Middle English

Historical Period

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.
The Middle English period began in 1066, following the Norman conquest of
England. Prior to this, England was controlled by the Anglo-Saxons, who
themselves had invaded the island following the collapse of Roman Britain in the
5th Century AD.
During their nearly 600-year reign in England, The Anglo-Saxons spoke the first
recorded version of the English language, known as 'Old English'. This version was
more closely related to the West Germanic language family than it was to the
version of English we know today. In fact, to a modern English speaker, Old
English would sound completely foreign!

Prior to the invasion, the Normans spoke a regional dialect of Old French, known
as 'Norman French'. Immediately after conquering England, the Normans began to
adopt loan words from the Anglo-Saxons, leading to a new variant of the French
language called 'Anglo-Norman'.

Anglo-Norman became associated with the upper class and was the language of
nobility, courts, law and administration. Despite this, most of the lower-class
population of England continued to speak Old English.

It took many years for English to once again re-emerge as the country's dominant
language. One of the primary reasons for this was the Normans' gradual loss of
touch with French culture. This occurred in part due to King John (1166-1216), who
lost control of Normandy - the region of France under Norman control - to the King
of France Philip II (1165-1223).

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(map that can be used on the slides)
This defeat isolated the Normans in England, quickly leading them to see
themselves as English rather than French. Although many Anglo-Norman words
had found their way into the Old English language by this point, this was the first
time that Anglo-Norman speakers had readily and extensively adopted Old English
words into their own vocabulary. The eventual mix of these two languages resulted
in what we now know as Middle English.Linguistic developments
 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
earliest 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.
Multilingual context
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.
Borrowing from early Scandinavian
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.
Borrowing from Latin and French
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., pastern n., pullen n., rack v., russet n. and adj.
Pronunciation
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.
A period characterized by 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 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.
Surviving documents
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.
Literature
For hundreds of years after the Norman invasion, most literature was written in
either Latin or French. Aside from some exceptions dated to the thirteenth century,
like Layamon's Brut, English only made a complete resurgence within written work
during the fourteenth century.
Writers
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
The most important text to come from Middle English is Chaucer's The Canterbury
Tales (1387-1400), which contains twenty-four unique tales told from the
perspective of travelling pilgrims who are trying to win a story-telling contest. The
work is largely written in poetry, but some passages are written in prose.

Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1440) was published in the early 15th century and
is the earliest example of an autobiography in the English language. Kempe's work
is invaluable, as she was one of the first to depict the reality of a typical middle-
class life in Medieval England.

Margery couldn't read or write, so she recited her stories to a scribe who wrote the
book for her. The narrative tells us a lot about the beliefs held in England at the
time. For example, when Margery's businesses collapsed, she saw it
as punishment for her sins and so devoted herself entirely to religion. The
autobiography also reveals a lot about common attitudes to women; she describes
being accused of heresy, repeatedly arrested, and being told she would be burnt
alive in the street.

All in all, Margery's account of her life is a frank, unembarrassed account of a

woman's life in Medieval England. As such, it is an essential text for anyone
interested in learning more about the period.

Anonymous - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Published anonymously sometime around the year 1400, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight tells the story of a knight at King Arthur's court, Camelot. The knight,
named Sir Gawain, accepts a challenge from a Green Knight who arrives at court,
after which Sir Gawain is put through a series of challenges that test both his
loyalty and honour.

Today the poem is seen as an important example of the 'romance' genre. No, not
that romance! This is the medieval romance.