LESSON 5 THE INFLUENCES OF THE OLD NORSE AND NORMAN FRENCH

IN MIDDLE ENGLISH AND THE RESURGENCE OF ENGLISH

Influences of Old Norse (Language of the Vikings) (Langfocus, 2019)

Vocabulary

Old Norse Middle English Modern English Equivalent

gæsling gesling gesling/gosling (young goose)

vængr winge, wenge wing
deyja [silent j] deyen die
illr ille ill
rotinn roten rotten
ugga/uggligr uglike ugly
knifr knyf, knif knife
kalla callen call
hitta hitten hit
taka taken take

More Loan Words from Old Norse (Townend, 2006):

bask, beck, cast, fellow, gape, hit, husband, ill, knife, law, leg, loft, meek, skill, skirt, sky,
take, though, want, wrong, and (very importantly) the pronouns they, them, and their

Syntax/Word Order (Langfocus, 2019)

Split Infinitives:

Norwegian (A Dialect of Old Norse): Jeg lover å ikke gjØre det igjen.
English: I promise to not do that again.

Explanation: In both languages, the negation adverb is placed in the middle of the
infinitive, splitting it. Split infinitives did not occur in Old English. They did, however, occur
occasionally in Old Norse.

Comment: Infinitive refers to “to + verb”.

Influences of the Norman French and the Resurgence of English

Important Events (Townend, 2006):

First decades after 1066 - Those who spoke French were [only] the Norman invaders.
11th Century - This century saw the death of Old Norse in England when
the Norse speech community seemed to have shifted to
using English.
1167 - Oxford University was founded (Mastin, 2011).
1209 - Cambridge University was founded (Mastin, 2011).
 Townend (2006) added:

Middle of 12th Century - Most members of the [Norman] aristocracy were bilingual.
The members of the aristocracy learned English as a second
language.
13th Century - English began to re-establish itself as a medium for the
written literature.

In Mastin’s (2011) account,

despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once
again, and, two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French,
that emerged as the language of England.

There were a number of contributing factors. The English had become

“Normanized”, but, over time, the Normans also became “Anglicized”, particularly
after 1204 when King John’s ineptness lost the French part of Normandy to the King
of France and the Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties.
Increasingly out of touch with their properties in France and with the French court and
culture in general, they soon began to look on themselves as English. Norman French
began gradually to degenerate and atrophy. While some in England spoke French and
some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both), everyone, from the highest to the lowest
[classes], spoke English, and it gradually became the lingua franca of the nation once
again.

The Hundred Year War against France (1337-1453) had the effect of branding French
as the language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence.

The Black Death of 1349-1350 killed about a third of the English population (which
was around 4 million at that time), including a disproportionate number of the Latin-
speaking clergy.

The Black Death and COVID-19: Chilling Coincidence

In the account of History.com Editors (2020), t he Black Death was a

devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the
mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from
the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina , [Italy]. People gathered on
the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were
dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed
blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out
of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the Black Death would
kill more than 20 million people in Europe —almost one-third of the continent’s
population.
Originating in China, the disease spread west along the trade routes across Europe and
arrived on the British Isles from the English province of Gascony. It is believed to have
been spread by flea-infected rats, as well as individuals who had been infected on the
continent (The Week Staff, 2020).
According to History.com Editors (2020),
physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as
bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as
 unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and
bathing in rosewater or vinegar.
Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the
sick. Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites;
and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many people fled the cities for the
countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected
cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as peopl e.
The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years
later. But officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa, [Sicily]
were able to slow its spread by keeping arriving sailors in isolation until it
was clear they were not carrying the disease —creating social distancing that
relied on isolation to slow the spread of the disease.
The sailors were initially held on their ships for 30 days (a trentino), a
period that was later increased to 40 days, or a quarantine—the origin of the
term “quarantine” and a practice still used today.

After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in economic
and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between
the nobility and the commoners was largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English
the official language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in
French), was adopted in 1362, and in that same year, Edward III became the first king to address
Parliament in English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the
language of instruction in schools (Mastin, 2011).

The 14th Century London dialect of [Geoffrey] Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is
at least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English (Mastin, 2011).

