Introduction into middle english period: historical background, which gave impetus to new language changes

1. Historical Events that Influenced the Language
The OE period lasted from the V(VII) till the VII-XI century. It started and lasted during the Germanic settlement on the territories of the British Islands. It is often called the period of full endings.
The ME period started in the XII-XV and lasted till the XVI century. It was due to the strong influence of Normans and Scandinavians who arrived to Britain. The period is called the period of leveled endings.
The ME period finished in the XVI century and the NE period started, which lasts till the present day. The NE period started with the introduction of printing in 1475, Chaucer’s Age and Shakespeare’s time. This is the period of lost endings.

Middle English
is the name given
by linguists to the
diverse forms of
English in use
between the late 11th
century and about
1470, when the
Chancery Standard,
a form of London-based English, began to become
widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the
printing press into England by William Caxton in
late 1470s.
The language of England as used after this time, up to 1650, is known as Early Modern English.

Vikings
invaded and settled in the north-east of England
contact with Norse invaders might have been responsible for some of the morphological simplification of OE, including the loss of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case (with the exception of pronouns)

From about AD 800 waves of Danish assaults on the coastlines of the British Isles were gradually followed by a succession of Danish settlers
Danish raiders first began to settle in England starting in 865
soon moved north and in 867 captured Northumbria and its capital, York.
in 869 by conquering East Anglia

In 871, Alfred became the King of Wessex
His army was weak and he had to pay tribute to Danes in order to make peace with them
but the Danes turned to the north and attacked Mercia, a campaign that lasted until 874
In ten years the Danes gained control over East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia, leaving only Wessex to resist
As a term of surrender, King Alfred demanded that Guthrum, the Danes leader be baptised a Christian; King Alfred served as his godfather. This peace lasted until 884, when Guthrum again attacked Wessex

884
Alfred defeated him, with peace codified in the Treaty.
The treaty outlined the boundaries of the Danelaw and allowed for Danish self-rule in the region

From 1016 to 1035 the English kingdom was ruled by Canute the Great as part of a North Sea Danish Empire
In 1066, two rival Viking factions led invasions of England. Harald Hardrada took York but was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZtsaUigoOw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQM29ZUXvk

William of Normandy and his Normans defeated Anglo-Saxon armies at the Battle of Hastings in Sussex in 1066
The language gradually became the mix of French (which was the language of Lords) and English (the language of peasants)
In the 11th-12th centuries French got the leading role
However in 1269 King Edward issued a proclamation in English. English was preserved but had a lot of French borrowings, so we can say that the vocabulary was greatly enriched, but not grammar.

2. Linguistic Consequences of the Scandinavian Invasion
the Scandinavian Invasion introduced many words during the 9th and 10th centuries (many place names, items of basic vocabulary, words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw)
The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English
a mixed language
theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English
simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the north and latest in the southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence

3. Linguistic Consequences of
the Norman Conquest
1066
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
Battle at Hastings
the top levels of society of English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies were removed
Their replacements spoke Norman French and used Latin for administrative purposes
Norman French came into use as a language of polite discourse and literature, and this fundamentally altered the role of OE in education and administration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU41crKHRng

Consider these pairs of MnE words. The first of each pair is derived from OE and the second is of Anglo-Norman origin:
pig - pork
chicken - poultry
calf –veal
cow – beef
wood –forest
sheep – mutton
house – mansion
worthy – honorable
bold – courageous
freedom - liberty
The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of MnE words for the mechanisms of government which derive from Anglo-Norman: court, judge, jury, appeal, parliament
prevalent in MnE are terms relating to the chivalric cultures which arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism and crusading

The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not change the language immediately.
Although the most senior offices in the church were filled by Normans, OE would continue to be used in chronicles such as the Peterborough Chronicle until the middle of the 12th century.
The non-literate would have spoken the same dialects as before the Conquest, although these would be changing slowly until written records of them became available.
The wealthy and the government anglicized again, although Norman remained the dominant language of literature and law for a few centuries.
The new English language did not sound the same as the old: the complex system of inflected endings was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken ME (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, South Western, Kentish). The loss of case-endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages.
This change was reflected in its increasingly diverse written forms too.

In the later 14th century, Chancery Standard (or London English) —introduced a greater conformity in English spelling
fame of Middle English literature tends to derive principally from the later 14th century, with the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (author of Canterburry Tales) and of John Gower
Early ME (1100-1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (in the North, with many Norse borrowings). But it has a greatly simplified inflectional system
The grammatical relations that were expressed in OE by the dative and accusative cases are replaced in Early ME with constructions with prepositions
This replacement is incomplete. We still today have the OE genitive in many words (we now call it the “possessive”: the form dog’s for “of the dog
Grammatical genders also disappear from English during the Early ME period (apart from personal pronouns)