Episode 166: The Arte of Warre

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 166, The Art of War.

In this episode, we're going to look at one of the most famous events in English military history, the invasion of England by the Spanish Armada.

It was the culmination of more than a decade of simmering conflict between England and Spain.

But the Armada wasn't the only thing that came from Spain during this period.

During the Elizabethan era, lots of words were also pouring into England from Spain.

In fact, English was borrowing words from Spain and Italy like never before.

And not surprisingly, many of those words related to warfare.

So this time we'll examine how the language of modern warfare was shaped by the Romance languages of Southern Europe.

And we'll see how the Spanish Armada changed the trajectory of English as a global language.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/slash history of English.

Now this time, we're going to look at the events of the late 1580s when the ongoing rivalry between England and Spain erupted into a full-fledged war.

For many years the two countries had been challenging each other around the world, in the open seas, in the New World, in the Netherlands, and in Ireland.

Part of the dispute between the two countries concerned religion.

Spain was staunchly Catholic under Philip II, and England was firmly Protestant under Queen Elizabeth.

For more than a decade, Philip had been trying to depose Elizabeth, and Elizabeth had been encouraging her privateers to raid and loot Spanish ships and ports in the Caribbean.

It was only a matter of time before the low-grade conflict grew into a full-fledged war, and in 1587, Philip was planning an invasion of England to bring an end to Elizabeth's reign once and for all.

Five centuries earlier, England had been invaded by forces from Normandy, and as we know, that conquest fundamentally changed England and the English language.

England eventually became part of a larger French empire called the Angevin Empire, and a large part of the native English vocabulary was replaced with French loanwords.

Well, in the late 1580s, it looked like history might repeat itself.

England faced the very real prospect of another conquest, this time from Spain.

And if Spain was successful, England would become part of the massive Spanish Empire.

A Spanish conquest would not only change the government and religion of England, it would also change the language.

Spanish rule would likely bring in lots of new Spanish loan words, and those loan words would likely have an elevated register alongside those from French and Latin.

Spanish rule would also bring an end to the Protestant Church of England.

That would likely mean the removal of English from regular church services.

It might also eliminate or reduce English versions of the Bible.

This was also a period in which England was making its first attempts to establish a colony in North America, and those efforts would likely be suspended or terminated under Spanish rule.

And that means that England would not be able to establish an empire to compete with Spain and other European powers.

And that means that English would likely be confined to the British Isles.

So it isn't an exaggeration to say that the future of English as a global language hinged on the outcome of this conflict with Spain.

Of course, we know that England didn't become part of the Spanish Empire, so all of those potential consequences are just theoretical today.

But Spain was such a powerful country at the time that it influenced the English language anyway.

Even before the Armada arrived, English was acquiring words from Spanish and words from its Mediterranean neighbors.

Loan words usually came into English through contact between English speakers and speakers of those other languages.

That's how English had acquired so many words from French.

But for the same reasons, there was very little Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian influence on English in the Middle Ages.

The speakers of those languages were too far removed from England to have much of an impact.

Outside of a handful of loan words, like the word cork from Spanish and the word marmalade from Portuguese, we don't really find many loan words from those southern European Romance languages prior to the 1500s.

But all of that started to change during the Tudor period, as England embraced the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and as Spain and Portugal became global powers with colonies around the world.

Those Renaissance ideas and those Italian works of literature and those Spanish and Portuguese goods started to flow into England, and that allowed words from those languages to pass into English as well.

Scholars who have studied the history of Spanish and Italian loanwords have determined that there were two periods when the rate of borrowing from those languages peaked.

The first peak occurred during the Elizabethan period, from the mid-1500s through the early 1600s.

Then there was a general decline for a couple of centuries.

The second peak occurred in the 1800s and early 1900s, partially due to contact between English and Spanish speakers in Western America, as well as significant Italian immigration to North America during that period.

I'll deal with that later peak in a future episode, but in this episode, I want to focus on that earlier peak during the Elizabethan period.

We've seen before that many Spanish words came into English during the 1500s due to the Spanish presence in the New World.

Spanish traders discovered new plants and animals and other products in the Americas and eventually introduced them to English traders and sailors.

Very often, the word was a Native American word that passed through Spanish and then into English.

That's how we got words like maize, tomato, or tomato, potato, tobacco, cocoa, chocolate, canoe, hammock, and so on.

Sometimes the Spaniards coined their own terms for things they encountered in the New World, like alligator, armadillo, and palmetto.

Meanwhile, Italian words also started to pour into English in the 1500s due to the influence of the Italian Renaissance and the popularity of Italian poets and writers.

During the Tudor period, many people from England also traveled to Italy to experience the culture there, and they brought elements of that culture back home.

During the 1500s and early 1600s, we find Italian loanwords associated with architecture and building styles like balcony, portico, grotto, granite, and stucco.

And we find Italian words associated with art and music like artisan, fresco, concert, and violin.

Italian words associated with trade include traffic, bankrupt, percent, manage, and firm as in a business firm.

Other words brought back home include regatta, gondola, carnival, and stanza.

Now I should note that some of those words came into English directly from Spanish or Italian, but some of them came in via French, because French was often the conduit for words that came from southern Europe due to its geographical position between England and those regions.

One interesting example of this pathway into English is the word parasol, meaning a small umbrella or sunscreen.

English borrowed the word from French.

It's first recorded in English in the early 1600s.

But French had borrowed the word from Italian, so it's ultimately an Italian word.

And that word is interesting because it points to a common problem that Northern Europeans encountered when they visited regions around the Mediterranean.

The climate there was much hotter and sunnier than it is in Northern Europe, so northern Europeans found parasols to be very helpful to block the sun.

And English didn't just borrow the word parasol.

Around the same time that parasol appeared in English, the word umbrella also appeared for the first time.

And umbrella is a word that was taken directly from Italian.

And shortly before that, English borrowed the word sombrero from Spanish.

Sombrero originally had the same sense as a parasol or umbrella.

Of course, today we tend to think of it as a large-brimmed hat that blocks the sun.

