Recommended literature

1. Алексеева Л. С. Древнеанглийский язык. – М.: Высш. шк., 1971.

2. Аракин В. Д. История английского языка. – М.: Просвещение, 1985.

3. Буніятова І.Р. Еволюція гіпотаксису в германських мовах (IV-XIII ct.). - K.: Вид. центр КНЛУ, 2003.

4. Иванова И. П., Чахояв Л. П. История английского язика. – СПб.: Лань, 2004.

5. Мороховський А. Н. Слово и предложение в истории английсого языка. – К.: Вища школа, 1980.

6. Очерки по историческому синтаксису германских языков. – Л.: ЛГУ, 1991.

7. Расторгуева Т. А., Жданова И. Ф. Курс лекций по истории английского языка. – И.: Просвещение, 1972.

8. Barber, Charles L. The English language: A Historical Introduction. - Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.

9. Baugh A.C, and T.Cable. A History of the English Language. - Routledge, 2006.

10. Blake N. F. A History of the English Language. - L.: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996.

11. Bynon Th. Historical Linguistics. - Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977.

12. The Cambridge History of the English language. Vol. 1 / R. Hogg (ed.). - Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992.

13. McCrum, R. et al. The Story of English. - London: Faber/ BBC, 1986.

14. Mitchell, Bruce. An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. - Oxforf: Blackwell, 1995.

15. Pyles, Thomas and J. Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English language. - N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1970. 1

LECTURE 4. THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Normandy and the Normans.

2. The Norman Invasion.

1. Changes in the life of Anglo-Saxons during the Norman reign.

4. Linguistic situation in England after the Norman Conquest.

5. The Re-establishment of English.

1. In the 9^th century while the Danes were plundering England, another branch of Northmen - the Normans - were doing the same along the North­ern coasts of France. The Danes settled down in the conquered part of England (“Danelaw”) and, as the time went on, they gradually mixed with the Anglo-Saxons, thus retaining their Germanic language and many of their customs. Likewise, the Normans settled down on the territory conquered from the French king, which came to be known as Normandy. The Normans had to live among the French people, who were a different people, with different manners, customs and language. The Normans had to learn the language, adopt new customs and a new way of life. However, the Normans lived under the rule of their own duke, though they acknowledged the king of France as their overlord. The Duchy of Normandy soon became strong and practically independent, coining its own money, making its own laws and building castles. The Norman knights were well-armed and well-trained and were considered the best cavalry in Europe.

2. In January, 1066, the English king Edward the Confessor died. He was called The Confessor because he grew up in a monastery in Normandy and cared for a quiet learned life rather than for fighting. His mother Emma was the daughter of Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy, and the wife of the English king Ethelred the Unready. When Edward became King of England in 1042, he brought with him many Norman nobles, and the English people disliked it. Edward found his greatest pleasure in building churches, the most beautiful of them being the Abbey of Westminster. After his death he was buried in a newly-built church. Later, a beautiful tomb was raised over him, which can be seen today in its present place in the Abbey.

The late king inclined much more to foreigners from beyond the sea than to Englishmen. He was said to have promised his second cousin, Wil­liam of Normandy, the English Throne after his (Edward's) death.

Since the late king had no children, the Witenagemot [wit'nxgqmqut] (the King's Council of nobles, officials and ecclesiastics) chose another relative of the deceased king - the Anglo-Saxon Earl Harold, the son of Earl Godwin. He was known to be brave and wise, besides, he hated the Normans.

On hearing that Harold became king after Edward, William of Nor­mandy at once set to get an army and a fleet to invade England and to obtain the Crown to which he believed himself entitled. He invaded England in September, 1066, defeating and killing Harold at a little village in the neigh­bourhood of the town of Hastings on the 14^th of October, 1066.

The victory at Hastings was only the beginning of the Conquest. Soon the Normans encircled London and the Witenagemot had to acknowledge William as the lawful king of England - William I or, as he was generally known, William the Conqueror. He ruled England for 21 years (1066-1087). During the first five years of his reign the Normans had to crush brutally many rebellions in different parts of the country. The subjugation of the country was completed in 1071.

3. The Norman Conquest brought about many important changes in the life of the Anglo-Saxons. The conquerors confiscated many estates and turned into serfs many Anglo-Saxon peasants. To reduce the power of great lords, William I abolished the great earldoms - Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex, and divided the country into numerous shires, or counties, as the Normans called them. William I appointed a royal official in each shire to be his 'sher­iff' ['Serif], responsible for law, tax collecting and order in his county.

William the Conqueror replaced the Witenagemot by a Great Council, made up of bishops and barons. Thus, the Norman nobles and knights be­came the ruling group.

