Resurgence of English

It is estimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of the Viking and particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very existence of the English language looked to be in dire peril. In 1154, even the venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, 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, of necessity, 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, 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. 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.

There are clearly many more recognizable words in this sample than in the Old English passage, especially once the continued use of þ ("thorn") to represent the sound “th” is accepted. Another now obsolete character 3 (“yogh”, more or less equivalent in most cases to the modern consonantal “y” as in yellow or sometimes like the “ch” in loch) is also used in this passage, and the letters “v” and “u” seem to be used more or less interchangeably (e.g. vpward for upward, ryueres for rivers, treuly for truly). The indications of a language in a state of flux are also apparent in the variety of spellings of the same words even within this short passage (e.g. contré and contree, þan and þanne, water and watres). Some holdovers from Old English inflections remain (e.g. present tense verbs still receive a plural inflection, as in beren, dwellen, han and ben), and many words still have the familiar medieval trailing “e” (e.g. wolle, benethe, suche, fynde, etc), but the overall appearance is much more modern than that of Old English.

Throughout the Middle English period, as in Old English, all the consonants were pronounced, so that the word knight, for example, would have been pronounced more like “k-neecht” (with the “ch” as in the Scottish loch) than like the modern English knight. By the late 14th Century, the final “e” in many, but not all, words had ceased to be pronounced (e.g. it was silent in words like kowthe and thanne, but pronounced in words like ende, ferne, straunge, etc).