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1345–1400) was enormously

popular in medieval England, with over 90 copies in existence from the 1400s (British
Library, n. d.).

Note: Circa means “at approximately… (Merriam-Webster, 2020).”

Chaucer's long poem follows the journey of a group of pilgrims, 31 including Chaucer
himself, from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to St. Thomas à Becket's shrine at Canterbury
Cathedral. The host at the inn suggests each pilgrim tell two tales on the way out and two
on the way home to help while away their time on the road. The best storyteller is to be
rewarded with a free supper on their return (British Library, n. d.).

Task:
Watch the video uploaded by Ancient Literature Dude (2019) on The Canterbury
Tales General Prologue, lines 1-42, read in Middle English in the link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzevRTpAga0 which features Jordan Ashley Moore,
an author who reads the prologue.
Vocabulary

The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which
are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-
age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes
“con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”.
Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters:

of crown and nobility

(e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke, viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry);

of government and administration (e.g. parliament, government, governor, city);

of court and law

(e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence, appeal, condemn, plaintiff, bailiff,
jury, felony, verdict, traitor, contract, damage, prison);

of war and combat

(e.g. army, armour, archer, battle, soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy, destroy);

of authority and control

(e.g. authority, obedience, servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer, charity);

of fashion and high living

(e.g. mansion, money, gown, beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite, banquet, herb, spice,
sauce, roast, biscuit); and

of art and literature (e.g. art, colour, language, literature, poet, chapter, question)
(Mastin, 2011).

More Loan Words from French:

abbey, battle, castle, chaplain, charity, council, duke, empress, folly, fruit, gentle, honour,
journey, office, purity, silence, treasure, (Townend, 2006) and figure, marriage, cell,
champagne, chateau, catch, equal, etc. (Langfocus, 2019).

General Notion:

Loanwords enter a language on account of either need or prestige. Nouns and

adjectives are by far the most frequently transferred word-classes, followed by verbs and
adverbs, and far ahead of ‘grammar-words’ such as conjunctions and pronouns (Townend,
2006).

Spelling (Langfocus, 2019)

Changes to the spelling of existing words were also made by Norman scribes who
preferred French spelling conventions:
 Old English Middle English Modern English Equivalent
circe chirche church

At the time, “ch”

represented /c/
in French.

That changed, and “ch”

came to represent the sound /ʃ/
in French, as in:
champagne and chateau.

Norman scribes changed the spelling of [the sound] /kw/ from “cw” to “qu”.

Old English Middle English Modern English Equivalent

cwen queen queen

The Normans introduced the “ou” spelling of the sound /u/.

Old English Middle English Modern English Equivalent

hus hous house
mus mous mouse

They also changed the letter “u” to “o” in some cases when it was followed by “v”, “n”,
or “m”.

Old English Middle English Modern English Equivalent

cuman come come
sum some some
lufu love love
sunu son son

Mastin (2011) showed that many of Orm’s [12th century monk] spellings were perhaps
atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless
under way during this period:

 the common Old English "h" at the start of words like hring (ring) and hnecca
(neck) was deleted;

 "f" and "v" began to be differentiated (e.g. feel and veal), as did "s" and "z"
(e.g. seal and zeal) and "ng" and "n" (e.g. thing and thin);

 many long vowel sounds were marked by a double letter

(e.g. boc became booc, se became see, etc.)

 the long "a" vowel of Old English became more like "o" in Middle English, so
that ham became home, stan became stone, ban became bone, etc.; and
  the “-en” plural noun ending of Old English (e.g. house/housen, shoe/shoen, etc.)
had largely disappeared by the end of the Middle English period [and] replaced
by the French plural ending “-s” (the “-en” ending only remains today in one or
two important examples, such as children, brethren and oxen).

English borrowed French vocabulary, where the value or sound of “c” is often “s” (e.g.
centre, face, difference), and English went further with this convention, using “c” for “s”
in words like OE is ‘ice’ (Culperer, 2015). This means that the Old English word “is”
evolved into “ice” in Middle English.

