Middle English

1. External history
1.1. The Norman Conquest and the Subjection of English 1066 - 1200
1.2. The Re-establishment of English 1200 - 1500
1.3. The Middle English Literature
1.4. Middle English Dialects

1.1. The Norman Conquest and the Subjection of English 1066 - 1200
At the beginning of the 11th century the whole of England came under the Scandinavian rule – the Scandinavian invasion was completed and the Danish king was seated on the English throne.
In 1042 England was back under English power, the English king who came to the throne – Edward the Confessor – was to be the last English king for more than three centuries.

In 1066 King Edward the Confessor died, and the Norman Duke William, profiting by the weakness of King Harold who succeeded King Edward on the English throne, invaded England.
He assembled an army, landed in England and in a battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066 managed to defeat Harold and proclaimed himself King of England.

Nobility and government
The lands of the Saxon aristocracy were divided up among the Normans, who by 1087 composed almost 10% of the total population.
Each landlord, in return for his land, had to take an oath of allegiance to the king and provide him with military services if and when required.
The Saxon machinery of government was immensely reinforced, with a Norman monarch and his officials.
The 13th century witnessed the appearance of the first Parliament, or a council of barons, which later was changed to a national Parliament.

The Position of English
In the period up to 1200 the attitude of the king and the upper classes toward the English language may be characterized as one of simple indifference.
They did not cultivate English—which is not the same as saying that they had no acquaintance with it—because their activities in England did not necessitate it and their constant concern with continental affairs made French for them much more useful.

The Linguistic Situation in England 1066 – 1200
The French language - The English language - The Latin Language
Thus came, lo! England into Normandy's hand.
And the Normans didn't know how to speak then but their own speech
And spoke French as they did at home, and their children did also teach;
So that high men of this land that of their blood come
Hold all that same speech that they took from them.
For but a man know French men count of him little.
But low men hold to English and to their own speech yet.
I think there are in all the world no countries
That don't hold to their own speech but England alone.
But men well know it is well for to know both,
For the more that a man knows, the more worth he is.

1.2. The Re-establishment of English
A feature of some importance in helping English to recover its former prestige is the improvement in the condition of the mass of the people and the rise of a substantial middle class.
The rise of another important group—the craftsmen and the merchant class. By 1250 there had grown up in England about two hundred towns with populations of from 1,000 to 5,000; some, like London or York, were larger. These towns became free, self-governing communities, electing their own officers, assessing taxes in their own way, collecting them and paying them to the king in a lump sum, trying their own cases, and regulating their commercial affairs as they saw fit.

1258 – Proclamation of King Henry III was published besides French also in English
1362 – the English language became the language of Parliament, courts of law; later, at the end of the century – the language of teaching
The rule of King Henry IV (1399-1413) – the first king after the conquest whose native tongue was English.
The end of 14th century also saw the first English translation of Bible
Chaucer was writing his English masterpieces in English

1.3. The Middle English Literature
Period of Religious Record
(from 1150 to 1250)
Period of Religious and Secular Literature in English (from 1250 to 1350)
Period of Great Individual Writers
(from 1350 to 1400)
Imitative Period or Transition Period
(15th century)

Geoffrey Chaucer (C.1343-1400)
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English author, poet and philosopher.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century.

Troilus and Criseyde is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a background of war in the Siege of Troy

John Gower (c. 1330 – October 1408) was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Vox Clamantis ("the voice of one crying out") is a Latin poem of around 10,000 lines in elegiac verse by John Gower that recounts the events and tragedy of the 1381 Peasants' Rising.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Medieval English romance in the Arthurian tradition. The text is thought to have been composed in the mid- to late fourteenth century.

1.4. Middle English Dialects
The Southern group included the Kentish and the South-Western dialects
The group of Midland (‘Central’) dialect – corresponding to the OE Mercian dialect – is divided into West Midland and East Midland as two main areas
The Northern dialects had developed from OE Northumbrian

2. Internal History
2.1. Phonetic and Spelling Peculiarities
2.2 Grammatical Changes in Middle English
2.3. Word-Stock Changes

2.1. Phonetic and Spelling Peculiarities
New accentual patterns are found in numerous ME loan-words from French. Probably, when they first entered the English language they retained their original stress – on the ultimate or pen-ultimate syllable. This kind of stress could not be preserved for a long.
In words of three or more syllables the shift of the stress could be caused by the recessive tendency and also by the `rythmic` tendency. Under the `rythmic` tendency, a secondary stress would arise at a distance of one syllable from the original stress. This new stress was either preserved as a secondary stress or else became the only or the principal stress of the word.

