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monarchy and Roman papacy, would be reflected in debates about language use. Although Latin would maintain its classical prestige for many Renaissance scholars, it would also come to be derided by some as a ‘popish’ tongue that had little or no place as the language of the new English nation and English Church. Overall, this Early Modern period would be characterized by the operation of ‘forces of centripetalization’ in state, religion and print which when combined, not only ‘tied the [English] language firmly to the nation’, but was also ‘victorious in establishing recognisable forms of the English language as central and stable’ (Crowley, 1996: 55). By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the ideology of a ‘monolithic’ English language would begin to take hold (leading to the standardization efforts of that century and beyond) – not just within England but also within the nascent British Empire.
Although the Early Modern period spans only about two centuries, it would be impossible to do justice to all its events and developments. We will therefore focus on those landmark events which would be of consequence for English in Section 5.2.
5.2 Social History
As Crowley (1996) implies, political, religious and technological developments were not only centripetal in nature, but central to the shape of the EMod period and, most importantly for us, to the use of English. The discussion in this section is therefore shaped around consideration of such developments and of their linguistic impact.
One of the social changes most focused on in this period is the decline in the power of the Catholic Church in England and the related emergence of an English Bible. Since Pope Gregory’s sixth-century missionaries had set foot on AngloSaxon soil, the Church had gone from strength to strength. It had become the spiritual heart of English life, much as the actual bricks and mortar of its churches had become centres of daily activity. Schama (2000: 280–2), for example, quoting a sixteenth-century account of the Holy Trinity church at Long Melford, Suffolk, writes that it was the core of a ‘wrap-around world which spilled over from the church porch into the streets’; a world in which there was ‘no hard-and-fast border between the secular and the spiritual’. The institution of the Church had come to serve as ‘school and theatre, moral tutor and local government’ and even as the repository of ‘magic and medicine’.
Pivotal in this world was the priest; the sanctioned and only intercessor between the people and their God. This authority, however, had begun to be undermined in the fourteenth century, partly through the devastation caused by bubonic plague (see Chapter 4). The decimation of the priesthood through the Black Death (since many of the clergy came into contact with the sick and dying) had led in 1349 to a decision that the last rites could be received from the laity if no priest was available. Initially envisaged as a temporary measure, this ‘DIY’ approach in fact facilitated the influence of radical thinkers such as John Wycliffe, who held that the priest was dispensable in matters of salvation and that each true Christian, with the guidance of the scriptures, could therefore be
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responsible for their individual spiritual well-being. This principle would later become primary in the teachings of Martin Luther (1482–1546), whose followers would find the role of the priesthood in determining salvation an offensive, even blasphemous symbol of ecclesiastical power (Schama, 2000: 282).
The ‘new Christians’, or evangelicals, as they called themselves, held instead that all that was needed for salvation was faith and easy access to the Word, and with this in mind, sought to ‘replace the monopoly of wisdom claimed by the Church of Rome with the gospel truth available in their own [English] tongue’, as opposed to Latin (ibid.: 282). Their effect was far-reaching: from the early 1500s, it was possible to hear ‘heresies’ in the mouths of the English as they rejected some of the long-established customs of the Church. Schama (2000) and Smith (1984), cite as an example the case of the London tailor Richard Hume, who refused to pay the mortuary due to the Church when his infant child was buried in 1514. Hume was taken to task by the Church court but overthrew their expectations of meek submission by deciding instead to launch a countersuit in the King’s court. He was arrested by the Bishop of London, who also ordered that his house be searched for heretical literature. Hume was found hanged in his cell two days after his imprisonment – according to the coroner, the victim of a murder. Hume was publicly branded a heretic by the Church but the case continued to provoke a great deal of criticism and debate in Parliament. For the first time, the power of the Church began to be thought of ‘as infringing the equity of the common law’ (Schama, 2000: 284).
This episode, and in particular, the search for heretical literature, neatly illustrates the Church’s anxieties about losing control over a once-dependent flock. Of what use was an ecclesiastical guide if people could read their own signposts to salvation? The limited literacy and limited (hand-written) textual production of earlier centuries had meant that this had never been a significant worry, but the late fifteenth–sixteenth century had seen a steady increase in the reading population, as well as the introduction of a new machine that made multiple text production relatively quick and cheap: the printing press, brought to London in 1476 by William Caxton. It took no great leap of imagination for Church officials and the new evangelicals to see, with respective horror and hope, the potential of the press in producing and disseminating English translations of the Bible.
