No More Learning

It is a sermon on the old text, “Ye
cannot serve God and Mammon,” “no man may wel serve tweie
lordes to queme," and every line bites in, as with the acid of
an etcher, some fresh detail of current manners. As soon as the
1 Harl. 2253, ed. Wright.
8 conceit.
5 Elegy on Edward I, before cited.
· malicious ill-temper,
• Political Songs of England, 1839.


## p. 371 (#391) ############################################

The Black Death
371
young priest can afford it, he has a concubine; if those in high
places protest, “he may wid a litel silver stoppen his mouth"; the
doctor is the doctor of the comedies of Molière, a pompous
charlatan, ready enough to take silver for his advice, “thouh he
wite no more than a gos wheither” the patient "wole live or die”;
“the knights of old” no longer go forth on brave, if Quixotic,
quests, they are “liouns in halle, and hares in the field,” and any
beardless boy can be dubbed of their company; everywhere are
the poor of the land oppressed
Ao if the king hit wiste, I trowe he wolde be wroth,
Hou the pore beth i-piled, and ha the silver goth;
Hit is so deskatered bothe hider and thidere,
That halvendel sbal ben stole ar hit come togidere,
and acounted;
An if a pore man speke a word, he shal be foule afroanted.
Before the fourteenth century had come to a close, the ravages
of the Black Death had brought about radical changes in the
relations of labourers to the soil and had left indelible impressions
on life and letters. The presence of a disease that, at its height,
meant the death of one out of every two people in London and,
in the eastern counties, of two out of every three, led to a relaxa-
tion of the current laws of life and to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381.
The outbreak of lawlessness consequent upon the dislocation of
life in town and country, and the labour troubles that followed,
sent outlaws to the greenwood and helped to build up the legends
of Robin Hood. Murmurs of discontent grew in volume, and
protests against papal authority acquired fresh strength by the
existence of the Great Schism. The Lollards began their attacks on
social abuses and sought to reform the church at the same time.
The people "spoke,” and, though the “cause” was not “finished” for
many centuries to come, yet the end of many of the political and
religious ideals of the Middle Ages was in sight. Wyclif, and
those associated with him, had begun their work, the poems that
go by the name of Piers Plowman had been written and the
"commons," in the fullest sense of the word, were beginning their
long struggle for political freedom.
24—2


## p. 372 (#392) ############################################

CHAPTER XVIII
THE PROSODY OF OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH
OF Old English poetry, anterior to the twelfth century
and, perhaps, in a few cases of that century itself, it has
been calculated that we have nearly thirty thousand lines. But
all save a very few reduce themselves, in point of prosody, to
an elastic but tolerably isonomous form, closely resembling
that which is found in the poetry of other early Teutonic and
Scandinavian languages. This form may be specified, either
as a pretty long line rigidly divided into two halves, or as a
couplet of mostly short lines rhythmically connected together by
a system of alliteration and stress. Normally, there should be
four stressed syllables in the line, or two in each of the half
couplets; and at least three of these syllables should be allite-
rated, beginning with the same consonant or any vowel, as in this
line (29) of The Wanderer:
Wenian mid wynnum. Wat se be cunnað.
Around or between the pillar or anchor stresses, unstressed
syllables are grouped in a manner which has sometimes been
regarded as almost entirely licentious, and sometimes reduced, as
by Sievers, to more or less definite laws or types. Probably, as
usual, the truth lies between the two extremes.
To any one, however, who, without previous knowledge of the
matter, turns over a fair number of pages of Old English verse, a
singular phenomenon will present itself. For many of these pages
the line-lengths, though not rigidly equated, will present a coast-
line not very much more irregular than that of a page of modern
blank verse. And then, suddenly, he will come to pages or
passages where the lines seem to telescope themselves out to
double their former length. The mere statistical process of enu-
meration, and of subsequent digestion into classes of more or less
resembling type, finds no difficulty in this, and merely regards it


## p. 373 (#393) ############################################

Old English Verse
373
as an instance of "stretched” or “swollen " verses, with three or
four accents in each half instead of two. Curiosity of a different
kind may, perhaps, pine for a little explanation of a more real
nature—may wish to know whether this lengthening was parallel,
say, to Tennyson's at the close of The Lotos Eaters-a definitely
concerted thing—or whether it was a mere haphazard licence.
But there are no means of satisfying this curiosity except by
conjecture. Further, our means of deciding whether, as is usually
said, the stressed syllables were bound to be “long” beforehand or
not are very scanty. It seems admitted that more than one short
syllable may do the duty of one long; and this is of the highest
importance. What, however, is certain is that, in spite of this
great variation of length, and in spite of considerable differences,
not merely in syllabic volume, between the members of the
"stretched” and unstretched groups respectively, there is a certain
community of rhythmical tone, sometimes full, sometimes muffled,
which not only distinguishes the whole body of this ancient poetry,
but is distinguishable, with some alteration, in the later revived
alliterative verse of Middle English up to the beginning of the
sixteenth century. In order to detect and check this, the student
should take the Corpus Poeticum of Old English and read pages of
different poems steadily, letting his voice accommodate itself to the
rhythm which will certainly emerge if he has any ear. Different ears
will, perhaps, standardise this rhythm differently, and it certainly
admits of very wide variation and substitution. The simplest
and most normal formula-not necessarily the one which mere
statistics will show to be commonest as such, but that which, in
itself, or in slight variations from it, predominates—appears to the
present writer to be
tum-ti-ti
tam-ti | tum-ti tum-ti.
ti-tum-ti)
These are almost the lowest terms of a fully resonant line. They
are sometimes further truncated; they are often enlarged by the
addition of unstressed syllables ; but they are never far off except
in the obvious and admitted “magnums. "
Long or short, these lines, in all but an infinitesimal proportion
of the total, are arranged in mere consecution. A kind of para-
graph arrangement—which is, in fact, a necessity—may be often
noticed; but there are, save in one famous exception, no "stanzas. ”
This exception is the extremely interesting, and, to all appearance,
extremely early, poem Deor. Here, things which are undoubtedly


## p. 374 (#394) ############################################

374 Prosody of Old and Middle English
like stanzas (though the number of lines in them is variable) are
formed by a refrain:
baes oferoode, pisses swa maez.
With some rashness, it has been assumed that this semi-lyrical
arrangement was the earlier, and that it broke down into the
continuous form. It may be so; but, in Old English, at any rate,
we have no evidence to show it
Further, in the main range of this poetry, though not to such
an exclusive extent, rime is absent. Attempts have been made
to discover it in some of the mainly rimeless poems of later
dates ; but the instances adduced are probably accidental. In
fact, the majority of them, alleged chiefly by German critics,
are not properly rimes at all, and are often mere similarities
of inflection. The real exceptions are (1) the famous piece in
the Exeter Book called, significantly, The Riming Poem, which
exhibits a system, probably imitated from the Norse, of internal,
and sometimes frequently repeated, consonance at the ends
of lines and half lines ; and (2) a few fragments, especially
the inset in the Chronicle about the imprisonment and death of
the "guiltless aetheling" Alfred. They are exceptions which
eminently prove the rule. A quest for assonance has also been
made, and a few instances of something like it have been pointed
out. But they are very few. Assonance, in fact, has never held
any important place in English prosody; and, where it exists in
unsophisticated times and instances, it is always, most probably,
the result either of inattention or of an attempt to rime. On
the whole, the body of Old English verse, as we have it, is
one of the most homogeneous to be found in any literature.
Alliteration, accent and strict separation of lines or half-lines
for its positive laws; rimelessness for its negative: these nearly
sum up its commandments, and its result is dominated by an
irregular quasi-trochaic rhythm which will retreat, but always
comes back again.
When, after the lapse of some two centuries, which furnish only
scraps of verse, we meet, at, or before, the end of the twelfth
century, with a fresh crop of English poetry, the results of prosodic
scrutiny are strikingly different. Instead of the just summarised
regularity-not in the least cast-iron, but playing freely round two
or three recognised principles, which are never absolutely deserted,
I see ante, p. 86.


