Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English

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If northern dialects were impenetrable to southerners, so too, according to the author of Cursor Mundi, was the language of the south incomprehensible for northerners:

In sotherin Englis was it draun, And turnd it haue I till our aun Langage o northrin lede,

Þat can nan oiþer Englis rede.

(‘It [the author’s source material] was composed in southern English, and I have turned it into our own language of northern people, who cannot read any other English.’)

This statement has been said to show that, however diVerent they were, northern and southern dialects were at least both recognized as ‘English’. But in claiming that other varieties of written English could not be read in the north, and had to be translated into the northern dialect, the author has pushed those varieties along the dialect–language cline until they are made to seem quite diVerent tongues from his own (although he may, of course, be exaggerating the otherness of ‘sotherin Englis’, and the separateness of northern language, to promote a sense of the independence of the north). In the Old English period, English identity had, as Chapter 2 has pointed out, been cultivated in part through aYrmation of the specialness of the English language. By the end of the thirteenth century, some people were suggesting that the English language was far from a unitary whole. For these individuals at least, it could no longer be looked to as an index of what the English people had in common.

middle english before and after 1350

The copying of texts

After the middle of the fourteenth century, the number of surviving texts written in northern English increases, as does the number in Northand North- West-Midland dialects. An example of the latter is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which was written, like the other works Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness which are contained in the sole remaining manuscript of the poem, in the late fourteenth century in the dialect of the east Cheshire area. There is also a surge in the volume of writing in English more generally, both in the composition of new works (including those of Chaucer) and in the copying of English texts. Fifty-Wve

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manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, for instance, survive from the Wfteenth century, and there are Wfty-Wve extant copies of another of the great works of the later fourteenth century, Piers Plowman (which seems originally to have been written in a South-West Midland dialect). The number of documents written in English, however, remains small until the second quarter of the Wfteenth century. The year 1362 is often cited as a key date in the expansion of the use of the English language: this is when the Statute of Pleading decreed that court proceedings (into which a very large ratio of people in the Middle Ages were at some time drawn) were to be conducted in English, instead of the French that had been used formerly. But records of legal proceedings were still kept in French—English was not used for this purpose until the seventeenth century (see further, p. 337)—so that the date had little direct impact on the only medium to which posterity has access. What is perhaps more important is the fact that the Statute gave the English language a validation that it had previously lacked, and this in turn may have stimulated the use of the language in other spheres, in writing as well as in speech. The Statute also nulliWed an important reason for acquiring, or maintaining, a competence in spoken French, hastening its passage to the status of a ‘foreign’ language, at least in the spoken medium.

The year 1350 is the terminus a quo of the great resource for the study of the dialects of Middle English, the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English

(LALME), although the Atlas does embrace some earlier material as well. LALME relies on texts which its compilers describe as ‘localizable’—for instance, documents or letters which contain some indication of the place where they were written. An example is the series of correspondence known as the Paston letters (see further below), which were written by the members of a prosperous Norfolk family over the course of the Wfteenth century (and into the sixteenth). Occasionally more ‘literary’ texts are localizable too. One of the best witnesses of the dialect of Kent, for example, is the holograph manuscript of the Ayenbite of Inwyt (or, in modern English, ‘Remorse of Conscience’: ayenbite, literally ‘back-bite’, and inwyt, literally ‘inward intelligence’, are two good examples of what the last chapter has described as ‘loan translations’; both were later replaced in the language by borrowings from French (remorse and conscience), which had itself borrowed the words from Latin). This devotional manual helpfully ends by stating that it was Wnished (‘uolueld’) by ‘ane broþer of the cloystre of Sauynt Austin of Canterberi, in the yeare of oure Lhordes beringe 1340’ (the brother names himself at the beginning as ‘Dan Michel’ of Northgate). Localizable texts such as these are used as ‘anchors’ to which other, non-localized samples of Middle English can be ‘Wtted’ through analysis of the forms which they contain. The distribution of the diVerent dialectal forms of individual words can also be disengaged, and these are represented in LALME through a series of maps. Some of these maps chart the

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the following passage, the lugubrious Owl accuses her opponent of encouraging immoral behaviour amongst human beings:

‘Al þu for-lost þe murZþe of houene, for þar-to neuestu none steuene:

al þat þu singst is of gol-nesse, for nis on þe non holi-nesse, 5 ne wened na man for þi pipinge þat eni preost in chir[ch]e singe.’

