Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English
.pdf128 jeremy j. smith
This adoption of ‘curyous termes’ such as illumynyd—which was, according to the MED, rare before the Wfteenth century—and encleryd in the sense ‘illuminated’ (recorded in OED only in a few sixteenth-century texts) preWgures the ‘inkhornism’ of the Elizabethan period (see further Chapter 8). It stems moreover from the same impulse: a perceived need to augment the vernacular. However, that such a lack was perceived in English would have puzzled earlier generations for whom the solution was easy: use French. But this last option was no longer available, and the marking of social standing required new linguistic strategies. As Burnley put it:
The loss of French had by this time Wnally removed the traditional linguistic distinction between the gentil and the peasant, and no upper-class standard English had yet emerged to Wll its role, so that it is apparent that the linguistic situation itself had contributed to this new solution to the problem of maintaining linguistic diVerentiation between the rulers and the ruled.4
In its way, and as Chapter 3 has already discussed, the loss of French in England was a kind of ‘language death’; and, as is common in such situations, vocabulary from the dying language was transferred to its successor as a means of Xagging social diVerence. It is no coincidence that so many words from French as well as Latin are Wrst recorded in the English language from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards—just as French was ceasing to be used as the heightened register of late medieval English elites. Examples of French loanwords here include desolation, enable, loyalty, perspective, separate, and zone.
Nor is it a coincidence that so much of this French-derived vocabulary retains a distinct stylistic signiWcance even in modern English. The word commence, for instance, is Wrst recorded in English texts in the fourteenth century; its very earliest occurrences are possibly ‘carry-overs’ from the French originals (e.g. in ‘þei it comenci to snewe and frese’ in the Auchinleck text of the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo). But the French derivation of commence means that its present-day semantic connotations are diVerent—heightened—from those of its near-synonym begin which derives from the native Old English beginnan. Such diVerentiation, of course, is to be expected; as the linguist Leonard BloomWeld put it, ‘where a speaker knows two rival forms, they diVer in connotations, since he has heard them from diVerent persons and under diVerent circumstances’.5
4 See Burnley (1983), 178–9. |
5 See L. BloomWeld, Language (London: Unwin, 1933), 394. |
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grammar
As with the lexicon, there is good evidence for grammatical variation in the writings of the Wfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Diatopic variation is well attested throughout the period, and many examples could be adduced.
Perhaps the most salient grammatical distinctions are between Older Scots and contemporary Southern English. The late Wfteenth century saw a major divergence between these varieties, most obviously indicated by the adoption of a new name for the former; originally known as Inglis to Scottish writers, the variety is called Scottis from the late Wfteenth century—a term which had been used up until that date for Gaelic.
As an illustration, we might compare the Southern and Scots paradigms for verbal inXexion. In Southern English during the Wfteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries, the paradigm for the present indicative tense appears thus:
I kepe, thou kepest, he/she/it kepeth, we/ye/they kepe.
In Older Scots, by contrast, there were two paradigms for the present indicative. The system works as follows: if the subject of the clause is a personal pronoun (i.e. ‘I’, ‘thou’, ‘he’, etc.), and comes immediately before or after the verb, the paradigm is as follows:
Singular |
1 |
I keip |
|
2 |
thou keipis |
|
3 |
he/scho/it keipis |
Plural |
|
we/Ze/thai keip |
Otherwise the -is form is used throughout the paradigm for all persons. A good example appears in the Brus, composed by the Aberdonian poet-priest John Barbour (c 1320–1396) in 1375 but surviving only in copies made a century later: ‘Thai sla our folk but enchesoune,/ And haldis this land agayne resoune’ (‘They slay our people without cause,/ And hold this land unreasonably’). Here, since sla follows immediately after the pronoun Thai, it lacks the -is inXexion which appears on haldis.
