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História da Língua Inglesa   

The Shaping of Modern English

English Language Program, Kingston University (UK)

From Middle English to Early Modern English

The period that we are about to look at – roughly, 1450-1600 – is the period in which a standard English essentially the same as the language we now used defined itself. This period is usually referred to as that of Early Modern English.  But first, it is worth taking stock of the position of the language as it was around the time of Chaucer's death in 1400.

English in 1400

Many of the features of English at the end of the ME period have already been touched on. By 1400 or even earlier Norman French had gone, effectively, from all important areas of the national life (see the account in John of Trevisa of the situation in 1387). English was assured as the medium of all normal communication. It was still highly dialectal, and without a standard written form, but one dialect – that of the East Midlands (including Oxford, Cambridge and London) – was beginning to establish a pre-eminence as the language of government and education.

The diversity of written English is clear if one compares the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with the probably contemporaneous work of Geoffrey Chaucer. This poem, which is dated ca. 1375-1400, seems to come from the North West Midlands: say Staffordshire or Cheshire or further north. Its language is, to our eyes, stranger than that of Chaucer, because it belongs to a dialect tradition that did not feed directly into modern standard English, as Chaucer's East Midland dialect did.

The importance of Chaucer

Chaucer appears at the end of the Middle English period and his writing has great importance for what follows. He was born around 1343 (just before the Black Death) and he grew up in the rapidly changing England of the years after the great plague. English was now the unquestioned vehicle for an English poet; and Chaucer arrived at the right time to benefit from that. At the same time, he was able to travel to the continent and to absorb the impact of the Renaissance, which had been under way in Italy and France for a century or more. As a member of the household of Edward III, he went on diplomatic missions to Spain (1366), France (1368), and Italy (1372). He was (as we would say) a senior civil servant for part of his working life and also a Member of Parliament. These positions and journeyings meant that he was well in touch with European culture of his time.

Chaucer is important not just for the quality of his writing but also because he emerged as the first great named vernacular writer in English. Though there was no printing in his lifetime to disseminate his works, his writings were known, and in the 15th century they became a point of reference for aspiring poets such as John Gower. For the first time England had a great writer in its own language, and one who united its literature to the new traditions of Italy and France.

To compare Chaucer's writing with the early ME texts (say the 12th c. Peterborough Chronicle or the Proclamation of Henry II to the shires in 1178) is to see how far the language had advanced towards a recognisable modern English. His writing is, compared with that of the Gawain poet, accessible to modern readers with relatively little difficulty. This is because Chaucer wrote in the East Midland dialect, which is the direct ancestor of modern English. The fact that he wrote in this dialect gave it added authority and assisted it toward becoming the standard written English for subsequent generations.

Towards a national language

But linguistic history is not made by single writers. Many other factors contributed to the transition from the divided and dialectal speech of the late middle ages to the established and confident national language that was available to Shakespeare at the end of the 16th century.

First, the political structure of Europe was changing. In the place of the feudal middle ages, where kings extended power over whatever areas they could command with little sense of "national boundaries", and where nationality was an unknown concept (what counted was the name of one's feudal lord), gradually states began to develop which had some of the marks of the modern nation state. These included a sense of national territory, a national language, and a common cultural inheritance. To this was added, in the 16th century, a cohesive religious identity, Catholic or Protestant. This process significantly affected the position of the vernacular languages and the way that their speakers related to them.

In England (there was no "United Kingdom"), this process gathered pace under the Tudor dynasty. The civil wars of the 15th century, the "Wars of the Roses" (1455-85), ended with the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and the accession of the first of the Tudors, Henry VII, to the English throne. Under his rule and that of Henry VIII (1509-47) England gained in self-identity as a national state in rivalry with others in Europe, especially Spain and France. His break with the Pope (Act of Supremacy, 1534) gave the country an independent church; and in this increasing sense of national distinctiveness, the English language played an important part.

Printing

Technological advances also affected the status of the language. William Caxton set up the first printing shop in London in 1476. This meant that, for the first time, books could be copied in significant numbers at a relatively low price (low for the people who had books). The availability of printing, and Caxton's readiness to print English texts, reinforced the importance of English; a written standard became a priority and the diffusion of books began to carry this standard all around the nation (at this time, almost no one outside the British Isles spoke English, and by no means all of those within). Significantly, one of the first English-language texts that Caxton printed was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The English reformation

From 1517 (Luther's "theses" at Wittenberg), that movement of religious division and conflict know as the Reformation began to spread across Europe. Henry VIII's reasons for joining in this were probably as much political as they were religious; after all, he had been given the title "Defender of the [Catholic] Faith" by the Pope because he had opposed the Lutherans.  But the establishment of an English Church with the monarch as "Supreme Governor" was important to him because it confirmed that he was master in every department of national life.

Across Europe the Reformation enhanced the position of the vernacular languages, because they (not Latin) became the languages of prayer, worship and reading the Bible. This placed the national language at the heart of public life. As English began to take on roles which previously had been fulfilled by Latin (or French), so it gained in prestige and power. The 16th century saw writers, scholars and readers intensely engaged in forging the national language into a fit instrument for the most important purposes: not just daily life, but also the religious and intellectual life of the nation.

Translating the Bible

In the Middle Ages, the Bible existed in Latin (as "The Vulgate",  St Jerome's vulgata editio, popular edition, 3rd century). Its reading was restricted by the unavailability of copies, the lack of literacy in Latin among the bulk of the population, and the Church's unwillingness to allow the uninformed to read and interpret it. With the Reformation, it became a priority to translate the Bible into the vernacular languages and to give it greater currency.

In England, there had been partial translations in the OE period (9th c.). The first full translation was by John Wycliffe in 1386. This was from the Vulgate, and preceded the invention of printing, so that it could have little currency. In the 1520s, under the influence of the continental Reformation, William Tyndale began a new English translation from the original Hebrew and Greek (in 1523); even then it was dangerous in England, and he fled to the continent, where he was caught up in the religious turmoil and executed. As late as 1530 Henry was still condemning English translations and invoking the law against translators. After the Act of Supremacy (1534) his attitude changed, and in 1535 Miles Coverdale published the first complete English translation (in Zurich). In 1540 Henry officially issued the "Great Bible", and ordered copies to be made available in all English churches.

A line of descent runs from the Coverdale (largely Tyndale) version of 1535 through the Great Bible (1540), the Geneva Bible (1560), and the Bishop's Bible (1568), to the Authorised Version (King James Version) of 1611. Gradually a normative text was arrived at which continued for centuries to be the primary literary text of the nation.

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