Notes

The “-en” plural noun ending of Old English (e.g. house/housen, shoe/shoen, etc) had largely disappeared by the end of the Middle English period, replaced by the French plural ending “-s” (the “-en” ending only remains today in one or two important examples, such as children, brethren and oxen). Changes to some word forms stuck while others did not, so that we are left with inconsistencies like half and halves, grief and grieves, speech and speak, etc. In another odd example of gradual modernization, the indefinite article “a” subsumed over time the initial “n” of some following nouns, so that a napron became an apron, a nauger became an auger, etc, as well as the reverse case of an ekename becoming a nickname.

Although Old English had no distinction between the formal and informal second person singular, which was always expressed as thou, the words ye or you (previously the second person plural) were introduced in the 13th Century as the formal singular version (used with superiors or non-intimates), with thou remaining as the familiar, informal form.

Resurgence of English

It is estimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of the Viking and particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very existence of the English language looked to be in dire peril. In 1154, even the venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and, two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French that emerged as the language of England.

There were a number of contributing factors. The English, of necessity, had become “Normanized”, but, over time, the Normans also became “Anglicized”, particularly after 1204 when King John’s ineptness lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France and the Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties. Increasingly out of touch with their properties in France and with the French court and culture in general, they soon began to look on themselves as English. Norman French began gradually to degenerate and atrophy. While some in England spoke French and some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both), everyone, from the highest to the lowest, spoke English, and it gradually became the lingua franca of the nation once again.

The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453) had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence. The Black Death of 1349 - 1350 killed about a third of the English population (which was around 4 million at that time), including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), was adopted in 1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the language of instruction in schools.

The following passage is taken from a late 14th Century work called “Mandeville's Travels” about travels in foreign land:

In þat lond ben trees þat beren wolle, as þogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all þing þat may ben made of wolle. In þat contree ben many ipotaynes, þat dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and þei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd before; and þei eten men, whan þei may take hem. And þere ben ryueres and watres þat ben fulle byttere, þree sithes more þan is the water of the see. In þat contré ben many griffounes, more plentee þan in ony other contree. Sum men seyn þat þei han the body vpward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly þei seyn soth þat þei ben of þat schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong, þanne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere þan an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o griffoun þere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, 3if he may fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen 3oked togidere, as þei gon at the plowgh.
There are clearly many more recognizable words in this sample than in the Old English passage, especially once the continued use of þ ("thorn") to represent the sound “th” is accepted. Another now obsolete character 3 (“yogh”, more or less equivalent in most cases to the modern consonantal “y” as in yellow or sometimes like the “ch” in loch) is also used in this passage, and the letters “v” and “u” seem to be used more or less interchangeably (e.g. vpward for upward, ryueres for rivers, treuly for truly). The indications of a language in a state of flux are also apparent in the variety of spellings of the same words even within this short passage (e.g. contré and contree, þan and þanne, water and watres). Some holdovers from Old English inflections remain (e.g. present tense verbs still receive a plural inflection, as in beren, dwellen, han and ben), and many words still have the familiar medieval trailing “e” (e.g. wolle, benethe, suche, fynde, etc), but the overall appearance is much more modern than that of Old English.
Throughout the Middle English period, as in Old English, all the consonants were pronounced, so that the word knight, for example, would have been pronounced more like “k-neecht” (with the “ch” as in the Scottish loch) than like the modern English knight. By the late 14th Century, the final “e” in many, but not all, words had ceased to be pronounced (e.g. it was silent in words like kowthe and thanne, but pronounced in words like ende, ferne, straunge, etc).

Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature

exts in Middle English (as opposed to French or Latin) begin as a trickle in the 13th Century, with works such as the debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” (probably composed around 1200) and the long historical poem known as Layamon's “Brut” (from around the same period). Most of Middle English literature, at least up until the flurry of literary activity in the latter part of the 14th Century, is of unknown authorship.

Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous “Canterbury Tales” in the early 1380s, and crucially he chose to write it in English. Other important works were written in English around the same time, if not earlier, including William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” and the anonymous “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. But the “Canterbury Tales” is usually considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin.

In the 858 lines of the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”, almost 500 different French loanwards occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucer’s vocabulary is French in origin. However, the overall sense of his work is very much of a re-formed English, a complete, flexible and confident language, more than adequate to produce great literature. Chaucer introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts - these were almost certainly words in everyday use in 14th Century London, but first attested in Chaucer's written works. Words like paramour, difficulty, significance, dishonesty, edifice, ignorant, etc, are all from French roots, but when he wanted to portray the earthy working man of England (e.g. the Miller), he consciously used much more Old English vocabulary, and he also reintroduced many old words that had fallen out of favour, such as churlish, farting, friendly, learning, loving, restless, wifely, willingly, etc. The list of words first found in Chaucer's works goes on: absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, desperate, discomfit, digestion, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative, miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, princess, resolve, rumour, scissors, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine, village, vulgar, wallet, wildness, etc, etc.

Such was the pace of continuous change to the language at this time, that different forms of words were often used interchangeably, even by the same author, and this flexibility (or inconsistency) in spelling is quite noticeable in Chaucer’s work (e.g. yeer and yere, doughtren and doughtres, etc). However, it should be noted that, because Chaucer’s work was copied by several different scribes, and we have no original in Chaucer’s own hand, different manuscripts have different spellings, none of which are definitive (e.g. the same word is variously rendered as site, sighte, syth, sigh and cite in different manuscripts).

In 1384, John Wycliffe (Wyclif) produced his translation of “The Bible” in vernacular English. This challenge to Latin as the language of God was considered a revolutionary act of daring at the time, and the translation was banned by the Church in no uncertain terms (however, it continued to circulate unofficially). Although perhaps not of the same literary calibre as Chaucer (in general, he awkwardly retained the original Latin word order, for instance), Wycliffe’s “Bible” was nevertheless a landmark in the English language. Over 1,000 English words were first recorded in it, most of them Latin-based, often via French, including barbarian, birthday, canopy, child-bearing, communication, cradle, crime, dishonour, emperor, envy, godly, graven, humanity, glory, injury, justice, lecher, madness, mountainous, multitude, novelty, oppressor, philistine, pollute, profession, puberty, schism, suddenly, unfaithful, visitor, zeal, etc, as well as well-known phrases like an eye for an eye, woe is me, etc. However, not all of Wycliffe’s neologisms became enshrined in the language (e.g. mandement, descrive, cratch).

By the late 14th and 15th Century, the language had changed drastically, and Old English would probably have been almost as incomprehensible to Chaucer as it is to us today, even though the language of Chaucer is still quite difficult for us to read naturally. William Caxton, writing and printing less than a century after Chaucer, is noticeably easier for the modern reader to understand.