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a change from above, that was both consciously implemented and consciously adopted. In this approach, the production and dissemination of official documents plays an important role, as well as that of private documents such as letters. Currently, new insights are being developed into the role played by other text types in the standardisation process, such as medical treatises. As a result, more and more data are becoming available which, we expect, will interestingly complement the picture we will attempt to present in this chapter.
5.2The rise and development of standard English
5.2.1 |
Selection |
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When Henry V (1413–22) was campaigning in France, he wrote his letters home in English. This fact is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that French, which had been the language of the aristocracy in England since the coming of the Normans, had lost its former prestige. This loss of prestige had set in when King John lost Normandy in 1204, and it was further accelerated by the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), when French came to be seen as the language of the enemy country. Consequently, we can identify a rise in English nationalism, and the English aristocracy abandoned French in favour of English. During this period the largest number of French loanwords entered the English language (see the statistics quoted by Baugh & Cable, 2002: 178, note; see also Culpeper & Clapham, 1996). Secondly, while the rise of standard English is associated with the chancery, the country’s independent administrative office (see Section 5.2.2), Chancery English has a precursor in the form of English used by Henry V’s Signet Office, the king’s private secretariat which travelled with him on his foreign campaigns. It is significant that the selection of the variety which was to develop into what is generally referred to as the Chancery Standard originated with the king and his secretariat: the implementation of a standard variety can only be successful when it has institutional support.
Institutional support can take the form of a king imposing on his subjects a particular decision which has linguistic implications, such as the adoption of Christianity in the sixth century, or of an Act of Parliament being passed involving a new language policy, as in the case of the formal adoption of sex-indefinite he in 1850 (Bodine, 1975: 136). We have already encountered an earlier example in the adoption of West Saxon for the Laws of King Ine, though the case of Henry V possibly reflects not so much a decision made by an enlightened monarch and his council as political and practical motives: by writing in English, Henry first and foremost identified himself as an Englishman at war with France, while at the same time seeking to curry favour with the English-speaking merchants, who might be prevailed upon to finance his campaigns.
The variety used by Henry V’s Signet Office, and hence selected in Milroyan terms, was that spoken in the east midland area. Arguments usually given to
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explain this development are that this dialect was spoken by the largest number of people, that the east midland area was agriculturally rich, that it contained the seat of government and administration as well as the two universities Oxford and Cambridge, that it contained good ports and that it was close to the chief archiepiscopal see, Canterbury (see, for example, Lass, 1987: 65–7). In other words, what qualified this dialect as a possible standard was the fact that the area in which it was spoken was connected with all the domains of a High language: government and administration, education and learning, and the church. In addition, it was used and understood by many speakers from a large, affluent area. One of Lass’s criteria for a dialect to develop into a standard language is that it must be a ‘high-prestige dialect in which the nation’s business is conducted’ (1987: 61). As the language of the court, and with parliament and the port of London as the centres of national and international business, the East Midland dialect qualified as no other. As for the use as the language ‘in which serious (or any) literature is normally written’, another of Lass’s criteria, the fact that popular poets such as Chaucer and Gower had written in English – though differing in a number of ways from the dialect which eventually developed into standard English – must have contributed to the rise in status of the vernacular vis-a`-vis that of French and Latin.
The Chancery variety was only one of four incipient standards identified by Samuels (1963), the other three being the Wycliffite variety, Chaucer’s dialect and the Greater London variety as shown in the Auchinleck MS. That none of the others was selected instead of the Chancery variety has indeed partly to do with lack of institutional support. Literary varieties such as the dialect of Chaucer and that of the Auchinleck MS which included, among other texts, a copy of Kyng Alysaunder, must have been seen as rather more ephemeral modes. As for the Wycliffite variety, widespread though it was, it was used as part of what was largely an underground movement and for that very reason never stood a chance of gaining official sanction.
5.2.2 |
Acceptance |
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Early Chancery English, the variety of English used by the chancery, the office responsible for the production of official documents issued by the king and the government, shows much resemblance to London English, particularly as found in the Guildhall Letter Books (Fisher, 1996: 63). The adoption of this variety as its medium in the 1420s may have been influenced by the factors listed above, possibly reinforced by the fact that English had been used by Henry V’s Signet Office, too – even if ‘the English of Henry’s signet letters bears a closer resemblance to the English of the later Chancery documents than the Chancery documents of his time’ (Heikkonen, 1996:115). We see in this the continuation of earlier practice, and therefore the acceptance of practice already current. In adopting this variety, the chancery had to convert a spoken dialect into a written form. For a long time, the history of standard English is, indeed, a history of
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standard written English; the beginnings of the standardisation process of the spoken language can be primarily located in the eighteenth century. In The Emergence of Standard English (1996), Fisher notes that what was developed by the chancery clerks was in effect an artificial system. What these men strove after was uniformity in handwriting as well as in language, and during their apprenticeship chancery scribes were trained to acquire such uniformity. According to Fisher, the chancery was ‘a compact, disciplined, hierarchical body of civil servants’ (1996: 43); it is only in such an environment that an attempt at normalisation – an important element in any standardisation process – would have had any chance of success. Again, we see the significance of institutional support, or in this case imposition from above, as an essential ingredient in the process. Such a development could only have taken place in a hierarchical organisation like the chancery.