## p. 375 (#395) ############################################

The Transition
375
and attempting nothing beyond their rangewe find what may, at
first, look like chaos; what has sometimes been taken for the same
dispensation a little obsolescent and broken down, but, when
examined fully and fairly, is seen to be a true period of transition.
The old order finds itself in face of a new, which does not by any
means merely replace it or destroy it; but, after an inevitable
stage of confusion, blends with it and produces something different
from either, something destined to be permanent as far as we can
yet see. In all the pieces usually dated a little before or a
little after 1200—the fragments of St Godric, Paternoster, The
Moral Ode and others, as well as the two long compositions of
Layamon and Orm-this process and its results are observable.
The new agency is the syllabic prosody (accentual, also, in general
character, but strictly syllabic) of French and of contemporary
Latin, with its almost invariable accompaniment of rime, and its
tendency, invariable also in French, though by no means so in
Latin, to iambic rhythm. It must be sufficient here to examine
the working out of this clash in the two long poems just referred
to, Ormulum and the Brut, with slighter remarks on the others.
In both poems it is possible to trace the older principle of
a rimeless line of more or less length, divided sharply in the
middle, or a rimeless couplet of two halves, in which, though not
invariably, there is a certain tendency to shorten the second. But
the two writers have been affected by the opposite and newer
system in ways curiously different, but quite intelligible as results
of the clash. Orm has unflinchingly kept to the old principle of
rimelessness; but he has as unflinchingly adopted the new
principles of uniformity in syllabic volume and of regular iambic
metrical beat. His lines are invariably of fifteen syllables, or his
couplets of eight and seven. That he achieves—as any example,
however selected, must show-nothing but the most exasperating
and wooden monotony, does not matter to him, and it ought not
to matter to us. He has sacrificed everything to regularity in
number and cadence, and he has achieved this.
Layamon's result, if not more actually important, is much more
complicated, much more interesting, with much more future in it;
but, for these very reasons, it is much less easy to summarise.
In fact, to summarise it in uncontroversial terms is very nearly
impossible. At first sight, if we can suppose an eye familiar with
Old English poetry and not familiar at all with Middle English,
it may seem to present no great difference from the former; and
there are still some who think that it does not present any that


## p. 376 (#396) ############################################

376
Prosody of Old and Middle English
is vital. But, when it is examined a little more carefully, differences
the most vital, if as yet sometimes not more than embryoni-
cally vital, emerge. Regarded as alliterative verse of the old
pattern, it can only be called very bad verse—verse which turns
the already abundant liberties of the original into mere chaotic
licence, for the most part, and which very seldom conforms at all
successfully. But, in addition to this, it succumbs, constantly
though irregularly, to the temptation which, except in late and
few instances, the old verse had rigidly resisted, and which Orm
was resisting absolutely—the temptation of rime. And this rime
seems to be forcing on it a new regularisation, that of equal-halved
distichs rimed together in the exact fashion of the French
octosyllabic couplet.
When we turn to the other and smaller poems of the period we
find this process of “slowly quickening into other forms” even
more importantly and interestingly exhibited. The Paternoster
is wholly in more or less regular rimed couplets of the kind just
noted. In The Moral Ode, the fifteen-syllabled line of Orm,
which, by the frequency of feminine endings, already promises
the reduction to fourteen, comes even nearer to the ballad metre
of eight and six, and exhibits a still more valuable characteristic
in its tendency towards maintaining the old syllabic freedom and
substitution of trisyllabic feet for the strict dissyllables of Ormulum.
Further, this heritage of Old English manifests itself in the
octosyllabic couplet; and, in the version of Genesis and Exodus,
which is assigned to about the middle of the thirteenth century,
anticipates exactly the Christabel metre which Coleridge thought
he invented more than five hundred years later. And, before very
long, though at dates impossible to indicate with precision, owing
to the uncertainty of the chronology of the documents, other
approximations of the old staple line or couplet to the metres
of French and Latin (especially the rime couée or combination
of two eights and a six doubled) make their appearance. These
transformations, however, as the liberty of their forms shows, and
as may be specially studied with greatest ease in the various
adaptations of the octosyllabic couplet, are neither mere aimless
haphazard experiments, nor mere slavish following of French and
Latin forms previously existing and held up as patterns. They
may be much more reasonably regarded as attempts to adjust
these latter to the old couplet with its middle division, and its
liberty of equality or inequality of syllabic length in the halves;
though, in all cases, the special rhythm of the older line or stave


## p. 377 (#397) ############################################

Foreign Influence
377
has become faint in the ear, and the new metrical swing prevails.
An equal division of the halves gives a distich which, for some
time, hesitates between eight and six syllables, the latter having
the additional assistance of the French alexandrine as pattern.
But it proves less suitable for English verse than the longer form,
and it is dropped or very rarely used. An unequal division-from
the first most popular-into eight and seven or eight and six,
gives the long line of Robert of Gloucester-sometimes called, for
convenience, a “fourteener” or, by Warton and others, but most
improperly, a "long alexandrine. ” This, when itself “disclosed”
in “golden couplets,” becomes at once the famous “common" or
ballad measure, the most distinctly popular metre for seven hundred
years past, and, at certain times, one yielding the most exquisite
harmony possible, though very easily degraded and reduced to
sing-song. In the course, moreover, of the give and take of this
commerce between material and mould, the beginnings of the
great decasyllabic, five-foot, or five-stress line emerge with a
frequency which has, for the most part, been inadequately noted;
as well as, more rarely, the alexandrine itself. In fact, it furnishes
the poet, by luck or design, with every possible line from four,
or even fewer, syllables to fourteen; while his examples in Latin
and French in turn furnish almost endless suggestions of stanza-
combination.
In one all-important particular, however, the foreign influence
exercised—by French altogether and, by Latin, in the greatest
part by far of its recent and accentual verse writing—in the
direction of strict syllabic uniformity, is not, indeed, universally,
but, to a very large extent, and stubbornly, resisted. The rime-
lessness of Old English might be given up with pleasure; its
curious non-metrical, or hardly more than half-metrical, cadences
might be willingly exchanged for more definite harmony; the
chains of its forced alliteration might be attenuated to an agreeable
carcanet worn now and then for ornament; and its extreme length-
licence might be curtailed and regularised. But, in one point which
had made for this latter, English refused to surrender; and that
was the admission of trisyllabic feet, as some phrase it, or, as some
prefer to describe the process, the admission of extra unstressed
syllables. The question was, indeed, not settled ; as a question it, no
doubt, never arose; and, when such problems came to be considered,
there was a dangerous tendency from late in the sixteenth century
till later in the eighteenth to answer them in the wrong way. But
practice was irreconcilable. Of the octosyllabic couplet there were,


