The Latin Question

From the Montgomery Manuscripts. The Montgomerys were
Scottish settlers in County Down,
some of whose lands made their way to
Harriett Wombwell.
The manuscripts abound with Latin references.

The thesis of the younger John Hadzor provides a further interesting insight into the linguistic context of the story and is a salutary reminder that Latin remained the international language of the European academic world, and was used as the language of diplomacy as well as in the Roman Catholic liturgy. 

Once Henry VIII had successfully nationalised the church however, things were to change, and it was not long before Latin was banned, and translations were made over time of all relevant texts and procedures into English, most famously with the King James Bible. There were also however Welsh, Irish, and even Cornish versions of the Bible produced, all causing friction of one kind or another.  

The oddity of all of this was that whilst it was an operating principle of the Protestant establishment to remove Latin from the religious sphere, the language was to be maintained with fierce dedication in other arenas, for which there was certainly a convincing rationale whilst it maintained its status as a common language for scientists, academics, and diplomats.

As time went by however, Latin simply disappeared as a functional language, making it even more interesting to consider why the British continue to this day to teach the language in public schools.  

A clue is offered in the manuscripts of the Montgomery family, whose general distaste for the native Irish and Anglo-Normans were discussed in an earlier entry. Their fondness for Latin quotation and reference is inescapable and the mark of a family for whom Latin is a badge of education and culture, all at a time when the British were reinventing their identity as inheritors of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. 

This however was not really the problem. The issue at stake is that families like the Montgomerys with their dismissal of the 'mere Irish' and the 'degenerate' Anglo-Normans, had adopted a colonial mindset, in which knowledge of Latin, the poetry of Virgil, and the campaigns of Caesar were of far more import than the living language, culture and traditions of the people who actually lived on their lands. 

The results of the linguistic politics of the day were to lead to the extinction of Cornish, and an elimination of the languages of Ireland, Wales and Scotland to the point where the majority of the people living there would no longer be able to speak their own native language. Once the British managed subsequently to oversee the transformation of English into a global lingual franca, there was little perceived need for mastery of other languages either. 

This linguistic hegemony whilst convenient unfortunately laid the foundation for the development of a monolingual and subsequently monocultural outlook that would fatally compromise the integration of the British into the European Union.

To cut a long story short, we can safely assume that the services held in the Downpatrick Church of Ireland with the later Hadzors in attendance would have been conducted entirely in English. 


The fanciful notion meanwhile – that the British were somehow direct heirs of the ancient Greek and Roman intellectual legacy – is conveyed somewhat in the given Christian name of one of those very Downpatrick church-goers, Dr. Seneca Hadzor, the great-grandfather of Harriett Wombwell.