General characteristics

1. The Scandinavian invasion.

2. The Norman French conquest.

3. Bilingual situation in the country.

4. Prevalence of English over French.

5. ME orthography.

6. ME dialects and written records.

1. The Scandinavian invasion.

As we discussed above Scandinavian raids into Britain began in 7 c. and went on up to 878 A.D. when Alfred the Great signed the treaty of Wedmore due to which the Danes were granted a vast territory to the north of the Thames. Alfred’s successors managed to take back the Danelaw in the first half of 10 c. Danish troops used to rob lands of Britain up to 1018. Since 1018 through 1042 Danish kings ruled Britain. Danes were kindred to the British, the languages being alike. The need to communicate led to intermixture of the languages. Phonetic influence of Old Norse was next to none. In morphology the influence was very important because it was one of the causes serving to reduce the system of OE flexions. In word stock borrowings were extensive, some causing semantic changes. Scandinavian influence on English will be discussed later.

2. The Norman French conquest.

The Scandinavian invasion, its final period, was one of the factors bordering OE from ME. The second factor was Norman-French conquest.

In 1066 Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king died heirless. The English crown was claimed by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, a relative of the deceased. The land, later called Normandy, was yielded to the Danish chief Rollo the Rover by the French king in 912. The Normans became romanised and accepted French culture and language.

On October 14, 1066, in the Battle of Hastings English troops were defeated by the Normans. William was proclaimed the king of England. Anglo-Saxon nobility was replaced by Norman barons. The Court, the government, the church, the Law – all became French.

About 200 000 Normans came to England with William. They represented the ruling minority to 2.000.000 of Anglo-Saxon population.

In 1204 British kings lost lands on the Continent and British Normans became isolated from their kinsmen in France.

Doomsday Book, 1086, shows a distinct segregation of people in Britain.

The time immediately after the Norman conquest, approximately the year 1100, was the starting point of the Middle English period which went on up to the war of the Red and White Roses (1455 – 1485) - the time thought to be the border between Middle English and New English. Henry Sweet called Middle English the period of levelled endings.

3. Bilingual situation in the country.

For the next three centuries after the Norman Conquest all the kings of England spoke French, the nobility, ecclesiastical any lay, was French-speaking. ‘Vor bote a man conne frense me telt of him lute’ “unless a man know French, one counts of him little”, wrote in the end of 13 c. the chronicler Robert of Glouster. If Old Norse and old English had been quite equal French became the language of the superiority, not because the court despised English but, because the court consisted of French-speaking Normans.

The Norman Conquest interrupted the literary tradition of the West Saxon dialect which had been the accepted literary language. West Saxon was reduced to the rank which it had occupied before the days of Alfred. All English dialects kept functioning within their limits, none dominated over the others. Hence when any Englishmen wrote or spoke he used his own local dialect without regard to the standards of West Saxon that had existed before the Conquest.

Readers of Scott’s “Ivanhoe” will remember the conversation between the Saxon thralls Wamba and Gurth, where stress in laid on the fact that the names of the live animals “ox”, “swine”, and “calf” are English, because they are herded by the English, whereas those of the cooked meats “beef”, “pork” and “veal” are French, because they are eaten by the French.

At first Normans and Anglo-Saxon did not mix. They spoke different languages and lived in separate areas. But the growing need to communicate in everyday life led to the fact that many people became bilingual. Lower layers of the French began to intermix, to intermarry with the English, began to feel themselves a uniform nation.