## p. 378 (#398) ############################################

378 Prosody of Old and Middle English
almost from the first, two distinct forms, the strict and the elastic;
in nearly all other metres the licence is practically assumed. By
1300, or a little later, say 1325—to admit the latest possible dates
for the Harleian lyrics and the bulk of the early romances—all the
constitutive principles of modern English prosody are in operation,
and are turning out work, rougher or smoother, but unmistakable.
One curious postscript has to be made to these few general
remarks. During the period just referred to—from Layamon, that
is to say, to the appearance of William of Palerne and other
things, at a time probably nearer to the middle of the fourteenth
century than to its beginning--attempts at the old alliterative metre
are absolutely wanting. It is not unusual to meet with assumptions
that, though wanting, they must have existed, at any rate in
popular literature; and to these assumptions, as to all such, no
reasonable answer can be made, except that it may have been so.
So far, however, no trace of any such verse in the period referred
to has been discovered; nor any reference to such ; nor any
evidence, direct or indirect, that it existed. About the end of the
period it reappears : sometimes, simple of itself, with a cadence
altered, indeed, but not out of all likeness, after the fashion that
was to produce its capital example in The Vision of Piers
Plowman; sometimes, in a very remarkable blend with rime, and
with metrical and stanza arrangement, after the fashion of which
the most notable instances, in less and more regular kind, are
Gawayne and the Grene Knight and Pearl. But this revival
or reappearance has no effect on the main current of English
verse; which continues to be distinctly metrical, to be, in effect
universally, rimed and to use alliteration only for a separable and
casual ornament, not as a constituent and property.


## p. 379 (#399) ############################################

CHAPTER XIX
CHANGES IN THE LANGUAGE TO THE DAYS OF
CHAUCER
1. CONTINUITY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
THE three Germanic peoples-the Jutes from Jutland, the
Angles from Schleswig and the Saxons from Holstein—who, in
the fifth and sixth centuries, made themselves masters of the
greater part of south Britain, spoke dialects so nearly allied that
they can have had no great difficulty in understanding each other's
speech. It does not appear, however, that, in their original seats,
they had any general name for their common race or their common
language. The sense of their unity, with the consequent need for
a general designation for themselves, would, naturally, be the pro-
duct of the time when they found themselves settled among a
population speaking an alien and unintelligible tongue. In fact,
it was probably not by themselves, but by other nations, that the
Jutes, Angles and Saxons of Britain were first regarded as forming
an ethnic whole; just as in earlier times the larger kindred of
which they were part had received the name of Germans from the
Celts. The Britons applied to all the Germanic invaders of their
country the name of Saxons, because, in the days of Roman rule,
that nation had been the most conspicuous among those who
ravaged the coasts of Britain; and, as is well known, the Celtic-
speaking inhabitants of the British islands still continue to call the
English people and its language "Saxon. ” On the Continent, the
Germanic conquerors of Britain seem, for a long time, to have been
called indiscriminately sometimes Saxons, after the Celtic practice,
and sometimes Angles, the latter being the name of the people
which had the largest extent of territory. At the end of the sixth
century, Pope Gregory I uses only the name Angli. This is a
somewhat remarkable fact, because the missionaries sent by Gregory
laboured in the Jutish kingdom of Kent, which, at that time, was
paramount over all the country south of the Humber. Possibly,
the explanation of Gregory's choice of this name may be found in


## p. 380 (#400) ############################################

380
Changes in the Language
the famous story, according to which his zeal for the conversion of
the pagans of Britain was first awakened by his admiration of the
beauty of the boy slaves from the Anglian kingdom of Deira.
On the other hand, about A. D. 660, pope Vitalian, writing to an
Angle king, Oswiu of Northumbria, addresses him as rex
Saxonum.
The Roman missionaries naturally followed Gregory's practice;
and it was probably from the official language of the church that
the Jutes and Saxons learned to regard themselves as part of the
“Angle kindred” (Angolcynn, in Latin gens Anglorum). The
political ascendency of the Angle kingdoms, which began in
the seventh century, and continued until the time of the Danish
invasions, doubtless contributed to ensure the adoption of this
general name. In the early years of the eighth century, Bede
sometimes speaks of Angli sive Saxones, thus treating the two
appellations as equivalent. But, with this sole exception, his
name for the whole people is always Angli or gens Anglorum, and
he calls their language sermo Anglicus, even when the special
reference is to the dialect in which the Kentish laws were written.
When he does speak of lingua Saxonica, the context, in every
instance, shows that he means the language of the East or West
Saxons. It is true that Bede was an Angle by birth, and this fact
might seem to detract from the significance of his use of the name.
But, a century and a half later, the West Saxon king Alfred, whose
works are written in his native dialect, never uses any other name
for his own language but Englisc—the language of the Angles. It
is in the great king's writings that we find the earliest vernacular
examples of the name which our language has ever since continued
to bear.
In a certain sense it may be said that this name, as applied to
the language of the south of England, became more and more
strictly appropriate as time went on. For the history of southern
English, or of the language of English literature, is, to a consider-
able extent, concerned with the spread of Anglian forms of words
and the disappearance of forms that were specifically Saxon.
Moreover, several of the most important of the processes of change
that transformed the English of Alfred into the English of Chaucer
—the loss of inflections and grammatical gender, and the adoption
of Danish words—began in the Anglian regions of the north, and
gradually extended themselves southward. Leaving out of account
the changes that were due to French influences, we might almost
sum up the history of the language during five centuries in the