(‘ ‘‘You forfeit the joy of heaven completely, for you do not have any voice directed to that: everything that you sing about concerns lechery, for there is no holiness in you, nor does any man on account of your piping conceive that any priest sings in church.’’ ’)

A conspicuous feature of this extract is the fact that representations of the reXex (i.e. the corresponding form) of Old English eo changes from o, as in -lost and houene in line 1 (Old English -leos(es)t and heofon(e)), to eo, as in preost in line 6. This variation seems to have taken place because the scribe was copying his text from a version which had been written by two diVerent scribes who had themselves used two diVerent spelling systems. This kind of copying is certainly not unknown in the later Middle English period—the English material contained in the Wfteenth-century miscellany known as the Thornton manuscript (MS Lincoln Cathedral 91 (A.5.2)), for example, seems to preserve the linguistic features of its exemplars. But attempts to translate material into scribes’ own dialects are more common than literatim copying in the fourteenth and Wfteenth centuries, perhaps because the increase in the writing of English material meant that more scribes had their own habitual forms to impose on texts.

Very often, though, scribes who do translate their exemplars do not translate them thoroughly, sometimes leaving the occasional ‘relict’ in their texts, sometimes producing what is known as a Mischsprache, a turbid conglomeration of forms from diVerent dialects, some inherited by the scribe from his exemplar, some added by him. One of the most popular poems written in Middle English—it survives in over a hundred manuscripts—is The Prick of Conscience, a lengthy devotional treatise which was composed in the north of England around the year 1350. The work circulated throughout England and has a particularly complicated textual history which is reXected in the language of many of its copies. The author begins by discussing why he has chosen to write in English:

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Fancherche Strate (‘Fenchurch Street’) which is found in Latin documents of the twelfth century shows phonological developments which are unique to the old East Saxon territory: the a in FanreXects the incomplete mutation of a to æ, rather than e, in this region in the Old English period, and the subsequent development of æ to a in Middle English; Strate (which was a word borrowed into early West Germanic from Latin) reXects the development of Old English æ to a¯ which was conWned to the East Saxon area (the development of Old English y to e in the root syllable of cherche is found in Kent as well as the Essex area to which the East Saxons gave their name). By the middle of the thirteenth century, the English of London and its vicinity was evolving through contact with speakers from areas both adjacent to the city and further away. This is illustrated in a proclamation of 1258—a document which is exceptional since it was issued in English. The proclamation affirms that Henry III (r. 1216–72) agrees to abide by what his councillors:

þæt beoþ ichosen þurZ us and þurZ þæt loandes folk on vre kuneriche, habbeþ idon and shullen don in þe worþnesse of Gode and on vre treowþe

(‘who are chosen through us and through the people of the country in our kingdom, have done and shall do to the glory of God and in loyalty to us’).

But the document states that if anyone contravenes Henry’s wishes, ‘we willen and hoaten þæt alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan’ (‘we wish and command that all our loyal subjects should account them deadly foes’). The switch from conciliatory to imperious sentiment is complemented by morphological variation: the southern -eþ ending in the third person plural of the present tense of the verbs (beoþ, habbeþ) changes to the Midland -en of willen and hoaten (compare haten in the extract from the East Anglian bestiary on p. 93 above). Shullen in the Wrst citation is from a ‘preterite present’ verb in Old English (that is, a verb which showed certain features typical of the preterite, or past, tense of verbs in their present-tense forms) and took an -en ending in Middle English even in southern texts. The oa spelling used to represent what had been a¯ in Old English in hoaten and ifoan (compare also loandes, in which an original short a has been lengthened before the consonant group nd) is a feature that is almost limited to Essex in early Middle English: the spelling probably represents an open /O:/ sound. Features typical of Essex, however, now coexist with others and, as the citations above reveal, the text can vary between forms derived from diVerent dialects.

