Machan 2012 Chaucer and The History of English PDF

Chaucer and the History of English
By Tim William Machan
L inguistic history, like all history, is written retrospectively. It is written from

some historical vantage that allows a critic to survey what has been previously
spoken and written and to decide which forms are representative, which aber-
rant, which tangential, and which proleptic in the ways they figure in a coherent
account of language change and development. While speakers use language to
accomplish specific tasks in specific situations, historians assemble these utter-
ances into moments of stasis (like dialects or historical stages) and narratives of
change. Classifying the linguistic record in this way, language historians make
possible large conceptualizations of a sort that typically eludes speakers in ordi-
nary conversation.
When critics turn their gaze backwards, then, they see not only isolated forms
and texts. They also see the backward gazes of their predecessors who have them-
selves assembled isolated utterances into patterns that have come to define the
history of English: varieties like “Old” or “Middle” English and narratives like
“the Great Vowel Shift.” Perhaps, like all history, linguistic history thus comes
partly preinterpreted. When we ask whether a particular form characterizes or
qualifies a category like Middle English, we begin analysis with an earlier gener-
ation’s identification and interpretation of the linguistic record—we begin, that
is, with categories like Middle English, dialects, covarying phonological shifts,
and so forth. And so the history of a language comes to involve at least two kinds
of fact: the attested forms found in written or audio records and the assemblages
of those forms into grammatical rules, phonological changes, and identifiable
varieties.1
Crucial to this historical process have been the contributions of specific indi-
viduals, few of whom have figured as prominently in histories of English as Geof-
frey Chaucer. In the case of his poetry, the two kinds of linguistic facts include
the record of the manuscripts and the conceptualizations made in part from those
facts, conceptualizations such as “Chaucerian English,” “Middle English,” and
“the history of English.” Indeed, so firmly has linguistic discussion relied on Chau-
cer that it becomes difficult to imagine the history of the language without him.
My intention here is much more modest—not to eliminate Chaucer from the his-
tory of English but to reconsider the significance of his role in that history. I want
to examine how the backward gaze of linguistics has utilized Chaucer in the nar-
ratives it constructs and then to focus on how one fact of his usage in particular
complicates and even belies those same constructions. By way of a conclusion I
For various kinds of help and support I would like to thank Ardis Butterfield, Alan Fletcher, Simon
Horobin, David Matthews, Alastair Minnis, Herbert Schendel, Jeremy Smith, and the anonymous
readers for Speculum.
1
See further Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Cambridge Studies in Lin-
guistics 81 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), pp. 4–41.
Speculum 87 (2012) doi:10.1017/S0038713411003885 147
This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
148 Chaucer and the History of English
suggest the limitations and necessities of writing the history of the language as
we do.
1. Chaucer in the History of English
Chaucer was barely in his tomb when writers like Lydgate and Ashby began
to refer to him as someone who illuminated and embellished English, even as he
eliminated all its rudeness. It was Chaucer, Hoccleve famously stated, who was
the “firste fyndere of oure faire language,” and Caxton similarly regarded him
as “the worshipful fader & first foundeur & embelissher of ornate eloquence in
our englissh.”2 There’s some sleight of hand here, of course. They and other early
writers primarily looked to Chaucer for literary precedents, and their comments
elide distinctions between English as a structured code and the rhetorical uses to
which that code might be put. At the same time, by eliding such distinctions early
Chaucerian commentary offers a critical tradition in which Chaucer did invent
the language as well as its rhetorical achievements, and this tradition—as much
as any particular aspects of Chaucer’s usage—formed a factual basis for the ear-
liest sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators on the history of En-
glish.3
With evolving comparative methods and increasing access to the written re-
mains of the past, these commentators were acutely aware both of the fact of
linguistic change and also of a humanist and national imperative to demon-
strate historical continuity. For early-modern grammarians, contemporary En-
glish and England needed to eclipse the past but also to be rooted in it, and
linguistically the fault line often fell between an idealized sense of Germanic pu-
rity and Romance-influenced modernity. For the late-sixteenth-century critic Rich-
ard Mulcaster, the present-day version of the language might represent the high-
est perfection of the language, but English still could be considered diminished
by its post-Germanic developments.4 Or as Alexander Gill observed in his 1621
Logonomia Anglica, the most linguistically detailed of the early-modern histor-
ical discussions, while Anglophones may be English by blood, they nonetheless
speak a “colloquium Latinogallicoanglice kantantium.” For Gill, it was specif-
ically after Chaucer when this “colloquium” arose, creating a group of speakers
who “Anglice non loquuntur, ab Anglicis auribus non intelliguntur . . . vt noua
barbaries vniuersam linguam Anglicam extirpet.”5 His contemporary Richard Ver-
stegan, similarly, saw Chaucer as the source of modern English but also as an
example of the last moments of the language’s purity: “Since the tyme of Chau-
2
These and other late-medieval and early-modern evaluations of Chaucer’s linguistic significance
are most conveniently available in Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criti-
cism and Allusion (1357–1900), 3 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1925).
3
For consideration of the features of English that did not originate with Chaucer or that are not
unique to him see Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words, Cam-
bridge Studies in Medieval Literature 39 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998).
4
Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie (London, 1582; repr., Menston, Eng., 1970),
p. 159.
5
Alexander Gill, Logonomia Anglica (London, 1621; repr., Mentson, Eng., 1968), sig. B2r, B1v.

Chaucer and the History of English 149
cer, more Latin & French, hath bin mingled with our toung then left out of it,
but of late wee haue falne to such borrowing of woords from, Latin, French, and
other toungs, that it had bin beyond all stay and limit.” 6 Less polemically, Ben
Jonson’s 1640 English Grammar draws heavily on Chaucer for its examples of
syntax, while in Richard Carew’s 1605 “Excellency of the English Tongue,” Chau-
cer, likened to Varro, is the only medieval writer mentioned.7
In this way, by the time modern and comparative studies began to flourish in
the nineteenth century, Chaucer had acquired two roles in the history of En-
glish. First, if he no longer held the historically impossible role of the language’s
inventor, he was still presented as someone whose language was at once typical
and admirable. To influential and widely read critics like William Fowler, George
Craik, R. G. Latham, George Marsh, and John Earle, Chaucer’s poetry served,
that is, as the preeminent illustration of Middle English. According to Earle, a
“mature form of English,” exemplified by Chaucer and Gower, first appeared
in the fourteenth century: “Piers Plowman is in a dialect; even Wiclif’s Bible Ver-
sion may be said to be in a dialect: but Chaucer and Gower write in a speech
which is thenceforward recognized as The English Language, and which before
their times is hardly found.” 8 H. C. Wyld fashions the same kind of accentless
English—a chimera that remains widely cited to this day—and projects it onto
Chaucer: “The dialect of London would, in any case, have become, nay, it was
already becoming, the chief form of English used in writings of every kind, and
that from the pressure of political, economic, and social factors; but there can
be no doubt that the process was greatly hastened, so far as pure literature is
concerned, by the popularity of Chaucer.” 9 Not only was Chaucer the avatar of
today’s language, then, but by his speaking he hastened the spread of what would
become Modern English at the expense of the regional varieties that scholars
like Joseph Wright saw approaching their inevitable disappearance.10
The result is that in some historical accounts, Chaucer’s language becomes not
just an illustration of Middle English but a synonym for it—the putative main
branch of English among the various offshoots of a period still today described
(erroneously) as the most dialectal in the history of the language. In Samuel Moore
and Albert Marckwardt’s influential mid-twentieth-century Historical Outlines
of English Sounds and Inflections, for instance, the chapter standing between one
on Old English phonology and another on Middle English phonology is not about
6
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605; repr., Ilkley, Eng., 1976),
p. 204.
7
Ben Jonson, The English Grammar (London, 1640; repr., Menston, Eng., 1972); Richard Carew,
“The Excellency of the English Tongue,” in William Camden, Remains concerning Britain (1605;
rev. ed. repr., Wakefied, Eng., 1974), pp. 42–51, at p. 51.
8
John Earle, The Philology of the English Tongue, 5th ed. (Oxford, 1892), pp. 68–69. See also
William C. Fowler, The English Language in Its Elements and Forms, with a History of Its Origin
and Development, rev. ed. (New York, 1855); George L. Craik, A Manual of English Literature
and of the History of the English Language from the Norman Conquest, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1874);
R. G. Latham, The English Language, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1855); and George Marsh, Lec-
tures on the English Language (London, 1872).
9
H. C. Wyld, A History of Modern Colloquial English (New York, 1920), p. 55.
10
Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Grammar (Oxford, 1905), p. vii.

Middle English grammar but instead is titled “The Language of Chaucer.” 11 As
impressionistic as such a judgment might be, it often has had the trappings of
empirical support, such as Chaucer’s use of final e and what it reveals about the
form’s status and the structure of English in the late-medieval period. To Henry
Sweet this is at once a dialectal and historical issue, for which Chaucer’s lan-
guage serves as a kind of neutral point of reference: “As regards the Northern
dialects of the Middle period, they ought strictly to be classed as Modern, as they
soon lost the final e entirely. But as they have all the other characteristics of the
Middle period, it seems most convenient to take the dominant speech of Chau-
cer and Gower as our criterion.” 12 It is because Chaucer’s language is more con-
servative, then, that it better represents Middle English. And the history of the
language, in turn, involves a linear movement from final e as a residual inflec-
tion to the absence of all adjectival inflections.
Sweet’s comment points as well to Chaucer’s other developed role in the his-
tory of English: as a transitional figure between the ancient and the modern. Just
as Verstegan and Gill had seen Chaucer’s language to be the form and moment
of linguistic perfection that preceded a Gallic-induced decline, many early-modern
and contemporary language historians, by using Chaucer’s language to illustrate
Middle English, also use the poet to characterize a historical period. By standing
in for Middle English, Chaucer’s language also serves as a link in a chain that
can connect the earliest Germanic writing in England to present-day global En-
glish and thereby provides evidence for a language that maintains transhistorical
integrity, however many changes it undergoes. Initially, the links had various
names, such as Saxon, Semi-Saxon, Early English, and even Anglo-Saxon (as
opposed to English), although by the end of the nineteenth century the Old,
Middle, Modern distinction had become conventional. In this heuristic, Middle
English—and so Chaucer’s language—stands halfway, as it were, to the present,
a position through which English had to pass in order to reach its current con-
dition. In some analyses, Chaucer resembles a politically active linguistic mid-
wife who brings to life a form of the language that could serve as a social, liter-
ary, and conceptual model for Lancastrian England and its cultivation of a national
English identity.13 Even more broadly, Earle sees Chaucer as a figure whose lan-
guage makes possible the emergence of a standard variety from the confusion
and primitiveness attributed to regionalisms: “In the midst of this Babel of dia-
lects there suddenly appeared a standard English language. It appeared at once
in full vigour, and was acknowledged on all hands without dispute.” “It is in the
writings of Chaucer and Gower,” Earle continues, “that we have for the first time
a full display of King’s English. . . . Chaucer and Gower are united inasmuch as
11
Samuel Moore and Albert H. Marchwardt, Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflec-
tions (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1951).
12
Henry Sweet, A History of English Sounds from the Earliest Period (London, 1874), p. 161.
Equation of the language of Chaucer’s poetry with Middle English remains widespread. See, for ex-
ample, Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years
War (Oxford, 2009).
13
The fullest articulation of this view is that of John H. Fisher, The Emergence of Standard En-
glish (Lexington, Ky., 1996).

