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Middle English language
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Middle English language , the vernacular spoken and written in England from about 1100 to about 1500, the descendant of the Old English language and the ancestor of Modern English.
(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)
The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early Middle English, from about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in use; (2) the Central Middle English period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the gradual formation of literary dialects , the use of an orthography greatly influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation of final unaccented -e , and the borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words; the period was especially marked by the rise of the London dialect , in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer; and (3) Late Middle English , from about 1400 to about 1500, which was marked by the spread of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish dialect and the other northern dialects. During this period the basic lines of inflection as they appear in Modern English were first established. Among the chief characteristic differences between Old and Middle English were the substitution of natural gender in Middle English for grammatical gender and the loss of the old system of declensions in the noun and adjective and, largely, in the pronoun.
The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large groups: (1) Southern (subdivided into Southeastern, or Kentish, and Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of the River Thames; (2) Midland (corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old English times) in the area from the Thames to southern South Yorkshire and northern Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish Lowlands , Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham, northern Lancashire, and most of Yorkshire.
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Middle English – an overview
Historical period, the most important linguistic developments, a multilingual context, borrowing from early scandinavian, borrowing from latin and/or french, pronunciation, a period characterized by variation, our surviving documents.
The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of ‘external’ history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.
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Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:
- in grammar , English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and more ‘analytic’.) Change was gradual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of English c .1500 was radically different from that of Old English. Grammatical gender was lost early in Middle English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms with final – e occurring after a preposition. In some other parts of the system some distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English the range of endings and their use among London writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for example, Shakespeare: probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare’s language is that verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in – en (at least in writing).
- in vocabulary , English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.
One other factor marks out the bulk of our Middle English evidence from the bulk of our Old English or early modern English evidence, although it is less directly a matter of change in the language than in how it is represented in writing:
- the surviving Middle English material is dominated by regional variation, and by (sometimes extreme) variation in how the same underlying linguistic units are represented in writing. This is not because people suddenly started using language in different ways in different places in the Middle English period, but because the fairly standardized late Old English literary variety broke down completely, and writing in English became fragmented, localized, and to a large extent improvised.
Medieval Britain had many languages. English continued to be in contact with Celtic languages on many of the internal frontiers within the British Isles. Until the use of Scandinavian languages in mainland Britain died out (the precise date of which is a matter of uncertainty), it continued to be in contact with these also. And, crucially, it was in contact with Latin and with French.
After the Norman Conquest, the ruling elite in England (in church as well as state) were French speakers. Before the Conquest, England had been relatively ‘advanced’ in the extent to which the vernacular language, rather than Latin, was used in writing. After the Conquest, English became pushed out of these functions almost entirely. Latin predominates in most types of writing in the immediately post-Conquest period. When, quite soon afterwards, we find a flowering of vernacular writing in a number of different text types and genres, this is in French, not English. Likewise it was French, not English, that generally vied with Latin in a wide range of technical and official functions until very near the end of the Middle English period. (What to call the French used in Britain in this period is a difficult scholarly question. Traditionally the term ‘Anglo-Norman’ has been used, notably in the title of The Anglo-Norman Dictionary . In fact, the present-day editors of that dictionary note that in many ways ‘Anglo-French’ is a more appropriate term, since it better reflects the wide variety of inputs shown by the French used in medieval Britain. OED3 retains the term ‘Anglo-Norman’ largely to maintain consistency with the title of The Anglo-Norman Dictionary .)
Up until about the middle of the fourteenth century, our surviving written records for Middle English of any variety are patchy, and can be characterized as a number of more or less isolated ‘islands’ of usage, reflecting the English of particular communities or even individuals who felt motivated, for various different reasons, to write something down in English. We have some substantial literary texts, such as the Ormulum or the Ancrene Wisse (both of which we will look at more closely below); in a very few cases, like the Ancrene Wisse and a small group of texts in a very similar language apparently from a very similar milieu, we can identify mini-traditions of English writing; but what we do not have are clear, well-established, persistent traditions of writing in English (whether for literary or non-literary purposes) from which any sort of standard written variety could grow.
From the later fourteenth century our records become more plentiful, especially for London, as the use of English increased in literary contexts and in a variety of different technical and official functions. English began more and more to be the default choice for major (broadly metropolitan) literary writers such as, in the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower (who still also wrote major poems in French and Latin), and (although his milieu was rather different) William Langland . We also continue to find substantial literary works from parts of the country far removed from London, and reflecting very distinct local varieties of English, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight .
In this same period religious writings in English become more and more common; these include the first complete English translation of the Bible, the Wycliffite Bible , which emerged from the circle of followers of the reformer John Wyclif . We also find increasing numbers of scientific and medical texts written in English.
As it came to share and, eventually, take over various functions from Latin and French, English was hugely influenced by these languages, in its stock of word forms, in the meanings these words showed, and in the phrases and structures in which they were used. Thus the vocabulary of such fields as law, government, business, and religion (among many others) became filled with words of Latin or French origin, as people began using English to express technical matters which had previously been the domain of Latin or French.