But between Spanish sombrero, Italian umbrella, and Franco-Italian parasol, we can see how English speakers were suddenly fascinated with sunblocking devices in the late Elizabethan period.

Now, as we explore the influence of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian on Elizabethan English, we should also keep in mind that those languages are Romance languages just like French.

They all evolved out of Latin.

And that means that those languages often had very similar versions of the same word.

For example, English borrowed the word piazza from Italian, and then it borrowed the word plaza from Spanish.

Piazza is first recorded in English in the mid-1500s, and plaza is first recorded in the mid-1600s, but they're ultimately just regional variations of the same Latin root word.

Sometimes, those similarities can make it difficult to pinpoint the specific source of a word.

For example, the word mustache is first recorded in English in its modern form around the current point in our overall story in the mid-1580s.

That form of the word came directly from French, but a few decades earlier we can find the word mustachio, which was taken from either Spanish or Italian, or perhaps from both, because both the languages had similar versions of the same word.

The word padre, meaning a priest or clergyman, also appeared for the first time in English in the mid-1580s.

But again, it's difficult to pinpoint the specific source of that word because the word was almost identical in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

The word signor also appeared in English for the first time in the Elizabethan period, but it appeared in three different forms.

First as S-I-G-N-O-R, which is derived from Italian, then as S-E-I-G-N-E-U-R, which is derived from French, and finally as S E N O R, which is derived from Spanish.

By the way, English already had the modern word senior, S E N I O R, which is the original Latin version of the word.

Now, even though the specific origin of some of those loanwords isn't always clear, there are ways to trace the history of a word.

One of the ways that linguists do that is to pay particular attention to the suffix that the word uses.

When Latin words passed through the various Romance languages, the roots often stayed the same, but the Latin suffix evolved differently within each language.

So that can be used as a guide to determine where the word came from.

For example, English had borrowed the word captain from French in the 1300s.

It's derived from the Latin word coppet, meaning head.

A captain was the head person, or the person in charge.

Well, in the Elizabethan period, we start to find the word capitana in English documents.

It's first recorded in the 1590s.

It meant the ship of an admiral or a commander, so it basically meant a flagship.

But capitana has a distinct suffix that's associated with both Spanish and Italian, and it's generally agreed that that version of the word was borrowed from one of those southern romance languages.

One strong marker of a Spanish or Italian loanword is a word ending in an O sound, especially a multisyllable word ending in an O sound.

In many cases, that final O sound was derived from an original Latin us or US ending.

Well, during the late 1500s and early 1600s, English borrowed a lot of words from Spanish and Italian that that ended in O.

I've already mentioned Spanish loan words like sombrero, armadillo, and palmetto.

In addition, English also borrowed Spanish words like tornado, mosquito, mulatto, mango, flamingo, embargo, and cargo.

From Italian, we got the words portico, grotto, stucco, and fresco that I mentioned earlier, alongside words like volcano, mato, cameo, canto, incognito, ghetto, duo, and stiletto, which originally meant a kind of dagger.

In fact, this O ending was so common that it may explain the modern pronunciation of words like potato and tomato or tomato.

As I noted in earlier episodes, those words originated within Native American languages and then were borrowed into Spanish.

Spanish had the words as patata and tomate,

so neither had an O ending in Spanish, but they picked up that pronunciation within English.

It's possible that English speakers had become so accustomed to that O ending in those Spanish loanwords that they just started pronouncing those new words with the same type of ending.

Also, note the word tobacco, which was another Native American word that passed through Spanish into English.

Again, that may have reinforced the idea that these words usually ended in O.

At any rate, Spanish patata and tomate became English potato and tomato, or tomato.

We actually have other examples where English speakers apparently added an O sound to the end of a loan word, perhaps to make it sound more Spanish or Italian.

The word bravado originated as the Italian word bravata.

French borrowed it as bravade, and then English took it from French in the 1570s.

So English originally had the word as bravade, but a short time later it started to appear as bravado.

That form of the word had never really existed prior to that point, so it appears that English speakers gave the word a more distinctive Italian pronunciation by adding that O ending.

The same thing appears to have happened with the Spanish word desperado.

The word was taken directly from the Latin word desperatus, which meant despaired of.

In fact, the words despair and desperate are derived from the same Latin root.

And it appears that English speakers took that Latin word desperatus and gave it a Spanish twist by adding the ado ending, thereby creating the word desperado, which meant a desperate person and later acquired the sense of a criminal.

Now Spanish did have a word desperado, but most scholars don't think it's the source of the English word because the Spanish word was an adjective and it wasn't used as a noun in the way that it was used in English.

Now if we dig a little deeper into the suffixes used in these various Romance words, we find some very interesting developments as it relates to English.

As I noted a moment ago, the original Latin suffixes evolved differently within the various Romance languages, and those differences can help us to trace the history of words as they passed between those languages.

For example, Latin had many words that ended with ata, spelled at a.

Within Italian, that ending largely remained the same.

Within Spanish, that ending tended to become ada, spelled ada, ada.

And within French, that ending tended to be shortened to a,

spelled e e with an accent mark, the axon eigu, above the first e.

So those specific suffixes can help us to trace which of those languages contributed the word to English.

But, as I've noted, Spanish and Italian words sometimes came into English through French.

It can be hard to distinguish a native French word from a word that French borrowed from Spanish or Italian, but those suffixes can reveal that history.

When French borrowed a word from Spanish or Italian, it often changed the ata or ada endings used in those languages by dropping the vowel at the end and converting them to ad,

spelled ade.

And again, that change helps to reveal the history of the word because if the word was native to French, it tended to end with a, spelled e, axon eigu e.

But if French borrowed the word from Spanish or Italian, it tended to end in odd, spelled ade.

And when English borrowed the word, speakers tended to pronounce that ending as aid.

And that little bit of linguistic history can help us to trace the origin of certain words.

So for example, let's consider the word crusade, derived from the Latin word cruciata.

It's a word that's closely associated with religious warfare of the Middle Ages, and it's a word that English borrowed from French.