This system of grammatical concord is known as the Northern Personal Pronoun Rule. As its name suggests, it was also found in Northern Middle English texts, but over time it withdrew towards the increasingly permanent Scottish/English border as prestigious southern forms pushed north in England during the modern period. The system survives sporadically beyond Scotland, most notably in some of the more conservative dialects of the Eastern United States; the nineteenth-century dialectologist Joseph Wright later recorded the
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system as widespread in the north and north midlands of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Northern Isles in his English Dialect Grammar of 1905.
But, as with the lexicon, dialectal distinctions are only part of the picture. Grammatical distinctions also relate to register during the late Middle and early modern periods. There are indications, for instance, that -s type endings for the third person present singular as in he keipis were already available in Southern Middle English in informal situations (see further Chapters 6 and 7). A similar informal/formal distinction is detectable in earlier texts, in the use or omission of adjectival -e in southern texts; Chaucerian verse, as is proven by metrical criteria, distinguished between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ singular adjectives in (e.g.) the man is old (strong) beside the olde man (weak since it follows the deWnite article; see further pp. 18–19). Conversely, it is interesting that in a few Scots texts of the ‘highest’ style the odd quasi-Anglicism is adopted. Thus, in the Eneados of the poet-bishop Gavin Douglas (?1475–1522) we Wnd doith (‘does’) in place of the expected dois in the Xambe doith brist (‘the Xame breaks out’).
Such early accommodations to usages which are prototypical of those found south of the Anglo-Scottish border preWgure a more thorough-going Anglicization in sixteenthand seventeenth-century texts written in Scotland. This ‘Reformation’ Anglicization appears Wrst in religious texts—such as the sermons of John Knox, the Scottish religious reformer whose usage will be furtherdiscussed in Chapter 7—and is probably related to the Protestant adoption of the English bible.6
However, register diVerences are perhaps most clearly demonstrated grammatically in syntactic choices. Since antiquity, rhetorical theory had demanded that ‘high style’ was associated with complex syntax, and there is good evidence for such continuing patterns of usage in Wfteenthand early sixteenth-century English writing. For instance, in 1418 the mayor, sheriVs, alderman, and communality of London wrote formally to King Henry V, assuring him of their loyal appreciation of his reports of his Wghting in France. A copy of the letter survives in the Guildhall Letter Book of the period:
Of alle erthely Princes our most dred soueraign Liege lord and noblest kynge, we recomaunde vs vnto your soueraign highnesse and riall power, in as meke wyse and lowely maner as any symple oYcers and pouuere lieges best may or can ymagine and diuise vnto her most graciouse and most soueraign kyng, Thankyng with all our soules your most soueraign excellence and noble grace of the right gentell, right graciouse, and right confortable lettres, which ye late liked to send vs fro your toun of Pount-de-Larche,
6 This is discussed further in A. Devitt, Standardizing Written English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and in J. J. Smith, ‘Scots’, in G. Price (ed.), Languages in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 159–70.
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which lettres wiþ al lowenesse and reuerence we haue mekly resceyued, and vnderstonde bi which lettres, amonges al other blessed spede and graciouse tithinges in hem conteyned, for which we thanke hyly, and euer shulle, the lord almighty, ware we most
inwardly conforted and reioysed, whan we herde þe soueraign helthe and parWt pros- 10 perite of your most excellent and graciouse persoune, which we beseche god of hys grete grace and noble pite euer to kepe and manteyne.
(riall: royal; her: their; spede: news of success)
This passage (constituting about half the complete letter) consists of a single sentence in which an opening commendation is followed by a lengthy subordinate clause introduced by the single (capitalized) present participle ‘Thankyng’ (line 4). Such a style, celebratory and mannered, derived from the French traditions found in homiletic and epistolary prose. As Burnley has pointed out, in his very telling discussion of this letter, it is a Wne demonstration of the ‘heigh stile’ which Chaucer’s Host describes in the Prologue to The Clerk’s Tale: ‘Heigh stile, as whan that men to kynges write’.
