Middle English Period

Some Key Events and Features

Some Notes
1100-1500CE
Almost at the end of the OE period the
Normans invaded and conquered England farreaching effects on English culture than the
earlier Scandinavian incursions
Middle English is framed

at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman

Conquest of 1066
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

Major Events in the MEng

Period
1100-1500CE
Some events in the MEng Period significantly influenced the
development of the English Lg

1066 - Normans conquered England

replace native English nobility w/ Anglo-Normans
Norman French becomes the lg of government in England

1204 - King John lost Normandy to the French

begins the loosening of ties between England and the Continent

1258 - King Henry III

issued the first English-lg royal proclamation since the Conquest
forced by his barons to accept the Provisions of Oxford (= established a Privy
Council to oversee the administration of the government the growth of the
English constitution and parliament begins )

1337 The Hundred Years War began and lasted until 1453
promoted English nationalism

What Middle English

sounded like
Book of the Duchess
The Canterbury Tales Prologue (Or
this audio version)
The Lords Prayer in Middle English

Who were the Normans

The Norman conquest carried out by
Northmen
Under the leadership of William the Conquerer
defeated the English and their King Harrold at
the Battle of hastings in 1066
Harrold and his two brothers were killed in the
battle

The Normans
William the Conqueror came not immediately
from Scandinavia but from France
northern coast of France had been invaded and
settled as recently as the 9th c by the vikings
(around the same time that other vikings were
invading the British Isles)
Scandinavians who settled in France are
commonly designated by an Old French form
Northmen, i.e. Normans
The section of France that they settled and
governed was called Normandy

In Grammar
English came to rely less on inflectional endings and
more on word order
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
the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of
English c.1500 was radically different from that of Old
English.

A brief overview of major

changes
Grammatical gender lost early in Middle English
Range of inflections (particularly in nouns) was
reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of
vowels in unstressed final syllables)
The number of distinct paradigms for nouns 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.
Verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in en
(at least in writing)

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.

Contact with other

Languages
Many languages were spoken in
Medieval Britain
Celtic: English continued to be in
contact with Celtic languages on
many of the internal frontiers within
the British Isles.
Scandinavian: until their use of in
mainland Britain died out (the precise
date is uncertain)
Latin and French

Languages after the Norman Conquest

Before the Conquest vernacular English used in
writing (rather than Latin) England
After the Norman Conquest England was trilingual

French and Latin, not English used in a wide range of

technical and official functions until very near the end of
the Middle English period.
French: the ruling elite in England, government,
sometimes in church
Latin: predominates in most types of writing in the
immediately post-Conquest period; main lg of the church
English: became pushed out of its previous functions
almost entirely; used by the majority of the countrys
population
Quite soon afterwards a flowering of vernacular writing
in a number of different text types and genres in
French, not English

What French was used in

Britain?
What to call the French used in Britain
in this period is a difficult scholarly
question.
Traditionally Anglo-Norman (e.g. in
the title of The Anglo-Norman Dictionary)
In fact, the present-day editors of that
dictionary note that in many ways AngloFrench is a more appropriate term, since it
better reflects the wide variety of inputs
shown by the French used in medieval
Britain.

Written English in the MEng

Period
Until about the middle of the 14th century
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
This reflects the English of particular communities or
even individuals who felt motivated, for various
different reasons, to write something down in English.

Some substantial literary texts

the Ormulum and the Ancrene Wisse
in a very few cases, we can identify mini-traditions of
English writing; but what we do not have are clear, wellestablished, persistent traditions of writing in English
(whether for literary or non-literary purposes) from
which any sort of standard written variety could grow.

Written English in the late MEng Period

From the later 14th century
the use of English increased in literary contexts and in a
variety of different technical and official functions
our records become more plentiful, especially for
London,
English began more and more to be the default choice for
major (broadly metropolitan) literary writers such as, in
the late fourteenth
e.g. Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, (who still also wrote
major poems in French and Latin), and (although his
milieu was rather different), William Langland
Also still 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.

Other texts in MEng

In this period religious writings in
English become more and more
common

e.g. the first complete English

translation of the Bible, the Wycliffite
Bible, which emerged from the circle of
followers of the reformer John Wyclif
increasing numbers of scientific and
medical texts also written in English.

Latin and French and

English!
English came to share and eventually took
over various functions from Latin and French
In doing so, it was hugely influenced by these
lgs --> word forms, their meanings, and the
phrases and structures in which they were
used
speakers began using English to express
technical matters which had previously been
the domain of Latin or French ==> the
vocabulary of fields such as law, government,
business, and religion (among others) became
filled with words of Latin or French origin

Variation, variation,
variation
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 used show considerable regularity, as do
the spellings used to represent them.

The Norman Conquest completely changed this

situation (politically and culturally)
people who chose to write in English in the early MEng period
typically had to improvise (--> they had to find ways of
representing a particular local variety of MEng in writing.
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 this is rare.

The Later MEng Period

In later MEng --> spelling becomes more
stable
we generally find more consistency in the
strategies used for representing particular sounds
in writing.
BUT there is still a considerable degree of spelling
variation, and this is still the rule rather than the
exception
it is quite typical to find the same word spelled in
slightly different ways within a single page of a
single manuscript.
e.g. the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English
records around 500 different spellings for through

Stillvariation!
Our surviving late Middle English writings show:
Variation in how to represent sounds in spelling
A wide variety of different regional varieties of
English.
London
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

BUT the real dominance of a metropolitan

variety over all others in literary use comes
only in the early modern period.

London English
London English of the late-14 thc and 15thc
showed a wide variety of inputs (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
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.

Still a great deal of variation within London English (in

written and spoken forms)
A number of Official documents were written in a
language often referred to as Chancery English,
which had a significant input into the practices of
early modern English printers

Surviving MEng Documents

We have much more surviving Middle English
evidence than we have for Old English
Still far less than for the developing, Londonbased standard language of the 16 thc 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 MEng
period we have only isolated flashes of evidence.

Challenges
Our surviving evidence for MEng
interesting challenges
The overwhelming majority of our
information comes from hand-written
manuscripts.
From the last quarter of the 15thc onwards
there are also printed books, and of course
there is also some written text on coins,
paintings, memorials, etc.)
Manuscripts can present many difficult
challenges for dating and interpretation.

The Texts and the Scribes

Modern work on the habits of medieval English
scribes suggests that their behavior 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

The 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.