Here is a fact so perfectly constructed it seems like something a polemicist invented, except it is simply true and sitting in every etymology dictionary on the shelf.
The Anglo-Saxon peasant kept a cow. He raised it, fed it, moved it to pasture, treated its ailments, watched it give birth, and if things went badly in winter made the decision about whether the family could afford to keep it. He called it a cu. It was his animal, his responsibility, his labour.
He did not eat it.
The Norman lord ate it. And he called it beef. From the Old French boeuf.
The Anglo-Saxon kept a pig. He called it a picga. The Norman ate it and called it pork, from porc.
The Anglo-Saxon kept sheep, which he called scep. The Norman ate them and called the meat mutton, from mouton.
The Anglo-Saxon watched deer move through the forest that had just been legally declared the king's personal property under the Forest Laws. He called them deor. The Norman hunted them and called the meat venison, from venaison.
The animal in the field has an Anglo-Saxon name because an Anglo-Saxon was looking after it.
The meat on the table has a French name because a Norman was eating it.
This division is sitting in plain sight in the English language and has been sitting there for nine hundred and fifty years, which is roughly the amount of time it has taken for anyone to notice that it tells you something important.
Walter Scott noticed it in 1819. He put it in Ivanhoe. The swineherd Gurth says to the jester Wamba: the swine is Saxon when he is kept and Norman when he becomes pork. The observation got filed as a colourful literary detail rather than as the class analysis of the food system that it actually is.
The language is the record. The record has been in every dictionary the whole time.
The Anglo-Saxon raised the food.
The Norman ate the food.
The English language has been commemorating this arrangement ever since.
I genuinely cannot believe this isn't in the national curriculum.
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