Hello. if you want to skip ahead I've put a time
on screen, but if not, I'll clarify before we start: if you haven't seen these videos
before, I'm not a linguist, I'm just an archaeology student with access to a university library
who's very interested in these kinds of things. So, because I've been unable to do the Anglo-Saxon
short film I was planning to do in time for Christmas because of COVID, I thought I'd
fill that gap with something else. So the premise of this is that there are 12
recordings, all of men with suspiciously similar voices, and each one is set 60 years after
the last one, and each one is the grandson of the previous one so there's that kind of
familial connection thing, because I thought that would be cool. And it shows the progression of south-eastern
English from about 1340 to 2006. So hopefully you enjoy, and there'll be annotations
on the screen things like that. I'm probably not going to be able to... to
subtitle it until tomorrow morning, so it'll be interesting to see if people are able to
understand. I imagine people will be able to get the hang
of the earlier recordings. So yes, until next time, merry Christmas and
I hope you enjoy this little video 1346 Whan that I was younger, if I telle yow
a tale from about Springtide whan that I was ful wel young, my fader was ever clad in old
wolle from a sheep he hadde whan that he was young... ful ready and never to fall apart,
a dusky sheep it mote haven been, and the wolle was tight about him, and we sayd one
day, "Fader your wolle hath moths. It hath moths in the sh... in the arms, it
hath moths in the shoulders, it hath moths in the elbowes, and not the wolle alone. Your hair hath moths, your hide (skin) hath
them. I was 20, I should sayn, I was no child then. My fader then sat up and saide, "If that I
have moths, then to haven moths is to been myself. And I knowe not what yow wollde haven me been
if not myself. And if we told him any thing more about the
moths, after that hadde he no care. 1406 I had a graundsire. Whan’t I was thy age, I had a graundsire,
sat with me in our house. T’was… a fewe stounds from here, on horseback. Going south. I remember whan that we moved to this house. This house was the reeve’s here, not the
reeve we have now, but it was his graundsire’s. He lived not in it but he had it as his owen,
for us to live in, and our kind. Nobody had lived in it for years, canst thou
thinke of the… all the cobwebs round all the hooks had cobwebs round them, could not
hang up your hat on the hooks, or you’lld find a spider made a home in your hat. And we had to rip out one wall, and the wattle
was all rotten! In daub, it should never be rotten, but it
was all… my thinking about it, it was woven, and left out somewhere for five year, and
then they made the house out of it. For it was all shot with woodworm. And think of a woodworm graving through daub? T’was shot with it, that must all have been
in it whan that it was idauben. So it was not never well-made, that house. And it leaned to one side. And we had to tearen down two of the walls
and put them back up. If you took down that wall, that’s a wall
from before, if you took that down, you’lld find t’was still shot. We still had Christmas day, long before thou wert here, all… a great deal of it was the same as it is now. So we had logs in the fire, the fire pit wasn’t in the middle of the room when I was young,
it was off to one side off over there. In the house I lived in as a boy. My grandsire one day, he put a pair of logs on, and our neighbour knocked On the door. So my grandsire goes to the door, and opens it up, and it lets this ungodly draft in for it’s snowing ice-cold out there, and it’s our neighbour, called… Thomas. And he said, ‘My dog hath run off, hath he come past here?’ and my grandsire then said, ‘No, I’ve not seen him… not in the house.’ And my neighbour said, ‘My grandson said he ran past here.’ So he went off into the night. And came back, and knocked again, and my grandsire opned the door, said ‘Look John I’m sorry, my horse hath run away, hath he come past here?’ and my grandsire said ‘No, no, come past here.’ And next time we saw our neighbour we were doing the cows the morning, and he was far off, he came over, he said ‘I’m sorry about the confusion I found the horse, he was spooked and he hadn’t been well tied up, so he ran off into the woods.’ And my grandsire said, ‘Did you find your dog?,’ and he said ‘That was my grandson, I thought he said the dog had run over there, but he meant to say the dog WAS run over there.’ So on the way past, when it was spooked, the horse had run over the dog and killed it. 1526. I lived further out when I was younger, nowhere near the Thames, and we lived sort of in the middle of nowhere. And we saw all sorts there. I used to snare rabbits to sell down the market, so I never put my knife in anything bigger than a rabbit till I was 20. for father insisted on doing all the slaughtering. But I once come down to my snare, I knew the spot they ran through I put the snare in this hedge, I once come down to it… one morning… and found there was a weasel in there still alive. And weasels are vicious things. So I got the biggest greatest longest stick I could find, and knocked it over the head. And untied it and threw it in some brambles. 1586 We cut a tree down, and we dragged this log down from the forest, we did it ourselves on boards, for our horses were both not well good, and we hadn’t any oxen. So we dragged this log ourselves, for we couldn’t afford a horse to fall down. So there’s peraventure twelve of us out there, dragging this great big log down I-don’t-know-how-far, with icen cold hands for it was winter, and winters were colder then. This great big log. And we cut these great slats out of it, cut big slats in it, and set fires in the slats, and we had this great log slowly burning away for days. And that was it, every year, we hardly went inside round Christ mass, we did our wark and came back to the log. And by the time Ianuary came around, we went back inside and it was just musty and dreary, and you couldn’t move for the rats that had moved in. 1646 We didn’t always have geese as fat as this to eat. When I was little, we had little lank geese, we had peradventure eight that we kept round Christmas, to sell to everyone round here. Or not round here, because when I was little I lived across the Thames. We sold the geese to five families, but they were little ropey things. But we had a few more decorations back then. We had a little etching of mother Mary that we put at the end of the house, and we had a crucifix, a Jesus on the Cross, and we put that on our big oak table leaning against the end. They're talking about no Christmas now, altogether. 1706. when i was younger, much younger before
you were born when your father was only just born - though i wouldn't be surprised if he
didn't mind - it a bakery in london the handmaid had left an old rag by the fire and a cloth
catched fire and the floorboards catched it off the cloth and the flour bags catched it off
the floorboards and if if you have a fire around flour it sets off burning and the bakery was
burnt to the ground and the butchers was burnt to the ground and the green grocers was burned
to the ground and this was in the middle of london and if you climbed up on the roof you
could see it from here. The flames would have been a hundred yards high and it was windy,
blowing winds, and you could see the fire bright across the sky. and where we are here the wind was blowing
the fire right towards us so you couldn't see the sun. And there was a shadow cast from
all the smoke and if you went outside it stunk horribly because everything in london was
burning and our clothes went all the wrong colour from the smoke and they'd to knock down
buildings just to stop the fire spreading and if you went outside you couldn't see a
lot of the stars because the... there was orange light all night i said you knew how the three wise men must
have felt. And a hundred... churches came down and the houses between them, and i should think
on the first night it took people their maker. so you must never leave a cloth by the fire
especially not a butter cloth 1766 there was an old woman what lived in
a hill / and if she's not gone she's living there still / she sold baked apples and blackberry
pies / and she's the woman what never told lies baa baa black sheep have you any wool? / yes my
old mate, three bags full / one for the master, one for the dame / one for the little boy
crying in the lane. my father knew a crooked man what went a crooked mile / he found a crooked
sixpence up against a crooked style / he had a crooked cat what catch the crooked mouse /
and they both lived together in his crooked wooden house. 1826 I only knew my granddad
from when I was very very little, I don't remember him especially well because he died when I
was seven. All I remember about him was he was very much like your father. He'd always to
be working, he never had a pain in his foot or... he never had no reason to be inside. He
was always out making wheels because he was a wheel right much like your father. But not
much like me, because when i was younger i could say for myself that i always looked
for a reason to stay in the house and do something easy. But my grandad could never
stay still. All I knew of him is from my mother. She says every Christmas when he got too old
to work and my father took on most of it, he would sit of a Christmas day in a corner and
read and read everything he could get his hands on. So he read me pretty songs, but he
also read the all manner about economics and the wider world. And he knew everything.