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The long succession of Viking Age raids, settlements, conquests, and political take-overs that played such a large part in Anglo-Saxon history from the late-eighth century onwards resulted in many speakers of varieties of early Scandinavian being found in Britain. In particular, there were areas of significant Scandinavian settlement in the east and north east of England (chiefly of speakers of East Norse varieties) and in the north west of England (chiefly of speakers of West Norse varieties), as well as in parts of Scotland. We speak of ‘early Scandinavian’ in this context because we are dealing with the antecedent stage of the later Scandinavian languages, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, etc. (As regards the divisions among the Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Norwegian are both West Norse languages, while Swedish and Danish are East Norse languages; however, very few of the Scandinavian loanwords in English can be assigned with any confidence to specifically East Norse or West Norse input.)
Gradually, over the course of generations, the use of early Scandinavian died out in England, but not without leaving a significant impact on the vocabulary of English. When most borrowings occurred is a matter of some uncertainty; Old English texts up to about the year 1100 are estimated to contain only about 100 Scandinavian loanwords, many of them in isolated examples. Most of these words come from semantic areas in which there was significant cultural influence from the Scandinavians, such as seafaring, warfare, social ranks, law, or coins and measures. Many, many more Scandinavian borrowings are first recorded in Middle English texts, but it is very possible (and indeed likely) that most of these first entered some varieties of English in the Old English period. One major indicator of this is that very early Middle English texts from areas of high Scandinavian settlement are full of Scandinavian borrowings.
The long homiletic poem entitled the Ormulum is the work of an Augustinian canon called Orm (a name of Scandinavian origin) who probably lived in south Lincolnshire; the dating is controversial, but Orm may have started work on the text as early as the middle of the twelfth century and continued well into old age. It contains well over a hundred words of either certain or likely Scandinavian origin, including some which are of common occurrence in modern English such as to anger, to bait, bloom, boon, booth, bull, to die, to flit, ill, law, low, meek , to raise , root , to scare , skill, skin, to take, though, to thrive, wand, to want, wing, wrong . Perhaps most interestingly of all, it contains some of the earliest evidence for one of the most important Scandinavian borrowings, the pronoun they and the related object form them and possessive their .
The example of they , them , and their is very instructive about the nature and extent of Scandinavian influence on English. It is very rare for pronouns to be borrowed; the fact that these forms were borrowed probably reflects both the very close contact between Scandinavian and English speakers, and the close structural and lexical similarities between the two languages. Because so many words, forms, and constructions were already either identical or very similar, this made it much easier for even grammatical words to be borrowed.
Something else illustrated by they , them , and their is the long process of internal spread, from variety to variety, shown by many words of Scandinavian origin after they entered English. Orm uses they invariably, but them and their vary in his text with the native forms hem and her . In later northern or eastern texts them and their quite quickly become the normal forms, but this takes much longer in other varieties: the most important early Chaucer manuscripts, from London in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, have typically they for the subject form but still hem and her for the object and possessive forms.
The inherited similarities between English and early Scandinavian also make it extremely difficult to be certain in very many cases whether a word actually shows a Scandinavian borrowing at all, or an Old English word which is simply poorly attested in our surviving sources. The Scandinavian component in the total vocabulary of Middle English perhaps amounts to somewhere in the region of 2 or 3 per cent, but any figures must be treated with a good deal of caution. In spite of the relatively small total, many of the words occur with quite high frequency, especially in texts from more northerly and easterly areas. Some Scandinavian borrowings which were doubtless borrowed in either Old English or Middle English are first attested much later; this is especially the case with words preserved only in regional use.
The Latin component in the vocabulary of Old English was small, only amounting to a few per cent of the total of surviving Old English words, and many (but by no means all) of these words were doubtless of very rare occurrence, confined to very occasional use by scholars. The securely identified pre-Conquest borrowings from French amount to barely a handful, and even in very late, post-Conquest Old English not many more are recorded.
In Middle English this picture changes radically. If we look at the vocabulary of Middle English as a whole, the evidence of dictionaries suggests that the number of words borrowed from French and/or Latin outstrips the number of words surviving from Old English by quite a margin. However, words surviving from Old English (as well as a few of the Scandinavian borrowings, especially they ) continue to top the high frequency lists (as indeed mostly remains the case even in modern-day English).
The formulation ‘French and/or Latin’ is an important one in this period. Often we can tell that a word has come from French rather than Latin very clearly because of differences of word form: for instance, English peace is clearly a borrowing from Anglo-Norman and Old French pais , not from Latin pac -, pāx . Some other pretty clear examples are marble , mercy , prison , palfrey , to pay , poor , and rule . It is often much more difficult to be certain that a Middle English word has come solely from Latin and not partly also from French; this is because, in addition to the words it inherited from Latin (which typically showed centuries of change in word form), French also borrowed extensively from Latin (often re-borrowing words which already existed in a distinct form). Some typical examples are animal , imagination , to inform , patient , perfection , profession , religion , remedy .
