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ELS 101: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
THENORMANSIN
ENGLISH
LANGUAGEAND
MIDDLEENGLISH
Created by: Mr. Elmar Puerto, LPT
Learning • Identified the
Outcome
significant events in
the Linguistic History of
English
s
At the end of the
• Created a Timeline on
the significant events
in the Middle English
lesson, the
• Categorized words of
students must Latin and French origin
have: through a Word
Inventory
the normans in
england
At the battle of Hastings, on 14 October 1066, King
Harold was killed and his army was defeated. On
Christmas day 1066 William was made king of England
in London and over the next four years he completed his
conquest of England and Wales. This conquest had a
very great effect on the development of the English
Language.
William had large stone castles built,
from which Norman soldiers controlled
the towns and countryside. He took very
large areas of Land from rich English
families and gave them to his Norman
followers. Each of these new land
owners had his own group of soldiers,
and each gave land to his own followers,
so there was usually one Norman Family
in each English village. Normans worked
in the Government and business and
controlled the Church.
Norman French immediately became
the language of the governing classes
and remained so for the next two
hundred years. French and Latin were
used in the Church, the law,
literature . Very little was written in
English although the English monks
continued to writing the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles until 1154. English was
spoken, however, in its different
regional dialects.
Slowly English became more widely used by the
Normans. Many of the Normans married English
women and so they and their children spoke English.
In 1177, one English writer reported that with 'free
men' it was impossible to know who was English and
who was Norman.
The upper classes continued to speak French as a

second language, and it was still used in government
and the law. However, French started to become less
important socially in England, partly because the
Norman French spoken in England was not
considered 'good' by Parisian French. The upper
classes began to feel prouder of their English than
their French.
Most ordinary people could not speak
French at all. At the end of thirteenth
century one poet wrote:
Ordinary people did not need to learn French,

and probably did not want to It was the
language of the Normans who had destroyed
many English towns and villages. English
was the language of the country, and people
who were proud of it and their history. A poet
in around 1300 wrote his introduction to the
poem Cursor Mundi:
The continuing bad feeling between England and
France resulted in the Hundred Years War (1337-
1453). During this time National feeling grew and
the English language was seen more and more as an
important part of being English.
Between 1348 and 1375, England was hit several

several times by illness known as Black Death and
almost a third of the people in England died. Many
churchmen, monk and school teachers died and
were replaced by less educated men who spoke only
in English.
English become more important. It was used more

and more in the government, as fewer and fewer
people could understand French. In 1362, English
was used for the first time in the opening of the
Parliament.
When Henry the Fourth became king in
1399, England had its first English-
speaking king since 1066. In the
following century English took placed of
French in the home, in written
communication after 1450 most letter
were English, not Latin .
English had survived -but it changed.

THe middle
english
In the four centuries that followed the
Norman conquest, the English
language changed more than in any
other time in the history. Thousands
into the language, and many Old
English ones left it. At the same time
the language changed grammatically,
mainly by becoming simpler. The
English used in this time is called
Middle English.
One way the grammar grew simpler was by losing some of the
different endings for nouns, adjectives and pronouns. For example, by
the fifteenth century the plural noun ending -(e)s was accepted
everywhere in England, although some plurals with -en survived
(children is among them). Other noun endings which have survived
are the 's (the boy's book) and the s' (the boys' book). Adjectives
and nouns also lost their grammatical gender, and the became the
only form of definite article.
The main change to verbs was to the past tense. Some of the Old
English verbs began to end in -ed. For example, the past tense climb
was clomb, but the word climbed also began to appear in the
thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, most of the thousands of
verbs which had entered the language from French also formed the
past tense with -ed. Sometimes the change went the other way, so
knowed became knew, but usually -ed was used. There are still
about 250 'irregular' past tense in English, but this is only about half
the number that there were in English.
In Old English there two main tenses: past and present. In Middle
English other tenses developed which used be, have, shall and will
began to be used to express the future. Have and be were both used
for perfect tenses at first, but in the end have was used for perfect
tenses (as in they have gone) and be was used for the passive (as
in it was done). Be was also used for the continuous tenses (as in
he is coming). These tenses were not used very often at this time,
but later they were used much more.
When the different noun endings disappeared, people had to put
words in a particular order to express meaning. the most common
order they used was subject-verb-object. They also used
prepositions for example in, with, and by, instead of noun
endings, so expression dæges and nihtes became day and night
in Middle English.
If English grammar was much simpler by the end of the fifteenth
century, its vocabulary was much richer. between 1100 to 1500,
but ten thousands of French words were taken into English, three-
quarters of which are still in use.
French words came into every Science and the Arts were
part of life: blanket, ceiling, enriched by the ideas and
chair, dinner, fruit, lamp and words dance, grammar,
table literature, medicine, music,
painting, poet, square etc.
And some things in Nature

New words arrived to describe
recieved new names: flower,
law: crime, judge, prison and
forest, mountain, river and
punish
ocean.
Back to Agenda
Several thousand words also entered English from Latin. They came
from books about law, medicine, science, literature or Christianity. These
books often used words which could not be translated into English. One
translator said:
So English translators often took the Latin word and made it into
an English one. Some words which came into Middle English from
Latin at this time were: admit, history, impossible, necessary
and picture.
One important source of Latin words was the
first translation of the Bible from Latin to
English which was made by John Wycliff and
his followers between 1380 and 1384. They
followed the Latin very closely using Latin
words. More than a thousand Latin words
appear for the first time in English in their
translation of the Bible.
The greatest writer in Middle English was
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400).
Chaucer, who lived in London, was both a
poet and an important government official.
He wrote in Midlands dialect (spoken by
people living in the Oxford -London-
Cambridge triangle) and used many words
from French and Italian poetry. His best
known work, The Canterbury Tales was
written in 1390s.
A different kind of development in the fourteenth
century was growing use of family names. People
began to need these as they moved away from their
village or as their village grew larger. Sometimes the
family name had their father's name (Johnson) as in
Anglo Saxon times. Other names showed where a
person lived (Rivers, Hill) or his town (Burton,
Milton) his country (French, Holland), or his work
(Cook, Fisher). A person 's family name could
change five or six times during his lifetime.
In the fifteenth century a machine was
brought to England which had great effect
on English. This was the printing machine
which William Caxton brought to London in
1476. Suddenly it was possible to produce
thousands of copies of books. but what
words and spellings should be used?
Caxton wrote:
ICaxton and other printers decided to use
the East Midlands dialect, mainly because
it was spoken in London and was used by
government officials. The printers did not
make their decisions in a particularly
organized way, but slowly standard
spellings developed. However, after this
time, the sounds in many words changed
or disappeared. As a result there are now
thousands of words that are spelt in
Caxton's time. For example, the letter k
in knee, w in wrong, and the letter l
in would were pronounced by this time.
By the end of the fifteenth century
English was starting to be read by
thousands of people. In the next
Century it was read by many more, and
used by the great star of English
literature -William Shakespeare.
AC TI V I TY 1 :
TIMELINE
CREATION
Instructions:
Create a timeline for the significant events of the
History of the English Language from the beginnings
of English until the Middle English. Use the Photo on
the link as reference. https://tinyurl.com/yhhcfwxb
Latin French
Activity 2:
Word
Inventory
Instructions:
Write 10 ordinary English words or
concepts with Latin origins and 10
ordinary English words or concepts
with French origins. Write your
answers on the table provided.
Thank you
for
listening!

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ELS 101: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The upper classes continued to speak French as a

Ordinary people did not need to learn French,

Between 1348 and 1375, England was hit several

English become more important. It was used more

English had survived -but it changed.

And some things in Nature

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