Such ‘high-style’ writing found successors elsewhere in literary use, notably in the so-called ‘trailing style’ which is characteristic of Caxton’s own prose (as opposed to some of his editions of other authors). A well-known example is from the preface to Caxton’s edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s cycle of Arthurian texts (1485):
And I accordyng to my copye haue doon sette it in enprynte to the entente that noble men may see and lerne the noble actes of chyualrye, the jentyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes vsed in tho dayes, by whyche they came to honour, and how they that were vycious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke; humbly bysechyng al noble lordes and ladyes wyth al other estates of what estate or degree they been of that shal see and rede in this 5 sayd book and werke, that they take the good and honest actes in their remembraunce, and to folowe the same; wherin they shalle fynde many joyous and playsaunt hystoryes and noble and renomed actes of humanytye, gentylnesse, and chyualryes.
(renomed: renowned)
Caxton is here restrained in his use of French-derived vocabulary, but his syntactic choice, with its lengthy subordinate clauses, clearly reXects the kinds of structure seen in the Guildhall Letter.
Such grandiloquent ‘high’ prose is not all that survives from the period, and a less convoluted style, which seems to be closer to the usage of contemporary speech, is also recorded. This ‘pleyn’ style, deriving from native models, is demonstrated in the writings of Sir Thomas Malory himself. It may also (to take a less well-known author) be illustrated from the translation of the French writer Froissart’s Chronicle by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners (c 1469–1533). As
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an illustration, here is part of a passage from Berners’s translation describing an incident in the Hundred Years’ War, the death of Sir John Chandos (1369–1370):
And anone it was fayre light day, for in the begynnyng of January the mornynges be soone light. And whan the Frenchmen and Bretons were within a leage of the bridge, they perceyved on the other syde of the bridge Sir Thomas Percy and his company; and he lykewise perceyved the Frenchmen, and rode as fast as he might to get the advantage of
5 the bridge . . .
(leage: league)
Although Berners does use some subordinated clauses, the dominant syntactic mode in this passage is co-ordination, indicated by the presence of the co-ordinating conjunction ‘and’.
Conversely, something more ‘rude’ (i.e. ‘low-style’) can be found in the colloquial Vulgaria or ‘school books’ which were designed as sources for translation from English into Latin. These consisted of collections of everyday sentences and the example below comes from such a collection from Magdalen College School, Oxford, c 1500:
Yesterdaye, I departyde asyde prively oute of the feldys from my felows and went be myselfe into a manys orcherde wher I dyde not only ete rype apples my bely full, but I toke away as many as I coulde bere.
(manys: man’s)
Of course, even such ‘rude’ writings are conventionalized and literary. Probably the nearest approximations to the colloquial registers of the period, other than in the dramatic texts cited in the previous section, are to be found in the great collections of private letters and memoranda in English which begin to appear in the Wfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of these pieces of ‘everyday English’, by far the best known and largest are the archived letters and papers associated with the Paston family (mentioned already in Chapter 4)—an aspirant late-medieval family from Norfolk that rose from humble origins to the nobility. Other collections are also important: the letters of the wealthy Stonor family in Oxfordshire, of the Cely family (a merchant family with business in London, Flanders, and Calais, some of whose letters will be discussed in Chapter 7), and of John Shillingford (Mayor of Exeter 1447–50), or the sixteenthand seven- teenth-century private documents collected by Bridget Cusack (see pp. 137–8 and the Further Reading to this chapter).
A Xavour of this sort of material may be had from some of the letters of John Paston III to his brother John Paston II. In October 1472, John III was living (rather unhappily) with his formidable mother Margaret in Norwich, and the following passage from a frank letter of that date to his brother gives an idea of the kind of
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language used informally by a member of the ‘rising’ classes of the late Wfteenth century. Syr Jamys, about whom John III is complaining, is James Gloys, a family chaplain and retainer already referred to in the previous chapter (see p. 113).
