(English Language
in Middle English Period)
In
1066, a dynastic quarrel over the throne of England ended in victory for
William, Duke of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings. William became King
William I of England and his Norman companions (Normans were originally
Norsemen who had conquered Northern France) became the feudal overlords of the
Anglo-Saxon population. There was never a great amount of Norman immigration
into England. Instead there was a grafting of a great superstructure of
economic, political, religious and military power onto a population that
remained largely English in ethnicity and language.
The
Normans were tremendous builders of castles and cathedrals (another cathedral
view) and built much of what we now see as the surviving medieval look of
England. Yet they essentially built these colossal symbols of their military
and religious institutions on top of, or alongside, the patterns of village and
agricultural settlement that had been imposed on the island by the Saxons.
England
in the late 1000s, the 1100s, and 1200s became a bilingual country. Norman
French was the prestige language, English the language of everyday folk. Few
Normans learned English in this early Middle English period. French was the
language of court, of law, of the literature of the period (though remember
that Latin was still a significant literary and religious language). Since few
Anglo-Normans learned English, initially, there was little borrowing of French
words into English in the period 1066-1300. The changes in English during this
period were nevertheless quite substantial.
Early
Middle English (1100-1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (in the North,
with many Norse borrowings). But it has a greatly simplified inflectional
system. The complicated grammatical relations that were expressed in Old
English by means of the dative and accusative cases are replaced in Early
Middle English with constructions that involve prepositions. This replacement
is incomplete. We still today have the Old English genitive in many words (we
now call it the "possessive": the form dog's for "of the
dog"; but the apostrophe here doesn't mean that anything has been
"left out." But most of the other case endings disappear in the early
ME period, including, you'll be happy to learn, most of the dozens of forms of
the word the. Grammatical genders also disappear from English during the Early
ME period, further simplifying matters.
Some
of these developments don't leave much trace in the record. In fact, just as
enormous changes are in action, we lose sight of them historically. Such a
trade-off is almost necessary. The Old English literary tradition ends soon
after 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle keeps going till 1154, but as we've seen,
it isn't the most talkative of books in a good year. With the clergy and court
of Norman England working in French or Latin, the great outpouring of
literature in English effectively stops cold in the late 1000s, and the 1100s,
though a great century for cathedrals, are a linguistic Dark Ages for the English
language. We have only scraps, such as a passage in a charter of Henry II (from
the year 1155) which begins:
"Henri,
þurh godes 3efu ænglelandes king gret ealle mine bissceopas 7 ealle mine eorlas
7 ealle mine scirereuan 7 ealle mine þeinas frencisce 7 englisce . . . "
--a fascinating cultural and legal document but not really stirring reading.
Moreover, such scraps seem like ad hoc measures taken by the powerful side in a
bilingual situation--we might as well try to read contemporary Spanish through official
(and awkwardly translated) government documents in 2000s Texas.
English
begins to re-establish itself in the 1200s, in the sense that native speakers
developed the beginnings of a literary culture. (The majority clearly spoke
English without interruption, of course.)
In
the mid-1200s, an English friar named Thomas of Hales wrote a remarkable piece
called "Love Rune," an erotic (and because he was medieval, probably
also allegorical) lyric poem. In the middle of the poem, Thomas realizes that
it's probably a good idea to start sucking up to Henry III for a bit:
He
is ricchest mon of londe,
So wide so mon spekeð with muð;
Alle heo beoð to His honde,
Est and west, north and suð!
Henri, King of Engelonde,
Of Hym he halt and to Hym buhð.
Mayde, to þe He send His sonde,
And wilneð for to beo þe cuð.
Ne byt He wið þe lond ne leode,
Vouh ne gray ne rencyan;
Naveð He þerto none neode,
He is riche and weli mon!
If þu Him woldest luve beode,
And bycumen His leovemon,
He brou3te þe to suche wede
That naveð king ne kayser non!
The
language here seems transitional between Old and Middle English. Of course,
Thomas had no idea he was in transition; he was just writing poetry. One thing
we do not see in Layamon, or Thomas, very much, is French vocabulary. There's
the odd line here "vouh ne gray ne rencyan," where
"rencyan" is an Old French word for a luxury fabric--very much the
kind of thing we'd expect there to be no English word for in this cultural
situation. Other than that, I don't see any French words here
("riche" is in French, of course, but they got the word from
Germanic, not the other way round; it's good Old English vocabulary).
