East-Midland and West-Midland

The East-Midland and West-Midland dialects of Middle English are intermediate between the Northern and Southern/Kentish extremes. In the West Midlands there is a gradation of dialect peculiarities from Northern to Southern as one moves from Lancashire to Cheshire and then down the Severn valley. This dialect has left modern descendants in the working- class country dialects of the area. The East-Midland dialect is much more interesting. The northern parts of its dialect area were also an area of heavy Scandinavian settlement, so that northern East-Midland Middle English shows the same kinds of rapid development as its Northern neighbor. But the subdialect boundaries within East-Midland were far from static: the more northerly variety spread steadily southward, extending the influence of Scandinavianized English long after the Scandinavian population had been totally assimilated. In the 13th century this part of England, especially Norfolk and Suffolk, began to outstrip the rest of the country in prosperity and population because of the excellence of its agriculture, and — crucially — increasing numbers of well-to-do speakers of East-Midland began to move to London, bringing their dialect with them. By the second half of the 14th century the dialect of London and the area immediately to the northeast, which had once been Kentish, was thoroughly East-Midland, and a rather Scandinavianized East Midland at that. Since the London dialect steadily gained in prestige from that time on and began to develop into a literary standard, the northern, Scandinavianized variety of East-Midland became the basis of standard Modern English. For that reason, East-Midland is by far the most important dialect of Middle English for the subsequent development of the language.

The Middle English period can be taken to begin with the Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent conquest of the whole of England. Norman French replaced English as the language of the aristocracy and the church. By the late 11th century the English higher clergy and nobility had been replaced by French. In the Domesday Book (1086), a detailed record of land property in England, proposed by William and carried out in his name, there are virtually no English landlords mentioned — the higher echelons of English society had been rid of the English.

A consequence of this is that writing in English only very slowly regains its position in society. There are some remnants of Old English, such as the Peterborough Chronicle, with its final entry in 1154, but these represent the dying throes of a written tradition now virtually extinct. After this Latin and French are the languages of literacy. It is not until the late 12th century that works in English slowly begin to appear again — in a very different guise from the last works in Old English. This time dialectal diversity, and not the koiné of a central region, characterises the scene. For this reason it is appropriate to deal with the literary monuments of Middle English according to geographical provenance.

East Midland

This is the area which includes London, the new capital of England after the Norman invasion. It is the region from which the later standard of Britain emerged. Its chief author is of course Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century whose main work is The Canterbury Tales and who also wrote a significant amount of poetry. The remaining literary documents from the East Midland area, in roughly chronological order, are the following.

Chaucer’s version of the tragic story of two lovers at the time of the siege of Troy.

The Orrmulum, a verse work of some 10,000 double lines, written ca. 1200, consists of a recounting of the story of the gospels and homilies. Its author is Orrm, a monk who termed his work ‘a little book of Orrm’. This is of linguistic significance because Orrm consistently used double consonants after short vowels.

Havelok the Dane is a legend in verse, written sometime before 1300 in Lincolnshire.

King Horn is a poetical romance about largely Celtic themes and was written ca. 1260 in Surrey.

Handlyne Synne is a translation of a handbook for the lay community in the form of a series of tales. It is about 12,000 lines long and was written ca. 1300 by Robert Mannyng.

The Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390) is a long work of some 34,000 rhyming couplets by John Gower (1330-1408), the next major 14th century poet of London after Chaucer.

West Midland

In the second half of the 14th century there was a revival of interest in alliterative poetry (common in the Old English period). The language of this region can be further subdivided into a southern type — exemplified by Langland — and a northern type — seen in the author of Sir Gawain.

Piers Plowman (1362-3) is by William Langland who died ca. 1399 and about whose life little is known. This work is several thousand lines long and available in three versions, A, B and C.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an allegorical poem composed in the late 14th century possibly by the same author as wrote The Pearl another poem from the northwest midlands.

The Brut by one Layamon is a history of Britain (which starts with Troy) comprising about 16,000 lines of alliterative verse.

The Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous prose work from about 1200, which is a practical guide for nuns.

Southern

This area is roughly co-terminous with the West-Saxon region of Old English and is attested quite early in the Middle English period through a number of literary works, some only of linguistic value.

Poema morale is an anonymous work of some few hundred lines in rhyming couplets from about 1150.

The owl and the nightingale is an anonymous religious instructional poem, again in rhyming couplets, from about 1200.

The Chronicle by Robert of Gloucester is a history of England of some 12,000 rhyming couplets from about 1300 and contains an account of the Norman invasion.

The Polychronicon by Higden, a history of the world, was translated from the Latin original by John of Trevisa (ca. 1350 - 1402).

