"And for ther is so gret diversite / In Englissh and in wrytyng of oure tonge..."

External History of Late Middle English

Events of the thirteenth century began to work against the position of power French had attained in England:

1204: King John, who did the English language a great deal of good because he was a despicable ruler, loses Normandy. John had fallen in love with Isabel of Angoulême; unfortunately, she was betrothed to Hugh of Lusignan, whom John attacked in anticipation of Hugh's vengeance-taking. The Lusignans appealed to King Philip of France, who detected an opportunity not to be foregone. When Philip summoned John to the Parisian court John refused to comply, saying he was not subject. Philip claimed that as the Duke of Normandy he was. John remained steadfast, and Philip invaded Normandy. By 1204 he had gained control of the duchy. King John, of course, was later forced to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymead (in June 1215) at the point of a sword, yielding some of his power to the nobility.

This divesture of English holdings in France was a good thing for English, for the wedge that was eventually to separate the two countries and languages began its penetration with this event. As the French king began to confiscate lands in France belonging to Anglo-Norman nobility, the rift widened. In 1244, King Louis IX required all French nobles to relinquish their holdings in England, claiming that they could not serve two masters; Henry III did likewise: by 1250 England had no vested interest in considering itself in any way to be "French."

Henry III, however, had very strong French connections, and he continually appointed Frenchman to positions of power in England. When he married Eleanor of Provence in 1236, many of her relatives were given positions and titles in England.

Edward I (1272-1307) restored sense of nationalism by heightening his citizens' antipathy toward France. In aid of this, he declared that the King of France had the "detestable purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue" (McCrum, Cran, & McNeil 60).

Early in the fourteenth century, the authors of Handlyng Synne, Cursor Mundi, Arthour and Merlin, and Nassington's Speculum Vitae all make statements to the effect that most people in England know English (and therefore can read the language of those texts) and few know French. William Nassington states, in effect, "I will not waste my time writing in Latin, but rather in English that most men use, that each man can understand who is born in England, both the learned and unlearned."

Further influences acting in favor of the re-establishment of English:

Hundred Years' War (1337-1453): The French alliance with Scotland against English efforts to gain control of the North caused Edward III to exert a claim to the French throne and invade France. English victories at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) increased English sense of nationalism. Henry V also won important victories in this war (Agincourt 1415) and was instrumental in reestablishing English as the official language of the court.

Black Death: in 1348 the Plague first appears in England, peaking in 1349. The lower class, who could not escape it by isolating themselves in their manors, as the rich could, and were unable flee the infested areas, suffered huge losses (as much as a third of the population; see Boccaccio's introduction to the Decameron). Consequently, their services were in greater demand, wages increased, and many of them became freeman and "middle class," thus increasing the importance of their language: English.

In 1362, Parliament declared that since "the French tongue . . . is much unknown in the said realm . . .all pleas which shall be pleaded in [the king's] courts whatsoever, before any of his other ministers whatsoever, or in his other places, or before any of his other ministers whatsoever, or in the courts and places of any other lords whatsoever within the realm, shall be pleaded, shewed, defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English tongue, and that they be entered and enrolled in Latin." The proceedings of Parliament (the Rotuli Parliamentorum) itself are, however, recorded in French up to the 1420s, and in English thereafter.

When Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) deposed (and murdered?) Richard II, he read his claim and acceptance in English (1399).

The actions of Henry V (1413-22) signaled a watershed for use of English in writing. Henry adopted the vernacular in 1417, the year he launched his second invasion of France. All of his correspondence, formerly in French or Latin, was from that point conducted in English. "The most dramatic and significant instance of his shift to English is found in the Chancery Warrants preserved in the Public Record Office: beginning on 5 August 1417 (four days after he landed in France), Henry began sending his warrants home to his Chancery in English and continued to do so with few exceptions until his death five years later" (Richardson 727). The influence of this action can be seen in the Brewers' Guild pronouncement (1422):

     Whereas our mother tongue, to wit, the English tongue, hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned; for that our most excellent lord king Henry the Fifth hath, in his letters missive, and divers affairs touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will [in it]; and for the better understanding of his people, hath, with a diligent mind, procured the common idiom (setting aside others) to be commended by the exercise of writing; and there are many of our craft of brewers who have the knowledge of writing and reading in the said English idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French, before these times used, they do not in any wise understand; for which causes, with many others, it being considered how that the greater part of the lords and trusty commons have begun to make their matters to be noted down in our mother tongue, so we also in our craft, following in some manner their steps, have decreed in future to commit to memory the needful things which concern us. (Herbert 1: 106; quoted in Baugh & Cable 150)

Thus, by the beginning of the second quarter of the fifteenth century, English had come back into use as the spoken language in all quarters, and had also begun to establish itself as the language of writing in England: the redevelopment of a standard written language had begun.

Middle English Grammatical/Syntactic Features

Pronouns

For a full range of the variation in late Middle English personal pronouns, consult the Oxford English Dictionary, Middle English Dictionary, and the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English.