In the fourteenth century, the language of London changed further. Texts copied there between 1330 and 1380 reXect features contributed by immigrants from the East Midlands, including East Anglia. Thus, for example, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of romances, which was produced in London around the year 1340, has the form werld for ‘world’, a spelling which is typical of Norfolk

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Chaucer, as is well-known, indicates the ‘foreignness’ of northern speech in his portrayal of the students Aleyn and John in The Reeve’s Tale (see further p. 123); but in his early poetry, somewhat conspicuously, he occasionally exploits northern morphology too. The most frequently quoted instance of this phenomenon is in these lines from The Book of the Duchess, which describe what the narrator will do if the god of sleep will put an end to his insomnia. The northern -es ending for the third person singular of the present tense of the verb appears in rhyming position (falles) in the Wrst line, a departure from Chaucer’s usual -eþ ending:

The diversity of English may have jeopardized the exact preservation of what Chaucer wrote but, as this example shows, it facilitated much of his writing in the Wrst place.

These excerpts from Chaucer illustrate also how much the language had changed since the Old English period. In morphology, one might note the spread of the plural noun ending derived from Old English -as (which had been used only with strong masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative plural in Old English) to nouns which originally would have had other inXections in the plural. Thus the form sorwes appears in line 7 of the extract from Troilus above: in Old English, the corresponding form would have been sorga or sorge, since the word was a strong feminine noun (such nouns could take either an -a or an -e in the nominative and accusative plural in Old English). Wordes in line 6 shows how the -es ending has spread to cases, as well as genders, in which it was not used originally: following the preposition ‘with’, the noun would have been in the dative case in Old English and would therefore have had the form wordum. Another point of interest is that the old genitive singular ending of a weak feminine noun, -an, has been whittled down to -e in herte (‘heart’s’) in line 4 of the passage from Troilus (our -’s ending, which comes from the genitive singular ending of strong masculine and neuter nouns in Old English, -es, has

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not yet been adopted in this word). And prepositional phrases appear where Old English would generally have used inXectional endings to express the relationship of nouns or pronouns to the rest of the clause: examples include to hire, to that, and with hire goodly wordes (lines 3, 5, and 6).

Forms derived from the old dative of the personal pronouns (i.e. the form for the indirect object) are now also being used where the accusative (i.e. direct object) forms would have been used in Old English: hence, for instance, hym keste, hym disporte in lines 2 and 6 of the Troilus extract. (Old English would have had accusative hine in such contexts.) In the other passages, one might note the contexts in which the old singular forms of the second person pronoun are used: when Chaucer addresses his own literary creation (‘So prey I God that non myswrite the’), and when Absolon asks Alison to kiss him (‘This wol I yeve thee, if thou me kisse’). These examples (both using the accusative thee in accordance with the syntax; the corresponding subject form is thou) should be compared with pronoun usage in the following stanza from Troilus, in which Troilus expresses his reluctance to part from Criseyde after he has slept with her for the Wrst time:

Although a single person is being addressed, as in the other passages, Troilus here uses the form derived from what was, in Old English, the plural second person object pronoun (yow, line 7, from Old English ¯owe ). The corresponding subject form would be ye, as in Troilus’s earlier observation to Criseyde that God ‘wol ye be my steere,/ To do me lyve’ (‘wishes that you be my guide, to make me live’). This shows that, as in modern French (and some modern English dialects; see further Chapter 11), the selection of the second person pronominal form depended, by Chaucer’s day, not just on how many people were being addressed, but also on considerations of respectfulness, politeness, and social standing (Troilus and Criseyde are of noble rank, Absolon and Alison in The miller’s Tale anything but). Etiquette now determines which form is used if one person is being spoken to, complicating considerably the ‘rules’ which governed the use of the pronouns in Old English.

Lexically, the passage from Troilus on p. 106 is distanced from Old English through the amount of French inXuence which it displays: the words purpos,