Re: Top 3 movies depecting middle Ages?


"Weland" <giles@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Paul J Gans wrote:
Peter Jason <pj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Paul J Gans" <gans@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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William Black <william.black@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Paul J Gans wrote:

Some few more or less accurately depict the times. The
Cadfael
TV series is one. If one checks the background props
they are
amazing.

Well, except for the soldiers dressed in carpet underlay
and the odd
major military type in a studded leather jacket...

Sure, but they got the wagon wheels right and most of the
home
furnishings as well, plus countless other details.

--
--- Paul J. Gans


Weren't they supposed to speak like Chaucer?


No. Cadfael is set during the English Civil war when
Stephen was fighting Matilda. Chaucer was a good bit
later.

But in any case, the characters would have sounded to
each other as if they spoke the "normal" language.

However, what is smeared over is the fact that Norman French
was actively spoken by the upper class and was hardly spoken
at all by the peasantry.

Less so then than when Henry II came to the throne. Both Williams and
Henry I made efforts to try and learn English and speak it, and their
generation's children seem, from what can be gleaned, to be conversant
and untroubled by the fact that their English children spoke English and
didn't speak French. That changed with Henry who, though he seems to
have understood some English didn't speak, but also brought with him a
host of French speaking nobles, courtiers, etc and a renewal of things
French.





Trouble was, the Angevins ruled a huge empire stretching all the way to the
Pyrenees - not just England or even England/Normandy - so they weren't so
interested in learning the language of a relatively small minority of their
subjects. For much the same reason, I don't suppose the present Queen speaks
a lot of Welsh

Things improved after the King of France booted them out of most of their
French fiefs in and after 1204. They clung on to a strip around Bordeaux,
and later acquired Calais, but from then on (save perhaps very briefly in
the 1420s/30s, and probably even then) England was the undisputed centre of
gravity of the Plantagenet possessions. So use of Frogspeak steadily
declined in favour of the Human language.

From what I can gather the 15C pretty much saw the end of it. Henry IV spoke
in English at his coronation, and Henry V wrote most of his letters home in
that language. Also, a lot of older noble houses (more apt to cling to
French) became casualties in the wars of the Roses.

Of course, older habits died hard in the legal profession. There is a famous
court record form Charles I's time, about a defendant who "ject un brickbat
au juge que narrowly mist".

--

Mike Stone - Peterborough, England

"Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of
Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work
strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby in the
reservoir, he turns to the cupboard only to find the vodka bottle empty".


P G Wodehouse - Jill the Reckless


.

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