How the Anglo-Saxons learned languages
Their methods are weirdly effective
Over the past six months, I’ve written a lot about how other languages have influenced English throughout its history.
Sometimes, this influence came from the bottom up, as happened with Old Norse: bilingualism that came from the mixing of Danes and English on the local level led to the introduction of new words and structures into the language.
But influence could also come from the top down, when words from languages spoken by the elite were adopted by the rest of society: this is the kind of influence that French had on English during the late Middle Ages. It’s also the kind of influence that Latin has had throughout the history of English.
For words, sounds, and other structures to migrate from one language to another, there needs to be a certain degree of bilingualism. The speakers of one language have to make a special effort to learn the other. And when a language is at the top of the social pecking order, as French was in England after the Norman Conquest, or otherwise has high prestige, as Latin has had throughout the history of English, that’s the language that people make the effort to learn.
It might surprise you to learn that we actually know a lot about how English speakers tried to learn these languages. What’s more, their techniques were very effective.
In fact, we could learn a thing or two ourselves from the Anglo-Saxons about how best to teach languages, because their system has all the ingredients that, in my experience as a language teacher, lead students to success.
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Latin in Anglo-Saxon England
During the Anglo-Saxon period in England (AD 450–1066), the only foreign language that was formally taught was Latin.1
In this period, Latin was used as the language of the Church and of civil administration in England. Because of this restricted role, the audience for Latin instruction was limited to people already in those spheres, or hoping to enter them.
That is, Latin was taught primarily to a small group of (mainly male) students at monastic or cathedral schools. Not all of these students were future monks: noble children also sometimes received their education in these schools.
Judging from the descriptions of authors such as Bede (c. 672–735) and King Alfred (849–899), Latin learning in England flourished early on after Christianity took root, but went into a period of decline around the time of the Viking invasions (780s–850).
Alfred then embarked on a series of educational reforms which aimed to revive Latin learning in England by first teaching literacy in (Old) English to a larger group, and then educating a subset of that group in Latin.
Alfred’s reforms, as well as the later (10th century) English Benedictine Reform, led to a flourishing in literacy in England in both Latin and Old English, eventually producing a generation of English churchmen around 975–1025, such as Wulfstan (–1023) and Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955–1010), who wrote bilingually: in Latin for the ecclesiastical elite and in English when preaching to lay people.
This period of around 975–1025 coincides with the composition of most of the Old English prose texts that we have, as well as when the Beowulf manuscript was copied.2
Despite ups and downs throughout the early medieval period, literacy in Latin was likely always relatively low, even among the people who, in theory, should be most expected to have it: the clergy.
We know this from comments made by monks such as Ælfric of Eynsham, who complained about þa ungelæredan preostas ‘the uneducated priests’ and the misunderstandings of those who could be dæle Lyden understandan ‘partly understand Latin.’
Throughout this period, we also see assertions that monks’ literacy was superior to that of secular clergy, that is, priests who were not members of religious orders.
However, it also seems to be the case that even (some) monks didn’t always have the best Latin: there are Old English translations of books primarily of interest to monks, such as the Regularis concordia (973), an important document in the 10th century English Benedictine Reform movement, which set out the ideal for monastic life.
This second golden age of literacy in England was brought to an abrupt end by the Norman Conquest of 1066, after which point a third language entered the mix: French.
But let’s limit our scope for today to how things worked before that, and see what we can learn from how the monastic and cathedral schools of Anglo-Saxon England taught Latin.
Teaching the art of grammar
We know very well how Latin was taught in Anglo-Saxon schools because we have the texts they used for teaching and learning Latin. These are of three types: grammars, dialogues, and glosses.
Grammars are works intended to explain the grammatical system of a language. In modern times, these are usually written by linguists and laid out in a predictable fashion: at their most basic, they discuss pronunciation (phonology), the various forms different kinds of words can take (morphology), and the rules for combining words to form phrases and sentences (syntax), usually in that order. They typically contain lots of examples to show you the various possibilities the language has to offer — and often the impossibilities as well.
Medieval grammars were a bit different. Most medieval grammars of Latin are based on two works by Aelius Donatus, a fourth-century AD rhetoric teacher: the Ars minor ‘Minor art’ and Ars maior ‘Major art.’ The Ars minor deals with parts of speech: noun, adjective, verb, etc. It is written in dialogue format:
Nomen quid est?
‘What is a noun?’Pars orationis cum casu corpus aut rem proprie communiterve significans.
‘The part of speech with case meaning a person or thing, either generally or specifically.’3
The Ars maior mainly deals with style and rhetorical devices, so it’s less relevant for language teaching in the sense that we think of it today: imparting knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of a language, as well as some ability to put that knowledge into practice.
Anglo-Saxon writers adopted the grammatical works of Donatus for use in teaching their students: one such writer was Tatwine (c. 670–734), Archbishop of Canterbury.
