Along with fiefs came the language of feudalism. The vocabulary of all the peoples on the peripheries of Frankish Europe is marked by loan words, often originally from the French, describing the equipment and habits of the immigrant mounted warriors who settled in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Hungarian words for ‘helmet’, ‘armour’, ‘castle’, ‘tower’, ‘tournament’, ‘duke’, ‘fief’ and ‘marshal’ are all loan words from German, several of them, like ‘tournament’, having been in turn borrowed by German from French. The Germanic word ‘rider’ (modern German Ritter, ‘knight’) was used in medieval Ireland (ritire) and Bohemia (rytiry) for a knight. The Polish and Czech words for fief are direct borrowings from the German Lehen. In southern Italy the Normans made the word ‘fief’, which had been a rarity, common currency. New arrivals brought new terms, reflecting different concepts of social and legal relationships.
Kitap: The Making of Europe
Erken Ortaçağ Piskoposluk Yapısı
Quite different in kind were the bishoprics established as Christianity spread, in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, into the non-Roman or post-Roman world. Early medieval Ireland and England were not significantly urban and hence a new kind of bishopric was required, one that was not city-based, indeed, one that might be without a fixed seat, adapted to the needs of a people (gens) or, in Ireland, a monastic congregation. The early Anglo-Saxon bishoprics thus tended to shift with the varying political patterns and to take their titles from an ethnic group or a region rather than a city. Hence we find ‘bishops of the West Saxons’ before there were ‘bishops of Winchester’, ‘bishops of the Hwicce’ before ‘bishops of Worcester’. In this way the institution of the episcopate adapted itself to social conditions very different from those of its birth. Indeed, one of the main features of the ecclesiastical history of the British Isles in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the re-establishment of the territorial, city-based episcopacy that had come to be the Latin model or norm in place of this early medieval non-urban model.
İngilizlerin Norman İsimlerini Benimsemesi
Names are, of course, among the most malleable elements of linguistic culture, offering, as they do, the repeated chance of choice; and soon, it seems, the English population of England chose to adopt the names of their conquerors. The kinds of pressure at work are shown by the story of one young boy, born in the area of Whitby around 1110, whose parents initially christened him Tostig but, ‘when his youthful companions mocked the name’, changed it to the respectably Norman William. This process began among the higher clergy and townsmen.