Given these factors, any figures for the relative proportions of French and Latin borrowings in the Middle English period have to be hedged about with many provisos. However, the broad picture is clear. In Middle English, borrowing from French is at least as frequent as borrowing from Latin, and probably rather more frequent.
By 1500, over 40 per cent of all of the words that English has borrowed from French had made a first appearance in the language, including a very high proportion of those French words which have come to play a central part in the vocabulary of modern English. By contrast, the greatest peak of borrowing from Latin was still to come, in the early modern period; by 1500, under 20 per cent of the Latin borrowings found in modern English had yet entered the language.
The greatest peak of first examples of French borrowings in English comes in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This probably largely corresponds to the realities of linguistic change, since we know that this is the period in which English was taking on many technical functions from Latin and, especially, French, at least so far as written records were concerned. However, this is precisely when our volume of surviving Middle English material also goes up dramatically, and so we cannot always rule out the possibility that words existed in English rather earlier. Certainly, some much earlier texts, such as the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse , show considerable borrowing from French at an early date, and we cannot always be certain that an absence of earlier attestations necessarily means that a word did not exist in at least some varieties of English at an earlier date.
Mixed language texts pose many difficult challenges. One quite common pattern is for accounts, records, and other official documents to have Latin as the ‘matrix’ language, but to switch freely to a vernacular language to name particular things or concepts. Whether the vernacular language in question is French or English can be very difficult to tell, or in many cases plain impossible. In fact, many scholars who have spent time working on such documents take the view that the writers themselves probably did not always distinguish very clearly between one clearly defined vocabulary as ‘English’ and another as ‘French’; the considerable overlap, of words belonging to both languages (as a result of earlier borrowing), in a context in which new words were being borrowed all of the time, would indeed have made it almost impossible to make such a clear distinction, especially in many areas of technical vocabulary. For some examples of some of the implications for OED data see the entries for oillet n., pane n.¹, pastern n., pullen n., rack v.², russet n. and adj.
Since our surviving Middle English evidence is so characterized by regional variation, it is very difficult to summarize ‘typical’ Middle English pronunciation, just as it is difficult to summarize ‘typical’ Middle English morphology, or grammar.
As a general rule of thumb, anyone entirely unfamiliar with Middle English who wants to be able to pronounce Middle English word forms is better off trusting the Middle English spelling, rather than making assumptions on the basis of the modern English pronunciation. In particular, vowel letters normally have values much closer to what is typical in modern continental European languages, than to the values that they have in modern English.
- for example, the i in fīn ‘fine’ represents a long monophthong similar to that in modern English meet , while the e in mēten ‘to meet’ represents a sound more similar to that in modern English make (but a monophthong, not a diphthong).
See Edmund Weiner’s piece on early modern English to see how the Great Vowel Shift changed this situation. See also the OED entries for A n., E n., I n., O n., U n. for much more detail on the development of the various sounds represented by these letters.
The majority of later Old English texts are written in a fairly uniform type of literary language, based on the West Saxon dialect. The linguistic forms employed show considerable regularity, as do the spellings used to represent them.
The political and cultural upheavals of the Norman Conquest completely changed this situation: people who chose to write in English in the early Middle English period typically had to improvise, in order to find ways of representing a particular local variety of Middle English in writing. To do this they often had to draw upon spelling traditions that were more typically used in writing Latin or French. Variation reigns supreme. Some groups of manuscripts show very similar language represented in very similar orthography, but in the broader picture these appear isolated pockets.
In later Middle English spelling habits typically become rather more stable, and we generally find more consistency in the strategies used for representing particular sounds in writing. However, a considerable degree of spelling variation remains the rule rather than the exception, and it is quite typical to find the same word spelled in slightly different ways within a single page of a single manuscript. If we look at the full repertory of surviving spelling forms, the situation can still seem quite bewildering; for instance, the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English records around 500 different spellings for through .
As well as showing variation in how to represent sounds in spelling, our surviving late Middle English writings also continue to reflect a wide variety of different regional varieties of English. Although London and its dialect became of increasing importance in official functions and in literary production, and many of the major late Middle English writers were based in or near the capital, the real dominance of a metropolitan variety over all others in literary use comes only in the early modern period.
London English of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showed a wide variety of inputs, among which a number of features from the central and east midlands figured strongly. It is in no way an interrupted continuation of the predominantly south-western Old English literary language, and in many key respects it reflects the language of parts of the country for which we have little or no evidence from the Old English period.
There also continued to be a great deal of variation within London English, in written forms as well as spoken. The focused usage of a number of official documents, often referred to as ‘Chancery English’, had a significant input into the practices of early modern English printers, but this is only one aspect of a very complex story, which is still subject to considerable uncertainty and debate.
This complicated picture is complicated still more by the nature of our surviving documents, which is discussed in the following section.
