THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

I. BRIEF HISTORY
The Middle English period (1100–1500) was marked by momentous changes in the English language. Some of
them were the result of the Norman Conquest and the conditions which followed in the wake of that event.
Others were a continuation of tendencies that had begun to manifest themselves in Old English.
A. The Periods of Middle English
1. The Decline of English (1066 – 1204)

1. Almost all English aristocracy was replaced by Norman aristocracy during the Norman Conquest.
 After 11th century, the English language largely lost its status and became the language of the lower
classes for over 200 hundred years
 The nobilities use French in law, literature and official documents while religious materials were written
in Latin
 French was the official language of the land and used by the aristocrats

2. The Resurgence of English (1204 – 1348)

 In 1204, King John or John Lackland lost his English possessions in France leading to eventual
collapse of French as an official language in France and started the second phase.
 Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties and began to look on themselves
as English
 Communications among English speakers of various regions grew and English became the vehicular or
common language of people with different dialects.
3. The Triumph of English (1348 – 1509)

 The Black Death (1348 – 1351) – 1/3 of the people in England died of this plague. This leads in a
massive labor shortage and a rise in the status of English, which was the language of the working
class.
 The Hundred Years War (1337 – 1453) – This war against France leads to the loss of all continental
holdings. French was branded the language of the enemy and the status of English rose and the
English people does not need to learn French anymore.
 In 13th to 14th century, English became the new medium of instruction. (language used in teaching)
B. The End of the Middle English Period
1. Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by
the introduction of the printing press in England in 1476 by William Caxton. This facilitated the expansion of
English vocabulary, regularization of inflection and syntax, and the creation of more widening gap between
the spoken and written work.
2. Beginning of colonization from 1500 after the discovery of America in 1492 which eventually led to a
global spread of the English language.
3. By 1500, English began to obtain a new position from a regional European language to a global system
of communication.
II. CHANGES/DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH

A. Grammatical Changes
 1. General reduction of inflections or word endings that show tense, gender, case, number etc. (During
the Middle English period, most of the earlier inflections faded away, and a greater reliance on different
forms of expression developed, such as word order and prepositional constructions rather than word
endings to express meaning or relationships.)
2. New kinds of construction
 progressive forms of the verb (as in I am going)
 range of auxiliary verbs (I have seen, I didn’t go, etc.)
 infinitive form of a verb by the use of a particle (to go, to jump)
 new form of expressing relationships such as possession appeared, using OF
3. Pronunciation system changed dramatically. A number of consonants and vowels changed their values,
resulting in the formation of new contrastive sound units ('phonemes').
4. Silent letters were observed in the Late Middle English
5. Loss of grammatical gender

B. Middle English Syntax (Sentence Structure)

The default or basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object. The process of development can be seen in the
Peterborough Chronicle.
III. INFLUENCES

A. French Influence on Vocabulary

French influence is much more direct and observable upon the vocabulary on the Middle English. The number
of French words that poured into English was over 10,000. These include a huge number of abstract nouns
related to nobility, government, court and law, art and literature and even fashion and high living.
By the time we reach The Canterbury Tales, the French lexical content is a major linguistic feature. According
to the Oxford English Dictionary, by the end of the Middle English period around 30 percent of English
vocabulary is French in origin.

Middle English also saw a huge increase in the use of affixes, producing an influx of new words with French
introducing such prefixes as con-, de-, dis-, en-, ex-, pre-, pro- and trans-, and such suffixes as -able, -ance/-
ence, -ant/-ent, -ity, -ment and –tion.

B. Latin Influence on Vocabulary

Thanks chiefly to its role as the language of religion, scholarship and science, Latin words would eventually
have a much greater impact on English than French with over 50,000 in OED. In literature, a style developed in
which authors tried to imitate the great classical writers by using intricate sentence patterns and euphonious
vocabulary.The 15th-century poet John Lydgate described it as ‘aureate’. The language of the 15th-century
poet John Lydgate is heavily ‘Latinate’ and shows the influence of Latin on Middle English. Most of the
surviving material is religious in character – about a third are collections of homilies (a type of sermon). The
writings of Ælfric in Latin continued to be copied throughout the period, and these overlap with sermons from
the 12th century that are very clearly in an early form of Middle English.