Kentish

The south-east corner of England was originally settled by Jutes and features of their language are probably responsible for the distinct dialect of Old English in this region and which continued into Middle English. The main documents for this period are 1) the Kentish Sermons from around 1250 which are translations of a French version of the Latin homilies and 2) The Ayenbite of Inwyt ‘The remorse of conscience’, again a translation and rendering from the French by an Augustinian Monk in the 14th century called Dan Michael of Northgate.

Northern

The dialect of this region was the most progressive in Old English and the first to absorb material — lexical and morphological — from the language of the Vikings. It is well attested in a large history of the western world in some 30,000 lines of verse, the Cursor Mundi. The author is unknown but was probably a monk from Durham.

Scotland

English was brought to Scotland in the Old English period and co-existed with Irish — brought from Ulster in the Old Irish period — chiefly in the southern lowlands. Since then there is a continuous tradition of writing in English. The major poet of the Middle English period in Scotland is John Barbour (?1320-?1396) from Aberdeen.

Documents from the 15th century are quite abundant; one type should be mentioned for its linguistic value here. Personal letters are available from this period which give some clues to colloquial English of the time. For instance, there is a collection of over 1,000 letters from one family, the Pastons who lived in Norfolk and corresponded frequently with each other.

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Middle English has a distinction between close-mid and open-mid long vowels, but no corresponding distinction in short vowels. Although the behavior of open syllable lengthening seems to indicate that the short vowels were open-mid in quality, according to Lass they were close-mid. (There is some direct documentary evidence of this, for example in early texts where open-mid /ɛː/ is spelled ⟨ea⟩ while both /e/ and /eː/ are spelled ⟨eo⟩.) At some point later in the history of English, these short vowels were in fact lowered to become open-mid vowels, as shown by their values in Modern English.

The front rounded vowels /y yː ø øː œː/ existed in the southwest dialects of Middle English, which developed from the standard Late West Saxon dialect of Old English, but not in the standard Middle English dialect of London. The close vowels /y/ and /yː/ are direct descendants of the corresponding Old English vowels, and were indicated as ⟨u⟩. (In the standard dialect of Middle English, these sounds became /i/ and /iː/; in Kentish, they became /e/ and /eː/.)

The mid front rounded vowels /ø øː œː/ likewise existed earlier on in the southwest dialects, but not in the standard Middle English dialect of London. They were indicated as ⟨o⟩. Sometime in the 13th century they became unrounded and merged with the normal front mid vowels. They derived from the Old English diphthongs /eo̯/ and /eːo̯/. There is no direct evidence that were was ever a distinction between open-mid /œː/ and close-mid /øː/, but it can be assumed based on the corresponding distinction in the unrounded mid front vowels. /øː/ would have derived directly from Old English /eːo̯/, while /œː/ derived from the open syllable lengthening of short /ø/, from the Old English short diphthong /eo̯/.

The quality of the short open vowel is unclear. Early in Middle English, it presumably was central /a/, since it represented the coalescence of the Old English vowels /æ/ and /ɑ/. During the Early Modern English period, it was fronted (in most environments) to [æ] in southern England, and this or even closer values are found in the contemporary speech of southern England, North America, and the southern hemisphere: it remains [a] in much of Northern England, Scotland, and the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the long open vowel, which developed later due to open syllable lengthening, was [aː]. At the time of Middle English breaking, the short open vowel was not a front vowel, since a /u/ rather than /i/was introduced after it. It was gradually fronted, to successively [æː], [ɛː] and [eː], in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Old English sequences /oːw/, /oːɣ/ produced late Middle English /ɔu/, apparently passing through early Middle English /ou/; e.g. OE grōwan ('grow') > LME /ɡrɔue/. However, early Middle English /ouh/ due to Middle English breaking produced late Middle English /uːh/; e.g. OE tōh (tough') > EME /touh/ > LME /tuːh/. Apparently, early /ou/ became /ɔu/before the occurrence of Middle English breaking, which generated new occurrences of /ou/ that later became /uː/.

All of the above diphthongs came about within the Middle English era. Old English had a number of diphthongs, but all of them were reduced to monophthongs in the transition to Middle English. Middle English diphthongs came about due to various processes and at various time periods. Diphthongs tended to change their quality over time. The changes shown above mostly occurred between early and late Middle English. Early Middle English had a distinction between low-mid and high-mid diphthongs, whereas all of the high-mid diphthongs had been eliminated by late Middle English times.

The processes that produced the above diphthongs are:

· Reinterpretation of Old English sequences of vowel followed by /w/, /ɣ/ > /w/, or /j/. Examples:

· OE weg ('way') > EME /wɛi/ > LME /wai/

· OE dæg ('day') > ME /dai/

· Middle English breaking before /h/ ([x], [ç])

· Borrowing, especially from Old French

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