We have much more surviving Middle English evidence than we have for Old English, but still far less than we have for the developing, London-based standard language of the sixteenth century and later. The information that we do have is patchy and uneven: we have a pretty good record for London and the surrounding area from about the end of the fourteenth century onwards, but for most parts of Britain throughout the period we have only isolated flashes of illumination.
Our surviving evidence for Middle English also poses a number of interesting challenges for historical lexicography. The overwhelming majority of our information comes from hand-written manuscripts. (From the last quarter of the fifteenth century onwards there are also printed books, and of course there is also some written text on coins, paintings, memorials, etc.) Manuscript evidence can present many difficult challenges for dating and interpretation.
Many (but by no means all) collections of functional records, e.g. recording business transactions, are in hands which are either contemporary or very nearly contemporary with the information being recorded. But this is much more rarely the case with literary works (taking this in a broad sense, to include e.g. technical or religious treatises); these are often recorded only in much later manuscripts, and even when the manuscripts are contemporary or nearly contemporary, they may show extensive departures from the language of the author.
In a very few cases, we have manuscripts surviving in the hand of the author, known technically as ‘holograph’ manuscripts. Pretty certain cases include: the Ormulum (see above); from the fourteenth century, the Ayenbite of Inwyt by Dan Michel of the Northgate; and, from the fifteenth century, various works by Thomas Hoccleve and John Capgrave. Most literary works survive in copies by non-authorial hands. These pose various interconnected problems.
Firstly, we need to assign a date to the manuscript in which our evidence occurs. This is often not a simple matter. Some manuscripts are dated on the basis of pieces of internal evidence, such as a dated inscription in one of the scribal hands, or a reference to a particular historical event. Other manuscripts contain no clear indication of date themselves, but are dated on the basis of careful comparison with the hands of other manuscripts which can be dated more confidently on other grounds. In this way, palaeographers have built up a careful picture of the development of the various different scripts that scribes used in medieval Britain. However, very many hedges, provisos, and qualifications are necessary at every stage in this process: even datable manuscripts can often only be dated very approximately, and dating to a particular year can only rarely be relied on as 100 per cent secure; the palaeographical dating that builds on these foundations is dependent on the skill and judgements of palaeographers, who will rarely claim precision for a particular dating, and who will often differ from one another in their judgements. Normally, palaeographical datings are expressed as an approximate date range. In some cases, palaeographers may only feel confident in assigning a manuscript to somewhere within a period of as much as a hundred years (this is quite often the case with fifteenth-century manuscripts).
Once we have a date for our manuscript, we then have the problem of trying to decide whether it is reflecting the contemporary language of the scribe, or the language of the original author, or of an earlier stage in a chain of copying, or whether it shows some sort of mixed language, with features from various different points in the chain.
Modern work on the habits of medieval English scribes suggests that their behaviour can be divided into three types:
- scribes who ‘translate’ consistently into their own dialect
- scribes who copy more-or-less precisely, letter-for-letter, from their exemplar
- scribes who ‘translate’ only partially, replacing some words or forms with those from their own dialect, but leaving others unchanged
Since our surviving manuscripts sometimes stand at the end of a long chain of copying, in which successive scribes may have adopted different approaches, the possible permutations become very complex indeed.
All of this has some important implications for historical lexicographers, including:
- it is only quite rarely, and in very special circumstances, that we can be absolutely certain that the precise reading we find in a manuscript is authorial.
- but equally, we cannot normally assume that the language of a manuscript precisely reflects the contemporary usage of its scribe, especially as regards vocabulary: even a consistent ‘translator’ may have left in some words or forms which he would not have selected in his own day-to-day linguistic usage.
- comparison between different manuscripts of a work often indicates that a particular word is very likely to have been used by the original author, but various scribes have made their own choices about spelling; the different spellings adopted may well correspond to different pronunciations, and leave us in doubt about the authorial form.
- thus, dating of words and forms from the Middle English period is often hedged around with uncertainty – not only do we have only a very partial reflection of actual linguistic use, but we also cannot be certain that we even have a faithful ‘snapshot’ of a particular moment in time.
Further reading on Middle English
- Simon Horobin and Jeremy Smith, An Introduction to Middle English (2002)
- Roger Lass, ‘Phonology and morphology’, in Norman Blake, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. ii: 1066–1476 (1992), 23–155.
- Roger Lass and Margaret Laing, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English,1150–1325: Introduction ..
- Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (1986)
- Philip Durkin ‘“Mixed” etymologies of Middle English items in OED3 : some questions of methodology and policy’, in Dictionaries 23 (2002), 142–55.
- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology (2009)
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Author: Philip Durkin, OED Deputy Chief Editor
Old English – an overview
Old English refers to the language as it was used in the long period of time from the coming of Germanic invaders and settlers to Britain up to the Norman Conquest of 1066, and beyond into the first century of Norman rule in England.
Old English in the OED
Old English is the term used to refer to the oldest recorded stage of the English language, i.e. from the earliest evidence in the seventh century to the period of transition with Middle English in the mid-twelfth century.