I noted a few episodes back that crusade only appeared in English during the Elizabethan period.

It may seem odd that a word that's so closely associated with the Middle Ages only appeared in English in the late 1500s.

Well, that's because English actually borrowed two different versions of the word from French.

A few centuries earlier, during the Middle Ages, English had borrowed the native French version of the word, croissé.

We know that that's the native version because it has that A ending that we would expect to find with native French words.

But then, French borrowed the Spanish and Italian versions of the same word.

The Spanish version was crusada, and the Italian version was crociata.

Well, as we've seen, French softened those distinctive endings by dropping the vowel sound at the end, and that produced the word crusade, which English borrowed as crusade.

And that's the version of the word that appeared during the Elizabethan period and survives to this day.

Again, it's ultimately a Spanish or Italian word that passed through French and then into English, and it replaced the original French version of the word which has since disappeared.

The same thing happened with another Latin word, the word armata,

which meant soldiers or armed forces.

As the word passed through Old French, the ending was changed to the native French ending A,

thereby producing the word armée, which English borrowed as army in the 1300s.

But Spanish and Italian had had their own versions of that Latin root word.

Italian preserved the original form of the word as armata,

and in Spanish the word became armada.

And during the 1500s, English borrowed both of those versions directly from those languages.

But it was the Spanish version, armada, that became the standard version in English.

and the word was specifically applied to a fleet of warships.

Now speaking of the words armada and crusade, that takes us back to Philip of Spain because that's what he was planning in the spring of 1587.

His plan was to assemble a massive armada and send it to England to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.

From his perspective, it was a crusade because he considered Elizabeth to be a Protestant heretic.

His goal was to remove her and replace her with a Catholic monarch, and the mission even had the blessing of the Pope.

In the last episode, I talked about the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

She was beheaded in February of 1587.

She was Elizabeth's cousin, and she was the Catholic monarch that Philip had planned to put on the English throne.

Mary's execution had caused outrage throughout Catholic Europe, and Philip believed that it had also caused outrage among Catholics in England.

He intended to tap into that outrage to justify his invasion of England.

And with Mary no longer alive, Philip now planned to depose Elizabeth and put his daughter Isabella on the English throne in her place.

During the spring of 1587, Philip was busy assembling his armada.

As I noted in a prior episode, Philip had also recently acquired the Portuguese throne as well, so he was now able to pull from both the Spanish and Portuguese fleets.

In fact, much of the Armada was assembled in Lisbon in Portugal.

By this point, English sailors were very familiar with the Spanish and Portuguese ships, and the English language was expanding to include terms for the ships that were commonly used in the 1500s.

Words like boat and ship are Old English words going back to the Anglo-Saxons.

Old English also had the word hulk, which was a large lumbering ship.

We still use that word today to refer to a large person, a sense that still survives in the name of the comic book character, The Incredible Hulk, but it was originally a term for a type of boat.

During the Middle English period, English had borrowed some new terms from French, like vessel and galley.

But now, during the 1500s, English was picking up terms with roots in Spanish and Italian, like frigate, pinnace, caravel, and galleon, derived from the same root as galley.

But as I noted in a prior episode, English ships featured a new design that made them faster and more maneuverable than the traditional warships used in Spain and Portugal and Italy.

The traditional warships had large structures in the front and back called castles.

Those castles were designed for traditional naval warfare in which one ship would pull alongside the other and sailors would board the other ship and engage in hand-to-hand combat with each other.

But English shipbuilders had reduced or eliminated those castles.

That made the English ships quicker, and it allowed them to sail into the wind more efficiently.

They could literally sail rings around the Spanish warships, as Francis Drake had been proving for nearly a decade.

Philip intended to overcome the nimbleness of the English fleet with sheer size.

He was assembling well over a hundred ships, and the crews were pulled from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and other parts of Europe.

It's important to keep in mind that Philip's empire included much of southern Italy, so that helps to explain some of the Italian influence in this military terminology.

Now, assembling the Armada also meant that stockpiles of food, weapons, and other supplies had to be gathered, and those supplies were stored at the dockyards until the armada could set sail.

The Italian word for that type of dockyard was arsenale, which English borrowed as arsenal in the 1500s.

Arsenals were often used to store weapons, and that sense of the word still survives in modern English.

Today we often refer to a stockpile of weapons as an arsenal.

Around the time that the Armada was being assembled, English documents also started using another Italian term for a storehouse or warehouse.

That was the word magazine, derived from the Italian word magazino.

By the way, both magazine and arsenal have Arabic origins, but the words filtered into Europe through Italian.

This newer word magazine passed into English via French, but it gave English another way to refer to a storehouse, especially one containing a stockpile of gunpowder or weapons.

Some of that original sense of the word still survives when we use the word magazine to refer to the detachable compartment on a gun where bullets or cartridges are stored.

Of course, the word magazine also acquired a completely different sense over time.

It came to refer to a type of publication that contains a series of articles related to the topic or theme of the publication.

Those types of publications were a different kind of storehouse, a storehouse of knowledge and information, and that's how the word magazine acquired its modern literary sense.

By the way, you might recall from an earlier episode that the word thesaurus has a similar history.

It's a Greek word that meant a treasury or storehouse, and in fact, the word treasury is derived from the same Greek root word.

Well since a thesaurus was a storehouse, the meaning was extended to mean a storehouse of information, and that's how we got the modern sense of the word thesaurus as a reference guide for words.

So thesaurus and magazine have similar histories in that regard.

Again, the assembly of the Spanish Armada required an arsenal or magazine of supplies, including weapons.

And speaking of weapons, the English language was also expanding during the Elizabethan period to include new terms for weapons of war, especially firearms.

Some of those terms came in from French, like the words munitions and ammunition.

Ammunition is really just a variation of the word munition.

The word bullet also came from French in the late 1500s.

We often think of a bullet as the small metal object that you put in a gun, but that metal metal object is actually a cartridge.

It contains the bullet and the gunpowder or explosive material.

Well, cartridge is another French loan word from this period in the late 1500s.

