Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 70.

Mind your manners for Pete's sake.

In this episode, we're going to continue our look at the Norman settlement of England.

We'll look at life in the countryside, and we'll look at how the Norman Masters interacted

with the English peasants.

This arrangement brought lots of words from French and Latin into English, and those

words are still very common in a language today.

So this time, we'll look at how many of those words came into English, and we'll see how

their meanings have changed over time.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com.

You can always reach me directly by email at kevinathistoryofenglishpodcast.com.

And I wanted to say thanks to those of you who've donated to the podcast, I appreciate

the support, and I hope you enjoy the slow transition we're making from old English into

middle English.

And speaking of that transition, I want to begin this episode by focusing on the gradual

evolution of the language in the years after the Norman conquest.

As I've noted before, this was a period in which old English writing fell out of favor.

Many scribes still spoke English, and they continued to copy older English manuscripts,

but those documents were just copies.

Most new documents were being composed in Latin, and in a few years a lot of documents

were being written in French.

...