they both wrote the particular form of English which became more and more
established as the standard language, and their books were classics of the best
society down to the opening of a new era under Elizabeth.” 14 To the extent that
histories of the language have often largely been histories of Standard English,
by extension, Chaucer’s language has significance not only because of its repre-
sentative quality but also because it can point, almost presciently, to develop-
ments that would take place long after the poet’s death.
It is worth noting that the language of other medieval poets, in comparison
with that of Chaucer, could well be considered more representative of medieval
language use. For simple volume of extant writing, for example, Chaucer’s works
pale in comparison with those of Lydgate, who is credited with approximately
five times as many extant lines of poetry. Strictly in terms of data, whether struc-
tural or discursive, Lydgate thus provides a much more empirically detailed ex-
ample of one individual’s Middle English usage than does Chaucer. At the same
time, the language of either Langland or Henryson is more structurally removed
from much Modern English than is Chaucer’s language and thereby, following
Sweet’s logic of difference as a measure of historical integrity, ought to be more
structurally characteristic of the language’s early history. In fact, although as early
as 1546 Peter Ashton noted the antiquity and obscurity of Chaucer’s language, a
dozen years before that Thomas Berthelette already had described Gower’s lan-
guage as “olde englysshe wordes and vulgars.” 15 In 1550 Langland’s language
led Robert Crowley to observe, “The Englishe is according to the tyme it was
written in, and the sence somewhat darcke.” 16
Yet even if these varieties are more removed from modern English and there-
fore more challenging to contemporary speakers, it is Chaucer alone who has
inspired what might be described as an industry of grammatical studies that en-
trench (and perhaps mystify) the substitution of his language for Middle En-
glish. And this is the case not simply because, following Owen Rogers’s 1561
edition of Piers Plowman, Langland’s poem was not reprinted for two and a half
centuries, but because as the scholarly traditions of historical English studies de-
veloped, they did so by continuing the emphasis on the significance of Chaucer’s
language. Once more, that is, linguistic history responded to the facts of prior
interpretation as well as to the facts of Chaucer’s usage.
In John Palsgrave’s 1530 Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse, a grammar
of historical importance for English as well as French, Chaucer is cited just three
times, compared with over a hundred citations of Lydgate’s works.17 By the end
of the century, however, when Lydgate’s poetry figured far less frequently in the
14
Earle, Philology, pp. 68 and 74–75. Chaucer’s centrality to the development of English and the
emergence of a standard language in his day is often treated as a critical given. See, for example,
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English
Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, Pa., 1999), pp. 10–12.
15
John Gower, Io. Gower de confessione Amantis (London, 1532), sig. Aiiv. Berthelette in fact
held up the old vulgars as models for his contemporaries.
16
William Langland, The Vision of Pierce Plowman (London, 1550), sig. iiv.
17
Gabriele Stein, “Chaucer and Lydgate in Palsgrave’s Lesclarissement,” in Cultures, Ideologies,
and the Dictionary: Studies in Honor of Ladislav Zgusta, ed. Braj B. Kachru and Henry Kahane,
Lexicographica, series maior, 64 (Tübingen, 1995), pp. 127–39.

corpus of printed Middle English than did Chaucer’s, the situation had reversed
itself. Despite its alleged modernity, Chaucer’s language had begun to elicit most
of the crucial discussion and to contribute most significantly to a developing sense
of the character and history of English. Chaucer’s language not only elicited ex-
tended commentary in Thomas Speght’s introduction to his edition of Chaucer’s
Works, for instance, but also figured in the glossary that concluded the volume.
That glossary, in turn, became a major source for seventeenth-century lexicograph-
ical efforts with “hard” words. Around 1666 Francis Junius thus used Speght’s
glossary to compile his own Chaucerian wordlist of thirty-one hundred entries in
eighty-four leaves.18 In his 1755 Dictionary Dr. Johnson generally limited illus-
trative quotations to those from writers of the past century and a half. However,
“Obsolete words are admitted, when they are found in authours not obsolete, or
when they have any force or beauty that may deserve revival.” 19 Chaucer is one
such writer, figuring prominently in the prefatory essay on the history of English
and in the definitions, illustrative quotations, and cross-references of the dictio-
nary proper. Chaucer’s language is featured in Francis Thynne’s 1599 Animadver-
sions, and his vocabulary in an appendix to Paul Greaves’s 1594 Grammatica An-
glicana. 20 It is the presumed obscurity and senescence of Chaucer’s English that
serve as the inspiration (according to the prefatory materials) for Francis Kynas-
ton’s Latin translation of Troilus and Criseyde, the first two books of which were
published in 1635.21 Chaucer’s lexicographical prominence became even more pro-
nounced in the Oxford English Dictionary, which, in a first edition that relied
heavily on literary quotations in general, includes more than eleven thousand il-
lustrations drawn from his poetry and prose.22
It is likewise in the nineteenth century that a tradition of Chaucerian gram-
mars, obviously developed in concert with the expansion of comparative philol-
ogy and historical grammars of English in general, becomes firmly established.
Thus, alongside broad discursive histories like Craik’s 1874 Manual of English
Literature and T. R. Lounsbury’s 1879 History of the English Language and struc-
tural descriptions like Karl Luick’s two-part Historische Grammatik der eng-
18
See John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Her-
itage (Cambridge, Eng., 2008), pp. 230–32. See further Johan Kerling, Chaucer in Early English Dic-
tionaries: The Old-World Tradition in English Lexicography down to 1721 and Speght’s Chaucer
Glossaries, Germanic and Anglistic Studies of the University of Leiden 18 (Leiden, 1979); and Jür-
gen Schäfer, “Chaucer in Shakespeare’s Dictionaries: The Beginning,” Chaucer Review 17 (1982),
182–92.
19
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), 1, no sig.
20
Francis Thynne, Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections
of impressiones of Chaucer’s workes, ed. G. H. Kingsley, EETS OS 9 (London, 1865); Paul Greaves,
Grammatica Anglicana (Canterbury, 1594), four leaves lacking pagination and signatures.
21
Francis Kynaston, Amorum Troili et Creseidæ libri duo priores Anglico-Latini (Oxford, 1635).
For Kynaston’s emphasis on Chaucer’s antiquity see Tim William Machan, “Kynaston’s Troilus, Tex-
tual Criticism, and the Renaissance Reading of Chaucer,” Exemplaria 5 (1993), 161–83.
22
John Considine, “Literary Classics in OED Quotation Evidence,” Review of English Studies 60
(2009), 620–38, at p. 625. Such reliance on Chaucer epitomizes a distinct lexicographical bias, from
Johnson to the third edition of the OED, for belletristic evidence. See Charlotte Brewer, “The Use of
Literary Quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary,” Review of English Studies 61 (2010), 93–
125.

lischen Sprache appeared Chaucerian grammars such as Bernhard ten Brink’s 1884
Chaucers Sprache und Verskunst, Sweet’s 1886 Second Middle English Primer:
Extracts from Chaucer, and Friedrich Wild’s 1915 Die sprachlichen Eigentüm-
lichkeiten der wichtigeren Chaucer-Handschriften und die Sprache Chaucers. 23
In the past half century at least six new Chaucerian grammars have been pub-
lished,24 as well as more focused studies on Chaucer’s phonology and vocabu-
lary. By comparison, while essays have been written about the language of Gower,
Langland, and Henryson, none of those poets has a full-length grammar to his
name. Whether in linguistic histories or studies of the medieval period in partic-
ular, Chaucer’s language still often stands in for Middle English.
2. Chaucer and the Second-Person Personal Pronoun
As consequential as Chaucer’s language has been in framing conceptions of

late-medieval English and the larger history of the language, its claims to
representativeness—presuming for the moment that any individual’s language can
make such claims—are often tenuous. Indeed, features of his language can be
both peculiar in the late-medieval period and tangential to what might be con-
sidered the main line of English’s development since the Middle Ages. And this
is so whether the features are details of grammar and usage or larger systemic
qualities of dialect or sociolect. The Type III London English he wrote (to use
M. L. Samuels’s influential typology) did indeed, as Sweet noted, preserve se-
nescent features like final e. And doing so made it, already by the early fifteenth
century, a kind of recognizably antiquated variety, distinctively associated with
literary works and orthographically and morphologically less influential than Sam-
uels’s Type IV.25 Here, however, I want to focus not on the broad perspective of
a variety but on just one element of English: the second-person personal pro-
noun.26
23
T. R. Lounsbury, History of the English Language (New York, 1879); Karl Luick, Historische
Grammatik der englischen Sprache, pts. 1 and 2 (Stuttgart, 1914 and 1940); Bernhard ten Brink,
Chaucers Sprache und Verskunst (Leipzig, 1884); Henry Sweet, Second Middle English Primer: Ex-
tracts from Chaucer (Oxford, 1886); Friedrich Wild, Die sprachlichen Eigentümlichkeiten der wich-
tigeren Chaucer-Handschriften und die Sprache Chaucers, Wiener Beiträge zur englischen Philologie
44 (Vienna, 1915). Luick’s Grammatik was planned as a two-volume work, but only the two parts
of volume 1 were published (with part 2 appearing posthumously).
24
Helge Kökeritz, A Guide to Chaucer’s Pronunciation (Stockholm, 1954); Ralph W. V. Elliott,
Chaucer’s English (London, 1974); G. H. Roscow, Syntax and Style in Chaucer’s Poetry, Chaucer
Studies 6 (Woodbridge, Eng., 1981); J. Kerkhof, Studies in the Language of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd
ed., Leidse Germanistische en Anglistische Reeks 5 (Leiden, 1982); David Burnley, A Guide to Chau-
cer’s Language (Norman, Okla., 1983); Simon Horobin, Chaucer’s Language (Basingstoke, Eng., 2007).
25
See M. L. Samuels, “Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology,” English Studies 44
(1963), 81–94; idem, Linguistic Evolution with Special Reference to English, Cambridge Studies in
Linguistics 5 (Cambridge, Eng., 1972), pp. 165–79; idem and J. J. Smith, “Chaucerian Final -e,” in
Samuels and Smith, The English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 7–12;
and Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition, Chaucer Studies 32 (Woodbridge, Eng.,
2003), p. 34.
26
Since this article is not concerned with other categories of pronouns, I will refer henceforth sim-
ply to the “second-person pronoun.”