## p. 381 (#401) ############################################

“English” and “Saxon”
381
formula that it became more and more "English" and less and less
"Saxon. ”
It will be convenient at this point to give some account of the
history of the nomenclature of the various stages in the development
of the English language. When, in the sixteenth century, the re-
mains of vernacular literature earlier than the Norman conquest
began to attract the attention of scholars, Englishmen naturally
found it inconvenient to apply the name of "English" to what to
them was, practically, a foreign language, requiring not less study
to understand than the Flemish of their own day. It became
customary, therefore, to speak of this language as “Saxon. ” As the
few pre-Conquest texts then known were written in the south, this
designation may be said to have been accurately descriptive. It
was so, however, merely by accident, for those who employed it
were accustomed to use the term “Saxons” as a general name for
the Germanic inhabitants of England before the Norman conquest.
The popular view was that the "English" people and the "English"
language came into being as the result of the fusion of “Saxons”
and Normans. Traces of this misuse of names, indeed, are to be
found in various forms of expression that are still current. Although
the double misnomer of “the Saxon heptarchy" no longer appears
in our school histories, modern writers continue to speak of “the
Saxon elements in the English vocabulary," and to misapply the
epithet “Saxon” to the architecture of the parts of the country
inhabited by the Angles.
The term “Saxon,” besides being historically incorrect as a
designation for the whole early Germanic population of Britain,
was inconveniently ambiguous, because it survived as the proper
appellation of a portion of the inhabitants of Germany. In the last
years of the reign of Elizabeth, Camden revived the use of the old
name Anglosaxones, and, probably for the first time, used lingua
Anglosaxonica for the language of England before the Norman
conquest. He explains that Anglosaxones means the Saxons of
England, in contradistinction to those of the continent; and, in his
English Remains, he, accordingly, renders it by “English Saxons. ”
Throughout the seventeenth century, and even later, "English
Saxon” continued to be the name ordinarily applied by philo-
logists to the language of king Alfred, but, in the eighteenth
century, this gave place to “Anglo-Saxon. ”
Camden's explanation of the compound name was, there can be
little doubt, historically correct. In its early use, it was applied
to distinguish those Saxons who were considered part of the


## p. 382 (#402) ############################################

382
Changes in the Language
“Angolcynn," and whose language was called “English,” from the
"Old Saxons," who remained in Germany; and the structure of the
native form Angulseaxe shows that the first element was intended
as a descriptive prefix. It was, however, natural that the com-
pound should be interpreted as meaning “Angle and Saxon," and,
apparently, it was taken in this sense already at the end of the
seventeenth century by George Hickes, who also applied the
analogous name “Dano-Saxon” to the Old Northumbrian dialect,
under the mistaken notion that its peculiar features were the
result of Scandinavian admixture. As thus misunderstood, the
term “Anglo-Saxon” was accepted as supplying the need for a
general name applicable to the Anglian and Saxon dialects in
their fully inflected stage. In this comprehensive sense it con-
tinues to be extensively used. The proposal of some scholars to
restrict its application, on grounds of historical propriety, to the
Saxon dialect failed to gain acceptance, because what was wanted
was an inclusive name for the early language of England, as the
object of a well-defined branch of linguistic study. When pro-
fessorships of “Anglo-Saxon” had been founded at Oxford and
Cambridge, it was hardly possible to narrow the meaning of the
name to a part of the subject which the professors were appointed
to teach.
As a popular designation, the name "Anglo-Saxon” has the
merits of definiteness and intelligibility, which may possibly long
preserve it in use. It has, however, the great disadvantage of con-
cealing the important fact that the history of our language from
the earliest days to the present time has been one of continuous
development. When this fact became evident through the atten-
tion bestowed by scholars on the language of the thirteenth
century, the inconvenience of the traditional nomenclature could
not escape recognition. The language of this period was too
different from the Anglo-Saxon of the grammars to be conveniently
called by the same name, while, on the other hand, it could hardly
be called English, so long as "English" was understood to mean a
language which the unlearned reader could at once perceive to be
substantially identical with his own. An attempt was made to
meet the difficulty by the invention of the compound "Semi-
Saxon," to denote the transitional stage between “Anglo-Saxon”
and “English," but this name was so obviously infelicitous that its
introduction helped to procure acceptance for a nomenclature
which recognised that the language of Caedmon was no less
"English" than that of Chaucer. The great German philologist,


## p. 383 (#403) ############################################

Periods of English
383
Jacob Grimm, had introduced the practice of dividing the history
of a language into three periods, designated by the prefixes “Old,"
“Middle," and "New" or "Modern”; and, in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, many scholars in this country adopted “Old
English" as the name for that stage of the language which had, till
then, been known as Anglo-Saxon. The change found much oppo-
sition, on the not wholly unreasonable ground that “Old English”
was popularly applied to any form of English that was characterised
by abundance of obsolete words and by antiquated spelling, so that
the novel use could not but lead to frequent misunderstanding.
The advantages of the new nomenclature for purposes of historical
treatment are, however, so considerable that it has now come into
general use, although a few philologists, both in England and
Germany, still decline to adopt it.
The main reason for restoring to the language of Caedmon and
Alfred its historical name of “English,” is to emphasise the truth
that there was no substitution of one language for another in
England after the Norman conquest, but only a modification of
the original language by gradual changes in pronunciation and
grammar, by the accession of new words and the obsolescence of
old ones. The change of nomenclature will be a mere useless
pedantry if we allow ourselves to imagine that there was any
definite date at which people ceased to speak “Old English" and
began to speak “Middle English," or even that there ever was a
time when the English of the older generation and that of the
younger generation differed widely from each other. Nevertheless,
owing partly to the fact that the twelfth century was an age of
exceptionally rapid linguistic change, and partly to other causes
hereafter to be explained, it is quite true that, while the literary
remains of the first half of the century exhibit a form of the
language not strikingly different from that of preceding centuries,
those of the latter half present such an amount of novelty in
spelling and grammatical features as to make the most superficial
observation sufficient to show that a new period has begun. The
date 1150, as the approximate point of demarcation between the
Old and Middle periods of English, is, therefore, less arbitrary
than chronological boundaries in the history of a language usually
are; though, if we possessed full information respecting the spoken
English of the twelfth century, we should have to be content with
a much less precise determination. While the Middle English
period has thus a definite beginning, it has no definite ending.
It is, however, convenient to regard it as terminating about


## p. 384 (#404) ############################################

384
Changes in the Language
1500, because the end of the fifteenth century coincides pretty
closely with the victory of the printing-press over the scriptorium;
and many of the distinctive features of literary Modern English
would never have been developed if printing had not been invented.
2. CHANGES IN GRAMMAR
The most striking characteristic of Old English, as compared
with later stages of the language, is that it retained without
essential change the inflectional system which it possessed at the
beginning of its history. So far as regards the verbs, this system
was very imperfect in comparison with that of Greek, or even of
Latin. There was no inflected passive, the need of which was
supplied by the use of auxiliaries; and there were only two
inflected tenses: the present, which often had to serve for a future,
and the past. The use of auxiliaries for forming compound tenses
was comparatively rare. The three persons of the plural had only
one form, which, prehistorically, had been that of the third person;
and, in the past tense, the first and third person singular were alike.
On the other hand, the system of declension was nearly as elaborate
as in any of the languages of the Indogermanic family. Substantives
had four cases : nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. The
adjective had two sets of inflections for gender, number and case-
the one used when the substantive was "definite” (as when pre-
ceded by the article or some equivalent), and the other when it
was "indefinite. " So far as this description goes, it might appear
that the Old English machinery for expressing the grammatical
relations of substantives, adjectives and pronouns was as adequate
for its purpose as even that of Greek. But, owing to the effect of
prehistoric changes of pronunciation, which had assimilated many
terminations that were originally distinct, the Old English declen-
sion of these parts of speech was, in fact, full of inconvenient
ambiguities. This will be evident if we place side by side the
paradigms of the word guma, a man, in Gothic (which, in this
instance, agrees very nearly with primitive Germanic) and in Old
English.
Gothic. Old English
Sing. Nom.
guma
guma
Accus.
guman
guman
guming
gaman
Dative gumin
guman
Plur. Nom.
gumans
guman
Accus.
gumans
guman
Gen.
gumanē
gumena
Dative
gumam
Gen.
gumum


