Middle English

ADRIANA

TEACHER’S COURSE

“HISTORY OF ENGLISH”
* MIDDLE ENGLISH

MIDDLE ENGLISH (1100-1500)
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 ofthe 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.
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. Thechanges 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 withconstructions 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 offorms 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-SaxonChroniclekeeps 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 passagein 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 bilingualsituation--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.) We look at some of a very early major work of Englishliterature,Layamon's Brut, in short #8.
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...