ME vertu [ver`tju:] > NE virtue ['vɜːʧuː]
ME recommenden [reko`mendenən] > NE recommend [ˌrekə'mend]
ME disobeien [diso`beiən] > disobey [dɪsə'beɪ]
ME comfortable [komfor`tablə] >NE comfortable ['kʌmf(ə)təbl]
ME consecraten [konse`kra:tən] > consecrate ['kɔn(t)sɪkreɪt]

2.2 Grammatical Changes in Middle English
The most important grammatical development was the establishment of fixed patterns of word order to express the relationship between clause elements. There was already tendency towards Subject-Verb-Object order

ME Noun
The plurals of nouns generally end in –s or –es. However, some nouns end in –n or –en (like Modern English ox, oxen), especially in earlier texts.
Possessive forms end in –s or –es. There is no apostrophe; possessives are distinguished from plurals by context.

Middle English Verb
Principal Changes
- levelling of inflections
- weakening of endings in accordance with the general tendency
- serious losses suffered by the strong conjugation

New verbs formed from nouns and adjectives or borrowed from other languages were regularly conjugated as weak.
Thus the minority position of the strong conjugation was becoming constantly more evident. After the Norman Conquest the loss of native words further depleted the ranks of the strong verbs. Those that survived were exposed to the influence of the majority, and many have changed over in the course of time to the weak inflection

Strong verbs which became weak
At a time when English was the language chiefly of the lower classes and largely removed from the restraining influences of education and a literary standard, it was natural that many speakers should wrongly apply the pattern of weak verbs to some which should have been strong.

The infinitive form (e.g. ‘to go’, ‘to sleep’, ‘to sing’) ends in –n or –en: e.g. goon, slepen, singen. In later texts, the –n may disappear.
The –n or –en ending can also indicate a plural form of the verb: e.g. they goon, they slepen, they singen. In the past tense, the ending may be –n, -en, or –ed.
The –n or –en can also be a past participle (like Modern English eaten). In this case the word will generally be preceded by a form of have or be, or else it will function as an adjective describing a noun.

ME personal and possessive pronoun

2.3. Word-Stock Changes
French Loans (about 3500 words)
Administration. Baron,court, royal, palace, duke, empire, government, liberty, manor, messenger, minister, noble, prince, treason, tyrant, sir, vassal, parliament, crown, reign, statute
Law arrest, arson, bail, bar, blame, crime, depose, evidence, felon, heir, jury, judge, legacy, pardon, plea, prison, punishment, sue, verdict
Religion abbey, baptism, cardinal, chant, charity, clergy, communion, confess, faith, friar, heresy, homily, mercy, miracle, novice, parson, prayer, religion, saint, sermon, solemn, temptation, virtue, prelate, ordain, divine.
Military army, barbican, battle, captain, combat, defend, enemy, lance, moat, navy, peace, retreat, spy, sergeant, guard.
Food and drink bacon, beef, clove, confection, cream, date, dinner, fruit, fry, gravy, jelly, lemon, mutton, olive, orange, plate, pork, roast, salad, salmon, sardine, saucer, sole, spice, sugar, supper, taste, toast, venison.
Fashion boots, brooch, button, cape, cloak, dress, fashion, flock, fur, garment, lace, ornament, rode, satin, tassel, train, vell, wardrobe.

General nouns action, age, air, city, coast, comfort, country, cruelty, debt, dozen, error, face, flower, forest, grief, hour, joy, manner, mountain, noise, number, ocean, pair, people, person, point, poverty, power, rage, reason, river, season, vision, task.
General adjectives active, blue, brown, clear, cruel, easy, final, gay, honest, horrible, large, mean, natural, nice, perfect, poor, real, rude, safe, second, simple, solid, sure, usual.
General verbs advise, allow, carry, close, cry, delay, enjoy, enter, form, join, marry, move, obey, pass, please, push, prove, refuse, remember, reply, satisfy, save, serve, suppose, trip, wait, waste.
Turns of phrase by heart, come to a head, have mercy on, hold one’s peace, on the point of, take leave, take pity on

Latin Influence

The poetic compounds of Old English declined dramatically at the beginning of the MD period. There are over a thousand compounds in Beowulf. Some types of compounding did continue to produce new words: bagpipe, birthday, blackberry, craftsman, grandfather, schoolmaster.
New compounds in –er were especially frequent in 14th century: housekeeper, moneymaker.

From The Canterbury Tales:
General Prologue
Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury
http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan ZephirusWhan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale And smale foweles maken melodye,

10 That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh (So priketh hem (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes To ferne halwes, kowthe To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
15 And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly The hooly blisful The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Bifil Bifil that in that seson, on a day,

20 In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
25 Of sondry folk25 Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.