Medieval English

LIST OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................

PART 1. TRILINGUAL MEDIEVAL BRITISH CULTURE.............................

1.1 Middle Ages: Historical Background...................................................................

1.2 The British Culture during Middle Ages . Medieval Literature..........................

PART 2.ENGLISH LANGUAGE OF MIDDLE AGES: FORM GENERATED FROM INTERPLAY OF ENGLISH, FRENCH AND LATIN...........................

2.1 Middle English Dialects.......................................................................................

2.2 English, French and Latin Interplay in forming the Medieval Language............

CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................................

BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, Old English was a language that had a typically Germanic grammar and vocabulary. During the Middle Ages, the most important thing that happened to the English language was a set of changes, mostly to the vocabulary, resulting from the Norman Conquest, and causing the incorporation of words from French. The English Language subsequently became recognizable as such to modern readers with the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer.

This can be said to be a topicality of the course paper. The course paper theme is “Trilingual Medieval British Culture, The Form of Middle English Generated by The Interplayof English, French and Latin”

So, the subject of it is development of English language during Middle Ages, the object – the language itself.

The main aim of the course paper is to show how language was changing, find out the trilingual nature of it and make sure the language really was trilingual on the base of the history, literature and writing of that time.

The course paper consists of  Introduction, Two Chapters, Conclusions and Bibliography.

In Introduction we outline the theme of the investigation, its main aims, its topicality, name the subject and object of it.

The First Chapter tells us about the historical background of England in Middle Ages, we analyze the culture of the country and its literature.

The Second One outlines the Englisj dialects and shows the trilingual nature of that time English create by interplay of three languages. There we give some actual examples from that time literature and documents to show this interplay.

In Conclusions we make the final conclusion of the course paper and prove that the aim of it was reached.

Bibliography lists the sources from which the information was taken.

 

PART 1. TRILINGUAL MEDIEVAL BRITISH CULTURE

As the name of this period indicates, Middle English (ME), constitutes a kind of middle stage within the evolution of English when one looks at it from a contemporary perspective. Lasting from about 1150 to about 1500, ME is the period that lies between Old English (650-1100) and (Early) Modern English (1500-today).

But rather than regarding the period as a purely temporal middle stage, ME should be seen as a transition point. The transformation of English in the Middle Ages marks its turn from the early Anglo-Saxon to the modern period. By the end of the ME stage, all the basic linguistic parameters that lead to its modern structure and anatomy are established.

1.1 Middle Ages: Historical Background

The landmark that triggered many of the most striking changes in the Middle English period was the Norman Conquest of England. In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy and killed king Harold in the Battle of Hastings.

The events at Hastings were woven into the famous Bayeux tapestry a unique and

 extraordinary document to reflect this episode of English history.

The historical and political context that led to the Norman invasion frames a complex story about collaboration, intrigue, and treachery. Both Harold and William the Conqueror had claims to the throne, which they both regarded as their rightful inheritance. When William invaded England he came to gain what he regarded his own possession and right[2, p. 14].

As this event was one of the most essential for our investigation we should discuss it in more details.

King Edward of England (called "The Confessor" because of his construction of Westminster Abbey) died on January 5, 1066, after a reign of 23 years. Leaving no heirs, Edward's passing ignited a three-way rivalry for the crown that culminated in the Battle of Hastings and the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon rule of England.

The leading pretender was Harold Godwinson, the second most powerful man in England and an advisor to Edward. Harold and Edward became brothers-in-law when the king married Harold's sister. Harold's powerful position, his relationship to Edward and his esteem among his peers made him a logical successor to the throne. His claim was strengthened when the dying Edward supposedly uttered "Into Harold's hands I commit my Kingdom." With this kingly endorsement, the Witan (the council of royal advisors) unanimously selected Harold as King. His coronation took place the same day as Edward's burial. With the placing of the crown on his head, Harold's troubles began.

Across the English Channel, William, Duke of Normandy, also laid claim to the English throne. William justified his claim through his blood relationship with Edward (they were distant cousins) and by stating that some years earlier, Edward had designated him as his successor. To compound the issue, William asserted that the message in which Edward anointed him as the next King of England had been carried to him in 1064 by none other than Harold himself. In addition, (according to William) Harold had sworn on the relics of a martyred saint that he would support William's right to the throne. From William's perspective, when Harold donned the Crown he not only defied the wishes of Edward but had violated a sacred oath. He immediately prepared to invade England and destroy the upstart Harold. Harold's violation of his sacred oath enabled William to secure the support of the Pope who promptly excommunicated Harold, consigning him and his supporters to an eternity in Hell[15, p.76].

