I managed to get access to a university library a little while back. Since then I’ve read Aelfric’s Lives of the Saints, Aelfric’s Catholic homilies and the Old English Heptateuch. I’m not a religious person, but what keeps me reading is the glimpse into pre-conquest English culture that it allows. Also, Aelfric's not a bad writer. The Saints' lives was particularly enjoyable. It also didn't hurt that they're relatively easy to read especially when there’s a facing translation as the EETE version of Lives of Saints has.

I started with Lives of the Saints, and I found myself nipping across to the facing translation 5 - 10 times a page and it would take me about 10 minutes to read one page. Now I find that I’m almost as quick reading Old English as I am reading modern English. If I come across a word I don’t know, I’ll look it up on Bosworth and Toller, but more often than not I’ll deduce the meaning of the word from the context. I feel my Old English reading skills have progressed more in the past few months than they have in the the past few years. I picked up Beowulf and read the first few pages and was able to rattle through it much more quickly and fluently than previously, though it did have some tricky vocab, but that's poetry for you.

I thoroughly recommend this technique for improving Old English language skills.

We know not the day nor the hour
Time telling in Anglo Saxon England

OE                Tima,        tid,                 stund
translation    time          time/hour      period of time?
German                         zeit                stund
translation                     time              hour
Swedish        timme       tid                 stund.
translation    hour          time             period of time

So I was thinking on these cognates. You have these cognate words that denote concepts around time, yet each language has chosen a different word to denote the concept of an hour, and English, of course, plumped for a loan.

This suggests to me that the concept of the hour and probably also the concept of the day broken down into 24 equal parts is a loan concept, for which a loan word is needed or a retooled native word. In which case, how did the pre-conquest English talk about time. I wonder if, as an agrarian society, they didn’t really need the concept of a standard hour. It’s hard to estimate time anyway so the time of day (as in mid-morning, midday, afternoon etc.) would suffice and, indeed, OE seems to have more of these words than modern English does (see below).

This subject came up on the Facebook group Old English where I post under the preposterous pseudonym, Phil. One poster summarizes Bede in his De Temporibus. Bede divides the day into 24 hours - hora. Then we have the punctus of 15 mins and the minutum of 1.5 minutes. He also mentions Byrhtferhth who, in his Enchiridon divides the day up just as Bede, on whom he based his work, but uses the word tid consistently for hour. And I’ve read this in other places as a translation for hour such as the parable of the workers of the vineyard in the phrase “eleventh hour”. He also uses the word punctus to mean the amount of time it takes for the sundial to move on.

Another poster gives an alternative system which he claims to have got from Wiktionary, so perhaps this information is not totally reliable. The day is divided into 8 stunde, and as such would appear to be a completely native invention. Interestingly, each of these stunde has its own name: uhta, morgen, undern, middaeg, gelontendaeg, aefn, niht, ond midniht. Was it systematized like this, or was this just the more expanded system of morning afternoon evening that a people would have if they didn’t have access to clocks, but spent a lot of time outside, and were used to guessing the time of day by the position of the sun (even in cloudy weather)?

Apparently, sundials were fairly widespread throughout pre-conquest England, and Alfred invented a candle to tell the time. However, were these time measuring devices like modern clocks on churches and in town squares or were they more similar in terms of the cultural perception, to modern day anemometers - a scientific device that didn’t mean much to your average lay person.

I imagine the latter. I imagine that the pre-conquest English would have gone by the position of the sun rather than faff around with scientific measuring devices. Indeed, clocks didn’t become widespread until industrialisation and the railways, and even then it was a long time before they added a minute hand.

However, one of the posters on the Facebook group took issue with this saying that military leaders would need a much better system than the times of the day than the stund mentioned above. Certainly modern military leaders need to synchronize watches and have people know the time down to the minute or even second, but would mediaeval warsmiths? Warfare, while nasty, was more ritualized then than it is now. Didn't they wait at a field until everyone turned up and then started all at once (I'm showing my ignorance of mediaeval warfare here). If they did need better time telling strategies, did they each bring their candles, waterclocks, and/or portable sundials with them, or did they just make do with their observation of the passage of the sun? “They’re marching on us, hlaford and they’ll be here between undern and middæg”

For some reason I’m skeptical that anyone but the most educated monks used the 24 hour division of the day. That’s possibly because of the existence of scientific treatises on time which suggest that it wasn’t common knowledge, and that horae and puncti occur so seldom in English texts.

Thoughts?

On þǽre ealdan gegaderunge, hæfdon wé sumne þrǽd þǽr man mote be ænigum þinge wrítan bútan hit wǽre on þǽre ealdan engliscre sprǽce. Hit helpe man tó leornianne and hit síe gamen éac, þynceþ mé. Is forþy gód anginn.

Ic eode tó þǽm tóþ-lǽce for þríe dagas. Ic hæbbe ege fram þǽm tóþ-lǽce, ac þá ic sætt, seah ic on þǽm wáge þǽs tóþlǽces scóle-cartan. Is efne swá híe secgaþ “ne gieme þú þǽs; se tóþ-lǽce wát hwæt he déþ. Ac þá ic læg and se tóþ-lǽce hæfde pílas on mínum múþe, þá þorfte ic oþer, ungelice “ne gieme þú þǽs” cartan. Ic beseah up tó fyrste and seah þǽr metinge mid cattbearnum þe hæfdon butterfléoge feþra.

