The Adventure Of English

This episode begins with the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in America in 1620, and their efforts to maintain the purity of the language they spoke. They borrowed relatively little from the natives, and the regional accents of the early settlers blended to produce a much more uniform sound than was the case in their homeland. Later, Scots and the Irish added their influence.

The fourth program visits the England of Queen Elizabeth the First, and shows how naval enterprise and foreign trade brought scores of new words into the language - anchovy from Spain, ketchup form Malay, and knapsack from Dutch are just three familiar exports from this time. We see how scholars were bringing new Latin terms into the language, and how there was a movement to stop this and keep English pure if it had succeeded, we might now say ungothroughsome instead of impenetrable. We visit Penshurst Place, home of the Sidney family, to see how poetry joined swordplay as a proper attribute of any up-and-coming young man. And we travel to the South Bank of the Thames and to Stratford-upon-Avon to find out how Shakespeare's English really sounded, and how he combined the languages of the common people and the aristocracy to take English to new heights and to invent so many memorable words and phrases that it seems - as a modern spectator said of Hamlet - that his plays are full of quotations.

Recounts the story of how English became the language of the English church. The long uphill battle begins with John Wycliffe and the first English translation of the Bible and the program goes on to describe how in the time of Henry V, political necessity made English the language of state, and how the work of the Chancery and later of the printers, helped to codify it.