A common assertion in historical grammars or works specifically about Mid-
dle English is that the language maintained what linguists call a T/V distinction,
named from the singular and plural forms tu and vos in Latin.27 This is a prag-
matic strategy by which second-person singular pronouns (thou and thee) mark
not only number but also familiarity, while second-person plural pronouns ( ye
and yow) can mark social distance as well as plurality. Sometimes thought to
originate in the fourth-century Latin “plural of majesty,” the strategy is in effect
a grammaticalized honorific—a mark of respect coded in grammatical structure—
that is present (if inconsistently so) in French as early as the Song of Roland. It
allows a social subordinate, such as a servant or child, to employ grammatical
number to articulate the superiority of kings or parents, who in turn can actual-
ize their own superiority in the singular of their response. Penitents can use the
plural pronoun to express their devotion to God, and lovers can shift from the
plural to the singular as their relationship shifts from the formal to the intimate.
For English, the T/V distinction is typically attributed to French influence and
identified as early as the thirteenth century.28 In Robert of Gloucester’s Chroni-
cle, for instance, the earl of Kent uses the plural Ze when urging the emperor to
recognize his loyalty:
Sire emperour . . . • ne be Ze no so bolde •
Vnder þat voreward • ichabbe þe al iholde •” 29
In the earlier Havelok, when the rightful queen (Goldboru) returns to England,
all the English men fall to their knees and address her with plural pronouns:
. . . Leuedi, Kristes ore
And youres! we hauen misdo mikel,
þat we ayeyn you haue be fikel.” 30
Presuming that such poems accurately reflect Middle English grammar, Walter
Skeat uses the examples of two other romances to illustrate pronoun usage. The
27
The seminal essay on the T/V distinction is Roger Brown and Albert Gilman, “The Pronouns of
Power and Solidarity,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960),
pp. 253–76.
28
Lounsbury, History of the English Language, pp. 287–89; Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle En-
glish Syntax, Mémoires de la Société néophilologique de Helsinki 23 (Helsinki, 1960), pp. 126–28;
Thomas Finkenstaedt, You und Thou: Studien zur Anrede im Englischen (mit einem Exkurs über die
Anrede im Deutschen), Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der germa-
nischen Völker, n.s., 10 (134) (Berlin, 1963), pp. 48–90; Karl Brunner, An Outline of Middle English
Grammar, trans. Grahame Johnston (Oxford, 1963), p. 58; Roger Lass, “Phonology and Morphol-
ogy,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language, 3: 1476 to 1776, ed. Lass (Cambridge,
Eng., 1992), pp. 56–186, at pp. 148–55; J. A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle
English, 3rd ed. (Malden, Mass., 2005), p. 41; Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the
English Language, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2002), p. 242. Both Old English poetry and
prose contain examples of plural pronouns used by individuals to suggest something like the plural
of majesty, though in their pragmatics and infrequency, such forms imply no historical connection to
Middle English pronoun usage. See Finkenstaedt, You und Thou, pp. 28–47.
29
William Aldis Wright, ed., The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, 2 vols., Rolls Series
86 (London, 1887), 1:97, lines 1341–42.
30
Lines 2797–99, ed. Walter Hoyt French and Charles Brockway Hale, in Middle English Metri-
cal Romances (New York, 1930), p. 170.

“distinction” between thou and ye and their implications, he says, “is so well
kept throughout these poems that it would not be well to lose so good an op-
portunity of pointing it out. It was one of those niceties of speech which it was
the poet’s especial business to observe.” 31 David Burnley likewise sees literary
practice in the Canterbury Tales as a mirror of everyday usage: “Such scrupu-
lousness in pronoun address belongs only to polite society; neither the Host in
the links between tales nor the churls in the fabliau tales necessarily observe
them.” 32
From those aristocratic beginnings, it is also often argued, the honorific pro-
noun spread throughout the Anglophone population. Tauno Mustanoja thus as-
serts that the honorific plural was sporadic until the fourteenth century, “when
this habit begins to gain ground; yet even at this time people of all ranks natu-
rally employ the singular when addressing one person.” “On the whole,” he con-
tinues, “the use of the plural in addressing one person is largely confined to the
upper classes of society.” 33 According to many grammars and histories, by the
fifteenth century the plural form in general was beginning to subsume the singu-
lar, pointing toward the use of the oblique you in all situations in many (but not
all) varieties of Modern English. As a dialectal or sociolectal marker, singular thou
survived into the twentieth century, but already in the sixteenth, because of the
widespread use of ye and you, the historical singular had taken on insulting force
in some contexts. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for instance, Toby Belch goads
Andrew Aguecheek to write a letter challenging the disguised Viola to a fight and
in doing so transforms the pronoun into a derogatory speech act: “if thou thou’st
him some thrice, it shall not be amiss” (3.2.39–40).
Such analysis renders the T/V distinction an integral aspect of English’s his-
torical grammar—a feature that, like the replacement of the verbal inflection -eth
by -s or the shift of the phoneme /e/ to /i/ in words like feet, displayed regular
usage as well as a recoverable origin and history (including its demise). Inas-
much as Chaucer’s poetry is often the exemplar of Middle English, the primary
illustration of this feature is likewise characteristically his poetry. One study re-
gards Chaucer along with Malory as models of increased sociolinguistic sensi-
tivity to pronoun usage, and histories of the language invoke Chaucer in this
capacity in an almost axiomatic way.34 Invoking the broader sociolinguistic con-
31
Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Romance of William of Palerne, EETS ES 1 (London, 1867), pp. xli–
xlii. A fragmentary alliterative romance on Alexander is included in the same volume.
32
Burnley, Guide, p. 18.
33
Mustanoja, Middle English Syntax, p. 127. Also see Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins
and Development of the English Language, 4th ed. (Fort Worth, Tex., 1993), p. 188; and M. L. Sam-
uels, “Dialect and Grammar,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, Cal-
if., 1988), pp. 201–21, at p. 213.
34
Norman Blake, “The Literary Language,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language,
2: 1066 to 1476, ed. Blake (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 500–541, at p. 539. Other works that use
Chaucer’s writings to illustrate the use of Middle English thou and ye include Mustanoja, Middle
English Syntax, p. 127; Finkenstaedt, You und Thou, pp. 74–87; Elly van Gelderen, A History of the
English Language (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 121–22; Marilyn Corrie, “Middle English—Dialects and
Diversity,” in The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford, 2006), pp. 86–119,
at p. 107; Seth Lerer, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York, 2007), p. 76;

figuration of T/V usage derived from Chaucer’s poetry further, an array of in-
terpretive criticism has explored the nuances of Chaucer’s pronouns in individ-
ual passages. Pronoun usage throughout Troilus and Criseyde, by the dreamer
and Black Knight in the Book of the Duchess, and by an assortment of Can-
terbury Tales characters (including Harry Bailey) has been used to demonstrate
how Chaucer’s manipulation of the pragmatics of grammatical number might
accomplish everything from a stylistic tic to characters’ exploitation of one an-
other to the expression of erotic love.35
Such readings are cogent. They show pronoun usage as yet another way for
Chaucer to reveal Troilus’s intimacy with Criseyde, for example, or Pandarus’s
distaste for her hesitancy in reciprocating Troilus’s affection. At the same time,
as many other passages show, Chaucer’s usage often seems more situational than
rigorously grammatical. While the poem to Bukton thus typically employs the
familiar thow, which could be expected among friends, the envoy (lines 25–32)
shifts between singular and plural pronouns:
This lytel writ, proverbes, or figure
I sende yow; take kepe of yt, I rede;
Unwys is he that kan no wele endure.
If thow be siker, put the nat in drede.
The Wyf of Bathe I pray yow that ye rede
Of this matere that we have on honde.
God graunte yow your lyf frely to lede
In fredam, for ful hard is to be bonde.36
It is possible to read the plurals as generalizing gestures that direct the poem to a
reading audience at large and the singulars as meant for Bukton.37 But in this
case, the singular at line 28, which would seem part of any generalizing gesture,
seems unmotivated. One might regard that particular singular as a kind of height-
ened rhetorical gesture—sort of the syntactic equivalent of an ethical dative.
Whether this much semantic nuance and significance should be invested in a gram-
Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Early Middle English (1066–ca. 1350),” in A Companion to the History of
the English Language, ed. Haruko Momma and Michael Matto, Blackwell Companions to Litera-
ture and Culture 54 (Chichester, 2008), pp. 184–90, at pp. 189–90.
35
Judith A. Johnson, “‘Ye’ and ‘Thou’ among the Canterbury Pilgrims,” Michigan Academician
10 (1977), 71–76; Colin Wilcockson, “‘Thou’ and ‘Ye’ in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” Use of English 31
(1980), 37–43; Burnley, Guide, pp. 17–19; Derek Pearsall, “The Franklin’s Tale, Line 1469: Forms
of Address in Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995), 69–78; Mari Pakkala-Weckström,
“The Discourse of Seduction and Intrigue: Linguistic Strategies in Three Fabliaux in the Canterbury
Tales,” Journal of Historical Linguistics 3 (2002), 151–73; Andreas H. Jucker, “‘Thou art so loothly
and so oold also’: The Use of Ye and Thou in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Anglistik 17 (2006),
57–72; Luisella Caon, “The Pronouns of Love and Sex: Thou and Ye among Lovers in The Canter-
bury Tales,” in “And Never Know the Joy”: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, ed. C. C. Barfoot,
DQR Studies in Literature 36 (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 33–47; Gabriele Knappe and Michael Schü-
mann, “Thou and Ye: A Collocational-Phraseological Approach to Pronoun Change in Chaucer’s Can-
terbury Tales,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42 (2006), 213–38.
36
All quotations of Chaucer’s works are from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd
ed. (Boston, 1987).
37
See Herbert Koziol, “Die Anredeform bei Chaucer,” Englische Studien 75 (1943), 170–74.

