CHAPTER IV

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

A UNIFORM literary language, or anything approaching it, did not exist in England before the death of Chaucer in 1400. From very early times Englishmen had written Latin correctly, sometimes with elegance, and many of their works were current throughout Europe. For a century or two after the Conquest, pure French was employed by the cultivated with natural ease; and even in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the ordinary French spoken in England had become sadly corrupt as compared with the standard speech of Paris, it was essentially the same in the various parts of the land. But with English the situation was different. At no time from the Conquest to the death of Chaucer was there any one dominant form of speech; at no time did men of letters acknowledge a common standard, or strive for uniformity when they wrote. Even at the close of the fifteenth century, Caxton was greatly troubled by the variations in the vernacular, and found it "hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language." And not before 1589, when the Art of English Poesie attributed to Puttenham appeared, do we meet with any definite statement that one particular dialect was adhered to by literary men. The great divergence of English as commonly spoken in the north and south from "the usual speech of the court, and that of London within sixty miles, and not much above," the author fully recognised, but he exalted the last because no other was

"so courtly or so current," and bore witness that this was then frequently "written" by "gentlemen and others," if not by the common people of every shire.

In Middle English are preserved works in several fairly distinct dialects continuing in the main the divisions of Saxon speech. The dialect of the north, however, included a larger district than the ancient Northumbrian. It was spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, in the north of Lancashire, and very probably in parts of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. To the end of the fourteenth century the language of the Lowlands, which is always called Inglis, is hardly to be distinguished from the Northern dialect. The real Scottish dialect begins about the middle of the fifteenth century, but was not so called until the sixteenth.

The field of the old Mercian came to be divided into two slightly divergent dialects called East and West Midland, extending in the west to the Welsh border, in the south to the banks of the Thames. At the middle of the thirteenth century, London, the capital of England since the time of Henry II., spoke essentially a south-east Saxon dialect; but as time went on London English lost its southern character, and at the end of the fourteenth century shared the characteristics of the Midland dialects, though with definite peculiarities.

The third chief division, that of the South, corresponding in general to the West Saxon and Kentish, embraces the whole territory south of the Thames, including the western counties of Gloucester, and (in part) Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Here too, however, are observed two groups: one, somewhat indefinite in its limitations, in the west and south, and another in Kent and the neighbouring district.

It is easier, it must be admitted, thus to state the confines of the various dialects than to determine where particular works belong. Two things above all are troublesome-first, the transformation that the records have undergone; and second, actual intermixture in the author's speech. Only in very rare instances

(e.g. the Ormulum and the Ayenbite of Inwyt) have we what appear to be autograph manuscripts. Usually texts must be studied in transcriptions of transcriptions, in which are manifest not only the blunders of copyists, but also the wilful changes in readings, the interpolations, and contractions of a succession of redactors. Scribes worked with great freedom, and not seldom transposed a whole poem from one dialect to another, making extensive alterations even in the rhymes, which are on the whole the best guide to original forms. Poems often appear in versions extraordinarily unlike, and the determination of the original dialect is sometimes guesswork pure and simple. Particularly is this the case with the productions of the minstrels, who never hesitated to adapt their narratives of whatever sort to the tastes and understanding of their hearers in different parts of the land. Fortunately, in such cases the determination of dialect is of very slight consequence to the student of literature.

Most worthy of consideration (particularly in connection with extant English romances) is the following lament that Richard of Bury voiced on behalf of his own well-beloved books:

Our purity of race is diminished every day, while new authors' names are imposed upon us by worthless compilers, translators, and transformers, and losing our ancient nobility, while we are reborn in successive generations, we become wholly degenerate, and thus against our will the name of some wretched stepfather is affixed to us, and the sons are robbed of the names of their true fathers. Ah! how often ye pretend that we who are ancient are but lately born, and try to pass us off as sons who are really fathers, calling us who have made you clerks the production of your studies. Indeed, we have derived our origin from Athens, though we are now supposed to be from Rome, for Carmentis was always the pilferer of Cadmus, and we who were but lately born in England, shall to-morrow be born again in Paris, and thence being carried to Bologna, shall obtain an Italian origin, based upon no affinity of blood. Alas! how ye commit us to treacherous copyists to be written, how corruptly ye read us and kill us by medication, while ye supposed ye were correcting us with pious zeal. Oftentimes. we have to endure barbarous interpreters, and those who are ignorant of foreign idioms presume to translate us from one language into another; and thus all

propriety of speech is lost and our sense is shamefully mutilated contrary to the meaning of the author! Truly noble would have been the condition of books, if it had not been for the presumption of the tower of Babel, if but one kind of speech had been transmitted by the whole human race.

A mixture of dialects is apparent in writers who lived on the borderland between two districts, or in such as had emancipated themselves from provincialism by travel and study. Those who in their works were deliberately serving local interests, adhered most closely to the dialect of their own region. Naturally, the language of the capital had much advantage over any rival, and, as before in Athens, Rome, and Paris, the commercial and legislative centre of the realm now again set the standard of national speech. By good fortune, it was in the London dialect that Chaucer consistently wrote (although he occasionally used Kentish forms), and so great was his preëminence, and that of other prominent authors like Gower and Wycliffe, who used the same dialect, that writers throughout England gradually yielded their local custom to higher authority. For centuries men still spoke as they would according to inherited habit, but in writing they fashioned their phrases to accord with the conventions which had slowly established themselves at the chief seats of commerce and cultivation.

So far as the language of Middle English is concerned, it is usually divided into three periods: early, standard, and late, from 1100 to 1250, from 1250 to 1400, and from 1400 to 1500 respectively. The first period was the time of greatest linguistic unlikeness. Too few monuments exist to enable us to judge of the state of the language in the North in this period. In the South, however, and to a much less degree in the Midland, the inflections of nouns and pronouns steadily persisted; and final e, with sound-value, was in general retained. In the South, much more than in the Midland (especially the North Midland), a considerable number of French words then appeared in the vocabulary. In the second period the great literary dialect groups and linguistic centres were formed. In the North the

inflection of nouns was limited to one prevailing type; in the South there were usually two. Unaccented final e is still much retained in the South, but is almost wiped out in the North. Numerous French words have by this time taken their place in common speech, even in the North. Between 1400 and 1500 dialects gradually disappeared from the literature, and inflections approached the forms of modern English. Final unaccented e was disregarded even in London and the South. Scottish at last came to be distinct from the English of the North.

The chronological table appended to this volume will readily show the student when and where were composed the different English works of which mention will be made in the ensuing pages. Here a word of general orientation will suffice.

In 1066 English literature of the Saxon style seems to have been too decrepit to resist successfully the domination of the foreign types then introduced. What little remains of English dating from the next hundred years is chiefly religious or didactic in character; and in literary composition of this kind the South took the lead. It was in the neighbourhood of old Wessex, where King Alfred's influence had made itself felt, and where literature, stimulated by him, had been produced by others later, that the first stirrings of creative impulse are to be seen. The shadow that had rested over Northumbria since its early literary supremacy in the seventh and eighth centuries was rudely overthrown, it required five hundred years and more permanently to dispel. No significant English work was composed in the North until the end of the thirteenth century.

An effort to discover the temper of different parts of the country by considering the nature of extant productions in the several dialects has unfortunately yielded too uncertain results to make them worth record. Something valuable might be said of the character of writings in the West Midland, where conditions specially favourable to original work existed; but, in the main, dialect is the least instructive aspect of a Middle English poem that the literary critic can dwell upon.