## p. 385 (#405) ############################################

Old English Grammar 385
The Gothic declension of this noun, it will be seen, has only one
weak point, namely, that the accusative plural had assumed the form
of the nominative. But, in Old English, the one form guman had
five different functions. There were, in Old English, many other
declensions of nouns besides that of which the word guma is an
example; and all of them were, more or less, faulty. The accusa-
tive had nearly always the same form as the nominative. In some
nouns the genitive singular, and in others the nominative plural,
did not differ from the nominative singular.
These observations apply to the West Saxon or southern dialect
of Old English, in which most of the extant literature is written.
But, while the West Saxon system of noun-inflection was thus
seriously defective, that of the Northumbrian dialect was far
worse, because, in that dialect, the final -n had come to be regularly
dropped in nearly all grammatical endings; and, further, the
unaccented final vowels were pronounced obscurely, so that we
often find them confused in our texts.
It was quite an exceptional
thing for the case and number of a substantive to be unambiguously
indicated by its form. The ambiguities were, to some extent, ob-
viated by the inflection of the accompanying article or adjective;
but the declension even of these parts of speech, though better
preserved than that of the substantive, had, itself, suffered from
wear and tear, so that there were only a few of the endings that
had not a multiplicity of functions.
The imperfection of the Old English system of inflections must
sometimes have caused practical inconvenience, and some of the
changes which it underwent were due to instinctive efforts to
remedy its defects. These changes naturally began where the evil
was greatest, in the northern dialect. It used to be believed and
the notion is not altogether extinct-that the almost universal
substitution of -es for the many Old English endings of the geni-
tive singular and the nominative and accusative plural was a result
of the Norman conquest. But, in fact, the beginnings of this
alteration in the language can be traced to a far earlier time. In
the Northumbrian writings of the tenth century we find that, very
often, when the traditional ending of a noun failed to indicate
properly its case and number, the required clearness was gained by
assimilating its declension to that of those nouns which made
their genitives in -es and their plurals in -as. As -es was the
only ending of nouns that never marked anything but a genitive
singular, and -as the only ending that never marked anything but
a nominative or accusative plural, the improvement in lucidity was
E. L. I. CH. XIX,


## p. 386 (#406) ############################################

386
Changes in the Language
very considerable. We lack definite evidence as to the rapidity
with which these two endings came, in the northern dialect, to
be applied to nearly all substantives, but the process probably
occupied no very long time. The change of declension syn-
chronised with a tendency, which prevailed in all dialects, to
obscure the pronunciation of the vowels in all unstressed final
syllables, so that -as became -28. The practice of forming genitives
and plurals, as a general rule, with this ending spread from the
northern to the midland dialect; perhaps this dialect may, in part,
have developed it independently. In the Peterborough Chronicle
(about 1154), and in the north midland Ormulum (about 1200),
we find it fully established. The English of educated Londoners
had, in the fourteenth century, lost most of its original southern
peculiarities, and had become essentially a midland dialect.
Hence, the writings of Chaucer show, as a general rule, only the
-es plurals and the -es genitives; the “irregular plurals,” as we
may now call them, being hardly more numerous than in modern
standard English. Words adopted from French often retained
their original plurals in -8. The dative case disappeared from
midland English in the twelfth century, so that Chaucer's de-
clension of substantives is as simple as that of our own
day.
In purely southern dialects, the history of the noun-inflections
was quite different. The case-endings of Old English-West
Saxon and Kentish-were, to a great extent, retained, with
the alterations that resulted from the general reduction of their
vowels to an obscure e. One consequence of this "levelling" of
vowels was that there was a large number of nouns of which the
nominative singular ended in -e and the nominative plural in -en,
as name, namen, tunge (tongue), tungen (in Old English nama,
naman, tunge, tungan); and, as the -n was, in these words, felt as a
formative of the plural, it was dropped in the oblique cases of the
singular. Hence, in these words all the cases of the singular ended
in -e, and the nominative and accusative plural in -en. To the
extensive declension thus arising all nouns ending in -e came to be
assimilated, including feminine nouns in which this ending had
been extended from the oblique cases to the nominative singular,
such as honde hand (Old English hond, dative honda), sunne sin
(Old English synn, dative synne). We observe here the same
instinctive struggle against the ambiguities induced by the pro-
gress of phonetic change that we have seen in the noun-declension
of the northern and midland dialects, although the remedial


## p. 387 (#407) ############################################

Changes in Declension 387
devices adopted were different. In the period with which we are
here concerned, southern English did not greatly extend the es
genitives beyond their original range, while -es, as a plural ending,
was nearly confined to those nouns that had -as in Old English,
and to neuters (like word) in which the singular and plural
nominatives had had the same form. The Old English termination
-um, which marked the dative plural in all declensions, survived
as -en. The genitive plural had two forms, e and -ene (Old
English -a, -ena); the latter, as the more distinct, encroached on
the domain of the former, so that "king of kings" was kingene
king instead of kinge king (Old English cyninga cyning).
The history of pronominal forms, like that of the declension
of nouns, exhibits certain changes serving to relieve the want of
distinctness in the traditional system. These changes began in the
Anglian districts, and did not, for the most part, reach the Saxon
region till after Chaucer's time. The forms of the Old English
pronouns of the third person, in all dialects, were, in several
instances, curiously near to being alike in pronunciation. The
masculine nominative hê was not very different from the feminine
nominative and accusative hēo (also hie, hi), and this closely
resembled the plural nominative and accusative hie or hi. The
dative singular masculine and neuter was him, and the dative
plural was heom. The genitive and dative singular of the feminine
pronoun was hire, and the genitive plural was heora. The one
form his served for the genitive both of the masculine hē and of
the neuter hit. (The forms here cited are West Saxon, the diver-
gences of the other dialects being unimportant. ) As the pronouns
were most commonly unemphatic, such differences as those between
him and heom, hire and heora, would, usually, be slighter in speech
than they appear in writing, and with the general weakening of
unstressed vowels that took place in Middle English they were
simply obliterated. In southern Middle English the resulting
ambiguities remained unremedied; but, in the north and a great
part of the midlands, they were got rid of by the process (very rare
in the history of languages) of adopting pronouns from a foreign
tongue. In many parts of these regions the Danes and Northmen
formed the majority, or a powerful minority, of the population, and
it is from their language that we obtain the words now written
they, their, them and, perhaps, also she, though its precise origin is
not clear. She (written scw) occurs in the Peterborough Chronide
about 1154. It does not appear in Ormulum (about 1200), which
retains the native pronoun in the form zho; the somewhat
25—2