matical feature with limited utility (it can occur, after all, only in works that have
second-person pronouns) is another matter.
Burnley coined the term “affective switching” to describe how shifts between
singular and plural second-person pronouns might reflect not simply number or
social status but degree of intended intimacy.38 He put this concept to good use
in readings of the Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde. Throughout
her tale, similarly, the Second Nun uses thou, which Burnley sees as an expres-
sion of the notion that to “idealistic Christians all men are brothers.” 39 Simon
Horobin approaches the Franklin’s Tale in a related vein. When the Franklin ap-
parently interrupts the Squire in his meandering story about Cambyuskan, Cam-
balo, and Canacee, he observes (lines 673–74),
In feith, Squier, thow hast thee wel yquit
And gentilly. I preise wel thy wit.
Of this passage, Horobin comments, “Here the Franklin emphasizes the Squire’s
youth and the use of the singular pronoun is presumably a means of flagging the
age gap, although there is also a suggestion here that the Franklin is deliberately
patronizing the Squire.” 40 Without disputing the cogency of any of those read-
ings, I do want to suggest that “affective switching” is a slippery concept that grants
a great deal of latitude to the intentions not just of fictional speakers but of poets
as well. Burnley seems to recognize as much in accounting for Pope Urban’s use of
a plural in an expostulation to Jesus in the Second Nun’s Tale (lines 197–99):
For thilke spouse that she took but now
Ful lyk a fiers leoun, she sendeth heere,
As meke as evere was any lomb, to yow!
Inasmuch as earlier in the same speech Urban uses thou and thee for Jesus, Burn-
ley suggests that the switch is “motivated by nothing more than the demands of
rhyme.” 41 This slipperiness produces a circularity. Like readings focused on the
social stratification of speakers, that is, “affective switching” and metrical neces-
sity bring with them an a priori presumption that number switches ordinarily
have pragmatic significance. Even as they grant latitude to the intentions of imag-
ined and real Middle English speakers, they thus reify the grammatical existence
of the honorific plural or familiar singular.
But as I noted above, it is not in fact difficult to find passages of pronoun num-
ber switching in Chaucer’s poetry that seem to lack any motivation. In the Knight’s
Tale, for example, while Palamon generally uses only thou and thee with Arcita,
he indiscriminately mixes T and V forms in his prayer to Venus (lines 2249–56):
Youre vertu is so greet in hevene above
That if yow list, I shal wel have my love.
Thy temple wol I worshipe everemo,
And on thyn auter, where I ride or go,
38
39
Ibid., p. 18.
40
Horobin, Chaucer’s Language, p. 102.
41

I wol doon sacrifice and fires beete.
And if ye wol nat so, my lady sweete,
Thanne preye I thee, tomorwe with a spere
That Arcita me thurgh the herte bere.
In the Miller’s Tale the smith responds to Absolon’s request for a “hoote kul-
tour” with a similar mixture of singular and plural pronouns (lines 3779–82):
Gerveys answerde, “Certes, were it gold,
Or in a poke nobles alle untold,
Thou sholdest have, as I am trewe smyth.
Ey, Cristes foo! What wol ye do therwith?”
In response to Thomas’s objection that his many years of religious giving have
done him no good, the friar of the Summoner’s Tale observes, “O Thomas, dos-
tow so? / What nedeth yow diverse freres seche?” (lines 1954–55) and then con-
tinues to mix singular and plural forms (lines 1958–77):
Youre inconstance is youre confusioun.
Holde ye thanne me, or elles oure covent,
To praye for yow been insufficient?
................... . . . ...
Thomas, of me thou shalt nat been yflatered;
Thou woldest han oure labour al for noght.
The hye God, that al this world hath wroght,
Seith that the werkman worthy is his hyre.
Thomas, noght of youre tresor I desire
As for myself, but that al oure covent
To preye for yow is ay so diligent,
And for to buylden Cristes owene chirche.
For all these passages one might construct ingenious readings of pronoun choice
as dependent on characters’ shifting emotional investment in one another. And it
is possible to imagine a rigid grammatical paradigm that would classify some of
these examples as “errors.” 42 But barring such readings, many number shifts are
better described as random or whimsical, and such randomness undermines ar-
guments for the grammaticalized status of pronoun number in Chaucer’s lan-
guage. This is certainly not to propose that Chaucer never intentionally manip-
ulates pronoun number; its effects in Troilus and the Canterbury Tales, as I said
above, have been amply demonstrated. But the fact that Chaucer’s use of pro-
noun number can vary from the contextually nuanced to the numerically com-
pulsory to the random suggests that affective and social switching were features
not of his grammar but of his stylistic repertoire. Whether the category of error
could even exist within such a context is doubtful.
Given the significance histories and criticism grant to Chaucer’s works as il-
lustrations of T/V usage in Middle English, Chaucer’s variation raises questions
about the status of pronoun switching in general. In his legend of St. Elizabeth,
42
Norman Nathan, “Pronouns of Address in the Canterbury Tales,” Mediaeval Studies 21 (1959),
193–201.

taken largely from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, Osbern Bokenham thus
says of the saint:
And so wele she groundyd was in loulynesse
That she wolde suffryn in no maner wyse,
Hyr maydyns hyr clepyn “lady” nere “maystresse,”
Nere, whan she cam, ageyn hyr for to ryse,
As among ientelys yt ys þe guyse;
Nere in þe plurere noumbyr spekyn hyr to
But oonly in þe syngulere, she hem dede deuyse,
As souereyns to subiectys be won to do.43
When taken at face value, the passage can serve as a primary witness to the gram-
maticality of honorific pronouns in the late-medieval period, and this is in fact
how some histories of the language regard it.44 But there are problems with such
a reading. For one thing, the passage fairly closely follows the Legenda, which
omits the comparison with sovereigns and subjects but includes the remarks on
Elizabeth’s resistance to being called lady as well as her rejection of honorific
pronouns: “Tanta se humilitate deprimebat ut nullatenus pateretur quod ancille
eam dominam appellarent, sed singulari tantum ad eam numero loquerentur, eo
modo scilicet quo inferioribus loqui solemus.” 45 The passage therefore might be
more accurately described as an illustration of faithful translation than of Mid-
dle English grammar. Besides this, Bokenham, obviously, is cultivating stylized
rhetoric in the form of hagiography, and it is just this kind of writing (including
that by Chaucer) that accounts for the vast majority of honorific pronouns in
accounts of Middle English. Indeed, this passage’s sentiments appear all the more
cultivated in view of a similar, stylized use in the fifteenth-century Crowned King.
Here, an unnamed clerk appears in a dream, in which he raises the T/V distinc-
tion as part of a modesty topos:
With that a clerk kneled adoun & carped these wordes:
“Liege lord, yif it you like to listen a while,
Sum sawes of salomon y shall you shew sone,
Besechyng you of your souerainte that y myght be suffred
To shewe you my sentence in singuler noumbre—
To peynte it with pluralites my prose wolde faile;
To pike a thonke with plesaunce my profit were but simple.” 46
The addressee of this short poem is a real king—Henry V on the eve of his 1415
invasion of France—and so The Crowned King ultimately offers conventional ad-
vice to a prince through the artifice of a dream vision. As a feature of this arti-
fice, the clerk’s discussion of literary style and pronoun choice scarcely provides
43
Mary S. Serjeantson, ed., Legendys of Hooly Wummen, EETS OS 206 (London, 1938), lines
10345–52.
44
The passage is read in just this way by Mustanoja (Middle English Syntax, p. 128) and Lass
(“Phonology and Morphology,” p. 149).
45
Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, ed., Legenda aurea, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Florence, 1998), 1:1167.
46
Lines 42–48, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins, in Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries
(New York, 1959), p. 229.

an unmediated reflection on ordinary Middle English usage. An overt reference
to the T/V distinction in these historical and literary circumstances might even
be described as a stylistic affectation.
Rhetoric and literary artifice are in fact crucial factors in one of the most thor-
ough and well-documented studies of thou and ye—Russell Osborn Stidston’s item-
ization and classification of an extraordinary number of fourteenth-century pro-
noun usages, now nearly a century old. Many of his examples certainly do suggest
the kind of stylistic intention and imagination that can figure in Chaucer’s poetry,
but all of Stidston’s sources are belletristic: saints’ lives, romances, chronicles, and
incidental poetry. Further, his analysis undermines its own argument that a T/V
distinction was an immanent, generalized feature of Middle English grammar. In
Stidston’s discussion of the English Metrical Homilies, for example, the inconsis-
tent usages he describes do not point to any grammatical regularity: “A monk
uses the plural to a fellow monk, altho later as a ghost he uses a singular to the
same brother. . . . One nun addresses her abbess with the plural while another uses
the singular. A bishop addresses St. John with the plural but St. John, with one
exception, uses the singular to the bishop.” And again: “In Rouland the hero uses
the singular to a Saracen giant. In Tristrem giants are thoued by the hero in com-
bat, but a dwarf is honored with a plural along with a singular by Tristrem. Per-
haps the rime is responsible for the plural rather than any merit of the dwarf.” 47
Some of these contradictory, ad hoc conclusions even run contrary to patterns of
Middle English usage that have been identified in Chaucer’s poetry; in the Auchin-
leck Manuscript it is thus customary for husbands to address their wives with the
thou that Chaucerian husbands would seem to avoid.
Just as it is easy to find Chaucerian examples that do not adhere to T/V usage
patterns, so it is easy to find similar examples in non-Chaucerian poetry. To re-
turn to Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, in the earl of Kent’s remarks to the em-
peror, only a few lines before the passage with the plural of majesty that I quoted
above, the earl uses the singular:
. . . al þi wille • þou ast þou miZt ise •
Of þe king þat is min vncle • he is al at þin wille •
Haue merci of him ich þe bidde • & ne let him noZt aspille •
Wat wostou more of him • bote þat he truage þe bere • 48
It is Sir Kay who mixes singular and plural when speaking with Guenevere in
Ywain and Gawain:
“Madame,” he said, “by Goddes dome,
We ne wist no thing of thi come
And if we did noght curtaysly,
47
Russell Osborne Stidston, rev. Arthur G. Kennedy, The Use of “Ye” in the Function of “Thou”
in Middle English Literature from Ms. Auchinleck to Ms. Vernon: A Study of Grammar and Social
Intercourse in Fourteenth-Century England, Leland Stanford Junior University Publications, Univer-
sity Series, 28 (Stanford, Calif., 1917), pp. 38–39, 78, and 57. I have eliminated Stidston’s intratex-
tual cross-references and silently expanded his abbreviations. On Chaucerian husbands and the second-
person pronoun see Pearsall, “The Franklin’s Tale, Line 1469,” and also below, p. 163.
48
Wright, ed., Metrical Chronicle, 1:97, lines 1336–39.