Dating Middle English evidence in the OED
These notes explain some of the principles and procedures involved in the dating of Middle English sources in the OED.
Early Modern English – an overview
The early modern English period follows the Middle English period towards the end of the fifteenth century and coincides closely with the Tudor (1485–1603) and Stuart (1603-1714) dynasties.
History of English
Middle English (c. 1100 – c. 1500)
Norman Conquest
The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who supported him.
The conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France about 200 years before (the very word Norman comes originally from Norseman ). However, they had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly adopted French (which is a so-called Romance language, derived originally from the Latin, not Germanic, branch of Indo-European), to the extent that not a single Norse word survived in Normandy.
However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called Anglo-Norman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of Paris of the period, which is known as Francien. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England became even more isolated from continental Europe.
Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years (Henry IV, who came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since before the Conquest to have English as his mother tongue). While Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly used for written language, especially by the Church and in official records. For example, the “Domesday Book” , in which William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was written in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.
However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the population, an estimated 95%) continued to speak English – considered by the Normans a low-class, vulgar tongue – and the two languages developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. It is this mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman that is usually referred to as Middle English.
French (Anglo-Norman) Influence
The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters of crown and nobility (e.g. crown , castle , prince , count , duke , viscount , baron , noble , sovereign , heraldry ); of government and administration (e.g. parliament , government , governor , city ); of court and law (e.g. court , judge , justice , accuse , arrest , sentence , appeal , condemn , plaintiff , bailiff , jury , felony , verdict , traitor , contract , damage , prison ); of war and combat (e.g. army , armour , archer , battle , soldier , guard , courage , peace , enemy , destroy ); of authority and control (e.g. authority , obedience , servant , peasant , vassal , serf , labourer , charity ); of fashion and high living (e.g. mansion , money , gown , boot , beauty , mirror , jewel , appetite , banquet , herb , spice , sauce , roast , biscuit ); and of art and literature (e.g. art , colour , language , literature , poet , chapter , question ). Curiously, though, the Anglo-Saxon words cyning (king), cwene (queen), erl (earl), cniht (knight), ladi (lady) and lord persisted.
While humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g. baker , miller , shoemaker , etc), the more skilled trades adopted French names (e.g. mason , painter , tailor , merchant , etc). While the animals in the field generally kept their English names (e.g. sheep , cow , ox , calf , swine , deer ), once cooked and served their names often became French (e.g. beef , mutton , pork , bacon , veal , venison , etc). Sometimes a French word completely replaced an Old English word (e.g. crime replaced firen , place replaced stow , people replaced leod , beautiful replaced wlitig , uncle replaced eam , etc). Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form a new word, such as the French gentle and the Germanic man combined to formed gentleman . Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly different senses (e.g. the Old English doom and French judgement , hearty and cordial , house and mansion , etc).
But, often, different words with roughly the same meaning survived, and a whole host of new, French-based synonyms entered the English language (e.g. the French maternity in addition to the Old English motherhood , infant to child , amity to friendship , battle to fight , liberty to freedom , labour to work , desire to wish , commence to start , conceal to hide , divide to cleave , close to shut , demand to ask , chamber to room , forest to wood , power to might , annual to yearly , odour to smell , pardon to forgive , aid to help , etc). Over time, many near synonyms acquired subtle differences in meaning (with the French alternative often suggesting a higher level of refinement than the Old English), adding to the precision and flexibility of the English language. Even today, phrases combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman French doublets are still in common use (e.g. law and order , lord and master , love and cherish , ways and means , etc). Bilingual word lists were being compiled as early as the 13th Century.
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Excerpt from “Le Chanson de Roland” in Norman French (c. 1160) (23 sec) .
The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural Anglo-Norman and the softer Francien dialect of Paris were also carried over into English pronunciations. For instance, words like quit , question , quarter , etc, were pronounced with the familiar “kw” sound in Anglo-Norman (and, subsequently, English) rather than the “k” sound of Parisian French. The Normans tended to use a hard “c” sound instead of the softer Francien “ch”, so that charrier became carry , chaudron became cauldron , etc. The Normans tended to use the suffixes “-arie” and “-orie” instead of the French “-aire” and “-oire”, so that English has words like victory (as compared to victoire ) and salary (as compared to salaire ), etc. The Normans, and therefore the English, retained the “s” in words like estate , hostel , forest and beast , while the French gradually lost it ( état , hôtel , forêt , bête ).
French scribes changed the common Old English letter pattern “hw” to “wh”, largely out of a desire for consistency with “ch” and “th”, and despite the actual aspirated pronunciation, so that hwaer became where , hwaenne became when and hwil became while . A “w” was even added, for no apparent reason, to some words that only began with “h” (e.g. hal became whole ). Another oddity occurred when hwo became who , but the pronunciation changed so that the “w” sound was omitted completely. There are just some of the kinds of inconsistencies that became ingrained in the English language during this period.