I send yow herwyth the endenture betwyx yow and Townesend. My modyr hathe herd of that mater by the reporte of old Wayte, whyche rennyth on it wyth opyn mowthe in hys werst wyse. My modyr wepyth and takyth on meruaylously, for she seythe she wotyth well it shall neuer be pledgyd ought; wherfor she seythe that she wyll puruey for hyr lond þat ye shall non selle of it, for she thynkys ye wold and [i.e. if] it cam to yowr hand. As for 5 hyr wyll, and all syche maters as wer in hand at your last being here, they thynk that it shall not lye in all oure porys to let it in on poynt.
Syr Jamys is euyr choppyng at me when my modyr is present, wyth syche wordys as he thynkys wrathe me and also cause my modyr to be dyspleaseid wyth me, evyn as who seyth he wold I wyst that he settyth not by the best of vs. And when he hathe most 10 vnsyttyng woordys to me, I smylle a lytyll and tell hym it is good heryng of thes old talys. Syr Jamys is parson of Stokysby by J. Bernays gyft. I trowe he beryth hym the hyeer.
(wotyth: knows; porys: powers; vnsyttyng: inappropriate; smylle: smile)
The simple syntax and uncomplicated vocabulary of the passage, accompanied by what seem (from comparison with modern usage) to be ‘natural’ expressions (e.g. ‘My modyr . . . takyth on . . . , I smylle a lytyll and tell hym it is good heryng of thes old talys’), are good indications of the main characteristics of the ‘playn’ style.
transmission: writing and speech
It should be clear from the preceding sections that the elaboration of English meant that it was possible to use the language for a very wide set of functions, from ceremonious address to colloquial complaint, and that this elaboration manifested itself in distinct lexical and grammatical usages. This elaboration has implications for the transmission of English, and it is to questions of transmis- sion—writing-system and phonology—that we must now turn.
It is usual to describe the Wfteenth century as the period of spelling standardization and, as discussed in the previous chapter, since Michael Samuels’s seminal article of 1963 scholars have generally emphasized the role of ‘Chancery English’ (sometimes renamed ‘Chancery Standard’) in this process. Samuels modelled the expression ‘Chancery English’—his Type IVof ‘incipient standard’—on ‘Chancery
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German’ or Kanzleideutsch which emerged in several German states during the later Middle Ages, for example Das Gemeine Deutsch used in Austria, Bavaria, Swabia, Alsace, parts of the Rhineland, and some parts of what is modern Switzerland. Chancery English was not envisaged by Samuels as located in any particular English oYce of state, and more recent work—notably by Michael Benskin, who is currently working on a complete reassessment of the issue (see pp. 111–12 of this volume)—has, as we have seen, tended to downplay any special and explicit intervention by government in the evolution of standard spelling practices.
What is undeniable is that the Wfteenth century saw a gradual shift from the richly diverse spellings of the Middle English period to a more muted set of variations where more exotic forms of rarer currency were purged in favour of those more commonly used. The outcome was that late Wfteenth-century spelling in England tends to be more various in character than present-day English usage, but nevertheless lacks precise dialectal ‘colouring’. For example: there are one hundred and forty-three distinct spellings for the item such recorded in the authoritative Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME), ranging from schch recorded in Norfolk through such forms as swich, seche, and soche to Kentish zuyche and Northern swilk, slik. But during the course of the Wfteenth century, such exotics tend to be replaced by more commonly occurring forms such as such(e) and sich(e).
This purging of what have been termed ‘grosser provincialisms’ seems to derive from communicative pressures relating to the elaboration of English. During the earlier Middle English period, as Chapter 4 has already discussed, written English had a local function—when writing had a national function, Latin and French were used, as (for instance) in the copying of Magna Carta— and therefore it made sense to develop a spelling-system which mapped fairly closely in phonic terms to the varying phonologies of individual localities. An eZorescence of distinct spelling-systems resulted. But as English began, through elaboration, to take on national functions, such variation impeded communication. As a result, a kind of ‘lowest common denominator’ of usage emerged: colourless written English. Colourless usage emerged at diVerent speeds in diVerent parts of the country; it appeared Wrst in the southern half of the country, later in the north, and it seems to have competed and interacted variously with well-established local usages in (e.g.) the South-West Midlands and East Anglia. These local variations fairly clearly relate to the state of vernacular literacy in these areas.
