Reference: Chaucer’s Middle English

Chaucer’s Middle English

Simon Horobin ([email protected])
A reference chapter from The Open Access Companion to the
Canterbury Tales (September 2017)
Variety

The history of the English language is traditionally divided into the following periods: Old
English (650-1100), Middle English (1100-1500), Early Modern English (1500-1800), Late
Modern English (1800-present day) (for a general overview see Horobin 2016). To a modern
reader turning to Chaucer’s work for the first time, the immediate impression is of considerable
linguistic chaos and confusion. This is especially true for modern readers accustomed to the
world of Standard English and the fixity of the printed book. But, where Chaucer’s language
may at first appear disordered, much of its apparent irregularity can be explained by reference to
the language’s historical development. As the term “Middle” English implies, the period in
which Chaucer wrote was one of considerable flux and change, in which the Old English spoken
by the Anglo-Saxons (a language that resembles Modern German more closely than it does
Modern English) was transformed into Early Modern English—a term that emphasizes its
position as the foundation of the language spoken throughout the world today.

Chaucer wrote during the final decades of the fourteenth century; hence, his language belongs to
the later Middle English period. An important feature of the division between the Middle and the
Early Modern periods was the emergence of a standard written variety of English. While dialect
variation has been a feature of spoken English throughout its history, the Middle English period
was characterised by considerable variety in writing too. So, where Modern English has just one
way of spelling most words (setting aside the small number of variants between US and British
English, such as color and colour), there were numerous ways of spelling common words in
Middle English. The word not, for instance, might appear as nat, noght, nawt, naught, naȝt and
many other similar forms. It is because of this dialectal variation that reading Chaucer’s Middle
English is quite a different experience from reading the works of his contemporaries, such as
Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which were both written in dialects of the
West Midlands. Since he was a Londoner by birth, Chaucer’s works are written in the dialect of
that city. The prominence of the city of London meant that it formed the basis of the standard
language, but this was a later, fifteenth-century, development. In Chaucer’s day, London English
carried no greater status than any other dialect.

As in many modern cities, the language spoken on the streets of Chaucer’s London was
characterized by considerable diversity—the result of large-scale immigration into the capital
during the fourteenth century. Although it is historically an East Midland dialect, London
English of this period was influenced by a variety of non-metropolitan dialects, as speakers from
different parts of the country migrated to London in search of work. During the early part of the
fourteenth century, immigration was greatest from East Anglia; in the second half of that
century, it was focused more on the Central and North Midlands. The result was a linguistic
melting pot; where Modern English is characterized by standardization and regularity, Chaucer’s
Middle English was dynamic and unregulated.

Since the eighteenth century, writers have sought to stabilize and regulate the English language;
variation and change were seen as disruptive and hostile to serious literary endeavor. However,
variation in spelling, grammar, and pronunciation can be of considerable use to a poet, and there
are many instances in Chaucer’s works where he draws upon this licensed variation where rhyme
or meter demands it. Let’s take the adjective merry as an example. In Old English, this word was
spelled myrige; in Middle English, alternative pronunciations emerged in the different dialect
areas—mury (West Midlands), miry (East Midlands), mery (East Anglia and the South-East). In
London, because of immigration, all of these pronunciations were available; Chaucer made use
of this variation in rhyme: merye appears at GP 208 where it rhymes with berye; at GP 802, it is
spelled mury in order to rhyme with Canterbury; and at Merchant’s Tale 2326, it is mirye, to
rhyme with pirie [“pear tree.”]

Vocabulary

The variety that we have seen in Chaucer’s dialect is also found in his vocabulary. The Middle
English wordstock (or “lexicon”) was made up of words from various sources. Core items,
including grammatical words like conjunctions (and, but) and pronouns (I, you, him), were
inherited from the Old English language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. During the Middle
English period, English was heavily influenced by the French spoken by the aristocratic Norman
invaders. Because French was also the language of courtly literature and fashionable manners,
much of the vocabulary of polite discourse and behavior was drawn from French: for example,
curteis, debonair, gentil, noble. Latin was another important source, especially in the area of
religious writing, as Latin was the language of the Church and the Bible—hence words like
scripture and monasterie. Middle English also included a number of words borrowed from the
Old Norse language spoken by the Vikings who invaded Britain during the Anglo-Saxon period,
although, since the Viking settlements were in the North and East Midlands, Norse words were
more prominent in the dialects of those regions than in London English. The structural
similarities between English and Norse (both are Germanic languages) combined with the
tendency for Vikings to settle among and intermarry with Anglo-Saxons promoted borrowing of
more everyday words from Old Norse; egg, husband, window, take, leg give a flavor.