The word caliber, referring to the internal diameter of a gun barrel, also came in from French around this time, as did the related word caliber for a type of firearm.

But many of the terms associated with weapons of war came from Spanish or Italian.

Some of them came into English via French, but they originated in Spain or Italy.

For example, the word musket was a new loan word in the late 1500s, and it actually originated as an Italian word, musketo.

The word pistol has a complicated etymology, but one theory traces it back to the Italian town of Pistolia in Tuscany, which was known for its production of firearms.

Soldiers in the Elizabethan era also used cannons.

Of course, cannons had been around for more than a century by this point, and English had the word cannon since the 1400s, and cannon is another word that originated within Italian.

Ships sometimes used similar devices to signal ships.

Those types of exploding projectiles were called rockets, another new term in English in the late 1500s.

And believe it or not, the word rocket is another Italian word, rocketto.

Exploding devices used in war were called bombs, derived from the Spanish and Italian word bomba.

The word was the same in both languages.

Again, it appeared for the first time in English in the 1580s.

Soldiers who fought on land were called an infantry, which was another new word in English in the late 1500s.

Infantry can be traced back to the Italian word infantiria.

An infantry fought on their feet, whereas a cavalry fought on horseback.

Cavalry also has Italian roots and is also recorded for the first time during the Elizabethan period.

The words squadron, battalion, and brigade were also borrowed directly or indirectly from Italian in the late 1500s or early 1600s.

So I hope you can see how the language of war was influenced by these southern Romance languages in the Elizabethan period.

And many of those new loan words would have been spoken by people in England as they prepared for the Armada's inevitable invasion.

During the spring of 1587, word reached England that Spain was preparing an invasion fleet.

In fact, Francis Drake was sent to Spain to attack the ships while they were still in port to disrupt and delay the attack.

The surprise attack worked, and several dozen of the Armada ships were sunk or destroyed.

The damage was so extensive that the invasion of England had to be delayed until the following year.

The last time we heard about Francis Drake was a couple of episodes back when he raided Spanish ports in the Caribbean and stopped by the fledgling settlement at Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks on his way back home to England.

The settlers at Roanoke were on the verge of starvation at the time, so he brought them back to England.

A few days later, a supply ship arrived at the island, but the settlers were already gone.

So fifteen of the men from the supply ship were left behind on the island, and the supply ship returned to England.

Well, a year had passed since then, and Walter Raleigh had decided that it was time to try again.

He wanted to construct another settlement in the region, but the outer banks were too treacherous.

So this time he decided to place his colony a little further north in the Chesapeake Bay region.

He also decided that the new settlement should be a civilian settlement.

Instead of a military garrison manned by soldiers, the new settlement would consist of families, men, women, and children.

They would be given land in the region to entice them to relocate there.

Around the time that Francis Drake was attacking the Spanish fleet in Spain and Portugal, Raleigh's latest expedition left England for North America.

The expedition was led by John White, who was to be the governor of the new colony.

He was an artist who had been part of the prior expedition to Roanoke.

He had drawn detailed pictures while he was there, and those drawings gave the people of England their first view of the native people and the landscape of the region.

Now he was in charge of this latest expedition, which consisted of three ships carrying 92 men, 17 women, and and 9 children, together with about 30 crewmen.

The passengers included his pregnant daughter Eleanor and her husband, Ananias Dare.

The plan was to stop by Roanoke first to check on the men who had been left behind by the supply ship the prior year, then they would head north to the Chesapeake Bay region.

The ships reached the outer banks in July of 1587.

White and his men headed to Roanoke Island to check on the men, but when they arrived, no one was there.

And on top of that, the captain of the main ship in the expedition refused to take the colonists any further north.

He wanted to plunder Spanish ships in the Caribbean, and it was too late in the season to deal with the colonists anymore, so the colonists were forced to revive the settlement at Roanoke, with plans to head to the Chesapeake Bay region at a later date.

In the earlier episode about Roanoke, I mentioned that the English had befriended a local indigenous man named Mantio.

Well, he had travelled back to England with the prior settlers, and he returned with Governor White on this expedition.

His tribe was the Croatoan tribe, who lived on one of the barrier islands.

They were friendly with the English, and when Mantio visited his people at Croatoan, he learned that the men who had been left behind the prior year had been attacked by a rival tribe.

Two of the Englishmen had been killed, and the others ran away and had not been seen since.

A few weeks later, Governor White's daughter, Eleanor Dare, gave birth to a daughter named Virginia Dare.

She was the first English child born in the New World, and that was a very symbolic event because it reflected a commitment to establish a permanent English colony, not just a military outpost.

But by that point, the colony was running into problems.

Supplies were running short, and there wasn't enough manpower to keep the colony going.

So in August, the colonists sent Governor White back to England to get supplies and reinforcements.

He left behind over a hundred men, women, and children at Roanoke, including his daughter and granddaughter.

According to White's account of the expedition, the colonists intended to move further inland at some point to avoid the local tribes around Roanoke, who were hostile and dangerous.

The ground was also more fertile further inland.

It was agreed that if the colonists moved, they would indicate where they were going by carving a message on a tree at the Roanoke settlement.

That way, White could find them when he returned.

It was also agreed that they would carve a cross above the name of the location if they were under attack and had to flee for their lives.

White left at the end of August and arrived back in England in early November.

But by that point, the English government was preparing for an imminent invasion by the Armada, so almost all ships were brought into service to defend the country.

No ships were allowed to leave without the government's permission.

So White was stuck with no way to return to his colony at Roanoke.

Now, I say he was stuck, but he would have probably said that he was sticked.

Believe it or not, the verb to stick was originally a weak verb, meaning that its past tense form was made by putting ed on the end.

So I stick a note on the wall today, but I sticked it on the wall yesterday.

But in the same year that White returned from Roanoke, 1587, we have the first recorded use of the word stuck in an English document, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So stick is one of those rare verbs that shifted from being a weak verb to a strong verb, meaning that its past tense form abandoned the normal ed suffix and developed a vowel change in the middle to reflect that tense.

That also happened with a few other verbs over time, like the verb to dig.