However, standardization in this context was not a straightforward matter— indeed, as Samuels stressed in 1981, interpreting the process ‘bristles with
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problems’7—and the problematic character of the process is well illustrated by the evidence of the Paston letters. Two short quotations might be used to demonstrate the issue. In 1479, John Paston II and his brother Walter both wrote to their mother Margaret. Here is a passage from John’s letter:
But on Tywesdaye I was wyth þe Bysshop of Hely [i.e. Ely], whyche shewyth hymselVe goode and worshypfull, and he seyde þat he sholde sende to myn oncle William þat he sholde nott procede in no suche mater till þat he speke wyth hym; and mooreouyre þat he scholde cawse hym to be heer hastelye.
And here is a passage from Walter’s:
I marvel soore that yow sent me noo word of the letter wych I sent to yow by Master Wylliam Brown at Ester. I sent yow word that tym that I xold send yow myn exspenses partyculerely, but as at thys tym the berare hereof had a letter sodenly that he xold com hom, and therefore I kowd have noo leysure to send them yow on that wys; and therefore
I xall wryt to yow in thys letter the hool som of my exspenses sythyns I was wyth yow tyll 5 Ester last paste, and also the resytys, rekenyng the xx s. that I had of yow to Oxon. Wardys, wyth the Buschopys fyndyng.
(xold: should; berare: bearer; xall: shall)
What is interesting about these two passages is that these two men, from the same family (and social group) and writing to the same person, have distinct spelling systems. John’s usage is more dialectally ‘colourless’ than Walter’s; his forms include whyche and sholde/scholde, both of which have a fairly widespread distribution dialectally. But Walter’s wych in the passage has been commented on, as has his use of x- in xold, xall (‘should’, ‘shall’); the latter in particular is a distinctively East Anglian usage. The reason for the diVerence between the brothers seems to be that John was a much-travelled man, part of the entourage of Edward IV, whereas Walter, a decade younger than his sibling, died soon after this letter was written; he was a student at Oxford, but otherwise seems to have lived at home and thus has closer social ties to the Norfolk region. John, more exposed to written English of diVerent kinds, adopts forms of wider currency. Nevertheless, both sons expect to be understood by the person who is to read their letters.
Alongside colourless English, there is evidence for other kinds of usage restricted to particular genres or even particular authors; and in the early modern English period there is evidence that spelling took on an ideological signiWcance. Samuels’s Type I (‘Central Midlands Standard’) seems, as mentioned
7 See M. L. Samuels, ‘Spelling and Dialect in the Late and Post-Middle English Periods’, in M. Benskin and M. L. Samuels (eds), So meny people, longages and tonges: philological essays in Scots and mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh (Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project, 1981), 43–54.
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in Chapter 4, to have emerged in the mid-fourteenth century as a means of transmitting university learning (particularly theological) to a wider audience who could read the vernacular. At the other end of the period under review, during the sixteenth century in Scotland, it became usual for Catholics to use Older Scots but for Protestants, modelling their usage on the English vernacular bible, to adopt Anglicized forms. It is no coincidence that one of the earliest English spelling reformers, Sir John Cheke, devised a special usage—with (e.g.) long vowels Xagged by the doubling of letters, as in eest (‘East’), fruut (‘fruit’)—for the translation of the Bible that he undertook at the request of the reformer Archbishop Cranmer. Moreover, special spelling systems seem to have been adopted for the copying of particular writers: it seems to have been usual to transcribe the Confessio Amantis of John Gower and the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ of Nicholas Love, both texts which survive in many copies, using spelling systems peculiar to both textual traditions. Thus a ‘typical’ Gower will contain slightly odd spellings such as o(u)ghne for the adjective ‘own’, -ende inXexions for the present participle, for example walkende rather than walking, and syncopated forms of the third person present singular verb, for example brekth (‘breaks’) rather than breketh, and these spelling systems continued to be used when these works came to be printed.
