Norman Conquest, The Influence of French and Development of Middle English

(The Last Invasion on England)

Norman Conquest, The Influence of French and Development of Middle English:

In 1066, William led an invasion of England and decisively defeated Harold at Hastings. This was the last time England was conquered by a foreign power. William’s Conquest was accomplished with very few men, and although he ravaged and burned some of the countryside, he did not massacre the inhabitants of England. Rather, he killed or exiled all of the nobles, replacing them with Normans loyal to him. It is important to note that although the Normans were ethnically Danish (they were “North-men” who had settled in the northwest part of France during the Scandinavian conquests), they were culturally and linguistically French. Thus when William completely replaced the English aristocracy, he did so with French speakers. William also replaced the leaders of the Church (the bishops and archbishops) with Normans who were loyal to him. For the next century and a half, England and Normandy were one kingdom. The kings spent half their time in England and the other half in France, and nearly all of the nobles had holdings in both countries. Although English was not spoken at the court, it is likely that some members of the aristocracy learned the language, if only to better manage their estates. Interestingly enough, charters continued to be written in English and Latin, not French (the diplomatic language was Latin, the description of the boundaries of the land was English). We know that Old English continued to be spoken for some time after the Conquest because, among other evidence, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be updated, in Old English, at Peterborough until 1154. In a relatively short time the close connections between England and France were severed. Nobles were forced to choose which of their holdings to retain, and England and France entered into a long period of hostility culminating in the Hundred Years’ War. French remained as the language of some of the aristocracy, but it is clear from many documents that it was no longer a regularly spoken language. Upper class individuals learned French for their visits to the continent and because it was one of the things that aristocrats needed to know, like heraldry, courtesy, or hunting. But regular speech in French among the English rather rapidly became rare, and those people who did speak French were almost certainly, at this point, bilingual rather than the monoglot French speakers who had come to England with William.

So after 1204, English was once again the language of England. But this was not the same English as had been spoken a hundred and fifty years before. Thus, although they shared a core vocabulary Middle English and Old English are grammatically different languages. It is unlikely that Old English and Middle English speakers would have understood each other even though

a very large percentage of the words that they used were the same. It is very important to note that this change did not occur through English adopting French grammar. In fact, almost no French grammar managed to move into English. Rather, the influence of the Conquest, the movement of English from an elite language partially controlled through writing to (in general) an entirely oral language, and the continuation of processes begun by the mixing of languages

in the Danelaw led to the massive grammatical changes that created Middle English.