Takes to no velany.
Bot pray ye now this gentil man
To tel the tale that he bygan.” 49
In Lydgate’s prologue to the Siege of Thebes, wherein he writes himself into the
Canterbury Tales, Harry Bailey uses both plural and singular pronouns to com-
mand him to tell a tale:
Come forth, Daun John, be your Cristene name,
And lat us make some manere myrth or play!
Shet youre portoos, a twenty devel way!
Is no disport so to patere and seie.
It wol make youre lippes wonder dreye.
Tel some tale, and make therof jape,
For be my rouncy, thow shalt not eskape.50
Tricked to leave his brother’s court for a wrestling match, Gamelyn (from the
Tale of Gamelyn) encounters and employs the same mixture of pronouns when
speaking with a man lamenting the death of his two sones:
“Good man,” seide Gamelyn, “whi mast thou this fare?
Is ther no man that may you helpen out of care?” 51
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, when Sir Cador recounts a military venture in
which fourteen knights died, King Arthur berates him. Cador mixes singular and
plural forms in his reply:
Sir . . . ye know well yourselven;
Ye are king in this kith; carp what you likes!
Shall never berne upbraid me that to thy borde longes,
That I sholde blinn for their boste thy bidding to work! 52
The Tale of Beryn provides yet one more illustration of the tenuousness of a gram-
maticalized distinction between honorific and familiar pronouns in late-medieval
English literature. Added to the Canterbury Tales in one fifteenth-century manu-
script, the tale begins with a prologue devoted to a fabliau of the Pardoner’s ad-
ventures with a barmaid named Kit, throughout which, despite the intimacy and
shared social rank that might be presumed, the protagonists almost always use
ye and yow. 53 To all these examples might be joined a host of others locatable
through corpora like the online Middle English Compendium. Quotations that
show the casual mixing of singular and plural pronoun forms within a single sen-
tence or two occur in the Compend of Alchemy, “A Warning against Lechery,”
49
Lines 85–90, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell, in “Sir Perceval of Galles” and “Ywain and Gawain”
(Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995), p. 86.
50
Lines 160–66, ed. John M. Bowers, in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations
and Additions (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1992), p. 17.
51
Lines 199–200, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw
Tales (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1997), p. 199.
52
Lines 1928–31, ed. Larry D. Benson, rev. Edward E. Foster, in King Arthur’s Death: The Middle
English “Stanzaic Morte Arthur” and “Alliterative Morte Arthure” (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1994), p. 190.
53
Lines 314–56, ed. Bowers, in The Canterbury Tales, pp. 68–69.

the English translation of Chartier’s Le traite de l’esperance, the Earl of Tolouse,
the Confessio Amantis, Ludus Coventriae, the Fall of Princes, Malory’s Works,
Palladius on Husbondrie, the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Rolle’s Psalter, Sir
Torrent of Portyngale, and the Towneley Plays.
Outside of such literary contexts, particularly after 1400, the plurals ye and
yow simply predominate. Although early-fifteenth-century business records con-
tain few occasions when the distinction might be observed, on those that do oc-
cur the records’ Mischsprache of Latin, French, and English follows the period’s
emergent pattern by generalizing the plural: “John Houghton which vnder you
hath occupied thoffice of waterbayly in the Thames,” 54 for example. The various
Chancery documents likewise use ye almost exclusively for the singular and plu-
ral second-person pronoun, as do the Cely letters, in which T forms occur only
sporadically and generally in the oblique.55 The Paston letters, regardless of the
individual author, display a similarly limited pattern, reserving the singular to ex-
press what Norman Davis describes as “anger, contempt, or hostility” and never
intimacy of any kind.56 William Paston II in fact provides a striking illustration
of how the T/V distinction might be known but not function as a feature of
Middle English grammar. A student at Cambridge from about 1449 to 1454, Wil-
liam there compiled a memorandum on French grammar, in which he wrote sen-
tences in French and supplied interlinear English translations. The memorandum
glosses vous as Ze, tu as thow, vostres as Zowr, and tenne as thyn; it also translates
tu vuldres as thow schalt and vous vouldres as Ze schall wyll. 57 While William thus
clearly knew how to discriminate singular from plural as well as (probably) to use
the T/V distinction, he never distinguishes thou and ye in his own English letters.
The tenuousness of a grammaticalized T/V distinction in Middle English emerges
as well in the transmission of Middle English works. The manuscripts of Piers
Plowman, Samuels has suggested, inconsistently distribute thou and ye, with the
singular form predominant in the A tradition, an increase of the plural form in
the B tradition, and both forms in the C tradition. But if Langland’s own pro-
nominal patterns were erratic, so, too, were the habits of his copyists, since manu-
script variation indicates that the second-person forms were “liable to continual
alteration by scribes according to their own notions of propriety.” 58
Manuscript copies of Chaucer’s Troilus, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and the En-
voy to Scogan all likewise show inconsistent scribal alteration of pronouns, in-
cluding the T/V distribution, in transmission.59 Here I turn first to the Franklin’s
54
Laura Wright, Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford, 1996), p. 85.
I have omitted Wright’s diacritics.
55
John H. Fisher et al., An Anthology of Chancery English (Knoxville, Tenn., 1984). In this col-
lection þu occurs only once, on p. 43. Also see Alison Hanham, ed., The Cely Letters, 1472–1488,
EETS OS 273 (London, 1975).
56
Norman Davis, “The Language of the Pastons,” Proceedings of the British Academy 40 (1954),
119–44, at p. 131.
57
Norman Davis, ed., Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 1 (Oxford, 1971),
pp. 150–53.
58
Samuels, “Dialect and Grammar” (above, n. 33), p. 214.
59
David Burnley, “The T/V Pronouns in Later Middle English Literature,” in Diachronic Perspec-
tives on Address Term Systems, ed. Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker, Pragmatics and Be-

Tale, wherein the Riverside text reads thou in line 1483, which contains Arve-
ragus’s address to Dorigen after she has confessed her arrangement with Aure-
lius: “To no wight telle thou of this aventure.” For Derek Pearsall, Arveragus,
who like all Chaucerian husbands seems to prefer the plural pronoun with his
wife, here “slips into the second person singular as he commands Dorigen never
to divulge the terrible secret of her adultery.” 60 And in the Ellesmere text, which
the Riverside follows, the pronoun may in fact be such a slip, embodying the
superior distance Arveragus adopts toward his wife once she has told him of her
wager. But the fact that fourteen other manuscripts here read ye or yow, while
another twelve omit any pronoun, suggests that to at least the scribes of these
texts the singular was not grammatically requisite, however stylistically nuanced
it could be. A similarly stylistically appropriate singular pronoun could be seen
in lines 436–37 of the Shipman’s Tale, where Harry Bailey expresses a kind of
bonhomie with the Shipman:
Now longe moote thou saille by the cost,
Sire gentil maister, gentil maryneer!
For thou in line 436 one manuscript nonetheless reads ye, while for Sire in the
following line one manuscript reads ye and ten thou. In the Clerk’s Tale lines
304–29 as printed in the Riverside edition, the marquis Walter and the poor man
Janicula exchange familiar and honorific pronouns in ways that reflect their dis-
parate social status and that recall usage in the Book of the Duchess. Thus, Walter
uses T forms at lines 306, 314, 324, and 329, while Janicula uses a V form at
line 322. In several manuscripts, however, Walter’s singulars become plurals, just
as Janicula’s plural once becomes a singular. Line 1641 of book 4 of Troilus and
Criseyde displays the same variation when Criseyde, in the process of affirming
her love to Troilus, says, “Syn I am thyn al hol, withouten mo.” To at least my
mind this is one of the most emotionally powerful expressions in all of Chau-
cer’s poetry, and even so four manuscripts change it by reading your or yours for
thyn. 61
The significance of such transmission patterns for Chaucer’s works is compli-
cated in ways that complicate evaluations of all scribal behavior. For one thing,
exemplars and scribes’ senses of fidelity to them vary, and for another, the de-
mands of rhyme would factor into any likelihood that a scribe might be willing
to substitute you for thee (or vice versa) in a line-final position, where a signifi-
cant number of the pronouns in fact occur. But even if some scribes preserved
specific pronouns for reasons other than just their accuracy as copyists—and that
would be difficult to prove one way or the other—the simple existence of this
yond, n.s., 107 (Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 27–45, at p. 30. Also see his “Scogan, Shirley’s Reputation,
and Chaucerian Occasional Verse,” in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of
Norman Blake, ed. Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 28–46.
60
“The Franklin’s Tale, Line 1469,” p. 76.
61
John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All
Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago, 1940), 6:658, 7:153, and 6:276–78; B. A. Windeatt, Troilus
and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus” (London, 1984), p. 411.

variation undermines any grammatical basis for the T/V distinction in Middle
English.
The transmission of other works recalls the passive role of honorific pronouns
in William Paston’s grammar. Sir Ferumbras, for example, is a translation of the
Old French Fierabras, whose T/V distinctions are obliterated in the version found
in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33. According to Stidston, “In our
Middle English version the singular is the normal and regular form, to be used
in a large majority of the cases. So far from there being any scorn implied in the
use of it, it is certain that it is perfectly respectful, not only between equals, but
also to superiors.” 62 For all the prominence that second-person pronouns can as-
sume in historical accounts of English and readings of Middle English poetry,
the earliest English grammarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rarely
discuss the collapse either of the singular into the plural or of the latter’s nomi-
native and oblique forms into you. The issue simply did not matter as much as,
say, the influx of inkhorn terms or the instability of English orthography, on which
grammarians commented frequently and sometimes passionately.63
Conventional views of the history of the second-person pronoun in Middle En-
glish raise several challenging issues for linguistic theory. First, they of necessity
rely solely on written evidence to posit changes in spoken language. And while
that is the case with all work on language that predates the modern electronic era
of recordings and video tape, historical reconstructions are typically restricted to
isolated sounds and forms, not the pragmatic patterns of ordinary speech.64 Put
another way, reconstructing a T/V distinction depends on presumptions about con-
text and usage that cannot themselves be verified. Most of the medieval written
evidence, further, is constrained in obvious ways by demands of genre, rhyme,
and convention. The restriction of a T/V distinction primarily to romances and
court poetry points to such conventions, as do patterns of pronominal colloca-
tion throughout the late-medieval period. Just as early-modern imprecations cor-
relate with thou, that is, Middle English sire, dame, and madame typically trigger
the plural pronoun, brother and sone the singular. If the distinction were in fact
grammaticalized, the impact of co-occurring words ought to be minimal, and that
is not the case. Similar evidence of the usage as more generic or conventional than
grammaticalized appears in the history of the singular pronoun’s demise. While
receding in all fifteenth- and sixteenth-century genres, in trial records, which can
make a limited claim to offering the closest written record of ordinary speech,
thou typically occurs with insults and accusations—triggered, in other words, not
62
Stidston, The Use of “Ye,” p. 93. Stidston thus directly (and substantially) contradicts the sum-
mary assertion of Sidney J. Herrtage, whose edition he used for his study: “The distinction between
the singular and plural pronouns of the second person is regularly observed; þou, þe, being used in
sentences expressing contempt, inferiority, and affection, while Ze, Zou, imply inferiority or respect
on the part of the speaker” (The English Charlemagne Romances, 1: Sir Ferumbras, EETS ES 34
[London, 1879], p. xxii).
63
See further Ute Dons, Descriptive Adequacy of Early Modern English Grammars, Topics in En-
glish Linguistics 47 (Berlin, 2004), pp. 64–70.
64
We may have reconstructed the phonology and morphology of Indo-European with a fair de-
gree of certainty, for example, but its textual patterns, phrases, and even syntax remain much more
speculative.

