The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 2 part 1 pdf

INTRODUCTION Norman BlakeBeginnings of the study of Middle English The study of Middle English since the Second World War English, French and Latin Spelling and standardisation Social an

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the firstmultivolume work to provide a comprehensive and authoritativeaccount of the history of English from its beginnings to its present-day world-wide use Its coverage embraces not only areas of centrallinguistic interest such as syntax, but also more specialised topics such

as personal and place names Whereas the volumes concerned with theEnglish language in England are organised on a chronological basis,the English of the rest of the world is treated geographically toemphasise the spread of English over the last three hundred years.Volume II covers the Middle English period, approximately1066-1476, and describes and analyses developments in the languagefrom the Norman Conquest to the introduction of printing Thisperiod witnessed important features like the assimilation of Frenchand emergence of a standard variety of English There are chapters onphonology and morphology, syntax, dialectology, lexis and semantics,literary language and onomastics Each chapter concludes with asection on further reading; and the volume as a whole is supported by

an extensive glossary of linguistic terms and a comprehensivebibliography The chapters are written by specialists who are familiarboth with the period of the volume and with modern approaches tothe study of historical linguistics The volume will be welcomed byspecialists and non-specialists alike and it will remain the standardaccount of Middle English for many years to come

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY

OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

GENERAL EDITOR Richard M Hogg

VOLUME ii 1066-1476

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Cambridge University Press 1992

This book is in copyright Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without

the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1992

Fourth printing 2006

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

The Cambridge history of the English language

Vol 2 edited by Norman Blake

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents: v 1 The beginnings to 1066 - v 2 1066-1476.

I English language - History I Hogg, Richard M.

II Blake, N F (Norman Francis)

INTRODUCTION Norman Blake

Beginnings of the study of Middle English

The study of Middle English since the

Second World War

English, French and Latin

Spelling and standardisation

Social and literary developments

Phonology, origins: the Old English input system

The formation of the Middle English vowel system

Consonantal developments

Length and quantity

Accentuation

When did Middle English end?

Morphology: general matters

Morphology: the major syntactic classes

Further reading

Textual sources

page x

xi xiii xvii xviii

1 1

3 5

Dialect method and the study of Middle English

The study of geographical variation in Middle English

Variation theory and Middle English dialectology

Concluding remarks

Further reading

S Y N T A X Olga Fischer

Introduction

The noun phrase

The verb phrase

Early Middle English literature

Later Middle English literature

Special features of the literary language

Further reading

156 156 167 192 201 204

207 207 210 233 278 280 285 364 370 383 391 398

409 409 414

439450

461 461 485 496

500 500

508517

532 540

7 O N O M A S T I C S Cecily Clark 542

7.1 Sources and methodology 5427.2 Anthroponymy 5517.3 Toponymy 587Further reading 604

Glossary of linguistic terms 607 Bibliography 629 Primary sources 629

Secondary sources 634

Index Gil

1 The dialects of Middle English page 34

2 a/o forms in Lancashire, West Riding and

Lincolnshire 183

O L G A F I S C H E R Senior Lecturer in English Language,

Universiteit van Amsterdam

R O G E R L A S S Professor of Linguistics, University of Cape Town

J A M E S M I L R O Y Professor Emeritus of Linguistics,

University of Sheffield

It was with great regret that the General Editor, the Editor and the contributors to the first two volumes of the Cambridge History of the English Language learned of Cecily Clark's death on 26 March 1992 Although she was able to see the proofs of her chapters, she was unable to see the finished books We hope that the chapters she has written for the first two volumes of the Cambridge History may stand as a memorial to her life and work.

GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE

Although it is a topic of continuing debate, there can be little doubt thatEnglish is the most widely spoken language in the world, withsignificant numbers of native speakers in almost every major region —only South America falling largely outside the net In such a situation anunderstanding of the nature of English can be claimed unambiguously

to be of world-wide importance

Growing consciousness of such a role for English is one of themotivations behind this History There are other motivations too.Specialist students have many major and detailed works of scholarship

to which they can refer, for example Bruce Mitchell's Old English Syntax,

or, from an earlier age, Karl Luick's Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache Similarly, those who come new to the subject have both one- volume histories such as Barbara Strang's History of English and

introductory textbooks to a single period, for example Bruce Mitchell

and Fred Robinson's A Guide to Old English But what is lacking is the

intermediate work which can provide a solid discussion of the full range

of the history of English both to the anglicist who does not specialise

in the particular area to hand and to the general linguist who has nospecialised knowledge of the history of English This work attempts toremedy that lack We hope that it will be of use to others too, whetherthey are interested in the history of English for its own sake, or for somespecific purpose such as local history or the effects of colonisation.Under the influence of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, therehas been, during this century, a persistent tendency to view the study oflanguage as having two discrete parts: (i) synchronic, where a language

is studied from the point of view of one moment in time; (ii) diachronic,where a language is studied from a historical perspective It mighttherefore be supposed that this present work is purely diachronic But

General Editor's preface

this is not so One crucial principle which guides The CambridgeHistory of the English Language is that synchrony and diachrony areintertwined, and that a satisfactory understanding of English (or anyother language) cannot be achieved on the basis of one of these alone.Consider, for example, the (synchronic) fact that English, whencompared with other languages, has some rather infrequent or unusualcharacteristics Thus, in the area of vocabulary, English has anexceptionally high number of words borrowed from other languages(French, the Scandinavian languages, American Indian languages,Italian, the languages of northern India and so on); in syntax a common

construction is the use of do in forming questions (e.g Do you like cheese?), a type of construction not often found in other languages; in

morphology English has relatively few inflexions, at least comparedwith the majority of other European languages; in phonology thenumber of diphthongs as against the number of vowels in EnglishEnglish is notably high In other words, synchronically, English can beseen to be in some respects rather unusual But in order to understandsuch facts we need to look at the history of the language; it is often onlythere that an explanation can be found And that is what this workattempts to do

This raises another issue A quasi-Darwinian approach to Englishmight attempt to account for its widespread use by claiming thatsomehow English is more suited, better adapted, to use as aninternational language than others But that is nonsense English is nomore fit than, say, Spanish or Chinese The reasons for the spread ofEnglish are political, cultural and economic rather than linguistic Sotoo are the reasons for such linguistic elements within English as thehigh number of borrowed words This history, therefore, is based asmuch upon political, cultural and economic factors as linguistic ones,and it will be noted that the major historical divisions between volumesare based upon the former type of events (the Norman Conquest, thespread of printing, the declaration of independence by the USA) ratherthan the latter type

As a rough generalisation, one can say that up to about theseventeenth century the development of English tended to be cen-trifugal, whereas since then the development has tended to becentripetal The settlement by the Anglo-Saxons resulted in a spread ofdialect variation over the country, but by the tenth century a variety offorces were combining to promote the emergence of a standard form ofthe language Such an evolution was disrupted by the Norman

xiv

General Editor's preface

Conquest, but with the development of printing together with othermore centralising tendencies, the emergence of a standard form becameonce more, from the fifteenth century on, a major characteristic ofthe language But processes of emigration and colonisation then gaverise to new regional varieties overseas, many of which have nowachieved a high degree of linguistic independence, and some of which,especially American English, may even have a dominating influence onBritish English The structure of this work is designed to reflect thesedifferent types of development Whilst the first four volumes offer areasonably straightforward chronological account, the later volumes aregeographically based This arrangement, we hope, allows scope for theproper treatment of diverse types of evolution and development Evenwithin the chronologically oriented volumes there are variations ofstructure, which are designed to reflect the changing relative importance

of various linguistic features Although all the chronological volumeshave substantial chapters devoted to the central topics of semantics andvocabulary, syntax, and phonology and morphology, for other topicsthe space allotted in a particular volume is one which is appropriate tothe importance of that topic during the relevant period, rather thansome predefined calculation of relative importance And within thegeographically based volumes all these topics are potentially includedwithin each geographical section, even if sometimes in a less formalway Such a flexible and changing structure seems essential for any fulltreatment of the history of English