His Ars grammatica Tatuini ‘Grammatical art of Tatwine’ expanded on the Ars minor of Donatus, including extensive lists of examples, some of which come down to us with glosses — explanatory translations of difficult words — both in Old English and in Latin, which indicates that some of these examples were considered obscure even by the student who knew some Latin.
Indeed, the student of any of these grammars based on the Ars minor would have had to know at least some Latin already, since the works themselves were written entirely in Latin. This is different from the way languages are typically taught today, where grammatical explanations are typically written in the language of instruction (which is the language the students already speak), rather than the target language (the language being learned).
Indeed, in modern language materials and classrooms, the language of instruction is often different from the target language. However, the two are not always different: when the language of instruction is the target language, we can call this immersion.
Some modern pedagogical materials support immersion: for learners of Latin, there is Hans Ørberg’s Lingua latina per se illustrata ‘Latin explained on its own terms’ series, which has nothing but Latin from the first page. But Ørberg’s book is carefully graded, so that (in theory) the reader always understands what’s going on.4
The grammars derived from Donatus aren’t graded in that way: they throw students in at the deep end. Donatus himself was writing for people who already knew Latin as a spoken language. But the later medieval grammarians, such as Tatwine, were writing for students for whom Latin was a second language.
How then did it work? Likely, a grammar like Tatwine’s came later in the sequence, once students already had some Latin under their belts.
Eventually, however, around the year 995, it became clear to Ælfric of Eynsham that a Latin grammar not written in Latin was necessary.
So he undertook to translate a Latin-language grammatical work into Old English: the Excerptiones de Prisciano ‘Excerpts from Priscian,’ a compilation of material from Donatus’ grammar and that of another, later grammarian named Priscian.
The result was Ælfric’s Grammar, the first Latin grammar written in the vernacular (i.e. the same language that people spoke) in Europe. It was also a widely copied work: more copies of Ælfric’s Grammar survive than of any other Old English text.
Medieval role-playing
The use of grammars was augmented by the use of dialogues. As we saw earlier, Donatus’ grammar was itself written in dialogue form. But there were other dialogues written expressly for the Latin classroom.
The most famous of these was also written by Ælfric of Eynsham around the year 1000: the Colloquy on the Professions. In this dialogue, students ask their teacher to teach them not to speak “corruptly.” He does so by asking the students to describe their jobs — the students then argue amongst themselves as to whose job is the most important.5 Here’s a sample:
Teacher: Et qualis tibi videtur inter artes seculares retinere primatum?
Teacher: ‘And which seems to you to hold primacy among the worldly crafts?’Counsellor: Agricultura, quia arator nos omnes pascit.
Counsellor: ‘Agriculture, because the farmer feeds us all.’Ferrarius dicit: ‘Unde aratori vomer aut culter, qui nec stimulum habet nisi ex arte mea?’
‘The smith says: Where does the farmer’s ploughshare or coulter come from? He doesn’t have a goad except due to my craft.’
Ælfric’s Colloquy worked for a few reasons. We’ll discuss them in more detail later, but for now, I’ll say: for one thing, it’s got conflict. It’s also got some memorable lines. But there’s another reason why it works so well for Latin in particular.
Latin, like Old English, inflects its nouns for case: in other words, when a noun is the subject of a sentence, it looks different from how it looks when it’s the direct object. And that’s not all: Latin distinguishes between six different cases.
The Colloquy puts students through their paces, showing the different forms of the nouns:
Quid dicimus de coco, si indigemus in aliquo arte eius?
‘What do we say about the cook, if we need his skill in any way?’Dicit cocus: Si me expellitis a vestro collegio, manducabitis holera vestra viridia…’
‘The cook says, “If you cast me out of your company, you’ll eat your vegetables green…’
Here you see the word cocus ‘cook’ used in two of its cases (ablative, with the preposition de ‘about,’ and nominative, as the subject of a sentence) in close proximity. Juxtapositions like this occur throughout the dialogue. This was likely intended to help students internalize the different case forms by placing them side by side.
A monk’s best friend
We’ll return to what makes the Colloquy (and related dialogues) work shortly. But first, let’s dwell a little bit on the last kind of text we find in connection with Latin learning: the gloss.
As I mentioned briefly earlier, glosses are bilingual texts in which individual words in one language are explained in terms of the other by writing the translation of difficult words alongside the words themselves. Here’s an example of a gloss that I’ll lift from an earlier article about the etymology of the word dog:
Hwílum ic beorce swá hund
sometimes I bark as dogThis gloss explains Old English in Modern English terms. In Anglo-Saxon times, however, the glosses explain Latin in Old English terms.
We have an enormous number of these glosses, which total about a quarter of all the words we have written in Old English, which shows how important glossing was as a scaffolding technique for readers whose Latin wasn’t quite at the level needed to understand texts at first blush.
These three types of text — grammars, dialogues, and glosses — allow us to build up a picture of how languages were taught and learned in the Anglo-Saxon world. Let’s sketch out the complete system and compare it to how we think about language learning today. We’ll find that, apart from a disturbing amount of violence, the Anglo-Saxon way of learning languages has much to recommend it.
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