Its past tense form shifted from digged to dug.

And we'll encounter a few other examples of that process as we move forward with the modern English period.

Now, 1587 not only gave us the first recorded use of the word stuck, it's also the year in which another notable book was composed.

This particular book was composed by a former soldier named William Gerrard, and it was called The Art of War.

Now, that's a short version of the full title, which was actually The Art of War being the only rare book of military profession drawn out of all our late and foreign services by William Gerrard.

So, this isn't the ancient Chinese military manual by Sun Tzu.

This is an early modern English manual with a similar title.

And the story of this book is interesting because it has a direct connection to the Spanish forces that were threatening England, and it also shows how much Spanish and Italian were shaping the language of war at the time.

According to the preface of the book, Gerrard was a mercenary in the Spanish army in the Netherlands.

His background beyond that is obscure, but he eventually retired to England to live near a close relative named Thomas Gerrard.

He composed this military manual in England shortly before he died in the same year, 1587.

His relative Thomas then turned the manuscript over to a man named Robert Hitchcock, who made some final edits to the text and published it four years later.

So this particular book called The Art of War was composed around the time that the Spanish Armada was being assembled in Spain and Portugal.

The book is essentially a guide to military service.

It describes the way the military is organized, the training regiment and required skills of soldiers, their duties and responsibilities, and the tactics and strategies used in warfare.

What's most interesting for our purpose is the language that he used in the manuscript, specifically his use of Spanish and Italian terms to describe certain aspects of military service.

For example, an early provision of the book describes the sentinel, which meant the act of keeping guard or watch over a camp.

The word could also apply to the soldier who kept guard, which is the more common sense of the term today.

It was another Italian loanword, sentinella, that passed into English via French.

It was a brand new word in English when the book was written in the late 1500s.

Gerard gives the following advice to a soldier who keeps watch.

He writes, quote, During the time of his sentinel, he ought to keep himself very close, wakeful, secret, and without noise or rumor, his match close and sure from seeing, and his piece ready charged, loaded with her bullet, and proined with touch powder.

Now in that passage he refers to the soldier's firearm as his piece.

In fact, he used that term throughout the book, and it's a term that's still used, but today it's mostly used as a slang term.

Gerrard then says that if the guard hears someone approaching, he should

demand with a loud voice, Kivala, who goes there?

End quote.

So he provides the specific wording of the demand, who goes there, but he provides it in French and English, which reflects the fact that French was such a widely used language on the continent.

Garrard says that if the approaching soldier responds that he is a friend, the guard should then demand the watchword, which meant the password.

If the password is not provided, the guard must assume that the soldier is an enemy.

He emphasizes the danger of the situation by writing, quote, for under color of giving the word, many sentinels have lost their lives, and sudden surprises and convasados have been given, end quote.

Convasado was a word used in some English documents during this period and meant an attack.

It appears to be a blend of the word canvas, which could mean an attack, combined with the Spanish word camisada with the same meaning.

So again, we see the Spanish influence being pulled into the text.

Gerard later refers to a traveling army coming to a rest at an alta.

That's his version of the Spanish and Italian word alto, which is an early form of the word halt.

The word is German in origin.

Remember that the Spanish Empire was partially born out of the old Habsburg Empire, which included the regions of modern Germany, as well as Spain and parts of Italy.

So it isn't surprising to find some German military terms in Spanish and Italian.

Gerard's use of Alta is the earliest form of the word found in English, but the original German version HALT appeared a short time later, and of course that's the version we use today.

In the book, Gerard also emphasizes the importance of trust among soldiers.

He writes, quote, A soldier in camp must make choice of two or three or more camarades, such as for experience, fidelity, and conditions do best agree with his nature, that can be tried soldiers and trusty friends, end quote.

So in that passage, he refers to those fellow soldiers with the Spanish term camarades, which is the first recorded version of our modern word comrades.

You might think that comrade is an Eastern European word, perhaps from Russian, because that's the context in which the word is often used today, but it actually originated in Spanish as the word camarada.

It passed through French into English, and again, the art of war is the first known document to use the word in English.

In another provision, when Gerard refers to a gathering or collection of soldiers, he uses the Italian term reculta to refer to that assembly.

English typically used the word muster to refer to that kind of assembly.

A muster was usually required when the troops were inspected.

The word muster had been around in English for a while, but in the late 1500s we find the first use of the phrase to pass muster, meaning to pass inspection or meet the required standard.

But here, Gerard foregoes the use of the traditional English term muster and uses the Italian term reculta instead.

Of course, an assembly of soldiers would eventually be dismissed or disbanded, and disband is another word that originated in Italian and passed into English via French.

The Art of War also gives us the first English use of the Italian word bizzognio, meaning a raw or inexperienced soldier.

The book also provides the first English use of the word salvo, meaning a simultaneous discharge of weapons.

It's another Italian word.

By the way, another word with much the same meaning as salvo is the word volley, which is a French loan word.

It was also a brand new word in English at the time and is also found in this manuscript.

Another word with Italian roots is the word cavalry, which I mentioned earlier in the episode.

Well, the art of war is the first known document to use that term in English.

The book also provides the first English use of the word tariff, which also comes from Italian.

The word terraplane meant a fortification.

It's used for the first time in this book, and it's another word that came from Spanish and/or Italian.

The Art of War also contains the first use of the Spanish word muchacho in an English text.

It meant a young man or a male servant.

And finally, the book also provides the first recorded use of the word grenade in English.

Here we find that aid ending that I talked about earlier in the episode.

Remember when French borrowed Spanish words that ended in ada spelled ADA, it softened that ending to ad or aid spelled ADE.

And that's what happened here.

The word began as the Spanish word grenada, which meant a pomegranate.

It was called that because the explosive devices resembled pomegranates, and they were filled with gunpowder in the same way that pomegranates were filled with seeds.

That term grenada passed through French, where the ending was reduced to ADE, and then English borrowed the word in its modern form as grenade.

So this is another word with Spanish roots that appeared for the first time in English in this book called The Art of War.