The third rival for the throne was Harald Hardrada, King of Norway. His justification was even more tenuous than William's. Hardrada ruled Norway jointly with his nephew Mangus until 1047 when Mangus conveniently died. Earlier (1042), Mangus had cut a deal with Harthacut the Danish ruler of England. Since neither ruler had a male heir, both promised their kingdom to the other in the event of his death. Harthacut died but Mangus was unable to follow up on his claim to the English throne because he was too busy battling for the rule of Denmark. Edward became the Anglo-Saxon ruler of England. Now with Mangus and Edward dead, Hardrada asserted that he, as Mangus's heir, was the rightful ruler of England. When he heard of Harold's coronation, Hardrada immediately prepared to invade England and crush the upstart[12,p.45].

Hardrada of Norway struck first. In mid September, Hardrada's invasion force landed on the Northern English coast, sacked a few coastal villages and headed towards the city of York. Hardrada was joined in his effort by Tostig, King Harold's nere-do-well brother. The Viking army overwhelmed an English force blocking the York road and captured the city. In London, news of the invasion sent King Harold hurriedly north at the head of his army picking up reinforcements along the way. The speed of Harold's forced march allowed him to surprise Hardrada's army on September 25, as it camped at Stamford Bridge outside York. A fierce battle followed. Hand to hand combat ebbed and flowed across the bridge. Finally the Norsemen's line broke and the real slaughter began. Hardrada fell and then the King's brother, Tostig. What remained of the Viking army fled to their ships. So devastating was the Viking defeat that only 24 of the invasion force's original 240 ships made the trip back home. Resting after his victory, Harold received word of William's landing near Hastings.

Construction of the Norman invasion fleet had been completed in July and all was ready for the Channel crossing. Unfortunately, William's ships could not penetrate an uncooperative north wind and for six weeks he languished on the Norman shore. Finally, on September 27, after parading the relics of St. Valery at the water's edge, the winds shifted to the south and the fleet set sail. The Normans made landfall on the English coast near Pevensey and marched to Hastings[5, p.8].

Harold rushed his army south and planted his battle standards atop a knoll some five miles from Hastings. During the early morning of the next day, October 14, Harold's army watched as a long column of Norman warriors marched to the base of the hill and formed a battle line. Separated by a few hundred yards, the lines of the two armies traded taunts and insults. At a signal, the Norman archers took their position at the front of the line. The English at the top of the hill responded by raising their shields above their heads forming a shield-wall to protect them from the rain of arrows. The battle was joined.

The English fought defensively while the Normans infantry and cavalry repeatedly charged their shield-wall. As the combat slogged on for the better part of the day, the battle's outcome was in question. Finally, as evening approached, the English line gave way and the Normans rushed their enemy with a vengeance. King Harold fell as did the majority of the Saxon aristocracy. William's victory was complete. On Christmas day 1066, William was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.

 

 

1.2 The British Culture during Middle Ages . Medieval Literature

Religion:

It was the Age of Faith, not the Age of Reason. Fear, uncertainty, and awe of the unknown defined Medieval society. This was a culture that had, since the fifth century, combined the remnants of the Roman Empire, the masses of (mostly German) tribal people, and the vigorous (and still relatively new) Catholic religion to produce what would eventually be a culture that covered the globe. In a curious way, the Roman, tribal, and Catholic elements all mixed together, each contributing to the culture in its own unique way. The Roman Empire left many useful items in its wake. The Latin language, while no longer used by anyone to raise their children, had become the international language of diplomacy, learning, and, most importantly, religion. Over a century before the Rome fell, Catholicism became the official religion of the empire. This had a greater impact on the church than it did on the empire[11,p.92].

When the Catholic (or simply "Christian," as in "followers of Christ") Church became the state religion of Rome in the 4th century, it adopted the governing techniques of the Romans enthusiastically. For now the followers of Christ had the full weight of the mighty Roman Empire behind them. The Roman form of government lasted over a thousand years because it was efficient and the Church fathers knew a good thing when they saw it. When the Empire in the west fell in the 5th century, the Catholic Church continued as a Roman institution. While everyone else spoke a babble of new languages and Latin dialects, the church did its business in Latin. The pope's official titles was "Pontifex Maximus," the same title the pagan Romans had always given their chief priest. Many of the terms and titles used in the church administration came directly from Roman practice.

Education:

The question related to the church is also education. The matter is that the Church was  fundamental for the education those days. Speaking about medieval education we should mention scholasticism.

