Principal Middle English written records as a reflection of ongoing changes in Standard

The literature written in England during the Middle English period reflects fairly accurately the changes fortunes of English. During the time that French was the language best understood by the upper classes, the books they read or listened to were French. The rewards of patronage were seldom to be expected by those who wrote in English; with them we must look for other incentives for writing. Such incentives were most often found among members of the religious body, interested in promoting right living and in the care of souls. Accordingly, the literature in English that has come down to us from this period is almost exclusively religious or admonitory.

The Ancrene Riwle, the Ormulum, a series of paraphrases and interpretations of Gospel passages, and a group of saint’s lives and short homiletic pieces showing the survival of an Old English literary tradition in the south-west are the principal works of this class. The two outstanding exceptions are Lagamon’s Brut based largely on Wace, and the astonishing debate between The Owl and the Nightingale, a long poem in which two birds exchange recriminations in the liveliest fashion.

There was certainly a body of popular literature that circulated orally among the people, just as at a later date in the English and Scottish popular ballads did, but such literature has left slight traces in this period. The hundred years from 1150 to 1250 have been justly called the Period of religious Record [28].

The separation of the English nobility from France by about 1250 and the spread of English among the upper class are manifested in the next hundred years of English literature. Types of polite literature that had hitherto appeared in French now appear in English. Of these types most popular was the romance. Only one English romance exists from an earlier date than 1250, but from this time translations and adaptations from French begin to be made, and in the course of the 14th century their number become quite large. The period of 1250 – 1350 is a period of Religious and secular literature of the English language. The general adoption of English by all classes, which had taken place by the latter half of the 14th century, gave rise to a body of literature that represents the high point in English literary achievement in the Middle Ages.

The 15th century is sometimes known as the Imitative Period because so much of the poetry then written was written in emulation of Chaucer. It is also spoken of as a Transition Period, because it covers a large part of the interval between the age of Chaucer and the age of Shakespeare. That period has been unjustly neglected. Stephen Hawes is not negligible, though admittedly overshadowed by some of his great predecessors, and at the end of the century there appeared the prose of Thomas Malory and William Caxton. In the north the Scottish Chaucerians, particularly Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas and David Lindsay, produced significant work. These authors carry on the tradition of English as a literary medium into the Renaissance. Thus, Middle English literature follows and throws interesting light on the fortunes of the English language [20; 24; 28; 54].

The runic writing system is a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter. The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark.

The literature of the Old English period was presented by two main tenors epic and religious. Among the most important works of this period was the poem Beowulf, which has achieved national epic status in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle otherwise proves significant to the study of the era, preserving a chronology of early English history, while the poem Cædmon’s Hymn from the 7th century survives as the oldest extant work of literature in English.

The effects of the Norman Conquest added new features to the regional and social differentiation of the language. New words, coming from French, could not be adopted simultaneously by all the speakers of English; they were first used in some varieties of the language.

The dialectal position of Middle English is basically a continuation of that of Old English. The most important extra linguistic fact for the development of the Middle English dialects is that the capital of the country was moved from Winchester (in the Old English period) to London by William the Conqueror in his attempt to diminish the political influence of native English.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary standing had greatly added to the prestige associated with written language in the London dialect.

The introduction of the printing by William Caxton was one of the most significant factors of the Standard English diffusion. This resulted in the spread of a single norm over most of the country, so much that during the 15th century it becomes increasingly difficult to determine on internal linguistic grounds the dialects in which a literal work is written.