General characteristics

PART II. LECTURE VI. THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD.

1. The Scandinavian invasion.

2. The Norman French conquest.

3. Bilingual situation in the country.

4. Prevalence of English over French.

5. ME orthography.

6. ME dialects and written records.

1. As we discussed above Scandinavian raids into Britain began in 7 c. and went on up to 878 A.D. when Alfred the Great signed the treaty of Wedmore due to which the Danes were granted a vast territory to the north of the Thames. Alfred’s successors managed to take back the Danelaw in the first half of 10 c. Norman troops used to rob lands of Britain up to 1018. Since 1013 to 1042 Danish kings ruled Britain. Danes were kindred to the British, the languages being alike. The need to communicate led to intermixture of the languages. Phonetic influence of Old Norse was next to none. In Morphology the influence was very important because it was one of the causes serving to reduce the system of OE flexions. In wordstock borrowings were extensive, some causing semantic changes. Scandinavian influence on English is to be discussed later.

2. The Scandinavian invasion, its final period, was one of the factors bordering OE from ME. The second factor was Norman-French conquest.

In 1066 Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king died heirless. The English Crown was claimed by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, a relative of the deceased. The land, later called Normandy, was yielded to the Danish chief Rollo the Rover by the French king in 912. The Normans romanised and accepted French culture and language.

On October 14, 1066,in the Battle of Hastings English troops were defeated by the Normans. William was proclaimed the king of England. Anglo-Saxon nobility was replaced by Norman barons. The Court, the Covernment, the Church, the Law- all became French.

About 200 000 Normans came to England with William. They represented the ruling minority to 2.000.000 of Anglo-Saxon population.

In 1204 British kings lost their lands on the Continent and British Normans became isolated from their kinsmen in France.

Domesday Book, 1086, shows a distinct segregation of people in Britain.

The time immediately after the Norman Conquest, approximately the year 1100, was the starting point of the Middle English period which went on up to the war of the Red and White Roses (1455- 1485) – the time thought to be the border between Middle English and New English. Henry Sweet called Middle English the period of leveled endings.

3. For the next three centuries after the Norman Conquest all the kings of England spoke French, the nobility, ecclesiastical and lay, was French – speaking. ‘Vor bote a man conne frenss me telth of him lute’ “unless a man know French, one counts of him little”, wrote in the end of 13 c. the chronicler Robert of Glouster. If Old Norse and Old English had been quite equal, French became the language of the superior class. It became the language of the court and of high society, not because the court despised English but because the court consisted of French – speaking Normans.

The Norman Conquest interrupted the literary tradition of the West Saxon dialect which had been the accepted literary language. West Saxon was reduced to the rank which it had occupied before the days of Alfred. All English dialects kept functioning within their limits, none dominated over the others. Hence when any Englishman wrote or spoke he used his own local dialect without regard to the standards of West Saxon that had existed before the Conquest.

Readers of Scott’s “Ivanhoe” will remember the conversation between the Saxon thralls Wamba and Gurth, where stress is laid on the fact that the names of the live animals “ox”, “swine”, and “сalf” are English, because they are herded by the English, whereas those of the cooked meats “beaf”, “pork”, and “veal” are French, because they are eaten by the French.

At first Normans and Anglo-Saxon did not mix. They spoke different languages and lived in separate areas. But the growing need to communicate in everyday life led to the fact that many people became bilingual. Lower layers of the French began to intermix, to intermarry with the English, began to feel themselves a uniform nation.

4. Normans were Normans no longer, but Englishmen. The Normans were greatly outnumbered by the Saxons. As at the beginning of 13 c. Normandy was lost to the English crown, they had long ceased to speak the Norman dialect; though many of them still regarded French as their mother tongue, and talked the Parisian dialect.

The great majority of the population considered English, in various dialects, their mother tongue and in the long run the aristocracy was obliged to follow their lead. E.g. in 1258 Henry III issued a proclamation in English (London dialect).

By the first quarter of 14 c. many of the descendants of the Normans had lost their French and were speaking English like their neighbours. Popularity of French actually stopped in the middle of 14 c., after the war with France began in 1339.

