Others, again, are partisan or patriotic songs. Of these, the tags of abuse of the Scots, found in Pierre de Langtoft's Chronicle, are very feeble. A crow over Sir Simon Fraser is a little better, and reads like third-rate Minot. The Lament on the Death of Edward I., and the rather earlier song of the victory of the Flemings over the French, are probably the only English political poems of literary interest until we come to the reign of Edward III. and the appearance at last of a writer who is patriot and poet as well, Laurence Minot. MINOT was a Northerner, possibly a Yorkshireman, who by about the year 1352 had produced eleven extraordinarily good war-poems, on such subjects as Halidon Hill, Neville's Cross, Crécy, the Siege of Tournay, and the Sea Fight at Sluys. He has a sturdy contempt for England's enemies, and expresses it in good, lilting verse. The average modern Englishman will find him easier to read than Chaucer or Burns; and, violent as he is, he repays reading. SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST Texts. Of the works referred to above, the following are published by the Early English Text Society: *Cursor Mundi, *Handlyng Synne, *Ayenbite of Inwyt, Lives of SS. Katherine, Juliana, and Margaret, Hali Meidenhad, William of Shoreham's *Works. Other full editions are: Layamon's *Brut, ed. Sir F. Madden (3 vols., 1847); *Ormulum, ed. Holt (1878); Robert of Gloucester's *Chronicle, ed. Wright (Rolls Series, 1887); Robert of Brunne's Chronicle, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Rolls Series, 1889); Richard Rolle, ed. Horstmann (Yorkshire Writers, Sonnenschein, 1895-6); *Pricke of Conscience, ed. Morris (Philological Society, Trübner, 1863); *Ancren Riwle, ed. Morton (Camden Society, 1853); *Owl and Nightingale, ed. Wells (Heath, 1909); *Minot, L., Poems, ed. J. Hall (Clarendon Press, 1897). Good collections are: CHAMBERS and SIDGWICK, Early English Lyrics (Bullen, 1911), the best introduction to the subject; MORRIS, An Old English Miscellany (E.E.T.S.), for narrative and didactic verse and religious lyrics; BÖDDEKER, Altenglische Dichtungen der MS. Harl. 2253 (Berlin, 1878), for political songs, secular and religious lyrics, the Debate of the Body and the Soul, and the Harrowing of Hell, the last also in A. W. POLLARD'S English Miracle Plays (Oxford, 1909); WRIGHT, Political Songs (Camden Society, 1839); Pearl, ed. Sir I. Gollancz (Nutt, 1907); Patience and Cleanness, same ed. (Milford, 1913–21). Suitable extracts from the works starred above will be found in MORRIS and SKEAT, Specimens of Early English (Clarendon Press); from Layamon's Brut and Robert of Brunne's Chronicle in ZUPITZA, Alt- und Mittelengl. Uebungsbuch (Vienna, 1902). Readers to whom Middle English is a new subject will be well advised to study SWEET's First Middle English Primer (Clarendon Press). This should be followed by M. H. LIDDELL's Chaucer Prologue, Knightes Tale and Nonnes Prestes Tale (Macmillan), and then by HALL's ed. of Minot. (2,352) 22 CHAPTER 8. THE LANGUAGE-MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (c. 1100-1350) Middle English Dialects-The Texts-Spelling, Scripts, Pronunciation, and general characteristics Old English came to an end with the generation which saw the Conquest, and the 12th century marks a break in the literary and linguistic tradition. Under the predominance of French the literary prestige of West Saxon declined with that of the vernacular in general, and the literature of the 13th century shows no trace of approximation to any standard dialect, while apologies for the use of the vernacular are frequent. In the 14th century English comes to its own, and the London usage becomes the basis of the new standard from 1350. Middle English Dialects.—The chief dialect-groups were as follows: I. Northern (O.E. Northumbrian), differentiated from Lowland Scots after 1350. 2. Midland (O.E. Mercian): (a) East-Midland; (b) West-Midland. 3. Southern: (a) South-Western (O.E. West-Saxon); (b) South-Eastern (O.E. Kentish). The geographical boundaries were approximately the same as before the Conquest, except that the old West-Saxon was receding into the south-west. The dialect of London retained Southern features up to 1250,' but had practically amalgamated with the neighbouring East-Midland by the end of the 14th century. Some of the more important dialectal differences are: Northern hām, stån, äld (hame, stane, auld), Midland and Southern hōm, stōn, õld; Northern and Midland kin, sin, fier, Southern cun, sunne, vuir, Kentish ken, zenne, veer; Northern lang, sang, Midland and Southern long, song; Northern kirk, dic, Southern churche, diche, etc. There are also differences in the forms of the pronoun and the verb, and the South was particularly conservative in the retention of old inflectional forms lost in the Midland and North. Middle English Texts.