But the problem with a man like that is that when it comes to the end, you simply can't
tell all that to anyone else and expect them to remember it. And short of being rich enough
to travel around the world, you are not best placed to do anything with it else. I know
everything what I need to know, and I haven't read a word since I was in school. I make a
habit of it - or to put it better, I don't make a habit of it. 1886 I'll tell you something. When I was younger, I used
to go down to public house every other day and drink with my friends. This was about when
the queen was first crowned when when I was 30 or so, so all sorts was coming round
here, coming in pubs, crowds all over... I didn't want to know about it, because there were all
sorts of berks out in the street causing havoc, because most have never seen a proper
street before, most of them come from middle of piss-all nowhere, excuse my expression. So I made
a custom of not talking to them, but one day I seen walking past a public house with a friend,
the most wonderful girl what I'd ever seen. She glanced in the public house and I thought
she caught my eye and turned and said something to her friend, in her friend's ear. And I don't
tell my friends where I'm off to. I ran after her and catched her. And she turns around,
most radiant girl I'd ever seen, height of perfection, most beautiful dress to wear for the coronation
I should think, and I put on my proud voice and I said "I couldn't help but notice that
you caught my eye in the public house back there." She chuckles and says, mean as anything,
"I was only telling my sister what a shithouse it looked like." 1946 When I was a lot younger - talk about before
the war, this was before the WAR, before the Boer war, quite a long time actually... we had a nice
lavish sort of a living room, but we didn't have a dining room, so we used to drag the table
into the living room to have our Christmas dinner. And it was me, mother, father, my brothers, and
it was my grandad while he was still alive, and he used to tell the most blue jokes across
the table, and... old, old, old man used to tell the most blue jokes sparing no detail,
and we'd be laughing, bashing on the table, and one night on new year's eve I thought
I'd tell my own joke. I couldn't have been more than about seven. And they all looked at me expectantly,
and I said "Mother, I can't tell the joke, it's too blue." And she says, "No it's all right, it's
new year's eve and we could do with a laugh." So I said "All right." I pulled the tablecloth
up to my face ready to hide if she decided she was going to hit me, and I said "What's
blue?" and she said "I don't know, what's blue?" and I said "Your face when grandad says..." and
then I said a swear word. And she looked at me for a second, not amused, and she says "If you
want to get a laugh out of the boys at school, you shall have to do better than that." 2006 We used to be a bit of a caroling family, so we used to go all around the houses on Christmas
eve singing carols, because all but one of us was lucky enough to have Christmas off
work, Christmas eve off work, so we went round singing. And when I was about 20, it snowed
in some parts of London on Christmas eve - this was back in the 60s. And it snowed properly
too, it wasn't just a thin layer, it was proper snow that your foot crunched right into. And
me and my sister never seen anything like it - that's your aunt Beryl - we never... we'd
never seen proper snow before, apart from on the telly and in pictures. You can sort of
tell how hard and crunchy is from looking at pictures or looking at a telly, but you
can't imagine feeling how cold it is in the palm of your hand, and how cold a snowflake
is on your hand or your tongue, so we went back to ch... we were like children again.
We were running around more energetic than I had been for five years or ten years or
whatever in the snow. And you may know what it's like when it snows in the countryside,
but you don't know what it's like when it snows in London until it does.
I thought it was cool how 1706 sounds the most like an American accent and lines up with when they were sending people over to colonize the area. The accent branched off and evolved in its own way in America.
As someone with a passing curiosity for linguistics, I love Simon's videos. They're always interesting and wonderfully lowkey. And it's really cool to hear what we know about accent changes put together like this.
I wish he had more from 1586 to 1646! It goes from unintelligible to something I can understand. I need some more of that grey area.
How does he know this is how the accents were back then?
I feel like it's kind of sad he had to add a disclaimer letting people know these weren't actual recordings of people from the 14th century.
I like that (with one exception) it wasn't just them reading some random text, but actually telling about what would be a noteworthy thing each of them would remember from their own life.
A great actor, too.
I'm so moved by the first story about the moths. The writing is just magnificent.
Brilliant!