We may regard October 1362 the turning – point, when Parliament was first opened in English and the Statue of Pleading was enacted whereby all court proceedings were to be henceforth conducted in English though “enrolled in Latin”.

Before 1385 English was introduced as a language of teaching at school along with Latin. The first king to speak English as his mother tongue was Henry IV (1399-1413). Before 1400 English was introduced in the court.

French survived in parliamentary acts till 1485,in ordinances – till 1400. Law French persisted for many years longer. Cromwell tried hard to break it, but it was finally abolished by Act of Parliament in 1731.

Some fossil French formulae have come up to our time: e.g. the inscription in the Royal Arms “Dieu et mou droit”.

The prevalence of English over French was the result of growing influence of lower and middle classes of urban society and provincial gentry who wanted to use alien French neither in business transactions nor in legal proceedings nor elsewhere.

5. OE spelling was reformed by Norman French scribes who introduced characteristic traits of French orthography into English.

(a). Certain consonant phonemes began to be denoted by digraphs:

/ts/ ch cheat, teach

/dʒ / dg (g,j) bridge (courage, joy)

/S/ sh dish, ship

/X/ gh right, night

/θ, ð / th bathe, thin, this

(b). OE с was rendered by k: e.g.

OE ME

drincan drinken

cnawan knowen

(c). OE f in the intervocal position was rendered by v, u which were variants of spelling: e.g.

OE ME

lufu love/loue

(d). The diagraph qu was used to render OE cw /kw/: e.g.

OE ME

cwēn queen

(e). The letter g was used to render OE ʒ as /g/, and y was used to render OE ʒ as /j/:

OE ME

ʒiefan given

ʒēar year

(f). the digraphs ow and ou were introduced to render OE ū: e.g.

OE ME

hūs house

cū cow

Introduction of these digraphs led to misunderstanding because in ME they denoted the diphthong /ou/ as well as /u:/, e.g.

/u:/ cow /ou/ snow

now low

down slow

how crow

(g). The digraph ie was introduced to render OE ē: e.g.

OE ME

fēld field

thēf thief

chief, Fr.

relief, Fr.

(h). The letter o was introduced to render /u/ when it was next to u, v, m, n to avoid misunderstanding, because they all represented a succession of vertical bars: e.g.

OE ME

sum some

lufu love

cuman comen

(i). In the final position y was substituted for i, and w for u: e.g. every, holy, twenty, Caunterbury, bow, tow, low.

In NE words ending in –i look distinct aliens: e.g. genii, rabbi, taxi. In general, ME spelling was rather unstable, which is accounted for independence and separation of dialects and weakness of a new national literary tradition that was coming to life in the second half of 14 c.

6. As it was stated before, the English dialects became equal and independent of each other after the Norman Conquest. They were now so far apart that a Southerner could hardly understand a man from Northern Countries. The Northern dialect (the descendant of the old Northumbrian), the Southern dialect (the descendant of the West Saxon and Kentish) and the Midland dialect (the descendant of the Mercian) had gradually risen to the position of respectable literary tongues, but no one of them could claim precedence over any other. The border between the Northern and Midland dialects was the river Humber; the border between the Midland and Southern dialects was the river Thames; the Midland dialect was actually two dialects – West Midland and East Midland.

Most important written records are as follows:

The Northern dialect:

The Prick of Conscience by Richard Rolle, 14 c.

Towneley plays, 14 c.

York plays, 15 c.

The Midland dialect:

Peterborough Chronicle, 12 c.

The poem Orm, Ormulum, 13 c.

Havelok, the Dane, 13 c.

Handlying Sinne by Robert Manning of Brunne, end of 13

Sir Gawain and Green Knight and other poems, 14 c.

Poems by Adam Dave, 14 c.

Works by Chaucer and Gower, 14 c.

The Southern dialect:

Layamon, Brut, 13 c.

Ancrene Riwle, 13 c.

The Chronicle by Robert of Glouster, ab. 1300.

The Owl and the Nightingale by John Treviss, 13 c.

Lychronicon, a translation by Ranulphus Higden, 14 c.

Michel, Ayenbite of Inwit, 14 c.

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