During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the second half of the 12th Century, many more Francien words from central France were imported in addition to their Anglo-Norman counterparts (e.g. the Francien chase and the Anglo-Norman catch ; royal and real ; regard and reward ; gauge and wage ; guile and wile ; guardian and warden ; guarantee and warrant ). Regarded as the most cultured woman in Europe, Eleanor also championed many terms of romance and chivalry (e.g. romance , courtesy , honour , damsel , tournament , virtue , music , desire , passion , etc).
Many more Latin-derived words came into use (sometimes through the French, but often directly) during this period, largely connected with religion, law, medicine and literature, including scripture , collect , meditation , immortal , oriental , client , adjacent , combine , expedition , moderate , nervous , private , popular , picture , legal , legitimate , testimony , prosecute , pauper , contradiction , history , library , comet , solar , recipe , scribe , scripture , tolerance , imaginary , infinite , index , intellect , magnify and genius . But French words continued to stream into English at an increasing pace, with even more French additions recorded after the 13th Century than before, peaking in the second half of the 14th Century, words like abbey , alliance , attire , defend , navy , march , dine , marriage , figure , plea , sacrifice , scarlet , spy , stable , virtue , marshal , esquire , retreat , park , reign , beauty , clergy , cloak , country , fool , coast , magic , etc.
A handful of French loanwords established themselves only in Scotland (which had become increasingly English in character during the early Middle English period, with Gaelic pushed further and further into the Highlands and Islands), including bonnie and fash . Distinctive spellings like “quh-” for “wh-” took hold (e.g. quhan and quhile for whan and while ), and the Scottish accent gradually became more and more pronounced, particularly after Edward I’s inconclusive attempts at annexation. Scottish English’s radically distinct evolution only petered out in the 17th Century after King James united the crowns of Scotland and England (1603), and the influence of a strongly emerging Standard English came to bear during the Early Modern period.
Middle English After the Normans
During these Norman-ruled centuries in which English as a language had no official status and no regulation, English had become the third language in its own country. It was largely a spoken rather than written language, and effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole. The main dialect regions during this time are usually referred to as Northern, Midlands, Southern and Kentish, although they were really just natural developments from the Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish dialects of Old English. Within these, though, a myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up, and indeed the proliferation of regional dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of England could not even understand people from another part just 50 miles away.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed (London had been the largest city for some time, and became the Norman capital at the beginning of the 12th Century), and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. The 14th Century London dialect of Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English, whereas text in the Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely foreign language.
It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the 14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa” (like the “e” in taken , or the “i” in pencil ). As inflectons disappeared, word order became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.
Passage from “Ormulum” (late 12th Century) (17 sec) (from Palgrave Macmillan Opens in a new window ).
The “Ormulum” , a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel (much as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”. This unusual phonetic spelling system has given philologists an invaluable snap-shot of they way Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.
Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:
- the Old English letters ð (“edh” or “eth”) and þ (“thorn”), which did not exist in the Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and replaced with “th”, and the letter Ȝ (“yogh”) was generally replaced with “g” (or often with “gh”, as in ghost or night );
- the simple word the (written þ e using the thorn character) generally replaced the bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and most nouns had lost their inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;
- the Norman “qu” largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon “cw” (so that cwene became queen , cwic became quick , etc);
- the “sh” sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old English, including “sc”, was regularized as “sh” or “sch” (e.g. scip became ship );
- the initial letters “hw” generally became “wh” (as in when , where , etc);
- a “c” was often, but not always, replaced by “k” (e.g. cyning / cyng became king ) or “ck” (e.g. boc became bock and, later, book ) or “ch” (e.g. cild became child , cese became cheese , etc);
- the common Old English “h” at the start of words like hring (ring) and hnecca (neck) was deleted;
- conversely, an “h” was added to the start of many Romance loanword (e.g. honour , heir , honest , habit , herb , etc), but was sometimes pronounced and sometimes not;
- “f” and “v” began to be differentiated (e.g. feel and veal ), as did “s” and “z” (e.g. seal and zeal ) and “ng” and “n” (e.g. thing and thin );
- “v” and “u” remained largely interchangeable, although “v” was often used at the start of a word (e.g. ( vnder ), and “u” in the middle (e.g. haue ), quite the opposite of today;
- because the written “u” was similar to “v”, “n” and “m”, it was replaced in many words with an “o” (e.g. son , come , love , one );
- the “ou” spelling of words like house and mouse was introduced;
- many long vowel sounds were marked by a double letter (e.g. boc became booc , se became see , etc), or, in some cases, a trailing “e” became no longer pronounced but retained in spelling to indicate a long vowel (e.g. nose , name );
- the long “a” vowel of Old English became more like “o” in Middle English, so that ham became home , stan became stone , ban became bone , etc;
- short vowels were identified by consonant doubling (e.g siting became sitting , etc).
Sumer is icumen in” (c. 1260) (35 sec) .