So the outstanding intellectual achievement of the High Middle Ages was the famous system of dialectics known as scholasticism. This system is usually defined as the attempt to harmonize reason and faith or to make philosophy serve the interest of theology. But no such definition is sufficient to convey an adequate conception of the Scholastic mind. The great thinkers of the Middle Ages did not limit their interests to problems of religion. On the contrary, they were just as anxious as philosophers in any period to answer the great questions of life, whether they pertained to religion, politics, economics or metaphysics’.

“The scholastics, who used Aristotelian methodology and adapted the Aristotelian world view, were especially concerned with these fundamental and intimately related problems: the proper study of theological knowledge, the nature of ultimate reality, and the relationship of faith and reason”.

Characteristics:

1. rationalistic, not empirical (i.e., logic v. science or experience)
2. authoritarian (i.e., truth is something to be discovered in the past and they relied on authority of the Scriptures, church fathers, and especially Plato and Aristotle.)
3. Otherworldly/ethical (Its cardinal aim was to discover how man could improve this life and insure salvation in the life to come.)
4. Not concerned with the causes of things but attributes (since universe was assumed to be static, it was only necessary to explain the meaning of things and what they were good for, not to account for their origin and evolution).

Medieval Literature

The literary culture of the Middle Ages was far more international than national and was divided more by lines of class and audience than by language. Latin was the language of the Church and of learning. After the eleventh century, French became the dominant language of secular European literary culture. Edward, the Prince of Wales, who took the king of France prisoner at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, had culturally more in common with his royal captive than with the common people of England. And the legendary King Arthur was an international figure. Stories about him and his knights originated in Celtic poems and tales and were adapted and greatly expanded in Latin chronicles and French romances even before Arthur became an English hero [15,p.54].

Chaucer was certainly familiar with poetry that had its roots in the Old English period. He read popular romances in Middle English, most of which derive from more sophisticated French and Italian sources. But when he began writing in the 1360s and 1370s, he turned directly to French and Italian models as well as to classical poets (especially Ovid). English poets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked upon  Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower as founders of English literature, as those who made English a language fit for cultivated readers. In the Renaissance, Chaucer was referred to as the "English Homer." Spenser called him the "well of English undefiled."

Nevertheless, Chaucer and his contemporaries Gower, William Langland, and the Gawain poet — all writing in the latter third of the fourteenth century — are heirs to classical and medieval cultures that had been evolving for many centuries. Cultures is put in the plural deliberately, for there is a tendency, even on the part of medievalists, to think of the Middle Ages as a single culture epitomized by the Great Gothic cathedrals in which architecture, art, music, and liturgy seem to join in magnificent expressions of a unified faith — an approach one recent scholar has referred to as "cathedralism." Such a view overlooks the diversity of medieval cultures and the social, political, religious, economic, and technological changes that took place over this vastly long period[10, p.22].

"Estates and Orders" samples ideas about medieval society and some of its members and institutions. Particular attention is given to religious orders and to the ascetic ideals that were supposed to rule the lives of men and women living in religious communities (such as Chaucer's Prioress, Monk, and Friar, who honor those rules more in the breach than in the observance) and anchorites (such as Julian of Norwich) living apart. The Rule of Saint Benedict, written for a sixth-century religious community, can serve the modern reader as a guidebook to the ideals and daily practices of monastic life. The mutual influence of those ideals and new aristocratic ideals of chivalry is evident in the selection from the Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses) and The Book of the Order of Chivalry. Though medieval social theory has little to say about women, women were sometimes treated satirically as if they constituted their own estate and profession in rebellion against the divinely ordained rule of men. An outstanding instance is the "Old Woman" from the Romance of the Rose, whom Chaucer reinvented as the Wife of Bath. The tenth-century English Benedictine monk Aelfric gives one of the earliest formulations of the theory of three estates — clergy, nobles, and commoners — working harmoniously together. But the deep- seated resentment between the upper and lower estates flared up dramatically in the Uprising of 1381 and is revealed by the slogans of the rebels, which are cited here in selections from the chronicles of Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham, and by the attack of the poet John Gower on the rebels in his Vox Clamantis. In the late-medieval genre of estates satire, all three estates are portrayed as selfishly corrupting and disrupting a mythical social order believed to have prevailed in a past happier age[7, p.18].

