essay by Brian Charles Clark
The character Bradwardine in Walter Scotts’ novel Waverly displays some wonderful examples of what Joseph Shipley describes as the “mingle mangled” speech of the time. Here’s an example of mingle mangle from Waverly. The year is 1745. The speaker is Bradwardine. He’s addressing his guest, the visiting young Waverly, and some of his local noble, friends at a pub. Inebriating beverages have been partaken of in quantity all evening.
‘I crave you to be hushed, Captain Waverly; you are elsewhere, peradventure, sui juris, – foris-familiated, that is, and entitled, it may be, to think and resent for yourself; but in my domain, in this poor Barony of Bradwardine, and under this roof, which is quasi mine, being held by tacit relocation by a tenant at will, I am in loco parentis to you, and bound to see you scathless…’ From this polyglottal sausage of a sentence, he turns sharply to his neighbor, and dropping back into Scots vernacular, says, ‘And for you, Mr Falconer of Balmawhapple, I warn ye, let me see no more aberrations from the paths of good manners.’ ” [Penguin Classic edition (1985), p. 98]
Shipley (In Praise of English, p. 24) shows how this mingle mangle of “scraps of Latin or Italian” comes from the Grand Tour tradition. An English gentleman “completed his education by taking the Grand Tour, which might mean spending as much as two years in France and Italy—where he gave impetus to the saying Inglese Italiano e un diavalo incarnato”, that is, the gentleman became “in full regard the Italianate Englishman.” Bradwardine is a Scotts incarnation of this vocabular tourist.
A modern-day mingle mangler can be found in David Markson’s novel Springer’s Progress [(1977) Dalkey Archive, 1990]. Springer is a blocked novelist who can’t seem to stop stepping out of the bounds of his marriage. Here’s his pick-up line to a young woman in his favorite bar: “‘I owe a cock to Asclepius. You want to pay him for me, please?’”
The response of western Europeans to the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire was to head for the hills. The unthwartable human desire for communitarian order soon led to the formation of the system of monasteries, convents, and religious lay orders. The absence of Roman law, and its upholders, the legions of soldiers formerly stationed at strategic, or at least convenient, locations around the Empire, left civil defense in the hands of the locals. If for centuries the wall had been forgotten, defensible walls now were built again. The best offense, after all, has long been a good defense. Starting in about the sixth century, the system of enclosed and largely self-sufficient monasteries replaced the former sociocultural organization of urban trade centers. Especially in the north, subject to attack from the “pagan” Vikings, and the south, subject to attack from the Islamic Saracens, these walled enclaves became the seeds of a renewed urbanity in the later Middle Ages. (For a clear-eyed history of the Dark and Middle Ages, I recommend 
, by Lewis Mumford.)