-Amongst the earliest texts are the 12th-century additions to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle made at Peterborough (1121-54), which represent the last traces of literary West-Saxon, and the Lambeth Collection of Homilies (12th century), some of which also exist in 11th-century West-Saxon. An important early text is the Ormulum (c. 1210) of Orm, a native of Lincolnshire, which is of great phonological value. Orm's Spelling.-Orm regularly indicates the quantity of vowels by doubling the consonant after every short vowel in a closed syllable, e.g. Orrmulumm, Ennglisshe, annd, turrnedd. He also attempted some qualitative distinctions, particularly with regard to the different values of g (Modern English g, y, dg, gh). 1 Cf. the Proclamation of Henry III. (1258), which combines Midland and Southern elements. Middle English texts may be conveniently grouped according to their dialect; but the evidence is often unsatisfactory, except in the case of rhyme or of MSS. known to be from the author's own hand, since texts were frequently subject to scribal alteration or transcription into another dialect. A representative collection of specimens in chronological order may be found in Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English (Oxford, 1894 and 1898). Spelling and Script.-English spelling was partly remodelled on French in the early 13th century, and by 1250 the following changes were regularly in use: qu, wh, for O.E. cw, wh; k, ch, for c, as in keen, child (O.E. cène, cild), but corn (O.E. corn); s(c)h for sc; v (u) for ƒ between vowels; a, e, for æ; i, u for y; ou for u (as in French bout, tu); y as a variant for i. The native script was superseded by the Continental small letters, which was in regular use after 1200, but the native characters þ, d, p, 3 were retained until the 14th century, when they were replaced by th, w, and g (y, gh). þ was still used in MS. abbreviations þe, pt, etc., often written ye, yt, and 3 survives in a few Scottish words (Menzies, Dalziel, gaberlunzie). Pronunciation. In spite of the more modern character of the spelling, the actual pronunciation remained much the same as in Old English, with the exception of certain changes in vowel-quantity-e.g., O.E. năma, beran, nosu, M.E. năme, bēren, nōse. The various qualitative changes which occurred are indicated in the spelling, which thus remained approximately phonetic. Some of the more important of these may be seen in the following words : O.E. stan, þæt, synn, M.E. stōn, that, sin; O.E. dẽap, deop, eall, heorte, M.E. dethe, depe, all, herte; O.E. dæg, dragan, bōh, M.E. dai, drawen, bough, etc. General Characteristics of Middle English.-(a) Inflection. The Old English inflectional system was already full of ambiguities, and these, together with the levelling of endings arising from the general weakening of the unstressed vowels to -e, led to the breaking up of that system in Middle English. The weak declension of nouns and adjectives had already disappeared in Old Northumbrian, and by 1200 few more inflections remained in Northern and North-Midland than at the present day. The Southern dialects retained many old forms, such as the weak plural of nouns, and inflected forms of the adjective and article, as late as the 14th century. In Midland and Northern the newly developed she, sho (O.E. heo = she), and the early use of the Norse demonstratives they, their, them (O.N. peir, peirra, peim) as personal pronouns, avoided the ambiguity of the Southern he (masculine and feminine), he, hi, her, hem (plural), while the dative and accusative were reduced to one form in both nouns and pronouns. Levelling took place also in the verbal inflection, and many strong verbs became weak. (b) Syntax. With the loss of inflections, the syntax became more analytic, and the number of prepositional and other periphrastic constructions increased. The lack of a distinctive inflection led to a confusion of the dative in impersonal constructions with the subject of the verb, cf. Chaucer's "wo was his coke." New constructions such as the historic present, the accusative absolute, and the omission of the relative are also found, possibly in part under French influence, and the use of the plural you in polite address was adopted from the French. SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST EMERSON, O.: Middle English Reader (with grammatical introduction, New York, 1905).—Kaluza, M. : Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (Berlin, 1900).-LUICK, K.: Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (in process of publication).—MORSBACH, L.: Mittelenglische Grammatik (Halle, 1896).— TEN BRINK-KLUGE: Language and Metre of Chaucer (1899), translated by M. Bentinck-Smith (Macmillan, 1901; new ed. by Eckhardt, 1919). See also Reading List at end of Chapter 2 of the Introduction. (A full bibliography is given in Wyld's Short History of English, Murray, 1914.) |