The selections under "Arthur and Gawain" trace how French writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries transformed the Legendary Histories of Britain into the narrative genre that we now call "romance." The works of Chrétien de Troyes focus on the adventures of individual knights of the Round Table and how those adventures impinge upon the cult of chivalry. Such adventures often take the form of a quest to achieve honor or what Sir Thomas Malory often refers to as "worship." But in romance the adventurous quest is often entangled, for better or for worse, with personal fulfillment of love for a lady — achieving her love, protecting her honor, and, in rare cases such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, resisting a lady's advances. In the thirteenth century, clerics turned the sagas of Arthur and his knights — especially Sir Lancelot — into immensely long prose romances that disparaged worldly chivalry and the love of women and advocated spiritual chivalry and sexual purity. These were the "French books" that Malory, as his editor and printer William Caxton tells us, "abridged into English," and gave them the definitive form from which Arthurian literature has survived in poetry, prose, art, and film into modern times[12, p.35].

"The First Crusade," launched in 1096, was the first in a series of holy wars that profoundly affected the ideology and culture of Christian Europe. Preached by Pope Urban II, the aim of the crusade was to unite warring Christian factions in the common goal of liberating the Holy Land from its Moslem rulers. The chronicle of Robert the Monk is one of several versions of Urban's address. The Hebrew chronicle of Eliezer bar Nathan gives a moving account of attacks made by some of the crusaders on Jewish communities in the Rhineland — the beginnings of the persecution of European Jews in the later Middle Ages. In the biography of her father, the Byzantine emperor Alexius I, the princess Anna Comnena provides us with still another perspective of the leaders of the First Crusade whom she met on their passage through Constantinople en route to the Holy Land. The taking of Jerusalem by the crusaders came to be celebrated by European writers of history and epic poetry as one of the greatest heroic achievements of all times. The accounts by the Arab historian Ibn Al-Athir and by William of Tyre tell us what happened after the crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem from complementary but very different points of view.

 

 

PART 2.ENGLISH LANGUAGE OF MIDDLE AGES: FORM GENERATED FROM INTERPLAY OF ENGLISH, FRENCH AND LATIN

2.1 Middle English Dialects

During the Middle English period (roughly 1100–1500) the English language is characterized by a complete lack of a standard variety. By contrast, during much of the Old English period, the West Saxon dialect had enjoyed a position as a written standard, and the transition to Early Modern English is marked by the emergence of the middle class dialect of London as the new standard variety of the language.

The lack of a written standard in Middle English is a natural consequence of the low status of English during this period. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the ruling classes spoke (Norman) French, while English lived on as the spoken language of the

lower classes. In the absence of a high-prestige variety of English which might serve as a target for writers of English, each writer simply used his own variety of the language.

The Old English dialects evolved and became ME dialects: Kentish, Southern, Northern, East-Midland and West-Midland[11, p.9].

The Middle English dialects can be divided into five major groups:

• South-Western (SW) (or simply Southern), a continuation of OE West Saxon;

• South-Eastern (SE) (or Kentish, though it extended into neighbouring counties as well), a continuation of OE Kentish;

• East Midland (EM), in the eastern part of the OE Mercian area;

• West Midland (WM), in the western part of the OE Mercian area;

• Northern (N), north of the Humber.

The traditionally recognized Middle English dialects are as follows: Kentish remains the same as in Old English, West Saxon transformed into Southern, and Northumbrian into Northern. The Mercian dialect constituted two parts: East Midland and West Midland.

The London dialect, comprising predominantly features of East Midland, became the written form of official and literary papers in the late 14th century. The London dialect had extended to the first two universities of Cambridge and Oxford, thus constituting the famous literary and cultural London—Oxford—Cambridge triangle.

Thus the year 1066 is the date of the Norman Conquest in England. The conquestsymbolizes the beginning of a new social, cultural, and linguistic era in GreatBritain, i.e. the conventional transition from Old English to Middle English, thelanguage spoken and written in England from the end of the 11th c. to the end of the 15th c. Undoubtedly French as the language of conquerors influenced English greatly. French, or Norman French was immediately established as the dominant language of the ruling class. Strikingly but Anglo-Saxon dialects were not suppressed. During the following 300 years communication in England went on in three languages: 1) at the monasteries learning was conducted in Latin; 2) Norman-French was spoken at court and in official institutions; 3) the common people held firmly to their mother tongue[9, p.39].

During the the Middle Ages in Britain educated people would have been trilingual. English would have been their mother tongue. They would have learned Latin as the required language of the Church, the Roman Classics, most scholarship and some politico-legal matters. And they would have found French – essential both for routine administrative communication within Britain and in order to be considered fashionable throughout Western European society.