One question that came up as this project began was the extent towhich it might be possible or desirable to work within a singletheoretical linguistic framework It could well be argued that only aconsensus within the linguistic community about preferred linguistictheories would enable a work such as this to be written Certainly, it wasimmediately obvious when work for this History began, that it would

be impossible to lay down a' party line' on linguistic theory, and indeed,that such an approach would be undesirably restrictive The solutionreached was, I believe, more fruitful Contributors have been chosenpurely on the grounds of expertise and knowledge, and have beenencouraged to write their contributions in the way they see most fitting,whilst at the same time taking full account of developments in linguistictheory This has, of course, led to problems, notably with contrastingviews of the same topic (and also because of the need to distinguish theephemeral flight of theoretical fancy from genuine new insights intolinguistic theory), but even in a work which is concerned to provide a

xv

General Editor's preface

unified approach (so that, for example, in most cases every contributor

to a volume has read all the other contributions to that volume), suchcontrasts, and even contradictions, are stimulating and fruitful Whilstthis work aims to be authoritative, it is not prescriptive, and the finalgoal must be to stimulate interest in a subject in which much workremains to be done, both theoretically and empirically

The task of editing this History has been, and still remains, a long andcomplex one As General Editor I owe a great debt to many friends andcolleagues who have devoted much time and thought to how best thiswork might be approached and completed Firstly I should thank myfellow-editors: John Algeo, Norman Blake, Bob Burchfield, RogerLass and Suzanne Romaine They have been concerned as much withthe History as a whole as with their individual volumes Secondly, thereare those fellow linguists, some contributors, some not, who have sogenerously given of their time and made many valuable suggestions:John Anderson, Cecily Clark, Frans van Coetsem, Fran Colman, DavidDenison, Ed Finegan, Olga Fischer, Jacek Fisiak, Malcolm Godden,Angus Mclntosh, Lesley Milroy, Donka Minkova, Matti Rissanen,Michael Samuels, Bob Stockwell, Tom Toon, Elizabeth Traugott, PeterTrudgill, Nigel Vincent, Anthony Warner, Simone Wyss One occasionstands out especially: the organisers of the Fourth InternationalConference on English Historical Linguistics, held at Amsterdam in

1985, kindly allowed us to hold a seminar on the project as it was justbeginning For their generosity, which allowed us to hear a great manyviews and exchange opinions with colleagues one rarely meets face-to-face, I must thank Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem Koopman andFrederike van der Leek

With a work so complex as this, an editor is faced with a wide variety

of problems and difficulties It has been, therefore, a continual comfortand solace to know that Penny Carter of Cambridge University Presshas always been there to provide advice and solutions on everyoccasion Without her knowledge and experience, encouragement andgood humour, this work would have been both poorer and later Afterwork for Volume I was virtually complete, Marion Smith took over aspublishing editor, and I am grateful to her too, not merely for ensuringsuch a smooth change-over, but for her bravery when faced with themountain of paper from which this series has emerged

Richard M Hogg

xvi

We acknowledge permission from Professor G Kristensson and the editors

of Lund Studies in English to reproduce the map 'a/o forms in Lancashire,

West Riding and Lincolnshire' on page 183

xvn

Book of the Duchess

Confessio amantis (Macaulay 1900)

Early Middle English

English Place Name Society

Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English

(Mclntosh, Samuels & Benskin 1986)

Latin

Legend of Good Women

Late Old English

The Complaint of Mars (Benson 1987)

The Parliament of Fowls

Proto Old English

List of abbreviations

*, ** a single asterisk precedes forms which are reconstructed or

inferred; double asterisks precede forms which are (claimed

is taken from the text with the first reference; the second is placed insquare brackets immediately afterwards

xxi

Norman Blake

1.1 Beginnings of the study of Middle English

Traditionally, the start of Middle English is dated in 1066 with theNorman Conquest and its finish in 1485 with the accession of HenryVII, the first Tudor monarch Both dates are political and historical, andthe events they represent may have an impact on the development of theEnglish language in the longer term but they are hardly appropriate asguides to the dating of periods in it In any case language does notchange as abruptly as such stark dates would suggest and the wholematter of when Middle English began and ended depends on thefeatures which are regarded as significant in marking a change in thelanguage The period is called 'Middle' English because it falls betweenOld and Modern English To most people today Middle English hasseemed closer to Modern than to Old English for a variety of reasons.Perhaps the most important of these has been the influence of GeoffreyChaucer His reputation as the ' Father of English Poetry' has meantthat many people have some familiarity with Middle English throughhis writings More importantly, his work has been almost constantly