## p. 388 (#408) ############################################

388
Changes in the Language
later east midland Genesis and Exodus has both words, ghe or ge
and sge or sche. After 1300, scho is universal in the northern
dialect and sche in east midland; but ho was common in west
midland down to the end of the century, and still remains in
the local speech of many districts. Ormulum has always they
(written þe33), but retains heore, hemm beside the newer their,
them (written þezzre, þezzm); in the fourteenth century they,
their, them are found fully established in all northern and east
midland writings, while, in the west, hy for “they" continued
in use. Early in the twelfth century, the accusative form of all
pronouns, except the neuter hit, had been replaced by the dative.
Chaucer uses she and they; but his her serves both for “her”
(accusative, genitive and dative) and for "their,” and he has
always hem for "them. ” In the south, the curious form hise or
is was used for “them. ” With regard to the other pronouns it will
suffice to mention that the form ich (with ch pronounced as in
“rich”) was general in the south, while, elsewhere, the Old English
ic became I early in the thirteenth century.
The Old English inflections of adjectives and article, and, with
them, the grammatical genders of nouns, disappeared almost entirely
early in Middle English. The Kentish dialect of the fourteenth
century, indeed, was exceptionally archaic in these points; in the
Ayenbite (written 1340) we find, for instance, the accusative
masculine form of the adjective and article in “ane gratne dyeuel"
(a great devil) and "thane dyath,” for which Chaucer would have
written "a gret deuel” and “the deeth. " In other districts of
the south, also, considerable traces of grammatical gender and
adjective inflection are found quite late. But the north midland
English of Ormulum is, in these respects, nearly identical with
that of Chaucer. The article is regularly the undeclined; gender
is determined purely by sex; and the adjective (with rare ex-
ceptions) has no other inflectional endings than the final -e used
when the adjective precedes a definite or a plural noun. In the
north, where final unstressed vowels had been silent, the adjec-
tive and article were uninflected, and grammatical gender had
ceased to exist, before the fourteenth century.
Among the most easily recognisable characteristics of Middle
English dialects are certain differences in the conjugation of
the verb. In Old English, the third person singular, and all the
persons of the plural, of the present indicative, ended in -th, with a
difference in the preceding vowel: thus, lufian to love, læran to
teach, give (in West Saxon) he lufath, he læreth, and we lupiath,


## p. 389 (#409) ############################################

Conjugation in Middle English 389
wa lærath. In the northern dialect, this -th had, in the tenth
century, already begun to give way to -8; and northern writings
of about 1300 show -es both in the third singular and in the plural
as the universal ending. The midland dialect, from 1200 onwards,
had in the plural -en, perhaps taken over from the present sub-
junctive or the past indicative; this ending, often reduced to e,
remains in the language of Chaucer. The third singular ended in
-eth in midland English (so also in Chaucer); but the northern -8,
which has now been adopted almost everywhere, even in rustic
speech, is found in many midland writings of the fourteenth
century, especially in those of the west. The southern dialect
preserved the West Saxon forms with little change: we find he
luveth, we luvieth in the fourteenth century. The plural indicative
present of the verb to be had several quite unconnected forms in
Old English: sindon and bēoth in all dialects, earon, aron in North-
umbrian and Mercian. In the thirteenth century, sinden occurs
in the north midland Ormulum and some southern writings. In
the fourteenth century, northern writings have are (monosyllabic),
midland varies between aren or are and been, ben, while the
southern form is beoth or buth.
The Northumbrian dialect had, in the tenth century, already
reduced the -an of the infinitive to -A, and, in the northern
English of the fourteenth century, the infinitive and the first
person singular present were destitute of endings (the final -e,
though often written, being shown by the metre to be silent). In
other dialects, the infinitive ended in -en, for which -e occurs
with increasing frequency from the thirteenth century onwards.
Chaucer and Gower have both forms; their metre requires the
final -e to be sounded in this as in most of the other instances, but
it is probable that, in ordinary speech, it was generally silent before
A. D. 1400.
The forms of the present participle, which, in Old English, ended
in -ende, afford a well-marked criterion of dialect in Middle English.
The northern dialect had falland, the southern fallinde; in the
midland dialect, fallande or fallende gradually gave place to
fallinge, which is the form used by Chaucer.
It is impossible in this chapter to pursue the history of
early English inflections in all its details, but, before leaving the
subject of the development of the grammar, we must say a few
words on the question how far the rapid simplification of the
declension and conjugation in the twelfth and succeeding centuries
was an effect of the Norman conqueste The view, once universally


## p. 390 (#410) ############################################

390
Changes in the Language
held, and still entertained by many persons, that the establishment
of Norman rule was the main cause by which this change was
brought about, is now abandoned by all scholars. We have seen
that, in the north of England, the movement towards a simpler
grammatical system had made no small progress a hundred years
before duke William landed; and the causes to which this move-
ment was due were such as could not fail to be increasingly
effective. The intimate mixture of Danish and native popula-
tions in the north and over a great part of the midlands must, no
doubt, have had a powerful influence in reinforcing the tendencies
to change that already existed. So far as these districts are
concerned, it is not too much to say that the history of English
grammar would have been very nearly what it actually was if the
Conquest had never taken place. It is peculiarly worthy of note
that the southern dialect, which we should expect to be most
affected by the French influence, and which, with regard to
vocabulary, certainly was so, was, of all dialects of Middle English,
the most conservative in its grammar. And there is good reason
to believe that, even in the south, the spoken language had
travelled a considerable distance towards the Middle English
stage before the fateful date A. D. 1066. Only twenty years after
the Conquest, the Norman scribes of Domesday Book, writing
phonetically and without influence from English tradition, spell local
and personal names in a way which shows that the oral language
bad undergone certain changes that do not regularly manifest
themselves in native writings until much later. And some of the
charters of the time of Edward the Confessor, which exhibit
modernisms that are commonly attributed to the scribes of the
late MSS in which they are preserved, are, probably, less altered
from their original form than is generally imagined. This remark
applies especially to informal documents not proceeding from
professional scriveners, such, for instance, as the interesting letter
of the monk Edwin about 1057, printed in Kemble's Codex
Diplomaticus, No. 922.
What the Norman conquest really did was to tear away the
veil that literary conservatism had thrown over the changes of the
spoken tongue. The ambition of Englishmen to acquire the
language of the ruling class, and the influx of foreign monks into
the religious houses that were the sources of literary instruction,
soon brought about the cessation of all systematic training in the
use of English. The upper and middle classes became bilingual;
and, though English might still be the language which they