by grammar but as a speech act. That these kinds of usages are cross-linguistic,
appearing in Latin, French, and Italian as well, underscores the cultivated, liter-
ate character that the T/V distinction could assume.65
Second, conventional views posit that a change to what is typically considered
a closed class of forms—personal pronouns—ran nearly its entire course and then
essentially reversed itself in less than two centuries. By comparison, when the third-
person plural pronouns (a similarly closed class) underwent their own radical ref-
ormation, they did so at a much slower rate. The nominative form they, derived
from Old Norse þeir, begins to appear alongside Old English hie already early in
the thirteenth century in the Ormulum and does not become the only nomina-
tive form until the fifteenth century. The native accusative him, however, persists
much longer after the introduction of the Norse-derived them. Indeed, it re-
mains common today in the shortened form typically represented in writing by
’em, as in “did you see ’em?” Unlike the T/V distinction in most historical dis-
cussions, moreover, the Scandinavian pronouns have not been replaced even in
part in the subsequent six hundred years by the forms they themselves replaced.
So far as I know, no postmedieval variety of English has restored hie for they,
while all varieties are presumed to have restored person, whether singular or plu-
ral, as the sole grammatical significance of you.
Third, the conventional history of the T/V distinction in English presumes a
change originating among the upper rank and proceeding in a top-down fash-
ion. There are two difficulties with such a history. For one thing, the upper rank
showed considerable variation in its own usage. Chaucer, writing in part for aris-
tocratic patrons, certainly knows and uses the distinction, though he is not ab-
solutely consistent, while the Pastons avoid it nearly completely. As entrepre-
neurs involved in city business (especially London) and wool merchants with
interests in the Low Countries, the Celys might be thought to represent the noveau
riche of the late fifteenth century, and even they preferred to generalize ye and
you. The second difficulty arises from a theoretical point of view. Most large
structural changes in the history of English have been “untargeted” ones that
originate among lower social ranks and disperse from there throughout the pop-
ulation. Targeted changes do arise (as in the Great Vowel Shift), when a middle-
rank group imitates the forms of its social superiors in order to transform its
own sociolinguistic status. But for honorific plural pronouns to have arisen in a
similar fashion, the highest rank of society initially would have had to be em-
ulated by all speakers, who then would have had to initiate a contrary pronom-
inal model that even the highest-ranked speakers adopted. In effect, this would
have been a top-down down-top change. And this all had to happen in very short
order in an age without mass communication or easy travel—both of which are
known to accelerate language change—and some of it would have been depen-
dent on courtly contexts that, as Horobin has suggested, have themselves never
been adequately distinguished from noncourtly ones.66
65
Burnley, “T/V Pronouns,” p. 31. Present already in the Paston letters (see above, p. 162), this
invective use of the singular is what Shakespeare puts to great effect in Twelfth Night.
66
Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (above, n. 25), p. 114.

We like history, linguistic and otherwise, to have neat contours and distinct
epochs, and the conventional history of a pronoun usage that began under French
influence in the thirteenth century, expanded in the fourteenth, and became se-
nescent by the fifteenth meets that desire. But this kind of generalization puts
considerable strain on the written evidence. Even when thou began to assume a
derogatory quality in the fifteenth century, the evidence suggests that its occur-
rences were largely literary. In Jonathan Hope’s words, thou and you led “sepa-
rate lives in the written and spoken mediums, and . . . thou, and the micro-
pragmatic plane of meaning, are much more evident in writing (either drama or
letters) than they ever were in speech.”67 Rather than evidence of a widely adopted
grammaticalized honorific, the T/V usages in romances and the court poetry of
Chaucer, both of which show the considerable impact of Old French traditions,
might be interpreted as a stylistic convention that was limited by genre. In Burn-
ley’s view, “the use of the V-form is part of the value system which medieval peo-
ple called curtesie. T/V choice is embedded in a broader behavioural matrix, and
is simply an optional extension to other linguistic and behavioural resources avail-
able for maintaining a more general social semiotic.” 68 Or, as Larry Benson with
characteristic wit described the simultaneity of late-medieval linguistic and so-
cial performances, “The fork, the handkerchief, and the English plural pronoun
of address are all fourteenth-century inventions.” 69
Such analyses can be pushed further, however. To what extent, I wonder, did
this particular literary convention occur in daily life, whatever a speaker’s social
rank? Whether even Chaucer used the T/V distinction when he spoke directly to
his wife or Bukton or the fishmonger can never be known but seems doubtful, at
least to me; because Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse, we certainly do not
conclude that he used it in conversations with Anne Hathaway or Richard Bur-
bage. My own notion, indeed, is that the English T/V distinction was rather like
postposed adjectives—derived from French, occurring in very limited social and
literary contexts (often in fixed phrases), and surviving generally in English not
as a grammatical feature but only as an affectation or stylistic nuance.70 The im-
portant point is that while both honorific pronouns and postposed adjectives might
have been (and to an extent remain) comprehensible to many speakers, we have
no way to prove—and I think little reason to believe—that the forms were active
67
Jonathan Hope, “The Use of Thou and You in Early Modern Spoken English: Evidence from
Depositions in the Durham Ecclesiastical Court Records,” in Studies in Early Modern English, ed.
Dieter Kastovsky, Topics in English Linguistics 13 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 141–51, at p. 148. Also see his
“Second Person Singular Pronouns in Reords of Early Modern ‘Spoken’ English,” Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 94 (1993), 83–100. On differences between written and oral usage, as well as the cor-
relation of thou with abuse and threats, see Terttu Nevalainen, “Mapping Change in Tudor En-
glish,” in The Oxford History of English, ed. Mugglestone, pp. 178–211, at p. 195.
68
Burnley, “T/V Pronouns,” p. 35. For an argument that demonstrates this very point see Thomas
Honegger, “‘And if ye wol nat so, my lady sweete, thanne preye I thee, [. . . ]’: Forms of Address in
Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” in Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. Taavitsainen and
Jucker, pp. 61–84.
69
Larry D. Benson, “The Beginnings of Chaucer’s English Style,” in Contradictions: From “Beo-
wulf” to Chaucer. Selected Studies of Larry D. Benson, ed. Theodore M. Andersson and Stephen A.
Barney (Aldershot, Eng., 1995), pp. 243–65, at p. 251.
70

features of any late-medieval Anglophone’s speech or, more generally, of Middle
English as a rule-defined linguistic code.
3. English without Chaucer
The second-person pronoun is just one grammatical feature of Chaucer’s lan-

guage. There are, of course, many other features, particularly in lexis and mor-
phology, for which his usage might well be said to reflect what I will call for the
time being the main currents of language history. But I want to use this one di-
vergence between Middle English usage and the status of Chaucer in histories of
English as a window onto larger questions, of theoretical and practical impor-
tance, about how we write linguistic history and what it means. Put simply, how
much of the history of a language should be based on the empirical record that
we have, how much reconstructed by extrapolation from that record, and how
much left unwritten, in recognition of the many things that we do not and can-
not know? Those questions invite not so much absolute answers as decisions about
priorities and their consequences.
Given the vagaries of transmission and archival survival, particularly for early
stages of the language, few claims for representativeness can be raised in favor
of the Middle English written record. We know that certain works that once ex-
isted, such as Chaucer’s Book of the Lion, no longer survive; that other works,
such as heretical sermons, were actively suppressed and destroyed; that ephem-
eral works, such as lyrics, often existed in only one manuscript copy, with the
result that the loss of that manuscript takes with it the lyric and its linguistic
evidence; and that various kinds of works went into early-modern bindings and
hearths, serving new purposes but no longer providing witness to Middle En-
glish usage. Beyond all that, from a survey of the survival rates of other kinds of
late-medieval material remains, we can presume that plain chance would ac-
count for the loss (and survival) of a great many other examples of Middle En-
glish. The written record, in short, is erratic, and that quality alone tempers the
significance of any linguistic data but particularly those of limited frequency,
whether words or usages, including the second-person pronoun.71
“Written” in the previous sentence points to yet another limitation of the record
that we do have. It is, necessarily, written and not spoken, and as such, as I noted
above, it is constrained by all manner of social and rhetorical conventions. Over-
whelmingly, through the end of the Middle Ages, literacy was the prerogative of
a mostly male, mostly clerical, and largely wealthy cohort of the English popu-
lation. To be sure, that demographic was changing in the fifteenth century, but it
would not do so decisively until some time after Chaucer’s death in 1400. Until
the subsequent appearance of Chancery English documents, business writings, and
71
It is because borrowings, for instance, are so individualistic, depending on genre, a writer’s style,
and an audience, that J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers warned against investing too much signif-
icance in the extant written record: “This is one of the reasons why the first record of a French word
in M[iddle] E[nglish] should not necessarily be assumed (as is commonly done) to imply that it was,
or even soon became, generally current in the ‘language’” (Early Middle English Verse and Prose,
2nd ed. [Oxford, 1968], p. lii).