available since Caxton issued the editio princeps of The Canterbury Tales in

1476 Each subsequent century has seen its great editor of Chaucer(Ruggiers 1984) and these editors have kept Chaucer and MiddleEnglish very much in the public eye The only other author who comes

anywhere near Chaucer in this respect is Malory, whose Le Morte Dartbur was published several times in the sixteenth and nineteenth

centuries

Both Chaucer and Malory are literary authors and the interest in theMiddle English period which they have generated has been moreconnected with literary culture than with language Interest in other

Norman Blake

Middle English writings developed only in the nineteenth century,partly as a result of the Romantic revolution Ballads, romances andprose texts all started to appear at this time Thomas Ritson and BishopPercy were among the first to popularise this type of literature throughtheir editions, though the work of Sir Walter Scott should not beunderestimated More academic editions were produced by scholars

such as Sir Frederic Madden, whose 1847 edition of the Brut is still

valuable However, it has to be said that the Middle English period didnot have the same appeal as the Old English one, partly because of itsnature as a transition period and partly because it does not have theattraction of the inter-relationship of pagan and Christian cultures Aperiod which is in transition does not have a point of focus unless that

is provided by a great author such as Chaucer But Chaucer was seenmore as the initiator of a new age rather than as a typical product of theMiddle English period

The same attitude prevailed in the study of language From thenineteenth century onwards there was great interest in the historicalstudy of the language which expressed itself through the study ofdialects, the development of phonology and the investigation ofindividual texts Much of this work was done through the study of thephonology of individual literary texts, and was to that extentfragmented A nineteenth-century edition of a Middle English work ofliterature is likely to contain an exhaustive account of the phonologicalfeatures of that text together with some indication of what area of thecountry those features point to It is unlikely to contain any description

of the syntax or any formal analysis of the lexis, though individualwords may well be commented on separately in the commentary.Sometimes this work was flawed because it did not pay sufficientattention to the various copies a text could go through or, in the case ofrhyme, what the limits of acceptability were for rhyme in the period Adifficulty which presented itself to scholars was the greater profusion ofavailable material as compared with Old English which allowed for thedivision of the country into a larger number of dialect and subdialectareas Inevitably a great deal of information was assembled which couldnot always be fitted into a manageable pattern The culmination of thiswork was the drawing of isoglosses to isolate various Middle English

dialects in Moore, Meech & Whitehall's Middle English Dialect

Charac-teristics and Dialect Boundaries (1935) This study is based on the

examination of 266 texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and

it proposed the establishment of characteristic features in Middle

English phonology whose limits could be represented as isoglosses.When plotted on a map, they divided the country into ten regions:northern, northeast midland, central-east midland, southeast midland,Kentish, southern, southwest midland, south central-west midland,north central-west midland and northwest midland This studyremained the basic framework for all phonological investigations untilfairly recently However, very little was achieved in the areas ofmorphology, lexis or syntax either generally or in relation to thecharting of dialects

1.2 The study of Middle English since the Second World WarSince the Second World War the study of Middle English language hasmade enormous strides, for which there are two major reasons: the first

is the growth of modern linguistics, which has introduced a completelynew approach to many areas of historical study; and the second is theestablishment of comprehensive national surveys to study the modernlanguage and earlier stages of English In the latter the development ofrecording techniques and of computers has been of enormous influence.Shortly after the war a research programme to map out present dialectcharacteristics was launched by Dieth and Orton This survey (Orton

et al 1962—71) isolated various rural localities and sought out older

speakers who had lived in the area all their lives so that a network ofdialect features could be plotted for the various sites investigated Thesurvey focused particularly on phonology and lexis From the in-vestigations dialect maps could be drawn, and usually they wereportrayed historically through the advance or decline of featuresnationally Inevitably, the most important point of comparison was thestate of dialects in the Middle English period, because so little wasknown of dialects in the Early Modern period as a result of the spread of

a standardised written language The maps of Modern English dialectfeatures provided a useful point of comparison for those studyingMiddle English The Middle English period is much richer in itsdocumentation than the Old English one, and the needs of thecentralised monarchy meant that various national surveys were con-ducted and their results have often survived today The earliest of these