Gmc Personal Pronouns OE Personal Pronouns EME Personal Pronouns PDE Personal Pronouns

Lexicon/Word stock

It may strike one as odd that the largest influx of French words comes as English is regaining its status among the nobility. This occurs around the middle of the thirteenth century, and the reason for it seems to be that in seeking words to express themselves in English, nobility fell back on the French vocabulary with which they were familiar.

French influences on vocabulary

Fewer words enter the language in the first 200 years after the Conquest than between 1250-1500 (about 900), and those that do exhibit peculiarities of Anglo-Norman phonology. The largest number of words from this period show influence of the Church.

After 1250, conditions change somewhat: those who had been accustomed to speaking French were now using English, and the loans entering the language result perhaps from a need to fill gaps in English lexicon or in speakers' knowledge of the lexicon. As the table below suggests, most of these items are words having to do with class and power:

In an number of instances, the Anglo-Saxon word survives along with the imported French term, so we have, for instance, the English calf and swine alongside the French-derived veal and pork: the French terms have come to refer to what's on the table, while the English words signify the animal it comes from.

Anglo-Norman/Central French

Words borrowed from Old French do not exhibit loss of s and replacement by circumflex (in French, the s before consonants lost at the end of the twelfth century): Old French feste (Modern French fête) > Middle English feste (PDE feast). The same process is illustrated by the PDE/Modern French doublets forest/forêt, hostel/hôtel, beast/bête.

At the beginning of words, in the same combination of consonants--st-- the s would also be lost, and replaced--at least in some respects--by an acute accent over the e. Thus the modern French/English pairs: établir/establish and état /(e)state

"Affricates" (the initial and final consonant sounds in "judge" and "church") were "softened" in French in the thirteenth century to the "fricative" sounds in "azure" and "shout." Thus those borrowings which retain the affricate pronunciation in English were borrowed before the thirteenth century (e.g., charge, chimney, jewel, just, and gentle, which are all pre-thirteenth-century borrowings).

On the other hand, the pronunciations of police and ravine retain the Continental, pre-Great Vowel Shift pronunciation, indicating a late borrowing: i.e., they were not targets for that Early Modern English sound change.

Anglo-Norman phonology also differed from that of Parisian, or Central French. In Anglo-Norman, initial ca- was often retained, while in Central French dialects it became a fricative, as illustrated by the pairs catel /chatel. The English verb catch comes from Anglo-Norman "cachier," while the verb chase comes from Central French "chacier" (pronounced in Modern French with the intial "sh" sound).

Central French avoided the initial labial consonant w-. The dialects of the northern and northeastern regions of France--possibly because of proximity to Flemish and Dutch--did not reject this phoneme: cf. Northern French/Central French doublets "warrant"/"garantir," "warden"/"guardian."

Central French also dropped the labial element in initial qu-. Thus we say "quit", "quarter," "quality," "question," etc. with the [kw] phoneme while in French the same spelling combination is pronounced with [k], as in the equivalent words "quitter," "quartier," "qualité."

Borrowed words also served as building blocks to which characteristically English word-formation principles were applied, as in gentlewoman, gentleman, (cf. gentilhomme), battleaxe (<OE æx).

Latin

The language also was importing Latin words during the Middle English period. Latin terms frequently entered the language through the process of translation. Wycliffite writings, for example, are credited with introducing over 1000 new words.

Sometimes, writers got a bit carried away, and such excessive use of Latinate vocabulary acquired the pejorative rubric, Aureate terms. We can see this propensity clearly in An Ballet ["Ballad"]of Our Lady, by the late fifteenth-century/early sixteenth-century Scottish poet, William Dunbar:

Hale, sterne superne! Hale, in eterne,
In Godis sicht to schyne!
Lucerne in derne, for to discerne	("lamp in the darkness")
Be glory and grace devyne;
Hodiern, modern, sempitern,
Angelicall regyne!
Our tern infern for to dispern	("woe"); ("reject"); ("drive away")
Helpe, rialest Rosyne!	("rose")

Continued excessive borrowing later results in a reaction known as the Inkhorn Controversy.

Arabic

Arab civilization was highly advanced at this time, and much of Western Europe's access to classical texts came through the Arabs. Arabic vocabulary, in turn, came into English indirectly during this period, through French and Latin, which meant that they underwent the phonetic changes peculiar to those languages before they reached English. Examples include:

zenith	< Arabic samt arras ("path overhead")
zero	< Arabic cifr (source also of cipher)
caliber	< qalib ("casting mold")
algebra	< al jebr ("the reunification," referring to the solving of equations)
alchohol	< al koh'l ("the essence")
orange	< naranj (with subsequent reanalysis)
spinach	< isfinaj
artichoke	< al kharshof

Dialects

As the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed toward the end of the fourteenth-century, Middle English was notable for its variety of form:

And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh, and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I god that non myswrite the,
Ne the mys-metre for defaute of tonge. (Troilus & Criseyde 5.1793-1796)

Chaucer exploits this variety in the Reeve's Tale by having the northern Reeve (whose own language is marked by northern features) tell a tale about two Cambridge students who speak an undeniably northern variety of English. In the Second Shepherd's Play (ca. 1500), which was written in the North in a Northern dialect, the character Mak tries to conceal his identity by speaking in Southern English. His ruse is seen through and he is told to "Tak outt that sothren tothe and sett in a torde!" (lines 215-216).

