however, to divide or separate. Both meanings could be seen as highly appropriate to what Thomas does. 20. In the Matthews Memorial Lectures delivered at Birkbeck College, London on 19th and 20th May 1999, forthcoming. 21. The most egregious example of textual bullying in the “Summoner's Tale” occurs when the friar, pressing for a donation, tells Thomas (1978-80) that he can find out about church-building, “If it be good,” in the life of St Thomas of India - and Thomas could, if he could read, if he could read Latin, if he had a copy. But he would find there that it was not! The Riverside Chaucer note (p. 878), which assumes that there must have been a text somewhere that says what the friar implies it does, therefore entirely misses the point, which is one more case of impudent exploitation of the ignorant. “Doubting Thomas” is not the patron saint of modern scholars. See again Shippey, Matthews Memorial Lectures, forthcoming. 22. This may seem an unattractive view of Chaucer for a democratic age, but it fits the pattern of the “Miller's Tale” and the tale which Chaucer perhaps intended for the Yeoman, of a somewhat self-flattering or self-reassuring de haut en bas attitude to social climbers, see Shippey 2000. 23. The theory is put in the mouth of Wamba the jester talking to Gurth the churl near the end of ch. 1 of Scott's 1819 novel. It has had a long life. LIST OF WORKS CITED Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 3rd edn. 1978 Benson, Larry, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., London: Macmillan, 1988 Burnley, David, “Lexis and Semantics,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol II, 1066-1476, ed. Norman Blake, Cambridge: CUP, 1992, 409-99 Bradley, S.A.J., “The First New-European Literature': N.F.S. Grundtvig's Reception of Anglo-Saxon Literature,” in A.M. Allchin et al, eds., Heritage and Prophecy: Grundtvig and the English-Speaking World, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1994, 45-72. Carpenter, Humphrey, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977 Chapman, Malcolm, The Celts: the construction of a myth, Basingstoke, Macmillan; New York, St Martin's, 1992 Fleming, John V., “The Antifraternalism of 'The Summoner's Tale,'“ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966), 688-700 Mühlhäusler, Peter, and Rom Harré, Pronouns and People: the linguistic construction of social and personal identity, Oxford: Blackwell's, 1990 Pearsall, Derek, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Oxford: Blackwell's, 1992 Pyles, Thomas, and John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 4th edn. 1993 Richter, Michael, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zur mündlichen Kommunikation in England von der Mitte des elften bis zum Beginn des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1979 ----- “Muttersprache und Literatursprache: Methodisches zur Situation in England im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Richter, Studies in Medieval Language and Culture, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995, 175-85 Ruthwell, W. “The teaching of French in medieval England,” MLR 63 (1968), 37-46, and “The role of French in 13th century England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1975-6), 454-66 Scheler, Manfred, Der Englische Wortschatz, Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1977 Shippey, T.A., “The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of Genre”, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, London: Longman, 2000, 78-96. ----- “Bibliophobia: 1, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 2, in the poems of Harley Manuscript 2253,” the Matthews Memorial Lectures for 1999, forthcoming from Birkbeck College, London. Short, Ian., “On bilingualism in AN England,” Romance Philology 33 (1980), 467-79 Strang, Barbara M.H., A History of English, London: Methuen 1970 Tolkien, J.R.R., “Chaucer as a Philologist: the Reeve's Tale,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1934), 1-70 ----- “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936), 245-95 ----- and E.V. Gordon, eds., 2n edn. revised by Norman Davis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 Trudgill, Peter, The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich, Cambridge: CUP, 1974 PAGE 19