In 1086-1087 a detailed survey of English counties was compiled by order of William. It came to be called by the people of England "The Domesday Book" ['du:mzdeibuk ; 'doumzdeibuk]. It was the first registra­tion in England. Its two volumes recorded the extent, amount, value and ownership of estates. The Anglo-Saxons were afraid of the registration and hated it. They were threatened to be punished on doomsday if they did not tell the whole truth or concealed some property from the king's officials. That is probably the reason for people's calling that registration book "The Domesday Book". It is interesting to know that the original of the Domesday Book is kept now in London in the Public Record Office. Though in the reign of the Conqueror it was looked upon as a tax book, nowadays its actual value is much greater because no other written document has represented such a clear and detailed picture of the period.

As a result of the registration William the Conqueror had the exact data for taxation. He increased the old taxes considerably and imposed a heavy property tax. Moreover, all the king's vassals were registered in the Domes­day Book and William I could now see to it that they all performed their military service. Besides that, both free peasants and serfs were registered in the Book as unfree peasants. Thus, by the 1086 registration the Normans aggravated the feudal exploitation and consolidated their own position.

The Church helped greatly in strengthening the royal power. In return for its support, the Church of England, the greatest feudal lord in the country, was granted certain privileges. Many new churches and cathedrals were built all over the country, including the Monastery in Canterbury.

During the reign of William the Conqueror about 200,000 Frenchmen migrated to England. The Normans ruled with a hard hand, and the defeated Saxons suffered oppression and indignities.

4. For about three centuries after the Conquest, French (a Norman dia­led) was the official and predominant language in the country. It was the language of the King's Court, of the government, of the court of law, and, alongside Latin, the language of the church. Norman French became the lan­guage of power, reinforcing social distance between the elite and the masses. The rich Anglo-Saxons found it convenient and prestigious to learn to speak the language of the rulers. English was spoken by the lower classes - by peasants and townspeople. The Norman Conquest put an end to the dominat­ing position of the West Saxon literary language. In the 12^th and 13^th centuries all English dialects were on an equal footing and independent of each other.

Gradually, there appeared a considerable layer of bilingual population, speaking both languages. The conquerors who settled down on English estates had to communicate with the natives, so they gradually learned to speak English. Many of them married Anglo-Saxon women, so their chil­dren and grandchildren grew up speaking English. While the two languages were spoken side by side, the Anglo-Saxons learned many French words. As a result of the Conquest, the English language changed greatly under the influence of the French language.

Firstly, there were many innovations, i.e. names of new objects and concepts, which enlarged the vocabulary by adding new items. Secondly, there were numerous replacements of native words by French equivalents. Thus, for instance, the loan words very, river, splendid replaced the native OE words swipe, ēa, Ʒeatolīc etc. But the adoption of a word synonymous with a native word did not necessarily led to replacement. Most frequently the co-existence of a borrowing and a native synonym ended in their differ­entiation - either in style, or dialect, or shades of meaning, or combinability. This third kind of influence enriched the English vocabulary even more than the adoption of innovations. The difference between the native and borrowed words often lies in their stylistic connotations: French loan words, particularly borrowed in Late MidE, preserve a more bookish, literary char­acter. Compare such pairs of synonyms as:

French English

commence begin

conceal hide

prevent hinder

search look for

odour smell

desire wish

It is an amazing fact that the English language not only survived but re­established itself as the national official language in the 14^th century.

5. The 14^th century witnessed a major shift in the linguistic balance of power in England. The first signs were attempts to maintain French arti­ficially by prescription and by threat. Such desperate remedies are a sure indication that a language is falling out of use [Hughes, 2000: 137]. A fourteenth-century statute required the students at Oxford to construe and translate in both French and English "lest the French language be entirely disused" [ibid.]. A parliamentary decree of 1332 required the aristocracy "to teach their children the French language that they might be more able and better equipped in their wards" [Baugh, 1965:165-6]. Nevertheless, in 1362 (he Chancellor opened Parliament for the first time with a speech in English, and in the same year the Statute of Pleading required all legal proceedings to be in English, because of the serious abuses and misunderstandings oc­curring as a consequence of incomprehension of the French language in the law courts. In 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke (1367-1413) ascended the throne as Henry IV, he was the first English-speaking king of England since Edward the Confessor. Moreover, during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) the French language was the language of the enemy, so its disuse was greatly accelerated. By the end of the 14^th century the supremacy of French was over, and the rise of London dialect began to become the foundation of the English national language.

However, the re-establishment of English as the official language did not mean that words of French origin were immediately substituted by An­glo-Saxon ones. As G. Hughes pointed out, it would not have been practical or reasonable to resuscitate, for example, the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot in place of parliament, the established term, since it had fallen out of use. In fact, the process accelerated the borrowings from French into those many areas where English had acquired semantic vacuums [Hughes, ibid.].

It should be noted that the language which appeared by the end of the MidE period was English, and while it was an English changed in many im­portant items from the language of King Alfred, its predominant features were those inherited from the Germanic tribes that settled in England in the 5^th century. However, there is a considerable difference between the grammatical systems of OE and MidE. This will be the subject of the following lecture.