When I read this interesting and important thread I learnt many knew things, but the below quoted section intrigued me.

Since I had to put him straight about Old Norse, still, accounting for the majority of borrowings into Early English ( the Norman-Angevin Period) and that it wasn’t until the end of the Hundred Years War ( when England’s aristocracy at last made its once-and-for-all plump for speaking English as their normative Mother Tongue) that French words came in en masse, I dropped a few other hints whilst I was about it.  Like the way the Ancrene Riwle is still closer to Old English than Chaucer, and does anyone think Germanic languages that retained normative Germanic vocabularies are somehow tongue-tied or straitjacketed because they haven’t borrowed enough French vocabulary, and was this a criticism anyone ever made of Goethe’s Faust?  Then I used forty-two of the sixty words in the same line note I wrote as examples of the half of Modern English’s vocabulary that goes back to Old English, and whereabouts in his own textbook he had given other reasons why half of Chaucer’s vocabulary was certainly not from French.

Since reading this, I've been at the Early middle English again. I've been dipping in and out of Ancrene Wisse in Sweet's Middle English Primer, and I've read excerpts from the Peterborough Chronicle here - a great site for several reasons not least of which because it highlights the loans, orange for Norse, purple for French, and because you can look at the texts in different standardized spellings. And, I notice that, indeed, there are very few French loans. I should really have noted this before but I didn't.

I've also been at this site from the University of Texas which has links to literature I've not read before such as the Love Rune, but more importantly, gives a potted history of post conquest English - one of the best I've found using Google as it does not repeat the above mentioned myth that the Norman kings immediately brought in thousands of French words which enriched the impoverished brutish speech of the English.

So, I was thinking about this myth which I've always accepted despite having enjoyed reading Ancrene Wisse and the Peterborough Chronicle many times, and I was just wondering, why didn't the newly conquered English immediately start taking on French vocabulary? I mean it's a bit odd that the language of administration, law and the church was all French and Latin and yet nearly 200 years later Ancrene Wisse is written in essentially late Old English with a handful of French loans.

This (along with numerous other things) has been playing on my mind for a while.

How did they say 'ago' as in 'I broke my arm three years ago.' 'I ate about 20 minutes ago'.

Looking at the Old English thesaurus, it says 'ymbe' or 'ymbe þæs'. B&T says: "where the point from which the time is measured is given by ðæs, (a) preceding :-- Ðæs ymb án geár"

I don't really understand this English sentence. Does it mean that we're measuring the time from the present to the time when the action occurred? In which case it would translate 'ago'.

However, later in the entry it gives " of past time :-- Ymb þreó niht com þegen Hǽlendes the Saviour's servant came three days ago" This is one of the few OE sentences that gets a translation, and the 'ymb' is translated as 'ago'.


Can anyone help me out?

I've often wondered why we had the two words for one wonderful, sublime drink.

Apparently in the Oxford English Dictionary the difference is that beer's made of hops and ale's made without hops. That doesn't seem right to me. All kinds of crazy things have been chucked into beer: mugwort, elderflower, yarrow, sweet gale, cinnamon, coriander, orange peel, ginger, oyster shells and the like. Modern brewers carry on this tradition and throw in cocoa powder, spruce and redwood buds, skittles, potatoes. They all end up being called beer. Yet hops turns it into a different drink.

My web wanderings brought me across this post on a beer blog.

http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/words-for-beer-2-–-was-beer-originally-cider/

It makes for interesting reading. The differentiation between beer and ale apparently being one of process. This makes sense. Ferment beer at very cold temperatures for months and it becomes 'lager'. With ale the wort is fermented. With beer, the wort is boiled and then fermented. The purpose of the boil is ostensibly to santize it, but it also removes proteins from liquid; they coagulate and drop to the bottom of the kettle. In the cooling of the boiled wort, more proteins come out of suspension this results in a clear liquid.

It would make sense that though it comes from the same ingredients, it is sufficiently different to warrant being called by a different name. More different from 'beer' than lager is from beer, and that is undeniably a different type of the same drink.

The claim that 'béor' is, in fact, cider or cyser is mind-boggling, but believable.

Further wanderings in the web brought me to some recipes for mediaeval ale.

recipe #1 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pwp/tofi/medieval_english_ale.html

recipe #2 http://historicalfoods.com/1807/anglo-saxon-ale-recipe/

recipe #3 http://www.regia.org/brewing.htm

Recipe #3 Though it's from Regia Anglorum it is very strange in that it requires you to boil the mash. This would deactivate the enzymes that turn the starches into fermentable sugars. It would also make the resulting drink very astringent by leeching tannins from the barley husks. However, I do like the fact that they ferment the mash rather than straining it to ferment it. I understand that whiskey is fermented this way.

I'm in the process of making 'ale' from recipe #1. It has the most research. It's for a 13th 14th century ale - 400 years off our time period. However, I'd be surprised if processes had changed significantly, and it's essentially the same as recipe #2 which claims to be "Anglo-Saxon".

Also the process is very similar to other 'non-boiled' ales from other parts of the world such as Finland's Sahti (which is mashed with juniper berries still on the branches) and Lithuania's 'Farmhouse ale'.

So this is non-'gruited'. That's the recipe specified, so fair enough. However, in the spring I intend to wander about gardens and parks and grab some mugwort and yarrow. I had a look at them on Google images and they are fairly common weeds. out here. Also, I might have a go at 4 litres mashed with hops, sahti-style.