This summer, I researched historical multilingualism and language policy from ancient to modern times. One of my most significant conclusions from this research is that our modern understanding of multilingualism is incomparably different to the true linguistic environment of the ancient world. In the past, languages were fluid, interwoven, interconnected social resources, rather than distinct entities that were isomorphic with ethnic or national groups. Populations often migrated across great distances, adapting their spoken tongues with ease under the influences of marketplaces, vernaculars, sacred scripts, and simple convenience. However, with the growth of nationalist and ethnolinguistic movements in the last few centuries, our world has become a much more monolingual one.

As I came to the end of my research, I began searching through ancient texts to analyse how different languages intermingled in written works. I eventually stumbled across the Lacnunga manuscript, an Anglo-Saxon medical text dated to the late tenth century. Remedies, charms, and incantations fill its roughly two-hundred pages. Even more interesting, however, were the languages this manuscript was written in—Old English, Latin, Old Irish, Greek, and Hebrew. Though it seems unusual, this was neither an oddity nor a literary effect. Lacnunga was written for active use by a community, one for which multilingualism was the overriding norm and monolingualism almost an impossibility.

To research Lacnunga further, I needed to see it in person. With a letter of introduction from my supervisor, I travelled to the British Library and was fortunately granted access to the manuscript. Holding this thousand-year-old book, its parchment fragile and fraying at the edges, wizardly faces and serpents illustrating the pages, was an incredible experience. Most interesting of all, though, was a rhyme scribbled into the corner of the final page:

This boucke with letters is wrate [written]
Of it you cane no languige make

This inscription uses early Modern English forms, and so must have been written by one of the text’s first editors a few centuries ago—even then, a text so vibrantly multilingual as this puzzled those who came across it. Today, monolingualism dominates our lives, education, and governance even further. In modern times, a ‘pentalingual’ text would be indecipherable, useless, and horrifically inconvenient—the opposite of what Lacnunga must have been to its readers a thousand years ago. To me, this manuscript is a poignant reminder that we are descendants of a world where migration and cultural interchange were constants, and languages more rich and fluid than we could ever imagine.