the Paston and Cely letters, moreover, much of the written record is belletristic,
whether in the form of lyrics, romances, saints’ lives, spiritual meditations, or
chronicles. It is not for at least another century that legal records, handbooks,
and ephemera constitute a significant part of the extant English corpus.
All literary evidence is, of course, affected by any number of generic features,
including rhyme, meter, plot, characterization, and formulaic expression. It is af-
fected as well by a particular epoch’s views on which sociolinguistic matter is worth
expressing in writing or worth writing about. In the English Middle Ages, this
matter did not in the main extend to socially inflected nuances of speech. Any
category like “ordinary” or “everyday” speech, for example, did not hold the in-
terest it does today. Langland’s cooks and knaves may cry, “Hot pies, hot,” but
such passages of rank-specific speech stand out because they are uninformative
as well as rare. Against the backdrop of formal medieval rhetoric, it is scarcely
surprising that Middle English style should place greater emphasis on cultivated
artistry than on sociolinguistic verisimilitude, even in genres like letters, court re-
ports, and mixed-language business accounts.72 Rhetorical convention and self-
conscious artistry are precisely what handbooks like Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poe-
tria nova emphasize. The speech of Chaucer’s drunken Cook is thus shaped by the
fabliau genre, by the metrical demands of rhymed iambic pentameter couplets,
and by Chaucer’s own interests in puns and urban imagery. The Cook’s language,
consequently, like the language of Langland’s street criers, bears a much more tan-
gential and mediated relation to contemporary lower-rank English than does that
of characters like Joe Gargery or Tony Jobling, created by Dickens, who as a writer
was himself the product of an impoverished household, little formal schooling,
and Victorian market expectations for realistic fiction. Even Chaucer’s best-known
reference to ordinary speech—his apology for rehearsing the churlish language of
the Miller—is foremost a rhetorical act, evoking the traditional humility topos
and figuring in his lifelong meditation on literary originality and authority.
Despite such limitations, histories of English (and the OED) characteristically
accept belletristic writings as unmediated evidence for the character of English
in some generic sense. The advantages of a reliance on this record are, first, that
it does provide most of the attested examples of Middle English and, second, that
the random quality of its survival means that the data do not reflect any inten-
tional prefiguring or interpretation. As William Labov has said of fragmentary
historical evidence in general, “It was not created to prove any point that we
might have in mind, or to serve the purposes of some research program that we
have set in motion.” 73 The foremost disadvantages are that the cultivated rhet-
72
As Burnley notes, all written evidence is constrained by some generic conventions: “The few doc-
umentary sources which purport to quote the brief utterances of real individuals may be complicated
by the multilingualism of medieval record-keeping, and may not be free from the effects of transla-
tion” (“T/V Pronouns,” p. 29).
73
William Labov, Principles of Linguistic Change, 1: Internal Factors, Language in Society 20 (Ox-
ford, 1994), p. 74. Laurel J. Brinton and Leslie K. Arnovick put the case for such evidence especially
well: “Most of the examples presented in the text are taken from literary sources, especially Chaucer
and Shakespeare for Middle and Early Modern English, respectively. While these examples will be of
interest to students of literature, they have been chosen because both writers incorporate a range of
registers, from high to low, and a variety of genres—both prose and poetry; moreover, they represent

oric of poetry from any age represents a significant reworking of ordinary speech
and that, however influential writers may have been on literary history, it does
not follow that they will have a concomitant impact on linguistic history. The
fact that the overwhelming majority of the medieval English population was il-
literate would have restricted still further the impact of someone like Chaucer
on daily language use. How could his language transform the language of those
who could not read his poetry?
By eliding any distinction between cultivated rhetoric and Middle English as
an abstraction of the ordinary usage of most of its speakers, histories reproduce
Hoccleve’s and Caxton’s sleights of hand and use rhetorical style to stand in for
language. Doing so not only extrapolates from the historical record, of course;
it also generalizes in a way that would never be done for Modern English, not
simply because we have nonbelletristic evidence but also because that evidence
easily falsifies claims based simply on stylized rhetoric. When we talk about the
written language of Joyce or Faulkner, that is, we do not imagine that we are
talking about early-twentieth-century English in general. And yet the critical pas-
sages I discussed in the first and second parts of this paper suggest just the op-
posite. They suggest that when we talk about Chaucer’s poetry, we do some-
times presume that we are simultaneously talking about the Middle English
language. By talking about something like an English T/V distinction in partic-
ular, criticism makes it real and in doing so fashions evidence and a category
that become part of the empirical record to which future language historians
must respond.
Cultivated rhetoric like Chaucer’s poetry has an additional disadvantage as a
basis of historical language study, and that involves the kinds of limits such evi-
dence puts on what we can extrapolate from it. The problem is not just that the
character of the evidence is restricted and rhetorically constrained. It is that even
if we could use this evidence to sketch a general sense of the contours of late-
medieval England’s linguistic repertoire, we have little chance of focusing its de-
tails, in part because (as I noted above) the repertoire granted such a small place
to those details. Of course, we might use the Uniformitarian Principle to fill in
the sizable gaps in the historical record. For instance, since in all Anglophone
communities today the absence of linguistic differences among speakers of dif-
speech, which we assume may approximate actual conversation. Their works are readily available in
searchable electronic corpora, which we have taken advantage of to provide fresh illustrations of the
grammatical phenomena under discussion” (The English Language: A Linguistic History [Don Mills,
Ont., 2006], pp. xvii–xviii). The collapse of linguistic history into literary history has been a con-
stant in the discipline’s modern history, present in widely read early volumes like Oliver Farrar Em-
erson’s History of the English Language (London, 1894) and T. N. Toller’s Outlines of the History
of the English Language (London, 1900); in perhaps the most influential history of English of all,
Baugh and Cable’s History of the English Language, first issued in 1935 and now in its fifth edition;
and in Lerer’s recent Inventing English (above, n. 34). Notable exceptions are Mugglestone’s Oxford
History of English and Pyles and Algeo’s Origins and Developments of the English Language (above,
nn. 34 and 33, respectively). For a critique of the reliance on belletristic examples for linguistic con-
clusions see Jeremy Smith, “Chaucer and the Invention of English,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer
24 (2002), 335–46.

fering social ranks seems impossible, we might then postulate that real-life me-
dieval cooks must have spoken in some way that both reflected their status and
that differentiated them from real-life medieval knights and franklins.74 Although
medieval written English offers little evidence of such socially stratified usage, it
does contain ample regional variation that might be regarded as corroboration
for just such an argument. The Uniformitarian Principle, that is, suggests that
since the absence of regional differences is impossible today, such differences had
to exist in the later Middle Ages, and that is just what the manuscript record
demonstrates. This affirmation of the Uniformitarian Principle could then sup-
port a claim for speech variation as a reflection of social variation.
But suspecting—or even knowing—that there were at least some rank-based
linguistic differences among members of late-medieval society offers no insight
into which features were shared, which did in fact differ, and which (if any) car-
ried sociolinguistic significance as markers of personal integrity, reliability, and
so forth. The deceptive peculiarity of many modern tools of historical and socio-
linguistic study, like dialectology or discourse analysis, is that when applied to
medieval materials they can produce results that would seem to validate analysis
but that also in the process distort the historical record. Indeed, while written
Middle English does show considerable regional variation, it offers little justifi-
cation that regional or social varieties constituted the kinds of stable, meaning-
ful categories in the late-medieval linguistic repertoire that modern dialectal and
sociolectal studies have been developed to find.75 With respect to a particular fea-
ture like the T/V distinction, the written record, as limited as it is, likewise gives
small reason to conclude that ordinary people in ordinary experience used the
distinction, that they did not do so, or that the distinction had any currency out-
side of select literate domains. Judging the distinction to be simply a literary af-
fectation, as I did, is every bit the leap of judgment (or faith) as presuming with
Mustanoja that the pronoun usage was widespread. The fact of the matter is—to
be somewhat arch—we have as much evidence of, and therefore expertise in, Mid-
dle English broadly conceived as we have of the street Latin by which the lan-
guage of Virgil became that recorded in the Strasbourg Oaths.
Within the context of such limitations to the historical record, I return to the
considerable status of Chaucer in histories of the language. Christopher Cannon
has shown that much of the stylistic originality attributed to Chaucer was not in
fact original with him but part of established English poetic traditions.76 I ar-
gued above both that Chaucer’s own pronominal habits do not reflect a rigid
grammatical structure and that medieval usage does not justify extrapolation from
his varied usage to Middle English grammar in general. Here I would go two
steps further and suggest that the impact of any one speaker in the history of a
74
As Lass formulates the Uniformitarian Principle, which enables all types of historical inquiry,
“Nothing (no event, sequence of events, constellation of properties, general law) that cannot for some
good reason be the case in the present was ever true in the past” (On Explaining Language Change,
Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 27 [Cambridge, Eng., 1980], p. 55). Also see Lass’s discussion in
Historical Linguistics (above, n. 1), pp. 24–32.
75
See further Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2003).
76
Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English (above, n. 3).

language is typically minimal and also that the history of English after Chaucer’s
death minimalizes the significance of his language still more.
Language certainly changes through speakers. It changes when they adopt new
pronunciations, new words, and new word orders. Speakers do this variably,
sometimes using one pronunciation and sometimes another, and they do so for
both mechanistic reasons (for example, ease of articulation) and sociolinguistic
ones (for example, imitation of a prestige accent). Numerous, unconnected lon-
gitudinal studies suggest that most changes proceed in the same way, remaining
for some time among a small group of speakers before the number of speakers
using them rises sharply and then levels off. The progress of a change, that is,
typically forms an “S-curve,” 77 by which someone, somewhere, has to be the
first to use a change. While such individuals might be publicly influential per-
sonages like prime ministers and popular entertainers, they can also be those
who have prestige in a narrowly defined speech community, such as a high school
clique, or even weakly tied speakers whose socially marginal status allows them
to move among distinct speech communities and introduce their forms to an-
other community’s speakers. In most cases, however, it is not possible to iden-
tify precisely who was the first person to utter (for example), “It is what it is,”
or to shift the midfront tense vowel /e/ in Middle English fet to the high-front
tense vowel /i/ of Modern English feet.
The important point is that even when a precise genealogy can be drawn, lin-
guistic change comes about not because of an original usage but because of all
the subsequent adoptions. George Harrison in A Hard Day’s Night may have pro-
vided the first documented example of the word grotty, but English changed only
when hundreds of thousands of other Anglophones began to use the adjective,
too.78 All this means that for a speech community of any significant size (and
throughout the language’s recorded history English speakers would qualify as such
a community), any one individual is likely to have little impact on the language’s
structure. Unless they can influence national and international television broad-
casts or enjoy publishing numbers as unprecedented as those of J. K. Rowling,
speakers have direct access only to the individuals in their immediate social and
professional circles. Prior to the advent of electronic communication and even print,
opportunities for broad language contact that might instigate change were fewer
still.
Cannon maintains that the significance of Chaucer’s English cannot be clari-
fied by an accurate history of English, “because it cannot be separated from the
project of writing that history. The problem is epistemological not historical.” 79
To the extent that histories rely on the facts of linguistic categorization and con-
ceptualization as well as the facts of linguistic detail, that is certainly true. But as
I hope to have suggested here, and as Cannon’s own work elsewhere in fact dem-
onstrates,80 there are pieces of a linguistic record that stands outside the catego-
77
For a brief discussion of linguistic S-curves see Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or
Decay?, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), pp. 84–97.
78
OED, s.v. grotty, a.
79
The Making of Chaucer’s English, p. 182.
80
See The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford, 2004).