## p. 391 (#411) ############################################

Influence of the Norman Conquest 391
preferred to speak, they learned at school to read and write
nothing but French, or French and Latin. When those who had
been educated under the new conditions tried to write English,
the literary conventions of the past generation had no hold upon
them; they could write no otherwise than as they spoke. This is
the true explanation of the apparently rapid change in the
grammar of English about the middle of the twelfth century.
It would, however, be a mistake to say that the new conditions
produced by the Conquest were wholly without influence on the
inflectional structure of the spoken language. Under the Norman
kings and their successors, England was politically and adminis-
tratively united as it had never been before ; intercourse between
the different parts of the country became less difficult; and the
greater freedom of intercommunication assisted the southward
diffusion of those grammatical simplifications that had been
developed in the northern dialect. The use of the French
language among large classes of the population, which has left
profound traces in the English vocabulary, must have tended to
accelerate the movement towards disuse of inflectional endings ;
though this influence must remain rather a matter of abstract
probability than of demonstrable fact, because we have no means
of distinguishing its effects from those of other causes that
were operating in the same direction. Perhaps the use of the
preposition of instead of the genitive inflection, and the polite
substitution of the plural for the singular in pronouns of the
second person, were due to imitation of French modes of expression;
but, in other respects, hardly any specific influence of French upon
English grammar can be shown to have existed.
In the main, therefore, the differences between the grammar of
Old English and that of the English of Chaucer's day must be
ascribed to internal agencies, helped to a certain extent by the
influence of the language of the Scandinavian settlers. The French
influence introduced by the Norman conquest had only a com-
paratively small effect.
3. PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLING.
The runic alphabet that had been used by the heathen English
was, soon after their conversion, superseded (for most purposes) by
the Latin alphabet of 22 letters, to which afterwards were added
the three characters p (w, called wynn), Þ (th, called thorn), which


## p. 392 (#412) ############################################

392 Changes in the Language
belonged to the runic alphabet, and , differentiated from d by the
addition of a cross-bar. The last-mentioned character was used
indifferently with ḥ, the two sounds of our modern th (in thick and
in this) not being graphically distinguished. The u or v, and the i,
were, in ordinary Old English spelling, used only as vowels, the
Latin practice of using them as consonants not being followed.
On the early coins, the sound expressed in modern French by u
and in German by ü was rendered by writing a V with an I inside
it. This compound character in MSS became y, and this was
identified with the Roman y. Instead of qu, the combination cp
was used in Old English; k occurs in some MSS, but was commonly
replaced by c; % was used, though very seldom, with its con-
temporary Latin value of ts.
It is not necessary to give in this place any account of the
changes in orthography during the Old English period. About
A. D. 1000, the vowels were probably sounded nearly as in modern
Italian, except that æ stood for a sound intermediate between
those of a and e (i. e. the modern southern sound of a in pat), and
that y, as already remarked, was like the French U The long
vowels, which had the same sounds as the corresponding short
vowels prolonged, were, at an early period, denoted by doubling,
and, later, by a mark (about equally resembling an acute and a
circumflex accent) over the letter; but this was often omitted.
The consonants had, for the most part, the same sounds as in
modern English, but some exceptions must be mentioned. Several
consonant letters had more than one sound, and, in the case of
most of these, modern English retains the Old English pronuncia-
tion, though not always the same written symbol. Thus, in fan
fan, æfen even, sæd seed, rīsan rise (sounded “rize"), þynne thin,
brābor brother, caru care, cealc chalk, scēap sheep, scol school,
god good, gēar year, þing thing, sengan to singe, docga dog, ecg
edge, the Old English sounds of f, 8, B, C, 80, 9, ng and cg were
exactly, or nearly, those of the letters occupying the same place
in the modern forms of these words. In the middle or at the
end of a word, g was sounded differently according to the
nature of the neighbouring vowels : in dæg day it was pro-
nounced like y in “year,” but in the plural dagas days it had
a sound that might be written gh, differing from the ch in Loch
just as g differs from k. The letter h, when initial, was pronounced
as at present; but, in other positions, it was pronounced like the
German ch (either guttural as in ach or palatal as in ich, accord-
ing to the sounds which it followed). It will be seen that, with


## p. 393 (#413) ############################################

Middle English Spelling 393
few exceptions, our ancestors of the eleventh century pronounced
the consonantal part of their words much as we do, even when
they wrote it with different letters.
The striking change in the written language of England during
the twelfth century was, to a considerable extent, a matter of mere
spelling. As was pointed out in the preceding section, soon after
the Norman conquest children ceased to be regularly taught to
read and write English, and were taught to read and write French
instead. When, therefore, the mass of the new generation tried to
write English, they had no orthographical traditions to guide
them, and had to spell the words phonetically according to French
rules. They used ch instead of the old c, when it was pronounced
as in cirice church. The sound of the Old English sc in sceamu
shame, which did not exist at that time in French, was rendered
by ss, ssh, sch, or sh. The French qu took the place of cp. The f
between vowels (pronounced v) was replaced by u or v (these being
still, as long afterwards, treated as forms of one and the same
letter, used indifferently for vowel and consonant). The Old
English symbol 2 was dropped, its place being taken by a or e.
The sound of the Old English y, in the dialects where it survived,
was expressed by u; and that of the Old English long u was
written ou, as in French.
Of course, these changes did not take place all at once. It is
not to be supposed that no one ever read an Old English MS, and
there was, for a long time, some mixture of the traditional spelling
with the new one. Some few English sounds admitted of no
tolerable representation in the French alphabet; and for the
expression of these the native characters were retained in use.
The letters 5, 8 and p were used, though often blunderingly, even
by scribes who, in other respects, were thoroughly French in their
spelling ; though often we find their sounds awkwardly rendered
by t, th, ht, or d, and U. And in the twelfth century, though the
continental variety of the Roman alphabet was generally used for
writing English, it was found convenient to retain the native form
of the letter g for those two of its sounds that the French g lacked,
namely, those of gh and y (as in year). A new letter was thus
added to the alphabet, and, though it came to be written 3, exactly
like the contemporary form of %, it preserved its name “yok"
until the fourteenth century. It may be remarked in passing that
the ambiguity of pronunciation of this letter has misled modern
writers into calling the author of the Brut “ Layamon " instead of
“ Laghamon”; the incorrect form, however, bas become too well


## p. 394 (#414) ############################################

394
Changes in the Language
known to be displaced. In addition to the two original values of
the "yok,” it very early obtained a third use, being employed
(without indicating any change of pronunciation) instead of the
Old English h in certain positions, as in knizt, ibrozt, rouz, for
which the older spelling was cniht, gebroht, ruh. But, in the
fourteenth century, many writers substituted y or i for 3, when
pronounced as in zeer (year), and gh in all other cases. In the
thirteenth century, the letters p and Ở went out of use, the former
being replaced by the northern French w. The letter þ was
retained; but, although it was still called "thorn" in the four-
teenth century, it seems in Chaucer's time to have been regarded
as a mere compendium for th, which generally took its place except
initially. It may be noted that Thomas Usk, in the acrostic
sentence of his Testament of Love (1387) spells bin (thine) with
the four letters THIN. The adoption of a number of French
words like ioie (joy), in which ¿ was pronounced like the modern
English j, introduced the consonantal use of this letter into
English orthography.
The Old English initial combination hl survived (written Ih) in
some dialects down to the fourteenth century; but hr was very
early reduced to r. For the Old English hw, Middle English
writers substituted wh, though the h was, at first, often omitted
in this combination as in other positions, by scribes of French
education. The northern spelling qua, quilk for wha, whilk (who,
which) arose from a dialectal pronunciation of qu as wh, which
still survives locally in a few words.
From the twelfth century onwards, the letter y, when used
as a vowel, was treated as a mere alternative form of i.
Ormulum is written in a peculiar phonetic spelling devised
by the author himself. This is based, to a considerable extent, on
native tradition, though the handwriting is of the continental
type. There are, however, some of the new features. Orm uses
ch and sh as we do now, and retains the Old English form of g for
the two sounds which the French g had not A device peculiar
to himself is the appropriation of different shapes of the letter g to
the two sounds in god (good) and egge (edge). But the most note-
worthy characteristic of his orthography is the method of indicating
the quantity of the vowels. The shortness of a vowel, in a syllable
ending with a consonant, is shown by doubling the following
consonant, as in Crisstenndom. When the short vowel ended a
syllable in the middle of a word, Orm marked it as in tåkenn,
and very often (though not always) indicated a long vowel by one,