Grammar

Like other modern Germanic languages, Old English was a highly synthetic language; this means
that it relied heavily upon special endings to indicate the relationships between words in a
sentence. By comparison, Modern English makes comparatively little use of such inflexions,
beyond the -‘s ending to mark possession and the -s ending to indicate when a noun is plural. By
the later Middle English period in which Chaucer wrote, many of the grammatical inflexions that
characterized the Old English period had already fallen out of use. The only noun endings that
survive into Chaucer’s dialect are the -(e)s ending that indicates possession and the -(e)s ending
that is added to a noun to signal when it is plural. There are, however, a handful of nouns that
preserve an alternative Old English -n plural ending (found today in ox–oxen)—for example,
toon (toes) and shoon (shoes)—but these often appear alongside equivalents with the much more
frequent -s. One further relic of the Old English inflexional system is preserved in certain set
phrases, where an -e ending appears on nouns following prepositions (indicating the “dative”
case): for example, in toune, on honde.

The decay of the Old English inflexional system also affected Middle English adjectives,
although in Chaucer’s usage an -e ending continued to be added to adjectives when they
modified a plural noun: for example, olde men. When preceded by a determiner—such as the
definite article the or the demonstratives this or that—singular monosyllabic adjectives also took
an -e ending: the olde man. These distinctions were rather old fashioned by the late fourteenth
century and had probably ceased to be a part of the spoken language. For Chaucer, they were a
useful metrical device because they provided an unstressed syllable between two stressed
syllables.

Pronouns

The Middle English pronoun system is similar to that of Modern English; it differed from that of
Old English in the replacement of the earlier third person plural pronouns with ones borrowed
from Old Norse—the ancestor of Modern English they, their, them—which were adopted as
replacements for the Old English equivalents hie/hi, hira, him, which were easily confusable
with other pronouns. As with other words borrowed from Old Norse, the third person plural
pronouns were adopted earliest in the Northern and East Midland dialects, only filtering down
into London usage in the fourteenth century. Chaucer’s pronoun system shows a mixed
paradigm; he used the Old Norse form for the nominative pronoun they but Old English derived
hir/her and hem. The only appearances of their and them in Chaucer’s works are in the Reeve’s
Tale, where they form part of the Northern dialect spoken by the two Cambridge students, Aleyn
and John, demonstrating that at this time they were still perceived to be Northernisms.

Among the differences between the Middle English pronoun system and that of Modern English
is the continued use of the Old English neuter possessive pronoun his (its). This can cause some
confusion when reading Chaucer’s works, since it is not always clear whether we should
translate his as his or its. This uncertainty was removed in the sixteenth century with the
introduction of the its pronoun—formed by adding the genitive -s ending to the neuter
nominative pronoun it.

A more major difference between Middle and Modern English concerns the second person
pronouns. Middle English had a singular pronoun thou, alongside a plural form ye; standard
Modern English, by contrast, uses just one form for both singular and plural: you. The singular
and plural pronouns were inherited from Old English, but their use changed during the Middle
English period under the influence of French usage. In Modern French, as with many other
languages, it is possible to address a singular individual using either the singular tu or the plural
vous pronouns. The choice between the two pronouns reflects the relationship between the
speaker and the addressee—in the most basic sense, tu is used between equals or by a superior to
a junior; vous is used to indicate respect and formality by a junior to a superior or between
strangers. In the Middle English period, the prestige of French aristocratic speech and manners
led to the introduction of a similar system in English. As a consequence, it is usual to find a
courtly man or woman in Chaucer’s works addressing another using the plural pronoun ye, since
this was the pronoun of respect. These distinctions are not fixed, however, and the switch
between ye and thou can often be revealing about changes in a speaker’s attitude. For example,
when Nicholas makes his first advances to Alison in the Miller’s Tale, he addresses her using the
intimate pronoun thee: “For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille” (MilT 3278). Alison responds
using the same pronoun, although she rejects his advances. But, when this attempt to repel him
fails, she switches to the plural youre pronoun as part of her appeal to the propriety of courtly
manners—“youre curteisye”:

And seyde, “I wol nat kisse thee, by my fey!