Now, as I noted, this particular manuscript was completed sometime around the year 1587, seven, shortly before the author William Gerrard passed away.

And it was during this period that England was busy fortifying its southern coastline in preparation for the arrival of the Spanish Armada.

What the authorities in England didn't know at the time is that the Armada wasn't actually going to land on the coast.

It had a different objective.

As I've noted before, the Spanish had a large number of troops in the Netherlands trying to put down a Protestant rebellion there.

The troops were under the command of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma.

He's generally known to history as simply Parma.

He was an Italian noble by birth, but he was one of Spain's best military commanders.

And the plan was to use his forces in the Netherlands to lead the ground invasion of England.

The problem is that Parma didn't have the ships required to move his forces across the English Channel.

He only had access to small shallow boats with little or no offensive weapons.

He couldn't cross the channel with those boats because the English ships and the boats of the Dutch rebels would pick them off one by one.

So the plan was for the Armada to enter the English Channel and destroy or disperse the English fleet.

The Armada would then proceed eastward to the Netherlands, where it would rendezvous with Parma's forces.

Having cleared the way, the Armada would then escort Parma's boats across the channel.

The Armada could then provide reinforcements to Parma, and it could also secure the supply lines back to the Netherlands.

That was the plan, and it was entirely dependent on that rendezvous between the Armada and Parma's forces.

By the way, the word rendezvous is clearly a French loanword, and it was another brand new word in the English language at this point in the late 1500s.

The term literally meant render you or present yourself.

By the spring of 1588, the Armada was finally ready, and it consisted of about 130 ships carrying over 20,000 men.

Some estimates suggest that there were more than 30,000 men.

In May, the fleet headed out to sea on its way to the English Channel, but it immediately ran into problems.

It was was battered by storms along the Spanish and Portuguese coast, and many of the food supplies were already starting to rot.

The Spanish authorities had been forced to make barrels with newer wood that didn't seal properly.

Since they were not airtight, the food kept rotting, and that would continue to be a problem throughout the expedition.

A few days later, the Armada was forced to return to port in northern Spain to repair and resupply the battered ships.

The ships remained in port for several weeks, and it wasn't until July 12th that the Armada finally headed back out to sea.

A couple of weeks later, the Spanish fleet finally reached the entrance to the English Channel.

Again, the English forces didn't really know what to expect.

They thought that the Armada was going to try to land on the southern coast, and they didn't really have the ground troops to prevent such an invasion.

Much of the southern coast of England actually remained undefended.

So the main objective of the English fleet was to harass the Armada so much that it couldn't land on the coast.

The winds and tides carried the ships in an easterly direction through the channel at that time of year, and the Spanish warships struggled to sail against those winds and tides.

So, if the English Navy could force the Armada through the Channel without landing on the southern coast, that would be a huge victory.

To carry out its plan, most of the English fleet was located at Plymouth on the southwestern coast of England.

And as soon as they saw the Armada, the fleet headed out to engage the Spanish ships.

The Spanish intended to fight in the traditional way by boarding the English ships and engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

But the English ships were too fast.

The Spanish could never get close enough to board any of the English ships.

Meanwhile, the English ships fired their cannons at the Spanish ships, but weren't really able to inflict any serious damage.

It was basically a stalemate.

That process repeated itself as the Armada proceeded eastward through the channel.

The Armada traveled along at its normal snail's pace, and the English fleet tagged along behind it, occasionally engaging with the rear guard of the Armada.

Of course, naval fleets are like a moving infantry in that they both have a rear guard and a vanguard.

The rear guard is the group of ships or soldiers at the back that defend the rear from attack.

It's a French loan word.

The ships or soldiers at the front that lead the way are the vanguard.

It's another French loanword, though the terms were largely the same in Spanish and Italian.

Of course, the word vanguard has acquired an extended sense over time, as someone or something that's innovative and leads the way in a more figurative sense.

But vanguard is actually a slightly shortened version of the original French word, which was avant-garde, literally before guard.

Now that original French term was re-borrowed into English in the 1900s in its original form.

And today, something that is avant-garde is experimental or cutting-edge.

But again, it's just the original version of vanguard, and both terms have an original military sense as the forces that lead the way in any mass movement of soldiers or ships.

After a few days, the Armada had passed by most of the best landing spots along the southern coast of England, and the English fleet was probably happy that it had prevented the Armada from landing.

But of course, that wasn't the Spanish plan.

The plan was for the Armada to proceed to the coast of Flanders and rendezvous with Parma's forces in the Netherlands.

Parma had about 30,000 troops to take part in the invasion across the channel.

The Armada eventually reached that rendezvous point, but when they arrived, Parma's forces were nowhere to be seen.

The whole point of the Armada was to attack and disperse the English fleet, but instead, the Armada had brought the English fleet with it.

The Spanish ships were too big to approach the Flemish coastline, and Parma's boats were too small to enter the open waters where they could be attacked by the English ships and the Dutch flyboats.

So Parma's forces were stuck in port and couldn't get out.

It now became apparent that this crucial stage in the Spanish plan was fatally flawed.

During the first week of August, the Armada remained anchored offshore while they tried to work out a plan with Parma.

But then the English did something that caught the Spanish completely by surprise.

In the middle of the night, the English commanders selected eight of the lesser ships in the English fleet and lit them on fire.

They then let the wind and currents take them directly into the place where the Armada was anchored.

The Spanish captains panicked at the sight of the approaching fire ships.

They were concerned that the embers would cause the sails and rigging on the Spanish ships to catch fire.

They also thought that the English ships were loaded with explosives and were basically floating bombs.

In their panic, the Spanish ships chose to cut and run.

Literally cut and run.

I mentioned in an earlier episode that the phrase cut and run comes from the act of cutting a ship's anchor line in order to make a fast getaway.

Well, that's what the Armada did.

But by cutting their anchor lines, it meant that the ships were now at the mercy of the winds and tides.

Some of the ships crashed into the Flemish shore, but most were dispersed into the North Sea, east of England.

And that effectively ended the immediate threat to England.

The ships of the Armada were not able to sail against the winds and tides to head back into the channel.

