Economic and Political Unification. Conditions for Linguistic Unity

The XVI century – the Period of the Development of the National Literary Language

The New English Period

The formation of the national literary English language covers the Early NE period (1475—1660). Henceforth we can speak of the evolution of a single literary language instead of the similar or different development of the dialects. (Note 12)

There were at least two major external factors which favoured the rise of the national language and the literary standards: the unification of the country and the progress of culture. Other historical events, such as increased foreign contacts, affected the language in a less general way: they influenced the growth of the vocabulary.

As early as the 13^th century, within the feudal system, new econom­ic relations began to take shape. The villain (виллан, крепостной) was gradually superseded by the rent-paying tenant (арендатор, съёмщик;). With the growing interest in commercial profits, feudal oppression grew and the conditions of the peasants deteriorated. Social discontent showed itself in the famous peasants' rebellions of the 14th and 15th c.

The village artisans (кустарь, мастеровой, ремесленник) and craftsmen (мастер, ремесленник) travelled about the country look­ing for a greater market for their produce. They settled in the old towns and founded new ones near big monasteries, on the rivers and at the cross roads. The crafts became separated from agriculture, and new social groups came into being: poor town artisans, the town middle class, rich merchants, owners of workshops and money-lenders.

The 15th and 16th centuries saw other striking changes in the life of the country: while feudal relations were decaying, bourgeois relations and the capitalist mode of production were developing rapidly. Trade had extended beyond the local boundaries and in addition to farming and cattle-breeding, an important wool industry was carried on in the countryside. Britain began to export woolen cloth produced by the first big enterprises, the "manufactures". The landowners evicted the peasants and enclosed their land with ditches and fences, turning it into vast pastures.

The new nobility, who traded in wool, fused with the rich towns­people to form a new class, the bourgeoisie, while the evicted farmers, the poor artisans and monastic servants turned into farm labourers, wage workers and paupers. The changes in the economic and social conditions led to the inter mixture of people coming from different regions and to the strengthening of social ties between the various parts of the country. Economic and social changes were accompanied by political unification. In the last quarter of the 15th c. England became a centralized state.

At the end of the Hundred Years' War, when the feudal lords and their hired armies came home from France, life in Britain became more turbulent than ever. The warlike nobles, disappointed with their defeat is France, fought for power at the King's Court; continued anarchy and violence broke out into a civil war known as the Wars of the Roses (1455—148 5). The thirty-year contest for the possession of the crown ended in the establishment of a strong royal power under Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty.

The absolute monarchy of the Tudors was based on a new relation of class forces: the crown had the support of the middle class. Henry ^VII reduced the power of the old nobles and created a new aristocracy out of the rural and town bourgeoisie. The next step in the creation of absolute monarchy was to break the monopoly of the medieval Papacy. This was achieved by his successor, Henry VIII (1509—1547), who quarreled with the Pope, declared himself head of the English Church and dissolved the monasteries (the English Reformation, 1529—1536); now the victory of the Crown was complete. The economic and political unification played a decisive role in the development of the English language. All over the world the victory of capitalism over feudalism was linked up with the consolidation of people into nations, the formation of national languages and the growth of superdialect forms of language to be used as a national Standard. The rise of capitalism helped to knit together the people and to unify their language.

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