## p. 395 (#415) ############################################

two, or fibrous systems, it is onenglish pronuthus far nohere were
Development of Sounds 395
two, or even three "acute accents" over the letter. This elaborate
and cumbrous system found no imitators, but, as preserved in the
author's autograph MS, it is one of the most important aids that
we possess for ascertaining the English pronunciation of the time.
The changes in spelling that we have thus far noticed are
merely changes in the manner of representing sound. There were
others that were the result of altered pronunciation. It very
often happens that very considerable changes take place in the
sounds of a language without affecting the spelling, even when (as
was, apparently, the case in Middle English) there is no general
prejudice against deviations from traditional correctness of ortho-
graphy. Pronunciation, as a general rule, is not altered deliberately,
but unconsciously. In the utterance of what is intended and
believed to be one and the same vowel or consonant sound, each
generation may vary to an almost imperceptible extent from that
which preceded it; and, if these slight changes are all in the same
direction, the difference may, in the end, become indefinitely great.
The normal result in such cases is that the letter comes to have a
new phonetic value, and the spelling is not affected. The reason
why there were exceptions to this normal course of things in
Middle English was partly that sometimes two originally distinct
sounds so developed as to become identical, and partly that the
orthography of French supplied a kind of external standard.
The history of the changes in English pronunciation down to
the time of Chaucer is far too intricate to be treated here with
any approach to completeness; but a few of its salient points may
be briefly indicated.
The first remark to be made is that the course of development
of several of the Old English sounds was quite different in different
parts of the country. When we compare the modern English
pronunciation of home, stone, with the Scotch and northern hame,
stane, we see the last term of a divergent development (which
began very early) of the Old English long a (pronounced as a in
father). While the northern dialect progressively altered the
sound in one direction, the midland and southern dialects pro-
gressively altered it in the opposite direction. We cannot precisely
tell how far the change in the northern pronunciation had pro-
ceeded in the fourteenth century, because the spelling was not
affected. But, in other dialects, as we know from various kinds of
evidence, the sound was that of the “open ő" as in lord, and it
was expressed in writing by o or 00. The words “goad” (Old
English gād) and “good” (Old English göd) are both written good


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396
Changes in the Language
in Chaucer's spelling, but they were not pronounced alike; if the
sounds had been confused they would not have been separated
again in later pronunciation; and Chaucer never rimes a word
that has the “open o" with one containing the “close o. ” The
latter retained its old pronunciation (that of the French o in rose),
perhaps a little modified in the direction of its modern equivalent,
the oo in cool.
The long e, like the long o, had an "open" and a “close”
pronunciation, which Chaucer also keeps apart in his rimes.
The open è comes from the Old English (Anglian) ā, ea, and the
close è from Old English ē, 20. A word like chepe to buy (from
Old English cēapian) which had the openē, could not correctly
rime with a word like kepe to keep (from cēpan) which had the
close è. In northern dialects, the distinction was so slight that
poets freely allowed the two sounds to rime with one another.
In all the dialects of Middle English, the short vowels å, , ,
when ending an accented syllable, were lengthened, ĕ and
becoming open ? and open 0. In Chaucer's pronunciation, mete
meat (Old English měte) was an exact rime to grete, the plural of
the adjective great (Old English greate), but not to grete to greet
(Old English grētan); þrote throat (Old English brotu) rimed
with hote to command (Old English hätan), but not with bote
benefit (Old English bõt).
The Old English y (pronounced ü) kept its original sound in
the south-west, and, perhaps, in parts of the west midland, being
written u when short, and ui or uy when long; in Kent, it had
become e before the Conquest; elsewhere, it was sounded exactly
like i, and written, like that sound, indifferently i or y. The words
“fire," "sin,” “knit,” have, accordingly, in the different localities
the three types of form fuir, ver, fir; sunne, zenne, sinne; knutte,
knette, knitte. Chaucer, whose London English was mainly east
midland, uses occasionally a Kentish form like knette -
With regard to the pronunciation of consonants, there is
little that needs to be said, as, for the most part, the Old English
sounds not only continued unchanged down to the end of the
fourteenth century, but remain so to the present day. The
pronunciation of initial f and s as v and % (“ vather came vrom
Zummerzet"), which sounds so strange to visitors to the south-
western counties, was, in the fourteenth century, current all over
the south; in fact, the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwyt, of 1340, exhibits
this pronunciation in the orthography with greater regularity than
any other extant book. The gh sound of the letter 3 gradually


## p. 397 (#417) ############################################

397
Words adopted from French
changed into that of w, and this change was represented in the
spelling. In the earlier of the two MSS of the poetical chronicle
called the Brut, written at the beginning of the thirteenth
century, the author's name appears as “Lazamon," but, in the later
MS, written before 1300, it is turned into “Laweman. ” On the
other hand, in 1340, the Kentish Ayenbite has still forms like
zorze (sorrow) instead of Chaucer's sorwe.
4. CHANGES IN VOCABULARY.
If the Norman conquest had little influence on the development
of English grammar, its effects on the vocabulary of the language
were profound. It introduced, as we have already observed, an
age in which all educated Englishmen spoke French in addition to
their native tongue, and, for the most part, wrote nothing but
French and Latin. French became the language of law and
government, of war and of the chase, and of all that pertained to
the life of the wealthier classes. Of the vernacular literature
from the Conquest to the middle of the fourteenth century, by far
the greater part consisted of translations from French and Latin.
It is true that, down to the end of the thirteenth century, nearly
all that was written in English was intended for readers who were
comparatively unlearned; but even these readers could be reason-
ably supposed to have some degree of acquaintance with the
fashionable language, for, as a rule, the man who absolutely knew
nothing but English probably could not read at all. And when,
once more, it became customary to write in English for highly
educated people, authors could venture, without any fear of not
being understood, to borrow freely from the literary, as well as
from the popular, vocabulary of the French language.
Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that the English
language received a large and rapidly increasing accession of
French words. A few, indeed, seem to have come in even before
the Norman conquest: catchpoll (kæcepol) occurs in a glossary of
the early eleventh century, and proud (Old English prūt, Old
Norse prūðr), if it be really French, must have been adopted much
earlier. In the Peterborough Chronicle, written about 1154, the
French' words amount to nearly a score. Their character is sig-
nificant. They include emperice empress, cuntesse countess (of
Anjou), curt court (king Henry II “ held mycel curt” at London
in 1164), dubbian to dub a knight, prison, privilege, rente, tenserie


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