After
about 1300, it's a different story, and we can see more of it happening. In the
years 1066-1300, the Norman dynasties saw themselves as part of an
international aristocratic community. They were as comfortable on the Continent
(where they owned many feudal possessions) as in Britain. Norman French high
culture extended across much of Western Europe, including Ireland. But after
1300, English kings increasingly identified themselves with England and its
people. Also in the 1300s, religious dissidents like John Wycliffe, at great
risk to themselves, broke with the Norman tradition of allegiance to the Roman
church and produced the first English versions of the Bible in many centuries.
Later
Middle English shows heavy French borrowing and continued reduction of the
inflectional system. It is in many respects "modern" except for two
key factors: 1) it was probably pronounced quite a bit differently from modern
English; and 2) it had no central standard. Instead there are several different
literary standards in Middle English (as there were in Old English) and no
sense till very late in the period that any one of those literary standards was
a "dialect" in opposition to a national "standard." Late in
the Middle English period, with the introduction of printing into England in
1470 and following, and the adoption by the printing industry (centered in
London) of many features of "Chancery English" as standard in its
orthography and usage, we have the first inklings of modern Standard English.
Why
did English speakers borrow so many French words in the period after 1300? What
kinds of words got borrowed?
To
understand these dynamics, let's look at some vocabulary that was borrowed in
the "early" period, before 1250 or so. (Selected from Williams,
Origins of the English Language, NY 1975.) In addition to obscure words like
"rencyan," some French words that appear in early English texts
include "canon, countess, sermon, custom, virgin, purgatory, tournament,
witness, constable, medicine, butler, abbey, crown, baron." There are
others, and from other registers; such everyday words as "fruit, rich,
poor, pay, mercy, change, very, catch" also enter English during the Early
Middle period. But basically, words in what we might broadly term
"administrative" use crossed over first--concepts used in Norman law,
religion, and economics (and that applies to the more everyday words too, if
you think about it).
Between
1250-1350, we see words entering like "easy, season, sound, piece, count
(as in number), continue, form, join, move, please, sudden, face, use, people,
task, solid, second, final, honest." By and large, simpler words, truly
everyday words--and why? What kinds of people were using them; why would they
introduce them into English? I suspect that a sort of Franglish was in
circulation among a lot of noble but not necessarily intellectual Anglo-Normans
who were learning English for the first time and for good, and carrying with
them an entire linguistic heritage.
After
1350, French borrowings tend to be words like "combustion, harangue,
register, solace, furtive, conjecture, representation, explicit"--not
esoteric words at all, but Latinate, learned, and multisyllabic, the words of
educated and literate people who moved between French and English and Latin
easily.
[We've
never stopped borrowing from French, but the imports have slowed
considerably--"quiche" and "vinaigrette" are two of the
major imports into common English during my lifetime. C'est la nouvelle
cuisine!]
Modern
Standard English is strongly influenced by the dialect spoken in London and the
surrounding counties in the years 1350-1450. This was only one of several
competing literary standards in its own day. It is the language of Geoffrey
Chaucer, but Chaucer had no sense that he was writing the "true" or
"pure" English of his time--he recognized (in fact he pretty much had
to) that there were other English standards in other parts of the country,
standards that produced literary works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or
Langland's Piers Plowman. In retrospect, we come to see Chaucer as the great
model for "standard" Middle English because his dialect was the one
chosen as the standard in the century after his death.
The
first time that contemporary records admit that Parliament was conducted in
English, for example, is 1362 (Fisher 45). Before that, records of
Parliamentary addresses and debates were recorded in French or in Latin--though
it's likely that a lot of this business was carried on in English and
translated into French or Latin purely "for the record." The
Parliament of 1362 passed a law requiring courts to conduct proceedings in English;
though that law was ignored by common-law courts until the 1700s (!?), the
court of Chancery--which was in a very broad sense the
"federal"--that is, Royal and Parliamentary--bureaucracy of its
time--conducted its business in English from the mid-1300s.
Fisher
notes that the crucial years of institutional transition were 1420-1460,
however. Before that time, legal documents in England are still predominantly
in French and Latin; during that time, there is an entire shift to English. The
Royal council and the subsidiary courts that processed petitions to Parliament
began to conduct their business in English, and this "Chancery
English" became the standard written form of a national government that
began to address all of its subjects in Chancery English as a standard form
instead of in standardized French and Latin. Fisher also notes that the Kings
of England, especially starting with Henry V (who reigned 1413-1422) had a
great impact on national language policy--for one thing, because starting with
Henry they began to speak and write in English instead of French.
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