Middle English

significance of the Norman Conquest to ME?

• Heir candidates for Edward the Confessor (d. 1066) (bc didn’t have kids):

  • Harold Godwinson, English earl (Edward’s wife’s brother; member of the most powerful English family at the time)

  • William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy (Edward’s mom’s grand-nephew)

  • Harald Hardrada, King of Norway (based on a deal between Edward’s Scandinavian predecessor and Harald’s predecessor)

• Battle of Stamford Bridge Harold vs. Harald (Sep)

  • Harold won

• Battle of Hastings Harold vs. William (Oct)

  • William won bc got fresh troops but pple wanted Harold bc not French + very powerful noble

  • 
    

Significance of French in England?

• Influx of a Norman ruling class:

  • very few in number and not strictly “immigrants,” but culturally influential

  • the Norman dialect of Old French becomes the language of prestige, and develops into “Anglo-Norman”

  • post-Conquest writing in England is maintained mostly in Latin and French

• “Early Middle English” (c. 1150-1300)

  • it’s there, but not a whole lot of it is written down

  • Peterborough Chronicle (continuation of ASC to 1154); Ancrene Wisse, Owl and the Nightingale (13c)

**diff words for diff parts of life/society

Explain the re-emergence of Written English!

• Increasing separation of English and French territories

  • John (yes, he of the Magna Carta) loses claim to Normandy

  • The Hundred Year’s War (1337-1453) and ongoing French-English hostility

• Rising socioeconomic status of speakers of English

  • the Black Death (1348-) and the Peasants’ Revolt (1381)

    • PR = against documentation in Latin + French bc even if read outloud to them, they wouldn’t understand

    • pple identifying with “England”

  • Paris French starts to be seen as sm better than Norman French

  • growing centralization in London

  • the advent of a generation of nobility (and, importantly, literary patrons!) who are brought up to speak English as their first language

examples:

• Henry III (1216-1272): first trilingual letter to the people (1258)

• Edward III (1312-1377): Pleading in English Act (1362)

• Richard II (1377-1399)

• Henry IV (1399-1413): first English king since Harold to speak English as first language

• Henry V (1413-1422): the king’s clerks begin to use English for work (Chancery English)

• Norman French falls in prestige on the continent, compared to Parisian French

• “French of England” drifts farther away from the Continent

ME orthography

• No more ‘wynn’! Good old ‘w’ is here.

• No more ‘ash’ (æ) after the very early ME period.

• Some ‘thorns’ (þ) and ‘eths’ (ð) still, but we begin to see the digraph ‘th’ used more and more.

• The yogh (ȝ, ᵹ, etc.)

  • Derived from the OE form of ‘g’, which could be either [g] (‘hard’) or [j] (editorial ‘ġ’)

  • In ME, the yogh could stand for [g], [x], or [j] (orthographically ‘g’, ‘gh’, or ‘y’)

  • niȝt, wrouȝt, yȝe, ȝif, ȝit, ȝift…

ME phonology

• No more æ (‘ash’)…because the sound it stands for, [æ], shifts to good old [a].

  • reflected in the orthographic shift to ‘a’ in that, at, apple

    • kinda like how Grimm’s law affects other vowels down the line

  • but wait…

• What used to be a long [a] shifts to [ɔ].

  • reflected in the orthographic shift to ‘o’ in bon(e), ston(e), no (down south)

  • but wait…

• Rounded [y] shifts/merges to unrounded [i].

  • fire, mice, kin

  • might still be sometimes written as fyr, mys, kyn

Lots of sounds are lost, weakened, or lumped together.

• loss of [h]-initial consonant clusters (hr-, hn-, hl-, also hw-)

• word-final [m] > merges to word-final [n] > often drops to [null/zero]

  • e.g., the OE infinitive ending -(i)an carries into -en in ME, but disappears entirely by 1500

  • Question: What swoops in to play the role of ‘infinitive marker’ after the loss of this ending?

• word-final vowel varieties > collapses into word-final [ə] (‘schwa’)

  • fun fact: most vowel-final words in PDE end in [i], a diphthong, or a schwa

• Reduction happens especially at ends of words, because they usually receive less stress in English

ME phonology, What’s happening to the vowels?

ME Morphosyntax (present)

Verb endings: PRESENT

• -es (Northern) and -eth (Southern) compete as the singular 3rd-person marker.

  • south = where Alfred had more of a claim so likes to stick to more conservative OE forms

• Northern -es eventually wins, but only much later.

  • The forms ‘has’/‘hath’, ‘goes’/‘goeth’, etc. coexist throughout ME.

  • Shakespeare still has both ‘he loves’ and ‘he loveth’ as an option.

• -(e)th (from OE -að) and -(e)n compete as the plural marker.

• -en eventually wins, but this sound is prone to falling off…

Why -es (Northern)?

• Found in Norse contact areas…but this ending is not “borrowed” from Norse! Then where does it come from?

• Error accommodation (Crystal):

• Scenario 1) “Anglo-Saxons heard other -s forms in Danish speech (like the ‘middle voice’ ending -sk), assumed they were present-tense forms, and began to use them as part of their own system.”

