Introduction: an ‘alternative’ history of English

Imagine a map of England upside down, as if London was not in the South-east, but ‘Up North’ in the far North-west, where Carlisle should be; and as if Lancaster was roughly in London's present location ‘Down South’, with Berwick the furthest point south. Even with the map the right way up, and Scotland included, it is hard to accept the fact that, as Cumbrian-born Melvyn Bragg has stated ([1976] 1987: 15) ‘Wigton is the middle of the British Isles’. (Pearce (2000: 172 claims Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire for this same ‘epicentre’.) For a rich variety of reasons, some of which will be explored in this book, the perceived centre of national gravity, so to speak, whether culturally, politically or economically, is ‘Down South’, particularly London and its ‘Home’ Counties, and this is certainly embedded in history; but one of my major aims is to upturn common conceptions of regions by changing the perspective. In focussing on the North of England and Northern English, a region and a dialect with a history that stretches far back before the Norman Conquest, the aim is also to turn upside down common conceptions of the history of the English language by inverting accepted hierarchies of influence and prestige.

By sheer coincidence this same metaphor recurs on the dust-jacket of a recent book by David Crystal, The Stories of English (2004).

This book is as much a personal journey, as it is a journey in time and space to discover the history of Northern English, itself a story of migrations, emigrations, travel and border-crossings. I was born at the end of the Second World War in Darlington, on the edge of County Durham separated from North Yorkshire by the River Tees. Midway between the glorious Dales and the sea-side, and poised in its dialect between ‘Geordie’ and Yorkshire English, Darlington was for me the origo, the still-point of my personal or ‘numinous map’, in York-born W. H. Auden's terms (1967: 830), of the North and its ways of speech. Salve magna parens. My family rarely ventured north of Newcastle, and Hadrian's Wall was a clear border: for Scotland was certainly perceived as being too far away and too cold, even for us Northerners. J.B. Priestley obviously had similar feelings: north of Newcastle he felt he was ‘marooned in Lapland’ (1934: 290). For the writer Beryl Bainbridge also, but on the other side of the Pennines, ‘the North stretched from Birmingham to Liverpool and then became Scotland’ (1987: 15). Rarely did we ourselves venture ‘over the top’, that is, over the Pennines, to the Lake District; and certainly Blackpool was out of bounds as being ‘common’.

The 1960s and beyond: the ‘renaissance’ of Northern English?

Three years after the publication of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) (see 4.3 above) Granada TV in Manchester broadcast the first episodes of a soap opera Coronation Street set in the working-class area of a fictional Northern town called Weatherfield. The Daily Mirror predicted after the first episode that it was ‘doomed’, with its ‘grim [opening] scene of a row of terraced houses and smoky chimneys’ in grainy black and white (North, ed. 1985: 14). Even other independent television companies in the North and Midlands were hesitant about transmitting it at first, believing that no one ‘south of Stockport’ would appreciate it (Kelly and Jones 2000: 41). Over forty years later it is now the longest running TV soap opera, remains one of the most popular programmes in Britain and has been ‘exported’ all over the world. The idea of the script-writer Tony Warren, born in Salford, it clearly owes part of its inspiration to pre-Second World War writers like Walter Greenwood, whose novel, Love on the Dole (1933) was set in Salford, and later made into a film (1941). Remarkable characters of the early years like Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst evoke Greenwood's colourful triumvirate of old Mrs Dorbell, Jikes and Bull, as well as the formidable Northern women of the earlier plays set in Lancashire of Hindle Wakes by Stanley Houghton (1912) and Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice (1916), both filmed three times.

Northern dialects and ‘boundaries’ in the Old English period

Many of the present-day images of Northern English and the North discussed in the first chapter are deeply rooted in history. Much of the North, especially the North-west and Scotland also, has remained ‘alien’ and inaccessible till modern times. Indeed, until the advent of the railways the easiest route to Scotland via the North-west was by boat from Fleetwood in Lancashire to Ardrossan on the Clyde coast (Hannavy 2003: 58). Lancashire until the eighteenth century remained hemmed in between the Mersey marshes, the Pennines and the Lake District, although accessible to Ireland. According to a seventeenth-century poem Iter Lancastrense the sparse roads were ‘gulphes of dust and mire’ (cited Langton 1998: 83) since the main roads north and south across Britain lay east of the Pennines. There was Ermine Street, for example, built by the Romans, part of the present-day Great North Road or A1, and implied on an early map of Britain by Matthew Paris of St Albans (c.1250). But even as late as 1740 there was no turnpike north of Grantham (see further chapter 3). The Norman bishop Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain said of the land across the Humber that, for the invading Saxons, it was ‘a frightful land to live in, more or less uninhabited’, and that it therefore offered a safe hiding-place for foreigners (cited Jewell 1994: 187).

‘The two nations’: the impact of industrialization

On his English Journey in the 1930s J. B. Priestley finds himself approaching ‘home’ in the North Country. Near Huddersfield at sunset he describes how the hills ‘were beginning to take on … that Wordsworthian quality which belongs to the North … a brooding tenderness’ (1934: 155). He later notes how, because of the dales nearby, he and other Bradford folk ‘have Wordsworth in our very legs’ (p. 174). Because of the massive impact made on the North in particular by the Industrial Revolution it is all too easy for the Romantic image of the North presented in the last section of chapter 2 to have been replaced in modern cultural memory, especially in that of outsiders, by the ‘Lowryesque’ (Dodd 1990) of grime and grimness, mechanisation and misery. (See also chapter 1.) In another sense, however, the age-old image of the alien wastelands and ‘barbarity’ of the North is simply reconfigured: the medieval view of the North being the Devil's homeland replaced or reinforced by an industrial underworld. As Dellheim suggests (1986: 226), to sensitive Victorians the ugliness of the industrial North was mirrored in the uncouthness of the language. Yet for Northerners themselves, Priestley's Wordsworthian trope rings true. It is hard to invoke any modern Northern townscape that is not also inextricably linked with either sea-side, dale or moorland; and even the Northumberland and Durham pit-villages, well into the twentieth century, measured their daily lives according to the rhythms of country customs and rituals as well as those of the working shifts.

A North–South divide? Images of Northern English to 1700

In this chapter I wish to probe and tease out aspects of that particular semiotic opposition, deeply rooted, which ultimately marks the story of Northern English as being quite distinctive from that of other regional dialects, although all of them have been lumped together and branded by the ideological labelling of ‘non-standard’. The issue of an opposition between ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’, especially in speech, will be explored in particular in 3.3 on eighteenth-century developments; in this section I explore the older opposition, that between the North and ‘the South’: inevitably, as London's power and prestige increases, compounded by an opposition between the North and the capital city. As stated in chapter 1, the North tends to exist in popular perception in relation to an ‘Other’, and to be defined by something outside it. And in the large majority of instances, this popular perception is negative, although, as we shall see in this chapter, a more positive image has sometimes emerged at different historical moments.

One important caveat for the earliest periods of the North's history, noted also in chapter 2, is the paucity of data, or of evidence about linguistic attitudes. We might not want to agree with Skeat's rather startling dismissal (1911: 24) of knowledge of the Late OE and ME periods for this region as ‘with a few significant exceptions … a total blank’, but we can sympathise.