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 þ at lond ben trees þ at beren wolle, as þ ogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all þ ing þ at may ben made of wolle. In þ at contree ben many ipotaynes, þ at dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and þ ei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd before; and þ ei eten men, whan þ ei may take hem. And þ ere ben ryueres and watres þ at ben fulle byttere, þ ree sithes more þ an is the water of the see. In þ at contré ben many griffounes, more plentee þ an in ony other contree. Sum men seyn þ at þ ei han the body vpward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly þ ei seyn soth þ at þ ei ben of þ at schapp. But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more strong, þ anne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more gret and strongere þ an an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o griffoun þ ere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, Ȝif he may fynde him at the poynt, or two oxen Ȝoked togidere, as þ ei gon at the plowgh.
Beginning of the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (late 14th Century) (61 sec) (from Norton Anthology of English Literature Opens in a new window ).
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 Ȝ (“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
Texts 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.
Beginning of the “General Prologue” to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (67 sec) .
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.
Richard is an English teacher with over 25 years of experience. He has dedicated his life and career to his passion for English, literature, and pedagogy, guiding multiple generations of students on their journey to discovery.
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Essays on Middle English literature
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MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION
An introduction to Middle English Literature, including: discussion of the historical context from Anglo-Norman period to the 14th Century, the development of the Middle English language, the medieval synthesis of Judeo-Christian faith and classical philosophy, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, and an analysis of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Truth" as representative of the medieval worldview.
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Katie Robison
This dissertation argues that late medieval dream poets viewed writing as a serious means of therapy, capable of healing both pscyhological and physiological ailments. Blending together the poetic revelatory tradition (influenced by Apocalpytic writings) with new understandings of health and medicine, fourteenth-century dream visions sought to treat the illnesses of their poetic personae by applying medical principles to literary bodies. It is the dream frame in particular, as both a reflection of the poet’s physical and mental condition and a catalyst for introspection and transformation, that enabled these poets to write through and for their bodies, ultimately facilitating healing. I take as case studies four late medieval dream visions: Le Roman de la Rose, Piers Plowman, The House of Fame, and L’Advision-Christine.
New Literary History
Ingrid Nelson
This essay proposes a biopolitics of lyric that comprises ethics, politics, and poetic form, exemplified in the philosophical lyrics of the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Lyric biopolitics is grounded in premodern and modern theories of “form, “rule,” and “life.” Rethinking formalism with respect to biopolitics draws on form’s plural meanings, acknowledges the intersection between ethics and politics in the categories of “life” and “rule,” and reveals how the physical, metaphysical, and aesthetic senses of form converge on the structures that shape life. Taking its cue from Agamben’s exploration of the medieval regula vitae (rule of life) as a foundation for a biopolitics of the rule, this essay suggests that a set of Chaucer’s philosophical lyrics, known as the Boethian lyrics, articulate a poetics of the rule, as sovereign rule and self-governance, navigable through medieval lyric form. Analyses of Chaucer’s poems “Fortune,” “Truth,” “Gentilesse,” and “Lak of Stedfastnesse” suggest a biopolitics of lyric that acknowledges the real conditions of medieval political existence and suggest a secular form-of-life. In Chaucer’s poetics of the rule, the rhetorical neatness of a rule’s formulation unfurls into the complexities of practice by way of medieval lyric forms that belie their apparent containment. These forms, like rules, are not bounded wholes but spaces of practice through which life is lived.
Maura Nolan
Jesse McDowell
What unites medieval scholars is the common understanding that Boethian thought has comprehensive influence on the literature and philosophy of medieval Europe, including the many works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet not much attention has been given to its nuanced appropriation in the Canterbury Tales. In the early and high middle ages, Boethian ideas burst out of literary works where destiny, chance, and providence govern themes across genres. Characters in these literary situations either overcome Fortuna or fall victim to her. Translations of De Consolatione Philosophiae abound throughout the period, and Chaucer the translator and poet intimated Boethian ideas in his works. In the Tales, Chaucer masterfully enacts elements of Fortuna and Providence in ways that seem united but are in fact disparate. By probing similar syntactical and philosophical passages of Chaucer’s own translation in the Boece, I argue that the narrative concerning Boethian themes in the Man of Law’s Tale stands alone as it evinces a different manifestation of destiny and chance in the performance of language and gender in Constance’s spiritual journey in the rudder-less ship than any other tale. Read against the Knight’s Tale, chance and destiny don’t solicit the powers of planetary agents striking down event-altering actions from the aether at will, void of attention to gender but focused on language, but rather elevate and yet expose the human condition to exile through theological imagery and spiritual vision. Chaucer plays out Boethian themes in chance and destiny in both tales, yet the shape of these themes reduces human agency in one and increases it in another; he prides human agency in The Man of Law’s Tale and diminishes it in The Knight’s Tale. These competing narratives could provide a methodology for analyzing the narratives in Chaucer’s contemporaries that might also exude a multiplicity of Boethian narratives.