Why, lat be!” quod she, “Lat be, Nicholas,
Or I wol crie ‘out, harrow’ and ‘allas’!
Do wey youre handes, for youre curteisye!”
(3284-87)

This example warns us not to treat the distinction between ye and thou as one determined purely
by fixed criteria of rank or gender; instead, the choice of pronoun can be an important index of
the relations between speakers, providing insights into the shifting emotional intensity of an
interaction.

Style and Register

We have seen that Chaucer’s Middle English was a language of variety and flux, with words and
pronunciations derived from different languages and dialects. The result of this is a language
with many alternative ways of expressing the same concept. But since no two words can have
precisely the same meaning, or be used in precisely the same contexts, this variety was extremely
useful for the poet of the Canterbury Tales. One of the innovations of Chaucer’s story-collection
is that it includes lowly peasant characters—a Miller, a Reeve, a Cook—rubbing shoulders with
aristocratic and noble characters like the Knight and Monk. To give voices to this social and
educational range required Chaucer to experiment in the construction of a range of styles.

Given their association with social and educational elevation, French and Latin words in
Chaucer’s vocabulary tended to occupy a higher register than Germanic words inherited from
Old English and Old Norse. This basic stylistic contrast between French/Latin words and Old
English/Old Norse equivalents can still be felt today in the different status of pairs such as
felicity/happiness, commence/begin, verity/truth. In the Canterbury Tales, words borrowed from
French and Latin are more commonly found in the speech of the socially-elevated characters or
in the tales dealing with more highbrow matters. The peasant characters, by contrast, tend to use
words derived from Old English and Old Norse.

An interesting stylistic challenge is presented by the character of Harry Bailly, a hostiler

(innkeeper), who, as the master of ceremonies, must be able to walk a tricky social tightrope. In
order to preserve harmony in this diverse social mix, Harry Bailly needs to be able to address the
more socially elevated pilgrims with appropriate decorum, while also maintaining camaraderie
among the lower classes. In his address to the Prioress, we see Harry Bailly in his most flattering
mode (ShipT 447-51); he speaks to her using the terms of polite courtly discourse and couches
his request in the most indirect and circumlocutionary manner, finally asking her: “wol ye
vouche sauf” [“agree.”] By contrast, the brusque manner with which he cuts off the hapless
pilgrim Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas employs none of these niceties. Instead, Harry speaks
“pleinly,” bluntly informing him that “Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord” (Th 930).

This ability to switch between different styles is also a characteristic of the tales themselves. We
see it in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, where her references to her private parts shift between the
coyly euphemistic (nether purs), jokily learned (quoniam), and crudely direct (queynte). Similar
stylistic switching appears in the Merchant’s Tale, where the narrator begins by describing the
sexual act between May and Damian in a bluntly physical manner:

Ladyes, I prey yow that ye be nat wrooth;

I kan nat glose, I am a rude man—
And sodeynly anon this Damyan
Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.
(MerT 2350-53)

But then, just a few lines later, the same act is described in blushingly coy terms, in an effort not
to speak “uncurteisly”:

And saugh that Damyan his wyf had dressed

In swich manere it may nat been expressed,
But if I wolde speke uncurteisly;
(2361-63)

Closely linked to a sensitivity to stylistic register is Chaucer’s understanding of the concept of

propriety: the importance of using the correct term to describe something. Just as today, different
professions have their own jargons, so in Chaucer’s day there was an understanding of the
concept of termes. Chaucer refers to the terms of philosophy, physik (medicine), law, and even
love—mastery of these terms was an important outward guarantee of a person’s status as a
member of the gentle class. Muddling your terms, or mispronouncing them, was a clear
indication of someone with failed pretensions to gentility. We can see this in action when Harry
Bailly, who admits that he “kan nat speke in terme” (PardT 311) responds to the Physician’s
Tale by saying that he was so grieved that it almost gave him a cardynacle (313). The word he is
looking for here is properly cardiacle, a condition of palpitations (related to our modern word
cardiac); Harry Bailly, with only the most rudimentary knowledge of medical terminology, has
confused it with the unrelated word cardinal.

As well as being a way of distinguishing a “gentle man” from a “knave,” technical terms were an
effective means of pretending to knowledge as part of a deception. We see this in the way that
the phony alchemist in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale hoodwinks his victims using terms that are
“so clergial [learned] and so queynte [abstruse]” (CYT 752). Latin words and phrases can be
used similarly, as we see in the way the Summoner parrots a handful of Latin terms that he has
learned from a papal decree, without any understanding of their meaning (GP 637-43).