There are many aspects of present-day English spelling which we owe to the chancery, such as the spelling <gh> for the velar which was still pronounced at the end of the Middle English period in words like light and knight, and <ig> in the word reign. Similarly, the <d> ending (rather than <t>) in the past tense and past participle forms of weak verbs was regularised by the chancery, and there were a number of preferred spellings, such as I for the first-person singular, and the forms which, should, such, much, but and ask. Even so, Fisher writes, the influence was greater on morphology than on spelling, and he mentions the second-person singular always being ye/you, the third-person plural regularly being they, them and their and the reflexive pronoun ending in self/selves. Other preferred forms are those as the plural of that (instead of tho), the adverb ending in -ly instead of -liche, the absence of present plural -n in verbs, and past participles ending in -n. Participles with the prefix y- as in ydo ‘done’ are not found. As for syntax, Fisher notes that the chancery preferred postverbal negation to preverbal negation, as in they that be noght able instead of they that ne be able (Fisher, 1996: 49–51); see also Section 3.3.6.
5.2.3 |
Diffusion |
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Being ‘the agency that produced most of the official proclamations and parliamentary records’ (Fisher, 1996: 39), the chancery was naturally instrumental in the diffusion of the written code that had been adopted. This worked in two ways. In the first place, the chancery at that time represented the only official body which attempted to produce a relatively uniform writing system. As such it at once filled a gap and set an example to local administrative centres which were brought into contact with chancery documents. The chancery written form consequently came to be widely imitated. Secondly, many of the chancery clerks came from the north, according to Fisher (1996: 51). This may have been part of the general wave of immigration from the north in the fifteenth century, which brought many people to the capital in search of work. The chancery must have been one of the institutions offering good prospects for boys with a certain amount of education who did not wish to pursue a career in the church, the more so in
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the light of the new developments with respect to the adoption of uniform writing systems in administrative centres elsewhere in the country. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suppose that young men were even sent to train with the chancery. The chancery itself, however, had far more apprenticeships than jobs for clerks, so many trained apprentices returned to their homes to find employment there, taking their accomplishments with them. These men would have been immensely respected for their knowledge and skills at writing, which in turn invested the work they produced with a kind of ‘correctness’, a stamp of official approval, in the eyes of the local authorities. Thus, on the one hand it was the chancery itself which was responsible for spreading its writing system, while on the other hand it was also the people that had been trained as clerks, and who had been attracted to the chancery as an institution offering apprenticeships, who helped in the further diffusion of the writing system.
5.2.4 |
Maintenance |
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About fifty years after the chancery adopted the East Midland dialect as its written medium, in the year 1476, the printing press was introduced into England by the merchant William Caxton (c.1421–91). Caxton spent thirty years (or so he claims) on the continent, where he had learnt about movable type. This greatly speeded up the process of book production, both in comparison with manuscript production and with the printing of pages from wooden blocks. Caxton, who had previously been involved in the lucrative trade in luxury goods, which included manuscripts, soon realised the economic prospects of the new invention, and he decided to become a publisher himself. First he learned the trade in Cologne (1471), and then set up a book-selling business in Bruges, where about three years later he published the first book ever printed in English, the History of Troy (1473–4). He moved to England, possibly assisted financially by his patron Earl Rivers, the brother-in-law of the king. Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster, close to parliament, from which he hoped to attract clients with money to spend, and he made the very shrewd decision to publish books in the vernacular only. The remarkable foresight which inspired this decision is shown by the failure of nearly contemporary attempts to set up printing presses in Oxford and St Albans (Blake, 1987). These printers published in Latin, hoping to find a place on the academic market, but Latin books were already easily available through trade with the Continent, and the ventures were soon given up.
That language was an important issue to Caxton appears from a number of comments in his prologues to the books he printed. In the prologue to the Eneydos (1490), for example, he writes as follows:
And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used an spoken whan I was borne, for we Englysshemen ben borne under the domynacyon of the mone whiche is never stedfaste but ever waverynge: wexynge one season, and waneth & dyscreaseth another season. And that comyn Englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from another. In so
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moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in Tamyse for to have sayled over the see into Zelande. And for lacke of wynde thai taryed atte forlond and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam into an hows and axed for mete and specially he axyd after egges. And the goode wife answered that she coude speke no Frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges; and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste another sayd that he wolde have eyren; then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo! what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, ‘egges’ or ‘eyren’? Certaynly it is harde to playse every man bycause of dyversite & chaunge of langage. For in these days every man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre wyll utter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that few men shall understonde theym. (Blake, 1973: 79–80)
However, Caxton’s concerns expressed here are not linguistic, as is often thought, but economic: as a merchant he wanted to sell books which last a long time, linguistically speaking, and which can be read by as large a reading public as possible. In other words, he was seeking a relatively stable language variety that could serve a supraregional function to speakers of different dialects. ‘And thus between playn, rude, & curyous, I stande abasshed,’ he wrote. He solved the problem as follows:
And for as moche as this present booke is not for a rude, uplondyssh man to laboure therin ne rede it, but onely for a clerke & a noble gentylman that feleth and understondeth in faytes of armes, in love & in noble chyvalrye, therfor in a meane betwene bothe I have reduced and translated this sayd booke in to our Englysshe not ouer rode ne curyous, but in suche termes as shall be understanden by Goddys grace accordynge to my copye. (Blake, 1973: 80)
In other words, he translated his book into the variety used by his intended audience, educated people and those belonging to the higher regions of society.
But in his choice of language variety Caxton was not as free as he himself appears to have thought. In view both of his intended audience and of his economic motives – to sell as many copies of the book as possible – it would have been unwise for him to have selected a variety different from that already in use by the chancery. By the time he set up his printing press, the most widely accepted written variety already was the dialect into which he translated his books. This was the variety in use by the literate section of society, which also constituted his own intended audience. What Caxton did, then, was no more than maintain a selection which had already been made in the early decades of the century, but what is interesting about the passages quoted here are the reasons he gave for doing so. These reasons demonstrate that by the end of the fifteenth century economic motivations contributed significantly to earlier linguistic and political ones in the standardisation process of the language.