ries we have inherited from Hoccleve, through Alexander Gill and Henry Sweet,
and all the way to Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable.81 Such linguistic facts can
work against traditional facts of categorization, but so, too, can the facts of the
continuum of English speech and writing after Chaucer.
Within one hundred years of Chaucer’s death, English was undergoing struc-
tural and sociolinguistic changes that would produce the language of today. Spo-
ken by merchants, missionaries, and colonizers, English was heard in North Amer-
ica in the sixteenth century, in the Indian subcontinent in the seventeenth century,
and in Africa and the South Pacific in the eighteenth century. Structurally, En-
glish underwent grammatical nativization by indigenous second-language learn-
ers, who inevitably reshaped morphology and phonology in particular on the mod-
els of their own languages, even as transplanted English monoglots adopted new
vocabulary and syntax in response to contact with not only new flora and fauna
but also the languages of indigenes and other colonizers. As English moved around
the globe and the influence of Anglophone politics and economics increased, the
English linguistic repertoire experienced a still greater shift. In Chaucer’s day the
language had been one island’s Low language in a primarily threeway diglossia
among Latin, French, and English. By 1800 it had become instead a global High
language in a repertoire of colonial languages unknown in the Middle Ages, lan-
guages like Hawaiian, Maori, Zulu, Bengali, Chinese, Algonquian, and so forth.
If the nature of English and the English repertoire changed through such means,
global expansion transformed the character of Anglophone demographics as well.
Just prior to the Black Death of 1348–49, the population of England may have
been as high as 5–7 million, which the plague, ultimately, decreased by one third
to one half. It was not until 1500 and perhaps later that the population returned
to its preplague high.82 The key point here is that however many people there
were in England during Chaucer’s lifetime, they accounted for virtually all of the
world’s Anglophones. Only merchants, pilgrims, and prelates would likely have
been speaking English outside of England. But over time, merchants and the new
group of Anglophonic indigenes would multiply to such an extent that today,
among a global population of approximately 1.5 billion first- and second-language
speakers of English, fewer than 500,000 reside in what Braj Kachru has called
the Inner Circle of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand.83 Twice as many people speak English as a second or third
81
Among the previously unknown but verifiable subplots of English’s history are the persistence
of nonstandard forms and the ways in which genre, such as early-modern personal letters, might con-
dition differences between men and women. See Shana Poplack et al., “‘Deformed in the Dialects’:
An Alternative History of Non-Standard English,” and Terttu Nevalainen, “Women’s Writings as Evi-
dence for Linguistic Continuity and Change in Early Modern English,” both in Alternative Histories
of English, ed. Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill (London, 2002), pp. 87–110 and 191–209.
82
David Grigg, Population Growth and Agrarian Change: An Historical Perspective, Cambridge
Geographical Studies 13 (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), p. 83; Massimo Livi Bacci, The Population of
Europe, trans. Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen and Carl Ipsen (Oxford, 2000), pp. 8 and 81; Paul Freed-
man, “Rural Society,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, 6: C.1300–c.1415, ed. Michael Jones
(Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 82–101, at p. 90; and Peter Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Popula-
tion in Medieval Thought (Oxford, 2000), p. 112.
83
Braj B. Kachru, ed., The Other Tongue: English across Cultures, 2nd ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1992).

language as do those who learned it as a mother tongue, and there are more
Anglophones in India alone than in the whole of the United Kingdom.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, at the very moment when a
kind of Whig history of English took shape, anchored in Teutonic tradition and
running unwaveringly through Chaucer to a nascent Standard English, demo-
graphic and sociolinguistic forces were transforming the language and the pop-
ulation of its speakers in ways that that history had no way to predict, explain,
or accommodate. These forces might even be thought to sever the future that
would be from the past that was being so meticulously (if hypothetically) con-
structed, and that is why I earlier referred to the main currents of English with
such hesitancy. For the English spoken in Fiji, Kenya, China, Singapore, and Bra-
zil, Chaucer’s role in the history of the language seems largely irrelevant. An even
larger argument is possible, however. Today English means not simply the stan-
dard languages of Kachru’s Inner Circle but a plethora of nonstandard varieties
as well as the language of a much larger group of speakers using the language in
domains and for purposes unconnected to Kachru’s circle. That fact presents sig-
nificant challenges to conceptual facts developed through English linguistic his-
toriography and through Chaucer’s role in particular in the history of English.
From this perspective, indeed, it is difficult to describe the language of Chaucer
or of the fourteenth century more generally as “middle,” as a variety structur-
ally or conceptually halfway to the present, whether it is the present of Standard
American English or African American Vernacular English.84
So much of English linguistic history does not pass through Chaucer, and so
little of medieval linguistic performance is available to us, that histories of the
language risk telling us only about how we have come to frame the limited evi-
dence that we have. When such histories extrapolate from Chaucer’s poetry to a
description of a linguistic code in use for hundreds of years across thousands of
square miles, they necessarily reflect the fact that they are anchored in the status
that has accrued to Chaucer from the days of Hoccleve to those of Sweet and
Baugh and Cable. To put the matter more precisely, they generalize from Chau-
cer’s poetry to the Middle English language as a widely used, primarily oral, ab-
stract, conventional, and creative system for mapping signifieds onto signifiers.
Those generalizations, in turn, circularly can serve as a heuristic for approaching
the specifics of Chaucer’s usage: Chaucer’s poetry establishes the broader linguis-
tic context for interpreting Chaucer’s language. The result for the second-person
pronoun is that a chronologically and (evidently) socially limited stylistic feature
has become a grammatical component of the Middle English language. It is a
feature sustaining a history of English that gives conceptual priority not to what
might be called ordinary and everyday usage (spoken or written) but to literary
and prestige forms, whether corroborated by the status of French, uttered by
upper-rank fictional characters, or sequenced in a narrative about the triumph
of English (or the resistance of the vernacular) and the development of a stan-
dard variety.
84
W. F. Bolton briefly made this very point (though with little long-term impact) when he said that
Chaucer’s writings do “not seem to have influenced the language generally” (A Living Language:
The History and Structure of English [New York, 1982], p. 163).

In so doing—in identifying dominant or typical linguistic forms and assigning
cause and effect to individual historical moments as if everything pointed to some
conclusion—such a history not only fills in the gaps in the historical record but
itself becomes part of the historical record. It is a history that imposes a master
narrative on what are essentially episodes. The fact that some of those episodes
(like the Great Vowel Shift) can have a cumulative effect does nothing to justify
an argument that long-term linguistic change, for English or any other language,
is teleological. As it advanced through the Middle Ages to the early modern pe-
riod, then, English in the abstract did not acquire and subsequently lose gram-
maticalized honorific pronouns. On the basis of what we know about the Mid-
dle English language—and I would reiterate how little that is—I would argue,
first, that the device seems never to have been more than a stylistic flourish in
select genres and, second, that episodes like the use of a T/V distinction can point
to the abstract character of English only when we narrativize them in a history
of the language. To resist turning conceptual facts into empirical ones, we might
better approach such linguistic episodes anecdotally.
Fault lines between recorded and surmised linguistic fact, as well as between
major and minor trends in a language, are not easy to identify. In the case of En-
glish, it is certainly true that structural distinctions among historical linguistic pe-
riods are rooted in the empirical details of morphological atrophy and leveling
that characterize all Germanic languages.85 But the treatment of one language
user—Chaucer—as the prototype of one particular period and the assignment of
historical narrative significance to that period are other matters. And that is true
whether the emblematic significance of Chaucer is understood to lie in his inven-
tion of literary English—Hoccleve’s “firste fyndere”—or in the “rough Diamond”
of medieval literature that Dryden saw in need of polishing, or in his prefiguring
of Standard English, or in his modeling of vernacular resistance to dominant me-
dieval cultural practices.86 Those kinds of judgment are interpretive acts, not em-
pirical ones, and as such they reflect the backward gaze of modern speakers by
which these speakers can construct a linguistic past leading to their linguistic
present and then to an imagined future. In narratives of language history, indeed,
the past is most easily imagined in ways that prepare for, if not culminate in, cur-
rent linguistic practice.
85
On the empirical basis of the old–middle–modern classification of Germanic languages see Roger
Lass, “Language Periodization and the Concept ‘Middle,’” in Placing Middle English in Context:
Selected Papers from the Second Middle English Conference, ed. Irma Taavitsainen et al., Topics in
English Linguistics 35 (Berlin, 2000), pp. 7–41.
86
Contemporary expressions of the centrality of Chaucer’s language in what might be called the
politics of resistance are commonplace. See, for example, Glending Olson, “Geoffrey Chaucer,” in
The Cambridge History of Mediaeval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, Eng., 1999),
pp. 566–88, at p. 581; D. Vance Smith, “Chaucer as an English Writer,” in The Yale Companion to
Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, Conn., 2006), pp. 87–121, at p. 113; and Peggy A. Knapp,
“Chaucer Imagines England (in English),” in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo,
Medieval Cultures 37 (Minneapolis, 2004), pp. 131–60, at p. 145. In Andrew Cole’s Literature and
Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 71 (Cambridge, Eng., 2008),
which argues for the centrality of Wycliffism to all late-medieval literary production, it is Chaucer’s
putative Wycliffite sympathies that in turn validate his poetic significance.

Chaucer’s greatest contribution to linguistic history and English linguistic his-
toriography may thus be conceptual. Beyond any words or literary forms he may
have popularized, Chaucer’s language has served as the epitome of Middle En-
glish, and in this way Chaucer offers a model for imagining a linguistic history
of discrete periods with historical continuity among them. The poet himself, that
is, emblematizes a way of defining English by understanding synchronic varia-
tion (demonstrated in the written record) as concealing some stable grammati-
cal structure (like Chaucer’s language as Middle English) and diachronic change
as a principle to link a series of such structures into some larger, stable code
like “English.” His language serves as one of the heuristics that make it possible
to imagine an abstract English with a fifteen-hundred-year history and some kind
of transhistorical integrity, despite the mutual unintelligibility among particular
moments in that history and despite the radical grammatical and pragmatic dis-
sociations of the modern era in particular from what are regarded as earlier stages
of the same language. It is in this very same way that a Standard English variety
has enabled the conception of nonstandard dialects since the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and that a generic Modern English helps identify creole and
pidgin varieties today by locating grammatical and conceptual primacy in Kach-
ru’s Inner Circle. Chaucer remains a “firste fyndere,” though not in a way that
Hoccleve—or Gill or Sweet—ever would have imagined.
Tim William Machan is Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

53233 (e-mail: tim.machan@marquette.edu).


Machan 2012 Chaucer and The History of English PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Machan 2012 Chaucer and The History of English PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Chaucer and the History of English

By Tim William Machan

L inguistic history, like all history, is written retrospectively. It is written from

Speculum 87 (2012) doi:10.1017/S0038713411003885 147

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

1. Chaucer in the History of English

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

2. Chaucer and the Second-Person Personal Pronoun

As consequential as Chaucer’s language has been in framing conceptions of

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

3. English without Chaucer

The second-person pronoun is just one grammatical feature of Chaucer’s lan-

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

Tim William Machan is Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

This content downloaded from 141.013.021.163 on October 11, 2016 07:28:44 AM

You might also like