IV. LITERARY CHANGES/DEVELOPMENTS

After the Norman Conquest, many Anglo-Saxon nobles were dispossessed and a new French-speaking
(Anglo-Norman, technically) aristocracy came to power. Over time, the Norman nobles cultivated a taste for
continental styles of literature such as Courtly Love, Romance, and the matter of Arthur.
A. Women Writers
In the Middle English period, named authorship came to be considered important— major works by women
include:

 The Book of Margery Kemp (the earliest autobiography in English)

 Juliana of Norwich's Showings (a series of mystical and theologically rich visions)
 works of Marie de France

B. Poetry—Lyrics/Ballads
Two of the era's most famous poets emerged from the urban merchant background: Geoffrey Chaucer
(1342-1400) and John Gower (1330 – 1408). Chaucer was the most respected poet of his time making
great contributions to the literary language by inventing the so-called “high style, characterized mainly by a
heavy use of romance.”

 Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales narrates the journey of a group of travelers who are going from
London to Canterbury on pilgrimage. 30 pilgrims from all layers of English society tells stories to each
other to pass the time while travelling to Canterbury cathedral and back. Thus, providing a wealth of
information about many evil attitudes in society and about contemporary linguistic structure in style.
 John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is essentially a collection of exemplary tales of love,
whereby Venus’ priest, Genius, instructs the poet, Amans, in the art of both courtly and Christian love.

C. Courtly Love
Courtly Love was a literary trend that flourished especially among the French nobility. This genre glorified an
idealized code of chivalry, in which a knight vows undying loyalty to his lady, who may bestow favor upon him,
but who never (in theory) takes him as a lover. Chaucer wrote one of the finest examples of the genre in his
long narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde,  which adapts the story of the Fall of Troy to a Courtly Romance
sensibility. Among Chaucer’s shorter works are the Parliament of Fowls,  in which he may have invented
Valentine’s Day, The Book of the Duchess, and many others.

D. Religious Writings

 John Wycliffe (1330-1384) produced his translation of the Holy Scriptures into plain English. His hope
was that people could inform themselves on matters of belief, rather than having to rely upon priests to
translate and interpret Latin scripture for them. Two complete translations were made.
 William Langland (1330-1387)’s Piers Plowman is an allegorical poem in unrhymed literative verse
regarded as the greatest Middle English poem prior to Geoffrey Chaucer. It is both social satire and
vision of simple Christian life.

E. Prose— Romance, Arthurian
The continental genre of Romance is a type of narrative that is focused on a knight's quests and adventures in
the service of his lady. These tales are often centered upon the adventures of the court of Arthur at
Camelot and the exploits of his knights.
Among the earliest printed works was Thomas Malory (1405 – 1471)'s Morte d'Arthur, a lengthy chronicle-
style account of Arthur's life story and many adventures (including the famous quest for the Holy Grail).
 F. Rise of Drama
In this era, drama also experienced a comeback in popularity. Early on, this form consisted of two major types:

 Morality Plays aim to impart moral, ethical, and spiritual truth by means of dramatizing an allegorical
life. Famous examples are Everyman and Mankind.
 Mystery Plays were dramatizations of stories from the Bible, from creation to the second coming of
Christ and it could take as long as 12 hours of continual performance, one station at a time, for the
whole cycle to unfold across the city.

V. IMPORTANCE OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

 Additional vocabulary became the primary means of introducing new concepts and new domains of
discourse into the language, as well as giving novel ways of expression to familiar concepts within old
domains of discourse.
 The period offered people a much greater linguistic choice. In 1200, people could only ask; by 1500 they
could question and interrogate as well.
 During Middle English we saw the evolution of a language which is increasingly handling the potentials of
regional, social and stylistic variation. At one extreme there was a learned, literary style, typically formal
and elaborate, characterized by a lexicon of French and Latin origin, and employed by the aristocratic
and well-educated. At the other, there was an everyday, popular style, typically informal and casual, full
of words with Germanic roots, and used by ordinary folk. The stage was set for the 16th-century literary
exploitation of these resources, notably in the poems and plays of Shakespeare.
 In terms of literary features, the Middle English period saw the development of rhymed meters and lyric
poetry. Both were not present in the Old English.
 Works like Canterbury Tales, alongside the Chancery Standard of written English, pushed English ahead
of French and Latin, becoming the dominant language which would eventually develop into the English
that we speak today. 

Sources:

1. https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_middle.html
2. https://www.easternct.edu/speichera/understanding-literary-history-all/medieval-english-literature.html
3. https://medium.com/@callum_ashley/what-is-middle-english-and-why-are-its-literary-works-so-
important-5f3a14a23c09
4. https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/middle-english
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLFihdWwmfw&ab_channel=TheVirtualLinguisticsCampus