One of the best-known advocates of an English Bible, William Tyndale, who felt that the scriptures should be ‘plainly laid before [the people’s] eyes in their mother tongue’, had a great deal of faith in the potential of print. He requested funds from the Bishop of London for the printing of his translation which were, unsurprisingly, refused. Tyndale eventually managed to have copies of his translation of the New Testament printed in Germany (3,000 were produced in 1526), and smuggled into England in casks of wax or grain (Schama, 2000: 285).
The Church’s reactions to such perceived ‘rebellions’ were nothing short of horrific. Men such as Cardinal Wolsey and later, Thomas More and John Fisher, sought to quell ‘the noise of the new Bible’ with royal backing (ibid.: 285). In 1521, Henry VIII, Defender of the (Catholic) Faith and husband of the Catholic
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Catherine of Aragon, had sanctioned a treatise which labelled Lutheranism ‘an abominable heresy’. With his king’s endorsement, Wolsey attempted to purge England, often consigning heretics and their books to the flames. Tyndale himself was burnt at the stake in 1536.
Interestingly, the ‘concatenation of state, religion and print’ (cf. Crowley, 1996: 55) that would favour English began its consolidation at almost the same time. In 1532, Henry VIII severed his loyalties to the papal authority in Rome (partly because of his dissatisfaction with the pope’s refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon) through his (orchestrated) recognition as the supreme head of the church in England. As befitting the head of the English Church and English State, Henry sanctioned a translation of the Bible into English – a decision wholly endorsed, and indeed perhaps even encouraged, by his new Archbishop Cranmer. It was no doubt obvious that an authorized translation would work effectively on a number of levels: it would satisfy the evangelical precept of making the word of God directly available to the people (a perspective that Cranmer subscribed to); it would clearly symbolize the independence of the English Church (governed by an English king for English people) from that run by Rome; and it would re-establish some control over the Word once on the street. In 1539, the Great Bible was published, with the illustration on its frontispiece clearly encapsulating the idealized marriage of Church and State. Henry sits in the top centre of the page, receiving the Word directly from God. He passes this on (in the form of the Bible) to Cranmer, who as Archbishop, oversees the spiritual welfare of the realm, and also to Cromwell, who looks after secular matters. Each in turn ministers it to smiling and grateful clergy and laity.
Henry had little more to do with the Great Bible, apart from in 1546 when he forbade women and members of the lower classes from reading it themselves, since they were prone to misinterpret it and be led astray. He died in 1547 and was succeeded for a short time by his son Edward (by Jane Seymour), who lived only until 1553. Even in his short reign, however, Edward’s strong Protestant leanings made themselves felt. With Cranmer and Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector, he began a reformation of the English Church which stripped it of many of the Catholic traditions which had survived under his father and sanctioned the publication of the Book of Common Prayer and of biblical translations in English. Such ‘centripetalizing’ developments in Church, State and print were curtailed with the ascension of Henry and Catherine of Aragon’s Catholic daughter Mary (1553–1558) to the throne but gathered momentum again under Elizabeth I (1558–1603), later becoming explicitly realized with the publication of the Authorized Version, or King James Bible, in 1611 (see Crowley, 1996: 55).
The authorized translations, plus their dissemination through the printing press, undoubtedly gave written English a dimension of status and acceptability that had previously been reserved for languages such as Latin. But the printed Bible was as much a reason for the ‘success’ of English in the written medium as a symptom of it: as stated earlier, from the sixteenth century onwards, there was simply a significant sector of the population which was literate, and which desired reading material in the language. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a
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significant expansion of educational facilities, a process initially begun in the fifteenth century, at the level of both the school and institutions of higher education. In terms of the former, there were increases in the number of ‘petty’ schools (which taught basic literacy), apprenticeship facilities (which also included mathematical and accountancy training) and grammar schools (which continued to be dominated by a classical, Latin-based curriculum). At the level of higher education, new colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge, and enrolment at these two institutions, as well as at the Inns of Court, increased substantially in the 1500–1600s (Smith, 1984: 195). This scholastic growth was greatly encouraged by the effects of the Reformation as well as by the influence of certain Renaissance scholars. For example, in pre-Reformation society, many high offices of state had been held by members of the clergy. This hold, however, had come to be broken with the establishment of the nation-state, leading to the need for an educated workforce of lay administrators in all ranks of state service (ibid.). Influential humanists and educators such as Colet and Mulcaster also advocated that education was integral not only to shaping a population that would be an asset to the nation but also to the intellectual, and hence social, development of the individual. Education, therefore, came to be seen as a stepping stone to social and material advantage, particularly among the growing, relatively moneyed classes:
There was a redistribution of national wealth in early modern England with a growing gap between the upper and middling ranks of society on the one hand and the impoverished masses on the other, and this meant that not merely the gentry but many of the ‘middling’ groups – yeomen and moderately prosperous townsmen – had the means as well as the desire to invest in their children’s education.
