The Dutch Language of the Ordinances

The Dutch word menigmaal (often), though very well attested in early modern Dutch, is not attested until very late in Middle Dutch. MNW, s.v. menichmael, gives as the only attestation a legal record of 1558, and points out that the Middle Dutch word was menichwerf. However, the new word menigmaal was already in use in the language of scribe 1. He spells it ‘menichmael’ (art. 5), but also ‘mannichmal’ (art. 11), a spelling reflecting his original dialect on the German border. The word ‘broderye’ (brotherhood) is not to be found in any Dutch dictionary, though it sounds entirely idiomatic and can be found in German.1 Wilhelm Deecke, Die Deutsche Verwandtschaftsnamen: eine sprichwissenschaftliche Untersuchung (Weimar: Böhlau, 1870), p. 106. Again, the fact that we find it in the north-eastern Dutch language of scribe 1 (art. 19) seems relevant. Oversiener (‘supervisor’) has no entry in MNW, but the word was well established in Dutch. The earliest attestation we have found is in Ordinances of the Orphanage of Kortrijk in 1411 (oversienre ende scepenen).2 ‘Ordinances of the Orphanage of Kortrijk’ <http://www.diachronie.nl/corpora/chna/document/kortrijk_1411_1>. See also Stallaert, Glossarium, II, s.v. oversiener. Here and in the Ordinances of the Hatmakers the word designates an official charged with ensuring that rules are observed: a ‘supervisor’.

More so than in the case of their English, however, we can tell that the Dutch of the Hatmakers interacted with the other language that was hardwired into their brains, for there are some striking cases of interference. ‘Stedfastelick’ (art. 3) is peculiar, because Dutch steeevast is already an adverb and so does not take and never took the adverbial suffix -lijk (see MNW, s.v. stedevaste). However, the suffix makes sense in a Middle English context, which had stedefast as the adjective and stedefastli as the adverb. The curious use of ‘versament’ in the repeated formula ‘dat is versament ende geordynert’ (‘it is decreed and ordained’) may also reflect interference from English. Middle Dutch versamenen is well attested, but only in the sense ‘unite, to join’. Middle English (and French) enjoinen, however, did cover both these senses, and perhaps we are dealing here with a semantic extension influenced by the English word.

More obvious cases of interference are those where the English text contains the model on which Dutch words or phrases were calqued. ‘Meer ouer’ (art. 5) in the sense of ‘moreover’ is more English than Dutch, and the possibility that it is due to linguistic interference is confirmed by the English text, which reads ‘Moreouer’ at this point. ‘Soe dat’ in the sense of ‘so long as, on condition that’ in article 22 is another anglicism. In Middle Dutch, the basic sense of so dat was ‘with the result that’, but the provisional sense was perfectly normal in Middle English (see MED s.v. that, 3a) and is exemplified by the English so that in article 22. The alternative for ‘soe dat’ in the Ordinances, ‘angesien dat’, is equally curious. The normal sense of this phrase is ‘because’ (MNW s.v. aengesienII), but in the Ordinances it is used as an equivalent of provided that (art. 8 and 17). The underlying metaphor (Middle Dutch sien and Latin videre both mean ‘see’) is the same. ‘In dat behalue’, meaning ‘on that point’, is another anglicism.3 See WNT for a later seventeenth-century example of this anglicism: ‘ick ben beladen Mijn Heer in U behalf’ (I am weighed down, my Lord, on your behalf’). In Middle Dutch behalue is a preposition (‘except for, apart from’), and the whole phrase seems to be based on the Middle English phrase ‘in that behalfe’ (see art. 8).

A couple of spellings also point to interference. The Dutch word for ‘dagger’ was dagge, and the reason why it is spelt with a final r in article 12 must be that the English is dagger (here spelt ‘daggar’). The Middle Dutch spelling of ‘space’ is spacie or spatie, but scribe 1 slips into the English spelling ‘space’ (art. 17).

The influence of the English text is naturally a factor here, but the impact of English goes deeper than that. Influence from Middle English stedfastli and enjoinen may explain ‘stedfastelick’ and ‘versament’, but these English words do not appear in the text. The interference was from a language which the Hatmakers had in their heads as well in this written document. And while ‘Moreouer’ in the English text may have triggered the first ‘Meer ouer’ in article 5, it is noticeable that it occurs again in article 12 where the English text has no equivalent. In short, the anglicisms are not the result of the Hatmakers’ lazy translation but the by-product of their bilingualism. The close genetic relation between the two West-Germanic languages they spoke, Dutch and English, would have made such interference all the more likely, for close genetic relationships between languages and the perception of such closeness by bilingual speakers of such languages have been shown both to motivate and to facilitate cross-language transfer.4 See Patience Epps, John Huehnergard, and Na’ama Pat-El, ed., ‘Contact Among Genetically Related Languages’, The Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013), 209–19.

Two other conclusions can be drawn from the data presented here. While interference from Dutch is not absent from the English written by these two scribes, most of the cross-language influence is from English to Dutch. For many bilingual speakers one language tends to be more dominant than the other. In the case of the two scribes who devised and wrote the Ordinances, the dominant language must have been English, a language which they managed to write with native-like competence. Of course, such competence may not have been characteristic of the Dutch-speaking hatmakers as a whole. However, these two writers at least had adapted very well to their new surroundings. We have mentioned the contrasting case of Theoderic Werken, who betrays his Dutch origins in his written English, but to give a balanced perspective we should point out that there are also contemporary examples of successful linguistic integration. Edmund Hermanson, a Dutch beer brewer who emigrated to Colchester around 1460 and died there in 1502, was responsible for a set of churchwarden accounts which are almost certainly written in his own hand. In terms of both his handwriting (a cursiva with a blend of Anglicana with secretary features) and language, there is nothing to suggest that he was not a native speaker and writer.5 Bart Lambert, ‘“I, Edmund”: A Microhistory of an Immigrant Churchwarden in Fifteenth-Century Colchester’, in People, Power and Identity in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of W. Mark Ormrod, ed. Gwilym Dodd, Helen Lacey, and Anthony Musson (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 92–114. In the case of Edmund Hermanson, his linguistic integration was matched by his successful social integration more broadly. He became a burgess of Colchester in 1466; was married twice, both times to English women; and was elected churchwarden at a time when such a position was still deemed desirable and prestigious. The lives of the two scribes who write the Ordinances cannot be documented, but there seems no reason to doubt that their linguistic assimilation reflected a measure of wider cultural assimilation also. The above-mentioned case of Anthony Levison, who signed the 1511 agreement with the Haberdashers, married an Englishwoman (Elizabeth Newton) and headed the 1531 petition against the import of headgear from abroad, tells a similar story.

Finally, the Ordinances of the Hatmakers are linguistically innovative in their Dutch as well as their English: some words and spellings are otherwise unrecorded, and others (such as English mulct and Dutch menigmaal) appear here for the first time. The Ordinances thus testify to the dynamism of this speech community and to the fertile interaction between the two languages in which they expressed themselves. They are a valuable source for the history of both languages, English and Dutch, and confirm the premise of modern sociolinguistics that linguistic innovation was driven by speakers who moved between different social networks and navigated different linguistic communities.