These last examples indicate that there was a perceived developing need to adopt a particular spelling system, but as yet no particular model had been selected for adoption. Indeed, authoritative norms for spelling in English only appear in the practices of printers in the sixteenth century, alongside the writings of the orthoepists and spelling reformers such as Hart and Cheke. Even then spelling variation in private writings lasted for many years subsequently (see further Chapters 9 and 10). The evolution of standardized spelling, therefore, relates closely to—and depends upon—the elaboration of English during the Wfteenth century, and the evidence suggests that standardization was not a straightforward process.
When we turn to the evolution of prestigious and/or standardized accents, the evidence becomes much more indirect and hard to interpret, but it is possible to make some broad observations.
The evidence for accents during the Middle English period derives from a mixture of things such as the analysis of rhyming and alliterating verse and including—for stress patterns—the study of metre, or by means of comparative and internal reconstruction. Particularly important is the study of the relationship between written symbol and what may be presumed to be the corresponding sound; although LALME, the great resource for the study of Middle English
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dialects, claims only to map the writing systems of the medieval period, it is nevertheless possible, provided that important qualiWcations are understood, to draw certain conclusions about the sound system relating to the writing systems which LALME records, since the relationship between written symbol and corresponding sound seems to have been closer during the Middle English period than ever since.
No detailed (as opposed to general) discussion of accents by a contemporary writer survives; until the spelling reformers and phoneticians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is no English equivalent to the twelfth-century First Grammatical Treatise which provides us with a sophisticated phonological analysis of the medieval vernacular of Old Icelandic. However, as Chapter 4 has already revealed, interpretation of this kind of spelling evidence does enable a good deal of the phonological map of the Middle English period to be reconstructed.
It is usual for scholars to argue that, as symbol and sound began to diverge under the impact of standardization during the course of the Wfteenth and sixteenth centuries—‘silent k ’, for instance, seems to have appeared in English in knife, knight during the course of the early seventeenth century—the evidence for speech becomes harder to interpret, or is indeed uninformative (a problem which is addressed in Chapter 6). Nevertheless, this argument has perhaps been overstated, for there are many writings from the Wfteenth and sixteenth centuries which, taken alongside the discussion of contemporary writers on language, enable something of the accentual map of the period to be reconstructed.
Some of the most interesting material relevant for this purpose has been collected by Bridget Cusack. The following passage is taken from a letter written by Alice RadcliVe, probably a resident of Winmarleigh in Lancashire. The letter is dated by Cusack to 1524.
Ryght Wryscheppefull Syr in my moste hwmly Wyse I recommande me vnto you Dyssyrynge to here of youre well fare the Wyche I pray iesu in cresse to is plusure & to youre moste herttys Dyssyre Syr has tochynge youre laste letter qwere in I persawe Ze Dyssyryt me to be gud moder to my swnne & yourys yt there be no predysciall nar hwrtte vnto my swnnys Anarretans Syr has ferre has lys in my pore power I wyll be lotthe to Se yt 5 swlde hwr it And yV yer be ony mon A bowth to do hym Any Wronge youre masterscheppe sall hawe knawlyge trystynge yt Ze Wylle se remedy for hym for he nor I has no noder socare both you
(hwmly: humble; in cresse: increase; is plusure: his pleasure; has: as (also in l. 6); in: wherein; persawe: perceive; swnne: son; predysciall: prejudicial; hwrtte: hurt; Anarretans: inheritance; swlde hwr: should hurt; A bowth: about; sall hawe: shall have; no noder socare both: no other succour but)