(ibid.: 197)
Smith (ibid: 185) states that one of the most significant consequences of the growth of educational facilities was the increase in literacy of many of the ‘middling sort’. While the grammar schools continued to provide a more traditional, classical education, it would seem that the middling groups received an education in which there was significant focus on literacy in English. Indeed, Görlach (1991: 6) states that this became ‘a very important precondition for social upward mobility’. Such education strategies not only necessitated the production of texts and teaching materials in the native language of the pupils, but also produced a market of readers enthusiastic about and interested in areas such as the sciences, literature, rhetoric and language itself. Thus, increase in readership (literacy levels in the EModE period peaked around 1600 for both the upper and lower classes (ibid.: 7)) was accompanied by increases in the authorship of translations and of original works in English. Other socio-cultural developments also played a part in the emergence of the latter: the successful establishment of numerous theatres during the sixteenth century inevitably led to the penning of new material; and the competition for (and shortage of) positions in church and government offices for the growing numbers of university graduates resulted in many trying to earn a living through writing (ibid.: 6).
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The expansion of the reading and writing markets was doubtless concomitant with the continuing improvements made to the printing process. Textual production was consistently made quicker, easier and cheaper, inevitably increasing the number of texts and copies in circulation. Between 1476 and 1640, for example, 25,000 English books appear to have been printed; ‘more than all the titles produced in the preceding periods of the English language put together’ (ibid.: 6). A significant proportion of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dealt with topics in the natural sciences which, as has happened in subsequent centuries, had captured the public fancy; and many others were aimed at the ‘practical men’ of the time with little or no Latin: ‘there were plenty of Elizabethan treatises on practical subjects like navigational instruments, geometry and warfare, which were written in English for the plain man, and sometimes by him’ (Barber, 1993: 177).
In addition, from the seventeenth century onwards, a fair number of texts which provided guidelines for English usage, such as dictionaries, grammars and spelling guides, were also produced. Their general success with the reading populace is a sure indication not only of an increasing confidence in the use of the language in written media but also of an increasing awareness and acceptance of a particular form of written English. In other words, such guides imply, as do dictionaries, grammar drills and spelling bees today, that ‘correct’ forms and usages in the language exist; and in the EModE period, that ideal of ‘correctness’ became quickly associated with the increasingly standardized English of the printed word.
But what did this standardization actually entail? Milroy and Milroy (1999: 19) maintain that standardization is in itself an ongoing ‘historical process’ motivated ‘by various social, political and commercial needs’ which typically significantly affects written forms, and which also proceeds on both concrete and ideological levels. This does indeed seem to be true of English from the late ME period onwards: its increasing use in various domains as a result of the decline of French in the fourteenth century (see Chapter 4), the later questioning of Latin during the EModE period, plus growing literacy and textual production in English, led to a perception that the language had to be, at least in the written medium, made as adequate as possible for its tasks. This meant the attainment not only, at a practical level, of functional efficiency (it was materially better for authors and publishers if the readership could ‘use and understand the language in the same way with the minimum of misunderstanding and the maximum of efficiency’ (ibid.: 19)) but also, ideologically, of aesthetic proficiency. The two were not easily separated for EModE scholars comparing the relatively ‘untried and untested’ written English against centuries of Latin and Greek scholarship:
Latin, the international language of education, rediscovered in its classical form, was well ordered, prestigious and dominant in many fields of written communication; by contrast, the vernacular was deficient in vocabulary and syntax, imperfect by standards of rhetorical beauty and copiousness, lacking obligatory rules of spelling, pronunciation, morphology and syntax, unsupported by any respectable ancient literary tradition and, finally, subject to continuous change. Indeed, scholars often enough claimed that it was deficient in principle and incapable of attaining the grammatical orderliness and copiousness of Latin.
(Görlach, 1991: 36)
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In other words, it was felt that norms of usage, which would not only ‘stabilize’ written English but also maximize its expressive potential, were imperative. As we will see in this chapter, EModE scholars concentrated on the establishment of such norms in orthographic practice and vocabulary usage. Norms, however, inevitably entail a notion of correctness. It is therefore not surprising that the normalization or standardization of written English gave rise to the perception of ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ forms of the language.
Given that we have consistently noted that English has never been a monolithic entity, we could justifiably ask at this point which variety or dialect of the language standardization efforts were centred on. We could also ask if such selection of form (cf. Haugen, 1972) was a conscious and deliberate decision by the intellectuals who came to be associated with standardization efforts. It actually seems that this selection occurred, in the late ME period, at a much less cerebral and more practical level: it was largely decided by printers. As indicated earlier, the concomitant increase in literacy and text availability in English necessitated the use of a fixed form for ease of printing. Caxton himself noted that, from the printer’s perspective, the variability in English was problematic, stating that ‘that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother . . . certaynly it is harde to playse euery man by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage’ (Prologue to Enydos, 1490).
