Middle English

Lore & Background

The transition from Late Old English to Early Middle English had taken place by the 1150s to 1180s, the period when the Augustinian canon Orrm wrote the Ormulum, one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English. Contact with Old Norse aided the development of English from a synthetic language with relatively free word order to a more analytic language with a stricter word order, as both Old English and Old Norse were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. Communication between Vikings in the Danelaw and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages; this effect was characterized as being of a 'substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic' manner. Old Norse and Old English closely resembled each other, and with a lot of vocabulary and grammatical structures in common, speakers of each language roughly understood each other, but according to the historian Simeon Potler, the main difference lay in their inflectional endings, which led to much confusion within the mixed population that existed in the Danelaw, thus endings tended gradually to become obscured and finally lost, 'simplifying English grammar' in the process, leading to the emergence of the analytic pattern. The dramatic changes that happened in English contribute to the acceptance of the hypothesis that Old Norse had a more profound impact on the development of Middle and Modern English than any other language. Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like hence and together), conjunctions, and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings; however, texts from the period in Scandinavia and Northern England do not provide certain evidence of an influence on syntax. While the Old Norse influence was strongest in the dialects under Danish control, which approximately covered Yorkshire, the central and eastern Midlands, and the East of England, words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English. Influence on the written languages only appeared from the beginning of the 13th century onwards; this delay in Scandinavian lexical influence in English has been attributed to the lack of written evidence from the areas of Danish control, as the majority of written sources from Old English were produced in the West Saxon dialect spoken in Wessex, the heart of Anglo-Saxon political power at the time.

Reader's Guide

Middle English is significant as the transitional stage between Old English and Early Modern English, during which the language underwent profound changes in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The Norman Conquest of 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers who spoke a dialect of Old French, now known as Old Norman, which developed in England into Anglo-Norman. The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of Norman words were borrowed into English and used alongside native Germanic words with similar meanings. Examples of Germanic/Norman pairs in Modern English include pig and pork, calf and veal, wood and forest, and freedom and liberty. The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman, such as court, judge, jury, appeal, and parliament. There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the chivalric cultures that arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism, seigneurialism, and crusading. Words were often taken from Latin, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms, including kingly (inherited from Old English), royal (from French, inherited from Vulgar Latin), and regal (from French, which borrowed it from Classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of the resulting doublet pairs include warden (from Norman) and guardian (from later French; both share a common ancestor loaned from Germanic). The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same dialects as they had before the Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that evolved individually from Old English. By the end of the period (about 1470), and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, a standard based on the London dialects (Chancery Standard) had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Little survives of early Middle English literature, due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales remains the most studied and read work of the period.

Did You Know?

• The Ormulum, written by the Augustinian canon Orrm in the 1150s–1180s, is one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English and incorporates a unique phonetic spelling system.
• The historian Simeon Potler characterized the effect of Old Norse contact on inflectional endings as 'substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic' manner.
• Examples of Germanic/Norman doublet pairs in Modern English include warden (from Norman) and guardian (from later French), both sharing a common ancestor loaned from Germanic.
• The dual personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) disappeared from English during the Early Middle English period.
• The Peterborough Chronicle, which continued to be compiled up to 1154, is an important text for reconstructing the evolution of Middle English out of Old English.