Barbara Strang observes memorably that:

[Middle English] is, par excellence, the dialectal phase of English, in the sense that while dialects have been spoken at all periods, it was [in the Middle English period] that divergent local usage was normally indicated in writing.  (1970, p. 224)

The principal Middle English dialects are known as Northern, East and West Midlands, and Southern. Characteristic Northern features include the plural indicative present of verbs in -es as contrasted with the Southern -eth and the Midlands -en inflectional endings. The th- plural pronoun forms (derived from Old Norse) were in evidence only in the North in the early Middle English period; by Chaucer's time, the nominative they form had become commonplace in London and other parts of the South, but the objective their and them forms were still unusual (Chaucer routinely used the hire/here and hem forms). Northern Middle English retained the spellings with a in words like bane and ham (Southern bone and home), and the unpalatalized sal and kirk for shall and church.

In the Paston Letters, we have a good record of Norfolk speech/writing of the late Middle English Period, here from Margarete Paston to her "Ryth wyrchepful hwsbond" John Paston (April 1448):

In this sample, we can see the spellings qh- for present-day wh- and x- for present-day sh-, characteristic spellings of East Anglia, of which Norfolk is the northernmost shire. Note also the final -th spellings for present-day -ght ("browth," "nowth")

Dan Michael, of Kent, wrote the Ayenbite of Inwyt (the "again(st)-bite [remorse] of conscience") around 1340. in his preface ("uore speche") he wrote:

Dan Michael's Kentish spellings, many of which also occur in texts from the Southwest, reflect the voicing of s- and -f- in self ("-zelue") and first ("auerst" and "uerste"), and the retention of the h-initial plural pronouns ("hi," "ham"), and present-day sh- spelled as "ss-".

Standardization

Despite the status of the West Saxon dialect of Old English as a literary standard, the standard variety of Middle English (and hence also of PDE) derives from the Central Midlands, an area demarcated roughly by the triangle formed by Oxford, Cambridge, and London. This is also the area most influenced by the Danelaw. Present-Day Standard English, then, can be seen to descend from the compromises negotiated between Old Norse and Old English speakers (of the Mercian dialect) in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and by the developments that result from those contacts in subsequent generations of speakers: the leveling of inflections, the consequent increase in importance of word order to signal grammatical relationships, the adoption of th- third-person plural pronouns, and the -s third-person singular, present-tense verb inflection, among other features.

Many regard the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton, in 1476, as being of paramount importance to the establishment of a linguistic standard, especially in spelling. But while the printing press provided the opportunity for standardization, there seems to have been no "house standard" in Caxton's shop ( though his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, did develop a standard spelling system: see Aronoff). Caxton's perplexity over linguistic variation is reflected in his preface to his edition of Eneydos, a paraphrase of Virgil's Aeneid, which he translated from French and published in 1490 (the crux of the matter is the confusion between the northern egges and the southern, Anglo-Saxon-derived, eyren):

And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that. which was vsed and spoken whan I was borne / For we englysshe men / ben borne vnder domynacyon of the mone. whiche is neuer stedfaste / but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth another season / And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse, for to have sayled ouer the see into zelande / and for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond. and wente to lande for to refreshe them And one of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete. and specyally he axyd after eggys And the good wyf answerde. that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry. for he also coude speke no frenshe. but wold have hadde egges / and she vnderstode hym not / And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde have eyren / then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel / Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. egges or eyren / certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes euery man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre, wyll vtter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes / that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym/ (Quoted in Bolton 2-3)

An earlier, but similar observation is made in Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, translated in 1387 by John Trevisa, and modernized here:

Also English men, though they had from the beginning three manner speech, southern, northern, and middle speech in the middle of the land, as they came of three manner people of Germania, nonetheless by mixing and mingling, first with Danes and afterward with Normans, in many the country language is impaired; and some use strange wlaffing, chytering, harring, and garring grisbitting . . . .

. . . for men of the east with men of the west, as it were under the same part of heaven, accord more in sounding of speech than men of the north with men of the south. Therefore is it that Mercians, that be men of middle England, as it were partners of the ends, understand better the side languages, northern and southern, than northern and southern understand each other.

All the language of the Northumbrians, and specially of York, is so sharp, slitting, and rasping, and unshaped, that we southern men may that language hardly understand. (Myers & Hoffman 116, quoting from Rolf Kaiser, Medieval English [Berlin, 1961], 526-527)

The Lord's Prayer (Pater Noster) in Middle English

 

Web Links

• Color facsimiles and transcriptions of William Caxton's 1st and 2nd editions of the Canterbury Tales (the British Li brary copies)
• Juris Lidaka's handout on ME Versions of Psalm 23
• UVa Middle English Texts
  • Middle English texts in electronic format (University of Virginia)...
• The Glossarial Database of Middle English
  • Glossaries for Chaucer, Gower, and more (Harvard University)...
• The Middle English Compendium (Middle English Dictionary, HyperBibliography of ME Prose and Verse, and and extensive collection of ME prose and verse texts).