The rendezvous with Parma had failed, and the Spanish fleet was running low on supplies and low on morale.

The crews were also being ravaged by sickness and disease by that point.

The Armada was eventually able to reconvene east of England, but by that point it had no choice but to head northward to sail around the northern part of Scotland and then head westward around Ireland to head back to Spain.

It was at that point that Queen Elizabeth gave the most famous speech of her reign.

She travelled down the Thames to the military camp at Tilbury.

She arrived there to inspect and rally the troops, and the speech she gave is a favorite of historical dramas, as this speech from a BBC production illustrates.

I know

I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,

but I have the heart and stomach of a king,

and a king of England, too.

And I think foul scorn that Spain or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

To which,

rather than face that dishonor,

I will myself take up arms beside you.

I will be your general and your rewarder for your virtues in the field.

That's a small excerpt from the speech that Elizabeth gave to the troops at Tilbury.

But it's a speech drenched in mythology.

First, the speech that's been handed down through history was published a few days after the actual speech that was given at Tilbury.

We don't know if the published speech matches the one actually given by Elizabeth.

And of course, by the time the speech was given, the Armada had already been effectively defeated.

It was limping northward to find a way back to Spain.

And in fact, the troops at Tilbury were sent home a few days later without ever being called to battle.

But the speech has served to present an image of Elizabeth as a warrior queen, facing insurmountable odds and emerging victorious.

But even as Elizabeth gave her speech at Tilbury, the Armada's fate had still not been completely rendered.

Remember that most of the ships were now sailing without their anchors, and the captains were not familiar with the rough seas north and west of the British Isles.

They never intended to take that northerly route, so their maps maps didn't provide the detail they needed to steer clear of the many hazards along the way.

On top of that, the fleet was ravaged by storms.

One ship after another was lost in the waves and along the shores of Scotland and Ireland.

Disease and starvation also took its toll on the crews.

What remained of the Armada finally made its way back to Spain in mid-October.

Estimates vary, but it appears that more than half of the ships were lost or rendered unusable.

Half of the men never returned, and a large number of those that did make it back to Spain died a short time later of diseases acquired on the ships.

Estimates suggest that two-thirds of the men on the Armada ultimately died from the expedition, either at sea or back in Spain.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada came as a shock to many people throughout Europe, and it had many consequences for England, for Europe, for the New World, and for the English language.

First, it was a massive defeat for Spain and showed that the Spanish Empire was not invincible.

While Spain remained a military power well into the following century, its control of the ocean trading routes soon came to an end.

Other European powers took advantage of that collapse and forged trading relationships and colonies around the world.

Those powers included England, France, and the Netherlands.

And that points to another consequence stemming from the defeat of the Armada.

It allowed the Dutch rebels to maintain their rebellion and to eventually secure their independence from Spain as the free republic of the Netherlands.

And the Dutch would soon rival the English on the high seas.

In England, the Armada's defeat secured Elizabeth's position on the throne.

Writers praised her, and she reveled in the glory of the unexpected victory.

And the period of prosperity that followed coincided with one of the greatest periods of English literature.

In the immediate aftermath of the victory, a poet named Edmund Spencer praised the glory of Elizabeth in his epic poem called The Fairy Queen.

and a young playwright named William Shakespeare praised the Tudor dynasty through his various history plays that told the story story of the Wars of the Roses.

Of course, the defeat of the Armada secured the position of English in the Anglican Church, and it secured the position of English within England itself.

The English language was increasingly perceived as the equal of any continental language, and that perception became even stronger in the years that followed.

And of course, England's victory ensured that its colonial efforts in the New World would continue, and that ensured that English would soon spread beyond the British Isles, and would eventually become the global language we have today.

But despite the door being opened to a British empire around the world, those efforts had not met with much success so far.

In fact, when the Armada was defeated, England only had a few dozen settlers living outside of the British Isles, and of course, they were living at the struggling settlement at Roanoke.

Or were they?

More than a year had passed, and no one really knew what was going on there.

The colony's governor, John White, had not been able to secure a ship to take him back to check on the settlers, which included his daughter and his infant granddaughter.

Part of the problem was that Walter Raleigh had other more pressing concerns.

In the immediate aftermath of the Armada's defeat, Raleigh had been sent to Ireland to protect the Irish coast in case case the remnants of the Armada decided to land there.

Several years before, Raleigh had acquired a large plantation at Munster in southern Ireland, so he decided to remain in Ireland to promote his settlement there.

Meanwhile, he seems to have lost interest in his fledgling colony at Roanoke.

In fact, it would take a couple of more years before White was able to find a ship to take him back to Roanoke.

It was actually two ships that belonged to privateers who were headed to the Caribbean.

They agreed to take White to Roanoke to check on the colonists as part of their expedition.

They left England in 1590, three years after White had left Roanoke.

A few weeks later, they reached the outer banks, but one of the ships nearly sank as it tried to pass through a narrow inlet to get through the island.

Several of the sailors drowned, including the captain of the ship.

Most of the crew wanted to turn around right there, but White convinced them to keep going to Roanoke since they were so close.

When they arrived at the island, they didn't see anyone.

As they approached the settlement, White noticed a tree with the letters C-R-O carved into it.

And when they reached the site of the actual settlement, no one was there.

But according to White's own account, he wasn't terribly concerned.

There was no sign of attack or destruction.

In fact, the houses had apparently been dismantled and moved.

That wasn't unusual because the houses were made so that they could be taken down if the settlement needed to be relocated.

It took a long time to make the square beams used in the structures, so it was easier to take them down and move them than to start from scratch at the new location.

So White assumed that the settlement had been moved elsewhere.

And in fact, the settlers had discussed moving the settlement further inland before White White left, so that seemed like a distinct possibility.

Then White found another clue.

The settlers had constructed a palisade around the settlement.

By the way, the word palisade was another brand new word in the English language at this point in the late 1500s.

It was borrowed from French, but likely originated in the Romance speech of southern Europe.

At any rate, someone had carved the word Croatoan into one of the gateposts of the palisade.