His pragmatic solution was to choose a London variety of the South-East Midlands area which ‘had already achieved some prominence’ politically, commercially and academically (Milroy and Milroy, 1999: 27). In particular, the variety Caxton settled on had been used in the Chancery documents of London scriptoria since about 1430, and had already undergone some standardization in terms of spelling. As we will see in Section 5.4.1, this would serve as the basis of printers’ decisions about typesetting and would ultimately influence the codification or fixing of standard spelling – incidentally, the only area in which complete standardization has been achieved.
As mentioned above, the other aspect of written usage which received a great deal of attention in the EModE period concerned vocabulary and its ‘eloquent’ use. It seemed clear to scholars wishing to use English instead of Latin in various domains that this increasing elaboration of function necessitated an elaboration of vocabulary resources as well. The long centuries of Latin use in specialized fields had left it lexically and stylistically well equipped; English, on the other hand, natively lacked much of the necessary terminology and rhetorical devices. Scholars therefore set out to, in the common parlance, ‘enrich’ the standard’s lexicon and increase its capacity for eloquence, with the result that the ‘EModE period (especially 1530–1660) exhibits the fastest growth of the vocabulary in the history of the English language’ (Görlach, 1991: 135) – largely, as we shall see in Section 5.4.5, through the adoption and adaptation of loanwords, particularly from Latin.
The end of the EModE period would see the growth of an explicitly prescriptive tradition in standardization efforts: a development that is often cited as characteristic of the eighteenth century. The 1700s would see a preoccupation among language scholars with certain aspects of ‘correct’ usage, and a real desire
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to inhibit variation and change, which was often viewed as ‘corruption’ or signs of a language’s instability. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the eighteenth-century prescriptivists would succeed in the further codification of certain orthographic, lexical and syntactical norms for written usage, some of which are still in use today. In addition, and very importantly, the eager reception of these codifications both reinforced and reflected a ‘much more widespread consciousness of a relatively uniform “correct” English than had been possible before’ (Milroy and Milroy, 1999: 29). Indeed, as these authors state, the eighteenth century successfully established ‘the ideology of standardisation, to which virtually every speaker now subscribes in principle’ (ibid.). We return to standardization in Chapter 6.
It might seem at this point that during the EModE period, English rather effortlessly and seamlessly slipped into roles previously played by Latin. It was not, however, as ‘bloodless’ a usurpation as it might appear. The long and venerable tradition of writing in Latin gave it a level of prestige that was difficult for English to challenge, even with the status and sanction that the latter had gained through use in biblical translation and general print. Although the use of the vernacular tongues in learning and writing was advocated by Reformers and Renaissance scholars alike, their actual use inevitably held these languages up to critical scrutiny. And as in the case of English, they were often found to be lacking, particularly when compared to the poetic and prosodic achievements of the classical Latin and Greek writers, revered in this age of rediscovery. Douglas (1515), for example, expressed a common view in his preface to Virgil’s Æneid when he wrote that ‘Besyde Latyn our langage is imperfite’ (in Görlach, 1991: 263). But the Zeitgeist increasingly favoured English. There was an increasing confidence in England as a nation to be reckoned with, and the sense that English should serve (in a distant echo of Alfred the Great’s hopes for Anglo-Saxon England) as its nation language1 – an ambition that would be more explicitly expressed in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 6). The humanist ideal of linguistic democracy in terms of access to knowledge was also successfully propagated by influential scholars such as Thomas Elyot, Richard Mulcaster, Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham. Many humanists also believed that the native tongue should be the primary medium of education. Elyot (1531), for example, thought it important that a ‘noble mannes sonne’ should, from infancy, have someone to teach him Latin, but should also have ‘nourises & other women’ as well, who would speak only English to him. (Elyot did specify, however, that it should only be English which was ‘cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced’.) Palsgrave (1540) also complained that many teachers could ‘wryte an Epistle ryght latyne lyke’ but could not ‘expresse theyr conceyte in theyr vulgar tongue, ne be not suffycyente, perfectly to open the diuersities of phrases betwene our tonge and the latyn’ (cited in Görlach, 1991: 37).
Overall, the influence of such respected scholars, the increase in national pride and the growing confidence of the middle classes in their status as a socially important body who provided a flourishing consumer market for literature in their native tongue, all led to a progressive acceptance of English as a language for all and every purpose. Indeed, the tenor of debates on the comparative worth of English changed throughout the period from ‘apologetic self-consciousness to