Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature

Texts in Middle English (as opposed to French or Latin) begin as a trickle in the 13th Century, with works such as the debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” (probably composed around 1200) and the long historical poem known as Layamon's “Brut” (from around the same period). Most of Middle English literature, at least up until the flurry of literary activity in the latter part of the 14th Century, is of unknown authorship.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous “Canterbury Tales” in the early 1380s, and crucially he chose to write it in English. Other important works were written in English around the same time, if not earlier, including William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” and the anonymous “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. But the “Canterbury Tales” is usually considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin.

In the 858 lines of the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”, almost 500 different French loanwards occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucer’s vocabulary is French in origin. However, the overall sense of his work is very much of a re-formed English, a complete, flexible and confident language, more than adequate to produce great literature. Chaucer introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts - these were almost certainly words in everyday use in 14th Century London, but first attested in Chaucer's written works. Words like paramour, difficulty, significance, dishonesty, edifice, ignorant, etc, are all from French roots, but when he wanted to portray the earthy working man of England, he consciously used much more Old English vocabulary, and he also reintroduced many old words that had fallen out of favour, such as churlish, farting, friendly, learning, loving, restless, wifely, willingly, etc. The list of words first found in Chaucer's works goes on: absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, desperate, discomfit, digestion, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative, miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, princess, resolve, rumour, scissors, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine, village, vulgar, wallet, wildness, etc, etc.

Such was the pace of continuous change to the language at this time, that different forms of words were often used interchangeably, even by the same author, and this flexibility in spelling is quite noticeable in Chaucer’s work. However, it should be noted that, because Chaucer’s work was copied by several different scribes, and we have no original in Chaucer’s own hand, different manuscripts have different spellings, none of which are definitive.

In 1384, John Wycliffe (Wyclif) produced his translation of “The Bible” in vernacular English. This challenge to Latin as the language of God was considered a revolutionary act of daring at the time, and the translation was banned by the Church in no uncertain terms. Although perhaps not of the same literary calibre as Chaucer, Wycliffe’s “Bible” was nevertheless a landmark in the English language. Over 1,000 English words were first recorded in it, most of them Latin-based, often via French, including barbarian, birthday, canopy, child-bearing, communication, cradle, crime, dishonour, emperor, envy, godly, graven, humanity, glory, injury, justice, lecher, madness, mountainous, multitude, novelty, oppressor, philistine, pollute, profession, puberty, schism, suddenly, unfaithful, visitor, zeal, etc, as well as well-known phrases like an eye for an eye, woe is me, etc. However, not all of Wycliffe’s neologisms became enshrined in the language.

By the late 14th and 15th Century, the language had changed drastically, and Old English would probably have been almost as incomprehensible to Chaucer as it is to us today, even though the language of Chaucer is still quite difficult for us to read naturally. William Caxton, writing and printing less than a century after Chaucer, is noticeably easier for the modern reader to understand.