is the Domesday Book itself, but others, such as the Lay Subsidy Rolls,are equally important Although such surveys and tax-rolls are inessence Latin documents, they contain personal names and place names

in forms which are lightly enough Latinised to permit the underlying

Norman Blake

English name to be recovered A survey of dialect characteristics ofMiddle English using the Lay Subsidy Rolls is being undertaken byProfessor Kristensson Some of the results have been published already,and eventually the whole of England will be analysed (Kristensson

or even at times individual characteristics so that the copying ofindividual manuscripts could be more specifically localised This wasachieved by working from the features of those texts which could beprecisely localised through external information and by establishing anational grid on to which other texts could be plotted The Edinburghsurvey aimed at examining a very large corpus of material from theperiod, and this corpus continues to grow It is now possible through

the published atlas (Mclntosh et al 1986) to show more clearly how the

language was changing at least at the written level and also to show howindividual texts changed as they were recopied in different parts of thecountry Articles by Professor Samuels and others have managed toexploit this material (Smith 1989) Perhaps particularly important hasbeen the work done to show the various layers of language in theLondon area and their inter-relationship The development of standards

in this area before the acceptance of a single standard is now much betterunderstood An edition by John Fisher and others of texts written in theso-called Chancery standard has promoted understanding of this change(Fisher, Richardson & Fisher 1984)

In one respect the onset of modern linguistics has not had the impact

on Middle English linguistic studies one might have expected So much

of modern linguistics has been concerned with the structure of language,particularly in the form of syntax, that one might have expected that thiswould encourage the wider study of historical syntax as well.Unfortunately, syntax still remains the Cinderella of Middle Englishlinguistic studies Professor Mustanoja completed only the first part of

his Middle English Syntax (Mustanoja 1960), and so the Middle English

period still has nothing to compare with Dr Mitchell's comprehensiveaccount of Old English syntax (Mitchell 1985) Individual studies ofspecial points continue to appear, but they cannot be fitted into a full

No longer do scholars think in terms of a finite disappearance of oneform or of one word to be replaced by another; they increasingly think

in terms of competition between forms both geographically andchronologically Choices were available to speakers of the language then

as they are today, and reasons have to be offered for the preference ofone over another This in turn has led to the concentration on stylisticsand features such as register An understanding of the possibilitiesinherent in the language has in its turn bred a greater respect for theusers of the language The mindless scribe has given way to a copyistfaced with a number of choices who tries to find his way through them

in a way which was partly conscious and partly subconscious Thegreater number of copies of Middle English texts and the wider range

of material have made this approach more meaningful than it couldpossibly be for the Old English period

1.3 English, French and Latin

It has already been suggested that the sources available for the study ofMiddle English are far greater than those for Old English, though it isappropriate to add a word of caution at this point In this period threelanguages were used in England: French, Latin and English French atboth the spoken and written level existed at first in England in thatvariety known today as Anglo-Norman It was used in literary works,official documents and religious writings Anglo-Norman, the aristo-cratic vernacular used in England, gave way during the early thirteenthcentury to Anglo-French, which was essentially an administrativelanguage which had to be acquired as a foreign language by the English

It was never a serious competitor to English Latin remained thelanguage of religion and administration through the whole of theMiddle English period, and English was used only for specific religiouspurposes, as we shall see English continued to be used at the spokenlevel, except in court circles, and consequently in status it was less wellregarded than either Latin or French It occurs in written textssporadically at first, and then increasingly supplants first French and

to reconstruct its cultural life, though there were naturally importantreligious centres in the north The early eleventh century does notappear to be a rich period of writing, though this may be the result ofmanuscript loss For after the Norman Conquest many Old Englishmanuscripts continued to be copied and this suggests the survival of atradition in the late Old English period Some Old English texts surviveonly in post-Conquest copies, as is true of much of the material collected

in Cockayne's Leechdoms (Cockayne 1864-6) The Late Old English

period is associated with a vigorous prose tradition centred on theworks of ^Elfric and Wulfstan and their imitators This prose traditionhad developed to counter the decay of learning, particularly Latinlearning, brought about by the Scandinavian invasions The intro-duction of Anglo-Norman and, in particular, the greater use of Latinwhich was encouraged by the Norman conquerors and promotedthrough the twelfth-century Renaissance of Latin learning led to the