Ancient Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
HARRIS ( K O N S T A N T I N O S ) NOTTAS , CO AUTHORS DTMS ET AL D T M S AS WELL AS MANY OTHER ANAGRAMS
Still convalescing and catching up on Reading, Reviews and such Here are 2 great samples
Zdravko Planinc
Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600
My three contributions cover Piers Plowman (Passus 17), The Piers Plowman Tradition, and the “Maye Eclogue” in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender.
Gillian Adler
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COMMENTS
Middle English language, the vernacular spoken and written in England from about 1100 to about 1500, the descendant of the Old English language and the ancestor of Modern English. (Read H.L. Mencken's 1926 Britannica essay on American English.) The history of Middle English is often divided into
The Church. The most important philosophical influence of the Middle Ages was the Church, which dominated life and literature. In medieval Britain, "the Church " referred to the Roman Catholic Church. Although works such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reveal an exuberant, and often bawdy, sense of humor in the Middle Ages, people also ...
Middle English (abbreviated to ME [1]) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. [2]
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s.During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to ...
In terms of 'external' history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.
Norman Conquest. The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court.
Middle English Literature "Middle English literature" refers to English literature that developed during the roughly 300-year period from 1150 CE to around 1450 after the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (aka the Anglo-Saxons) settled in England in the latter part of the fifth century and eventually gave the country its name and language.
Misreading English Meter: 1400-1514 - Nicholas Myklebust. The Medieval English Begging Poem [Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve] - Dave Henderson. Law, Gender, and Judgment in Middle English Debate Poetry - Wendy A. Matlock. Reading Lydgate's Troy Book: Patronage, Politics, and History in Lancastrian England - Diana Fawsitt.
Essays on Middle English literature by Everett, Dorothy, 1894-1953. Publication date 1978 Topics Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 -- Criticism and interpretation, English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- History and criticism, Civilization, Medieval, in literature Publisher
A Handbook of Middle English Studies presents twenty-six original and accessible essays by leading scholars, analyzing the relationship between critical theory and late-medieval literature. The collection offers a range of entry points into the rich field of medieval literary studies, exploring subjects including the depiction of the self and ...
An introduction to Middle English Literature, including: discussion of the historical context from Anglo-Norman period to the 14th Century, the development of the Middle English language, the medieval synthesis of Judeo-Christian faith and classical ... This essay proposes a biopolitics of lyric that comprises ethics, politics, and poetic form ...
Middle English was a combination of the Anglo-Norman dialect and Old English. The primary change between Middle English and Old English was the simplification of grammar. Many famous texts arose during this period, including The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1440), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1400).
Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature. Featuring Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, William Langland, Margery Kempe, John Gower, Julian of Norwich, Everyman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Also includes sections on medieval lyrics and medieval morality plays. Works, biographies, articles and links to additional resources.
This book examines Middle English literature and includes works by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and John Lydgate. Essays deal with topics ranging from romances to drama, chronicles, and other narrative forms, as well as gossip, orality and aurality, translation, and multilingualism. The book also looks at vernacular texts ...
The Middle English Language: Example Texts and Analysis. Middle English, which spans from the 11th to the 15th century, was a significant period in the development of the English language.During this era, the language underwent significant changes in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation as a result of Norman Conquest and increased contact with Latin and French.
In an essay of one to two pages, explain the main characteristics of Middle English literature. Example: Heroic characters battling good versus evil were prominent in Middle English literature ...
The Middle English Period (1100-1500) Middle English (ME) was the dominant and traditional spoken language form in many parts of England during the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are so called as the middle period between the decline of the Roman Empire and prior to the period called the Renaissance. Brief History of the Middle English.
The basic structure of an essay always consists of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. But for many students, the most difficult part of structuring an essay is deciding how to organize information within the body. This article provides useful templates and tips to help you outline your essay, make decisions about your structure, and ...
Expository writing examples for middle school. Below are several sources of expository writing samples for middle school students. The Write Source Expository Writing Samples; Holt, Rinehart, Winston Expository Essay Models; Finally, here is an article in the New York Times that will help you teach your students real-world expository writing ...
Revised Copy. Middle English played an important role in the history of the English language. Middle English began about 1150-1500. Dialect diversity was major in this period that people from one part of England could not understand people in another part. Although, slowly, the dialect spoken in London was becoming the standard.
Basic essay structure: the 3 main parts of an essay. Almost every single essay that's ever been written follows the same basic structure: Introduction. Body paragraphs. Conclusion. This structure has stood the test of time for one simple reason: It works. It clearly presents the writer's position, supports that position with relevant ...
Come up with a thesis. Create an essay outline. Write the introduction. Write the main body, organized into paragraphs. Write the conclusion. Evaluate the overall organization. Revise the content of each paragraph. Proofread your essay or use a Grammar Checker for language errors. Use a plagiarism checker.
ESSAY WRITING PARAGRAPH WRITING TIPS. Each paragraph should focus on a single main idea. Paragraphs should follow a logical sequence; students should group similar ideas together to avoid incoherence. Paragraphs should be denoted consistently; students should choose either to indent or skip a line.