According to Culperer (2015), the digraphs (one phoneme [or unit of sound] is
represented by two letters) promoted by Middle English scribes include:

Middle English Old English

sh replacing sc in words like scip. ship
gh replacing h in words like riht. right
ch replacing c in words like cin. chin
wh replacing hw n words like hwæt. what

Pronunciation

The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) (Langfocus, 2019)

From Late Middle English Early Modern English Late Modern English
1350 CE 1700 CE 1900 CE

For reasons that are not exactly clear, all the long vowels of Middle English shifted.

The GVS refers to a set of changes whereby the pronunciation of long vowels was ‘raised’.
Raising means raising the tongue towards the roof of the mouth (Culperer, 2015).

Vowels Middle English

/a:/ as in name /æ:/ /ℇ:/ /e/ as in name
/e:/ as in sweete /I/ as in sweet
/ℇ:/ as in greet /I/ /e/ as in great
/i:/ as in time /ƏI/ /aI/ as in time
/o:/ as in boote /u/ as in boot
/Ɔ:/ as in boot /o/ as in boat
/u:/ as in hous /ƏU/ /aU/ as in house

Note: The colon (:) is used to indicate that the vowel is long.

The long "a" vowel of Old English became more like "o" in Middle English, so
that ham became home, stan became stone, ban became bone, etc. (Mastin, 2011).

The words ye or you … were introduced in the 13th Century as the formal singular
version …, with thou remaining as the familiar, informal form (Mastin, 2011).
The Printing Press

During the 1400s and 1500s, English spelling became more standardized due to the
arrival of the printing press in England (Langfocus, 2019). German goldsmith Johannes
Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436 (Roos, 2019).

Printing in those days used movable metal types that were arranged into words. The
lower part of the storage houses the small letters (used most often); while the upper part
houses the capital letters (used less).

William Caxton brought the first printing press to England in 1476, after running one
in Belgium (Langfocus, 2019).

Watch the video uploaded by Huyett (2014) on How a Gutenberg Printing Press
Works in the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLctAw4JZXE&t=24s.
 References

Ancient Literature Dude. (2019, June 11). The Canterbury Tales General Prologue, lines 1-42,
read in Middle English. [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzevRTpAga0

British Library. (n. d.). The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. https://www.bl.uk/
collection-items/the-canterbury-tales-by-geoffrey-chaucer

Culperer, J. (2015). History of English. (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (2012). Second pandemic of the Black Death in Europe. In
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. Black Death. https://www.britannica.
com/event/Black-Death

History.com Editors. (2020). Black Death. https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/

black-death

Huyett, S. (2014, March 4). How a Gutenberg printing press works. [Video]. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=DLctAw4JZXE&t=24s

Langfocus. (2019, January 27). Viking influence on the English language. [Video].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAU3TpunwM&t=839s

Mastin, L. (2011). The history of English: How English went from an obscure Germanic
dialect to a global language. https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/

McCain, M. (n. d.). Divided upper and lower type cases for movable type. In Kohlstedt, K.
Fit to print: Split-level storage explains “upper-case” & “lower-case” letters. https://
99percentinvisible.org/article/fit-print-split-level-storage-explains-upper-case-
lower-case-letters/

Merriam-Webster. (2020). Circa. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circa#:~:

text=%3A%20at%20approximately%2C%20in%20approximately%2C,with%
20datesborn%20circa%201600

Pinterest. (n. d.). Image result for Johannes Gutenberg. https://www.pinterest.ph/pin/

531776668488900650/

Pryor. (2020). Steel type letter & figure sets. https://www.pryortechnology.com/products/

steel-type-character-sets

Roos, D. (2019). 7 Ways printing press changed the world. https://www.history.com/news/

printing-press-
renaissance#:~:text=German%20goldsmith%20Johannes%20Gutenberg%20is,type
%20a%20century%20before%20Gutenberg.

The Week Staff. (2020). What was the Black Death and when did it end? https://www.
theweek.co.uk/76088/what-was-black-death-and-how-did-it-end#:~:text=How%
20did%20it%20end%3F,and%20live%20in%20greater%20isolation.
Townend, M. (2006). In Mugglestone, L. (Ed.). The Oxford History of English. Oxford
University Press, Inc.

WallpaperAccess. (2020). Buckingham Palace wallpapers. https://wallpaperaccess.com/

buckingham-palace