gradual breakdown of this prose tradition The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is

a good example of this situation Several of the various recensions wererecopied during the late Old English period and continuations were

added The latest text is the so-called Peterborough Chronicle, which was

copied at that abbey ca 1121 from an original of indeterminate originand then provided with sporadic continuations until ca 1155 (Clark1970) From then on historical writing in England essentially uses Latinuntil the fifteenth century Old English alliterative verse peters outtowards the middle of the eleventh century, though some have argued

for an eleventh-century date for Beowulf The Battle of Maldon may have

been composed in the eleventh century, but there are few significantpoems from that century and certainly nothing that could be described

as a vigorous poetic tradition There are some modest attempts atalliterative poetry shortly after the Conquest, mostly associated with thewest of the country, but these soon die out In the early thirteenth

century there is La3amon's Brut in alliterative long lines, although it is

a translation of Wace's versified French version of Geoffrey of

Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (Brook & Leslie 1963-78) This

text is from the southwest midlands In the following century there is

a revival of alliterative poetry in the west midlands associated

particularly with Piers Plowman (Kane 1960; Kane & Donaldson 1975) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Although the greatest impetus for

these poems comes from the French and Latin traditions, their style hasmany links with the Old English alliterative tradition and it has proveddifficult to determine how that tradition survived through a periodwhen little poetry was written Although a great deal of alliterativepoetry may have been lost, it has also been suggested either that itsurvived at an oral level or that alliteration remained alive as a stylistictechnique through prose

Some prose writing in English occurred through most of our period,and it is especially associated with the homiletic tradition At first therewere writings in both the east and the west of the country, though bythe end of the twelfth century it is particularly in the west that homiletic

writing flourished The writings of the so-called Katherine group and the Ancrene Wisse are linked with the dialect of the Old English Vespasian Psalter, and in Middle English these writings are mostly found in the

west midland counties of Worcestershire and Herefordshire Many ofthese works may have been written for women religious or for womenwho adopted a form of life which embraced some religious discipline, ifnot that of an established order During the fourteenth century otherwritings in prose became more frequent, usually as translations fromFrench or Latin In part, these were intended to provide instruction forthose unable to read Latin or French, though gradually they are written

in English because the status of that language improved By the fifteenthcentury prose in English was becoming the norm so that letters andrecords, such as those of London gilds, are found in English Thefifteenth century saw an enormous expansion of what was written inprose, and increasingly this is produced in London and its immediatesurroundings The growth of the civil service in London and the rise inpatronage from the court made London a centre for English Londonwas now the largest city in the country and its merchants were powerfuland wealthy Inevitably, this generated a lot of writing, which wasincreasingly in English The culmination of this development is theintroduction of the printing press by William Caxton in 1476, for he set

up his press in Westminster The bulk of his output was in English andwas clearly intended to appeal to the middle and upper classes whowanted reading material in their own language (Blake 1969a) The

centuries following the Conquest One of the best of these is The Owl and the Nightingale, probably written at the beginning of the thirteenth

century in the south-east of the country (Stanley 1960) This poemshows already a clear assimilation of French language and poetictechniques, even if the number of French words it contains is relativelysmall During the same century French romance begins to make animpact on English, and most of those which are found in MiddleEnglish have French sources or parallels At the same time lyrics,perhaps prompted by the teaching requirements of the friars, begin tomake their appearance so that by the end of the century the use ofEnglish for poetic purposes is widely accepted again It is only in thefourteenth century that this trend turns into a flood, though again, apartfrom the alliterative poetry, much of this poetic activity is connectedwith London and the south-east It culminates in the work of GeoffreyChaucer, John Gower and John Lydgate From this time onwardspoetic composition not written in English will appear aberrant, though

it needs to be remembered that Gower himself did compose poems inFrench and Latin as well as in English