That seemed to be a clear indication that some or all of the settlers had gone to live with Mantio's people at the Croatoan settlement on the Barrier Island.

Also, neither the carving on the tree nor the carving on the gatepost included a cross, which would have been a sign of distress.

So White was convinced that the settlers had moved elsewhere.

likely to the Croatoan village on the Barrier Island.

White asked to be taken to the Croatoans to see if the settlers were there, but the sailors were reluctant to risk any more damage to the ships in the dangerous waters around the outer banks.

They were also running short on supplies, so it was decided that the ships would head to the Caribbean to resupply and attack Spanish ships, and then they would return to the outer banks in a few months.

But as they left, a storm blew them out to sea.

They ended up so far off course that they eventually decided to head back to England.

They arrived home in October.

It was the last opportunity that White had to see his family in the New World, and he died three years later.

To this day, no one really knows what happened to the settlers that were left behind at Roanoke.

Today that colony is known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and it remains one of the oldest mysteries in North America.

And people have been trying to determine what happened there for more than four centuries.

In the early 1600s, Walter Raleigh sent a couple of expeditions to the Outer Bank to look for the colonists, but both expeditions were hampered by bad weather, and neither one actually made it to the Outer Banks.

It was apparently a widespread belief in England that the settlers were still there, living among the indigenous people, fully ingrained into one or more of the tribes.

I noted earlier that the theater experienced a boom in the years after the English victory over the Armada.

One of the poets who thrived during that period was Ben Johnson.

In the early 1600s, he co-wrote a play called Eastward Ho.

That play featured a ship captain named Seagull, who told stories about the New World at a riverside inn.

In one passage, the captain says,

A whole country of English is there, man, bread of those that were left there in seventy.

They have married with the Indians, and make them bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England.

⁇ End quote.

Now that's a direct reference to the Roanoke settlement and its potential fate.

A short time later, England finally established a colony in the Chesapeake Bay region to the north of Roanoke.

That was Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America.

And during those early years, the English heard stories from the Native Americans about people who lived to the south who dressed like the Englishmen and lived in buildings with wooden walls like the English.

The Jamestown settlers were convinced that the Native people were referring to the surviving colonists of Roanoke.

A couple of expeditions were sent out to look for them, but no English settlers were ever found.

Then, about a century later, in the early 1700s, a Londoner named John Lawson was hired to conduct a massive survey of the Carolina region.

He traveled throughout the region and eventually reached the outer banks.

When he traveled to the island where the Croatoans had lived, he reported that some of the indigenous people there had gray eyes, by which he presumably meant blue eyes.

The native people of that region didn't normally have blue eyes, so that implied that some of the people of the island had European ancestry.

He also reported that he met some local native people who specifically told him, quote, that several of their ancestors were white people who could talk in a book as we do, end quote.

Now these reports are fascinating, and even if the local people were merely recounting myths about their ancestry, they were apparently intrigued by the idea that people could read a book and write down their thoughts.

The indigenous people of the region didn't have a written language, so that ability of the English settlers apparently left a lasting impression.

Over the past few years, researchers have excavated the site of the Croatoan settlement, looking for clues that might confirm that the colonists were living there in the late 1500s.

The dig was conducted by local researchers with the assistance of a team of archaeologists from the University of Bristol in England.

The researchers dug down to reach the layer of soil that dated to the 1500s, when the Roanoke settlers might have been living there.

As I noted earlier, the settlers would have said digged, but we say dug today.

As the researchers dug through the dirt, they found occasional English and European artifacts, but that didn't really confirm anything because the Croatoans had traded with the colonists, as well as with the Englishmen that were there before them at the earlier Roanoke settlement.

So what the researchers were looking for were items that the English colonists might have had with them at the settlement, but would not have been there due to trade or other circumstances.

Of course, it's difficult to identify what those items would be, but the researchers did find two objects that intrigued them, and may support the view that the colonists were living there in the late 1500s.

And both of those items are relevant to the theme of this episode and to the story of English.

The first item they found was part of an iron sword, a weapon of war.

The reason why that was so intriguing is because a ship captain who was present at the earlier settlement at Roanoke reported that the Englishmen routinely traded with the local indigenous people, but there was one thing they would not trade, and that was one of their swords.

The native people didn't have iron weapons, and the English did not want to supply them with any in case of a future conflict.

So the fact that modern researchers found part of an iron sword at the Croatoan site implies that an English person was living there who owned the sword.

Maybe, unless it was stolen, or taken after the colonists had been killed or forcibly removed.

But the researchers also found something else very intriguing.

They found two pieces of writing slate and a lead pencil nearby that dated to the 1500s.

Remember that the Croatoans didn't have a written language, so they would not have had any use for a writing slate or a pencil.

Again, the presence of those items implies that there were people living there who had the ability to read and write, like the English colonists.

Unfortunately, there were no words written on the slate, only some faint drawings.

So maybe the Croatoans just used it to draw pictures for entertainment.

If the slate had contained English words, the mystery might have been solved, but that wasn't the case.

So what happened to the Roanoke colonists?

Did they all move to live with the Croatoans?

Or did most of them move inland, with a few others left behind at Croatoan to show the way when Governor White returned?

Or were they all killed by one of the hostile tribes that lived nearby?

Or were they killed or captured by Spanish sailors who might have discovered the settlement and wanted to destroy it?

Or did they try to return home to England in their boats and perished at sea?

Again, no one really knows, and the mystery continues.

What we can say is that the English efforts to colonize the New World didn't end with the lost colony.

In fact, it was only the beginning.

It was the beginning of a much more widespread effort to spread English power, an English culture, and the English language around the world.

And it was an effort that survived, in large part, due to a failed rendezvous off the coast of England in the summer of 1588.

Next time, we'll move the story of English forward into the 1590s, the decade that followed the defeat of the Armada.

It was a golden age of English literature and poetry.

And it was the era of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Edmund Spencer, and many others.

And it was also an era in which the English language reached new literary heights, and forever dispensed with the notion that it was inferior to the learned languages of the continent.

So, until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.