Middle English
The History of the English Language
Course 1 · Chapter 3 · Middle English
While French was the language of the court, English carried on, with no royal standard to hold it still. In the two centuries after the Conquest it lost most of its endings, changed its spelling and split into regional dialects. By the late 14th century it was a literary language again, in the hands of Chaucer. This chapter covers those changes and the writers who show them.
The Peterborough Chronicle: English in transition
Wikipedia's Peterborough Chronicle article describes a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle kept by monks of Peterborough Abbey, with unique material on English history after the Conquest. A fire on 4 August 1116 destroyed the monastery's library, and the abbey then copied other churches' chronicles up to about 1120. The entries from 1122 onward are unique to Peterborough and fall into two continuations:
| Part | What the article says |
|---|---|
| First continuation (1122 to 1131) | Mixes Old and Middle English vocabulary and simplifies pronouns and strong verbs |
| Second continuation (1132 to 1154) | Mixed forms, ending in an early form of Middle English; grammatical gender almost completely lost; the feminine pronoun she (spelled "scæ") first recorded here |
| 1154 | The last entry, with the death of Abbot Martin and the arrival of a new abbot, which likely halted the writing |
This is the 1150s end of Old English that Chapter 1 gave as one of the dates, seen in a manuscript.
What changed
The Middle English article describes these differences from Old English:
- Endings: most case endings disappeared, and the dative and instrumental were replaced by prepositional phrases. Only two noun declension patterns remained, and the dual pronouns were lost. The article links this to Norse contact and a shift to fixed word order.
- Gender: grammatical gender gave way to natural gender. Most of the roughly dozen Old English forms of the definite article were lost in Early Middle English, leaving the.
- Vocabulary: the core stayed Germanic, with Old Norse loans especially in the north and a large French and Anglo-Norman layer in government, law, the arts, religion and chivalry (Chapter 2). Scholastic Latin added abstract terms later.
- Spelling: early on, scribes used many regional forms. Ash (æ) faded; eth (ð) fell out of use in the 13th century, replaced by thorn; thorn (þ) was replaced by "th" in the 14th century; wynn (ƿ) became "w". Yogh and new letters such as k, q and z were added, and a silent final "e" marked vowel length.
- Verb endings: plurals varied by dialect, with the Southern forms keeping Old English -eþ, the Midland forms using -en from about 1200 and the Northern forms using -es.
Dialects
The Middle English article says the four main dialects in England were Northern, East Midland, West Midland and Southern. It gives little detail on their boundaries in the part I read.
| Text | What the article says |
|---|---|
| Ormulum | A biblical commentary by Orrm, probably composed in Lincolnshire in the second half of the 12th century, with a unique phonetic spelling system |
| Layamon's Brut | A 12th- or 13th-century source that still inflects adjectives for case |
| Ancrene Wisse | Religious texts for anchoresses, apparently from the West Midlands in the early 13th century, linked to the Katherine Group and the "AB language" |
| Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340) | A translation of a French confessional work, written in the Kentish dialect |
Chaucer
Wikipedia's Geoffrey Chaucer article gives his life as about 1343 to 25 October 1400: a London-born poet and civil servant, a page in a noble household, captured in France in 1360 and ransomed, later Comptroller of Customs for the port of London, a Member of Parliament for Kent and Clerk of the King's Works. It says he wrote in Middle English when Anglo-Norman French and Latin dominated court and literary life, and translated from French and Latin, including Boethius.
- Works: The Canterbury Tales (begun in the early 1380s and left unfinished) and Troilus and Criseyde.
- Reputation: often called the "father of English literature"; his contemporary Thomas Hoccleve praised him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage". About two thousand English words are first attested in Chaucerian manuscripts.
- Dialect: his work is often credited with helping standardise the London dialect, which blended Kentish and Midlands forms. The article calls this an overstatement and says court, chancery and bureaucratic usage mattered more. The Middle English article says he wrote in the emerging London dialect but gives some characters northern speech, as in The Reeve's Tale.
Here are the opening lines of the General Prologue as Wikipedia's General Prologue article prints them:
| Middle English | Modern paraphrase (per the page) |
|---|---|
| Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; | When April with its sweet showers has pierced March's drought to the root, bathing every vein in such liquid |
The Middle English article prints the second line with a different letter, "droȝte", so the two pages spell the word differently. I show the General Prologue article's spelling and do not say which is better. Read aloud, much of it is close to Modern English, which is why a few notes on spelling make it readable. Chapter 6 covers the sound changes that make the spelling look odd.
Words to know
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Natural gender | Gender that follows the real sex of what is named, not grammar |
| Thorn (þ) | The Old English letter for "th", later replaced by the digraph "th" |
| Yogh | A Middle English letter for some "gh" and "y" sounds |
| Continuation | A later section added to a chronicle by new writers |
| Rhyme royal | A stanza form Chaucer helped to introduce |
| Dialect | A regional variety of a language |
✏️ Try It Yourself
Think of the answer first, then click to check.
1. What happened to most case endings in Middle English?
Show answer
They disappeared, and the dative and instrumental were replaced by prepositional phrases.
2. What happened to grammatical gender?
Show answer
It gave way to natural gender.
3. What does the Peterborough Chronicle show about she?
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The feminine pronoun she (spelled "scæ") is first recorded there, in the second continuation.
4. How did the letters thorn and eth change?
Show answer
Eth fell out of use in the 13th century, replaced by thorn; thorn was replaced by "th" in the 14th century.
5. Name the four main dialects of Middle English in England.
Show answer
Northern, East Midland, West Midland and Southern.
6. Why is "ye olde" a mispronunciation?
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The scribal abbreviation for þe ("the") resembled a Y.
7. Which language did Chaucer write in, and which were dominant at court?
Show answer
Middle English; Anglo-Norman French and Latin dominated English court and literary life.
8. What does the Geoffrey Chaucer article say about the claim that he standardised London English?
Show answer
It calls it an overstatement: court, chancery and bureaucratic usage were more important.