At a more official level administrative documents and letters werewritten at first in Latin or French, and throughout the period Latinremained the official language of the Church Taxation and othersurveys were written at first in Latin and sometimes from the mid-thirteenth century in French, and the same applies to judicial records.Although written in Latin or French, these documents contain suchmaterial as English names in a Latinised form which can be exploited foronomastic studies and more general linguistic surveys The material can

be important as it is often possible to localise the place where suchdocuments originated, although extant copies are often from West-minster In addition to the well-known English charter issued byHenry II in 1155, there is a small corpus of administrative documents inEnglish dated before 1189, though it is not until the end of thefourteenth century that documents in English become common Thesame applies to letter collections Letters in French or Latin are foundthroughout the medieval period, but examples in Middle English arecommon only from the beginning of the fifteenth century The earliest

English letter in the Paston collection is dated to 1425 (Davis 1971-6)

It should be said, however, that insufficient attention has been paid byscholars to non-literary material in their work on the history anddevelopment of Middle English, often because many of these recordshave not been made available in modern editions (see Chambers &Daunt 1931; Fisher, Richardson & Fisher 1984) All the material whichsurvives from the Middle English period is relatively formal, no matterwhether it is literary or not, and so it is difficult to have much feel forinformal varieties of the language This restriction needs to be kept veryfirmly in mind in the chapters that follow, because the beginnings of the

literary representation of low-class speech, as in Chaucer's fabliaux,

might suggest to the modern reader that we do have access to thesevarieties

1.4 Spelling and standardisation

As indicated in a previous section, people today find Middle Englishmuch easier to recognise as English than is true of Old English, whichappears to be more like a foreign language If we compare the samepassage in both Old and Middle English, the differences are obvious.The following is Matthew 2.13 in an Old English (West Saxon) versionand the longer Wycliffite version:

1 E>a hi pa ferdon, pa aetwyde Drihtnes engel Iosepe on swefnum,

and pus cwaed, Aris and nim past cild and his modor, and fleoh

on Egypta land, and beo pser o3 past ic de secge; toweard ys paetHerodes seed paet cild to forspillenne

('When they had left, then the angel of God appeared to Joseph in adream and spoke in this way: "Arise, and take the child and hismother and flee to the land of the Egyptians and remain there until Itell you The time is at hand that Herod will seek out the child todestroy him."')

2 And whanne thei weren goon, lo! the aungel of the Lord

apperide to Joseph in sleep, and seide, Rise vp, and take thechild and his modir, and fle in to Egipt, and be thou there, tilthat I seie to thee; for it is to come, that Eroude seke the child

to destrie hym

There are many contrasts between the two passages, but those whichstrike one immediately are changes in the spelling and letter forms, for

Following the Norman Conquest many monastic institutions, whichwere the intellectual centres and scriptoria of their day, had an influx ofmonks trained in France accustomed to the spellings found in Frencheven if these did not as yet constitute a French spelling system Whenthey copied texts in English they gradually transferred some of thesespelling habits to English and so altered profoundly the look of English.Though these changes do not necessarily indicate any alteration inpronunciation, the attempt by French people to speak English and at alater stage bilingualism would inevitably promote changes at the spoken

level as well Old English contained the letters w, p and d, of which in

Middle English the first and the last were abandoned fairly promptlyand the middle one was not much used except in special circumstances

by the end of the fourteenth century Some letters which were seldom

or never used in Old English were gradually introduced in Middle

English such as k, q, x and % What had been cyning in Old English is now king; and in the Old English passage above cwsed gave way to Middle English quath This last example shows that different letter combinations were used in Middle English, for OE cw gives way to ME

qu The same applies to c (as in cild) becoming ch (PDE child), sc becoming sh/sch (OE sceadu, PDE shadow), and c% becoming gg/dg (OE

«3, PDE edge).