Sample Passage

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
(GP 1-18)

The opening of the General Prologue is a good example of Chaucer forging a high register
intended to evoke a sense of gravity appropriate to the opening of the work. As we might expect
for a passage written in high style, these lines contain a number of words of French or Latin
origin, adding to the sense of stylistic elevation: perced, licour, engendred, corages, pilgrimages.
But the choice of words is not driven exclusively by etymological factors; after all, Chaucer and
his readers did not have access to modern dictionaries. In the case of a word like corage, the
elevation derives in large part from the word’s usage. This word may be translated as “heart” and
so is, to some extent at least, synonymous with the word herte. Since corage is of French
extraction, while herte derives from Old English heorte, the distinction between the two would
appear to be one of style and register. But, while there are instances of both herte and corage that
could be accurately rendered by the modern English word heart, there are other more subtle
semantic distinctions to be made. The word corage was never used to refer to the bodily organ; it
is most commonly employed in the abstract sense of the heart as the seat of the emotions—the
place where affections, attitudes, and desires are formed. So in the Knight’s Tale, Palamon cries
as if he “stongen were unto the herte” rather than “unto the corage”—since the reference is to the
physical organ itself. By contrast, Chaucer the pilgrim, ready to set out on his pilgrimage,
describes himself as being “with ful devout corage”; here, the reference is to his emotional and
spiritual disposition. This example shows us that words borrowed from French during this period
tend to denote more abstract ideas, whereas English words cover the physical, down-to-earth
concepts. Subtle distinctions in meaning and usage like these remind us that we need to be
careful not to simply assume that two words are synonymous; this is especially important when
reading Chaucer in a student edition where words are often given one-word glosses, meaning
that such nuances of meaning are often elided. Another distinction between corage and its
modern equivalent courage concerns its pronunciation; here, the meter shows us that Chaucer
and his audience would have sounded the word with stress on the second syllable rather than the
first, thereby preserving the French pronunciation more closely.

It is not just the vocabulary that evokes this sense of dignity and grandeur; also important is the
syntactic structure; notice how the punctuation that has been added by the editor conceives of the
entire eighteen lines as a single sentence. Within this single sentence are numerous clauses
linked together in complex ways. While part of this sentence employs a simple paratactic
structure—in which a clause is linked to the following by a coordinating conjunction such as
and—Chaucer embeds these clauses within a more complex series of subordinate clauses—using
the subordinating conjunctions whan that or whan. The result of this is to postpone the main
clause until line twelve: “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”

The passage also includes instances of some of the grammatical features we have observed. In
the phrase “the yonge sonne” in line seven, we have an example of the -e added to a singular
adjective following a definite article. In line nine, “And smale foweles maken melodye,” we
have an instance of the -e ending added to the adjective smal to make it agree with the plural
noun that it is modifying. The plural pronouns they and hem provide examples of the mixed
system of Old Norse and Old English pronouns used by Chaucer, while the neuter possessive
pronoun his appears on several occasions. Because this pronoun was identical with the masculine
possessive pronoun, it is not always possible to determine where Chaucer intended a
personification. In line five, for instance, is Chaucer personifying Zephirus, the west wind, or
should we translate his as its? The capitalization of the initial letter of the name Zephirus might
encourage us to read this as a personification, but we need to remember that details such as
capital letters and punctuation are modern practices imposed by editors and so do not necessarily
reflect Chaucer’s intentions.

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Burnley, J.D. The Language of Chaucer. Basingstoke, 1989.

Cannon, Christopher. “Chaucer’s Style.” In The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, edited by

Piero Boitano and Jill Mann, 2nd edition. Cambridge: 2004, 233-250.

Davis, N. “Chaucer and Fourteenth-Century English.” In Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Derek

Brewer. Cambridge: 1974, 58-84.

Donaldson, E. Talbot. “Idiom of Popular Poetry in the Miller’s Tale.” In Speaking of Chaucer.
London: 1970, 13-29.

Horobin, Simon. How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language. Oxford:
2016.

Horobin, Simon. Chaucer’s Language, 2nd edition. Basingstoke: 2012.

Online Resources:

The Middle English Compendium: a free online resource that includes a fully searchable Middle
English Dictionary, Hyperbibliography (including bibliographical references for all the texts
used in the dictionary) and an extensive corpus of electronic texts (including the works of
Chaucer): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/index.html

The Middle English Glossarial Database: a searchable collection of the works of Chaucer and
John Gower: http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/tools/

Larry Benson’s Chaucer Homepage: a useful collection of materials relating to Chaucer’s

language, including a complete glossary: http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

4.0 International License.