• Scenario 2) “Danes tried to use the English present-tense -ð forms, but mispronounced them as -s. The Anglo-Saxons then found the -s forms congenial, eventually using them as part of their own system.”

• Modern parallel: “French people unable to pronounce English th consonant sounds will replace them by /s/ or /z/—’I sink zis is ze way’. English people unable to pronounce French nasal vowels will replace them by an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant—‘tray bong resterong’ (très bon restaurant).”

ME Morphosyntax Past

Verb endings: PAST

• Many past verb endings tend to level to the weak -t/d dental suffix, even if they used to be “strong.”

• OE climban – ME climben

• attested ME past forms include clamb, clomb, clemb, climbed, climed, clemde…

• OE helpan – ME helpen

• attested ME past forms include halp, healp, holpe, hilpe, hulpe, helpe

Map of Dialects

north has more of an {ah} sound vs south {o}

north = more // to old norse

4 dialects

ME lit

Reminders about the sociolinguistic setup:

• Texts from the period 1100-1500 in triglossic England comes in at least three linguistic flavors. Many writers working on “English soil” wrote in just Latin or French. Some wrote in all three languages!

  • Marie de France; John Gower

• Many works in Middle English were “translations” from Latin or other continental languages.

• Note on the ‘borrowed’ Arthurian tradition:

  • Welsh legends > Latin faux-chronicle (Geoffrey of Monmouth) > French romances > English

• “Courtly love”

  • heterosexual love + feudalism merger, immensely productive for literature; later merges with religious culture too

significance of Harley Lyrics

The Harley Lyrics (BL Harley MS 2253, c. 1340)

• One manuscript contains works in Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Latin

• Eclectic anthology of poetry (and some bits of prose

French in England

London Grocers’ Company (1432)

shows mix of fren + engl in same sentences/work

significance of Orrm

• Our first spelling reformer: Orrm (c. 1200)

  • monk who wanted other monks to be understood by their lay pple

• The Orrmulum: an unfinished (but still long) collection of homilies based on the Gospels, written in an extremely idiosyncratic but consistent orthography personally developed by Orrm

  • a “desperate orthographical extravaganza” (Thomas Hahn)

• He doubles consonants after a short vowel to mark the vowel length (cf. hopping – hoping)

• He distinguishes various sounds linked to a single graph, like the ‘yogh’:

  • e.g., ȝ for /j/ (ȝet), ȝȝ for /i/ (maȝȝ), and ȝh to mark a consonant (halȝe)

• Why? To help his fellow monks read the books out loud in sounds the laity would recognize

  • “an elaborate scheme to equip those who do not ordinarily read English—in effect, all literate people—to pronounce vernacular speech with impressive authenticity” (Hahn)

• a response to flux/instability of both speech sounds and writing standards in this awkward period.

significance of cursor mundi

Cursor Mundi (c. 1300)

• an encyclopedic “history of the world” in verse, based mostly in religious learning

for the love of engl pple →access for common/lawy pple to understand stuff in latin + french

new idea at time: engl should be lang u use in england

significance goeffrey chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) (tried to capture a wide social structure)

• London poet, translator, admin man, and most famously, writer of The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390)

  • Why is CT so adored? Among other things: a fantastic grab-bag of sociolinguistic observations.

    • The “pilgrims” in the frame narrative hail from all classes and estates, allowing Chaucer to put the entire spectrum of spoken English into their mouths as they each tell a tale, including colloquial, informal, and verging-on-inappropriate “speche.” (“alas,” “but wyte ye what,” even a “tehee”!)

• General Prologue opening:

  • mix of earthy, courtly, and Latinate vocabulary

  • rhymes in iambic pentameter, but with alliterative touches

signigicance of alliterative revival in ME lit

The “Alliterative Revival”

• Is it really a revival, or does it just ‘look like’ it because texts resurface c. 1350? No one knows.

• Texts in this tradition tend to be found more up north & northwest…

“But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man,

• Generally shares with OE the 4-stress line with 2-3 stressed syllables alliterating, but favors looser and longer lines reminiscent of (alliterative) prose; sometimes incorporates rhyme

• William Langland, Piers Plowman (c. 1370) – cultural links to the Peasants’ Revolt (1381)

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (part of the 4-text Pearl-manuscript; last quarter of 14c)

significance of wycliffite bible to ME

The Wycliffite Bible (c. 1380-95)

• or simply the “Middle English Bible”!

• The most commonly found piece of Middle English literature (in terms of extant numbers).

• Based on the Vulgate (the Latin version of the Bible that was the medieval standard).

• Early example of the actual text of the Bible (not paraphrases or retellings) being made available

for the vernacular-speaking laity.

• Affiliated with theologian and reformer John Wycliffe and his followers, later termed “Lollards,” a

dissident ‘heretical’ group that was critical of the Catholic practices of the time. Many consider

Wycliffism or Lollardy to be a “proto-Reformation” movement.