What in fact was happening was that the West Saxon standard wascollapsing in the face of these new pressures It should be rememberedthat this standard was the written language of an educated elite and wasnow somewhat archaic and had never represented the spoken language

of most Anglo-Saxons Naturally, this did not happen at once, for thestandard was maintained in certain monastic institutions into the twelfthcentury Gradually, as less writing in English was done under theimpact of the use of Latin arising from the twelfth-century Renaissanceand of French, the old spelling system was abandoned No centralunified system was put in its place to start with, so that early MiddleEnglish gives the impression of being far more fragmented than LateOld English In practice, the introduction of new spelling habitsallowed the scribes to make their written system reflect more closely the

speech forms that they heard daily because they were no longer confined

to the straitjacket of an imposed spelling system

The freedom from the old spelling standard allowed the writtenlanguage to take account of the different sounds introduced by theViking and Norman settlers It is an interesting feature of Late OldEnglish that it contains little influence of Old Norse in either spelling orvocabulary The pull of the standard was so strong that this newinfluence could not find full expression It is also true that the areas ofgreatest Scandinavian settlement, the north and east, produced lesswritten material in the late Old English period, in part at least because

so many monasteries were destroyed or seriously weakened by theVikings The languages spoken by the Viking invaders were branches

of the North Germanic variety of Indo-European and were not onlymutually intelligible but were also largely comprehensible to speakers ofOld English, a West Germanic language Old Norse and Old Englishdiverged in pronunciation in certain specific points, some of which are

still traceable in the modern language PDE give has as its ancestor OE ye/an, though that form would normally give something like PDE *yive.

In Middle English the reflex of OE yefan was indeed jive or a variant of that spelling In Old Norse the equivalent verb was gefa, and Middle

English shows forms which exhibit features of this verb particularlyinitial < g > instead of < y > These forms occur mainly in northerndialects, but gradually this < g > percolates south, where it merges with

the southern form to produce give rather than geve The same development accounts for forms like PDE get and guest, which in Old English were $iet/$et and giest/^est as compared with ON geta and gestr.

The development of the Germanic sounds differed in the NorthGermanic dialects from the West Germanic ones so that many of thewords introduced by the Viking invaders had phonological formswhich were distinguished from those used by the Anglo-Saxons Inmany cases these forms were adopted into northern dialects and surface

in the Middle English varieties of those dialects In some instances theywere further adopted by the standard language as a result of thesouthward drift of northern dialect features This results in furtherexamples of that unexpected phenomenon that Modern English doesnot reflect the sound pattern of Old English, even though the modernstandard is based on a Middle English London and east midland variety

For example, PDE though reflects an Old Norse form *poh which must

be an intermediate stage between ONGmc *pauh and standard ON pd.

Norman Blake

The Old English form peah reflects the development of Gmc au to OE e'a In Middle English northern dialects have forms like pogh and pough

for this word, whereas southern and midland ones are more likely to

have forms like pagh, paugh and peigh In such cases it may be difficult to

decide why the standard language has finally chosen the reflex of thenorthern variety; but for our purposes it is important to recognise thatthe appearance of these forms in writing was occasioned by thebreakdown of the old West Saxon standard Forms of this type maketheir appearance from the earliest northern texts found in Middle

English such as the Ormulum (White 1878) It is only later that such

forms begin to extend southwards

The breakdown of the Old English scribal tradition based on theWest Saxon standard allowed for that diversity which we regard astypical of Middle English writing systems as compared with those in theOld English period The diversity should not be interpreted as a free-for-all in which any spelling was possible, though that is perhaps theimmediate impression a modern reader of Middle English has incomparison with Old English or Modern English Standards orincipient standards developed in particular localities Often these werebased around a monastic foundation and may even have been regulated

by a single teacher The most famous example is the so-called ABlanguage associated with certain manuscripts from the southwestmidlands in the early thirteenth century and provisionally localised byDobson at Wigmore Abbey, Herefordshire (Dobson 1976) The Corpus

Christi College Cambridge manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse, a name sometimes given to this text to distinguish it from the Ancren Riwle

version found in different manuscripts, is written in a consistent dialect

which is also found in the Bodley manuscript of the Katherine group.

The way in which the AB dialect could be copied is studied in some

detail by Dobson in his edition of the Cleopatra manuscript of Ancren Riwle (Dobson 1972) The two most important scribes of that

manuscript maintain many of the features of the main AB language butalso diverge from it to some extent because of their geographical origins

or incomplete training in the conventions of the AB language Dobson'sstudy, which supplements Tolkien's earlier one (Tolkien 1929), isimportant in showing how a set of conventions is generated andgradually breaks down with the passage of time

The most important area for the development of writing standards isthat of London and its immediate environs Early scholars such asMackenzie portrayed the London dialect in broad terms as one which