Lesson 5

The Influences of the Old Norse and Norman French in Middle English
and the Resurgence of English (Part 1)
Influences of the Old Norse (Language of the Vikings)
(Langfocus, 2019)
Vocabulary

Old Norse Middle Modern English

English Equivalent

gæsling gesling gesling/gosling

(young goose)

vængr winge, wenge wing

deyja [silent j] deyen die

illr ille ill

More Loan Words from Old Norse (Townend, 2006):

bask, beck, cast, fellow, gape, hit, husband, ill, knife, law, leg, loft, meek,
skill, skirt, sky, take, though, want, wrong, and (very importantly) the
pronouns they, them, and their
 Old Norse Middle English Modern English
Equivalent

rotinn roten rotten

ugga/uggligr uglike ugly
knifr knyf, knif knife
kalla callen call
hitta hitten hit

taka taken take

 Syntax/Word Order (Langfocus, 2019)

Split Infinitives:

Norwegian (A Dialect of Old Norse):

Jeg lover å ikke gjØre det igjen.
English: I promise to not do that again.

Explanation: In both languages, the negation adverb is placed in

the middle of the infinitive, splitting it. Split infinitives did not
occur in Old English. They did, however, occur occasionally in Old
Norse.

Note: Infinitive refers to “to + verb”.

Influences of the Norman French and
the Resurgence of English
Important Events (Townend, 2006):

First decades after 1066 - Those who spoke French were [only] the
Norman invaders.

11th Century - This century saw the death of Old Norse in England
when the Norse speech community seemed to have shifted to using
English.

1167 and 1209 - The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were

respectively founded (Mastin, 2011).
Townend (2006) added:

Middle of 12th Century - Most members of the [Norman] aristocracy

were bilingual. The members of the aristocracy learned English as a
second language.

13th Century - English began to re-establish itself as a medium for

written literature.
In Mastin’s (2011) account,

despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its
resilience once again, and, two hundred years after the Norman
Conquest, it was English not French, that emerged as the language of
England (Mastin, 2011).

There were a number of contributing factors. The English … had

become “Normanized”, but, over time, the Normans also became
“Anglicized”, particularly after 1204 when King John’s ineptness lost
the French part of Normandy to the King of France and the Norman
nobles were forced to look more to their English properties.
 Increasingly out of touch with their properties in France and
with the French court and culture in general, they soon began to
look on themselves as English. Norman French began gradually to
degenerate and atrophy. While some in England spoke French and
some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both), everyone, from the
highest to the lowest [classes], spoke English, and it gradually
became the lingua franca of the nation once again.
 The Hundred Year War against France (1337-1453) had the
effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status
of English rose as a consequence.

The Black Death of 1349-1350 killed about a third of the English

population (which was around 4 million at that time), including a
disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy.
 The Black Death and Covid-19: A Chilling Coincidence

In the account of History.com Editors (2020), the Black Death was

a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe
and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October
1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port
of Messina, [Italy]. People gathered on the docks were met with a
horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and
those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed
blood and pus.
 Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships”
out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the
Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—
almost one-third of the continent’s population.
Originating in China, the disease spread west along the trade
routes across Europe and arrived on the British Isles from the
English province of Gascony. It is believed to have been spread by
flea-infected rats, as well as individuals who had been infected on
the continent (The Week Staff, 2020).
According to History.com Editors (2020),
physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques
such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were
dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious practices
such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or
vinegar.
Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they
could to avoid the sick. Doctors refused to see patients; priests
refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their
stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even
there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep,
goats, pigs and chickens as well as people.
 The plague never really ended and it returned with a
vengeance years later. But officials in the Venetian-controlled port
city of Ragusa, [Sicily] were able to slow its spread by keeping
arriving sailors in isolation until it was clear they were not
carrying the disease—creating social distancing that relied on
isolation to slow the spread of the disease.
The sailors were initially held on their ships for 30 days (a
trentino), a period that was later increased to 40 days, or a
quarantine—the origin of the term “quarantine” and a practice still
used today.
 After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and
merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and,
within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between
the nobility and the commoners was largely over. The Statute of
Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts
and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French),
was adopted in 1362, and in that same year, Edward III became
the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial
psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the
language of instruction in schools (Mastin, 2011).
 The 14th Century London dialect of [Geoffrey] Chaucer,
although admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns
as a form of English (Mastin, 2011).

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1345–1400)
was enormously popular in medieval England, with over 90 copies
in existence from the 1400s (British Library, n. d.).

Note:
Circa means “at approximately… (Meriam-Webster, 2020).”
 Chaucer's long poem follows the journey of a group of pilgrims,
31 including Chaucer himself, from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to
St. Thomas à Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral. The host at
the inn suggests each pilgrim tell two tales on the way out and two
on the way home to help while away their time on the road. The best
storyteller is to be rewarded with a free supper on their return
(British Library, n. d.).
Task:
In the next slide, watch the video uploaded by
Ancient Literature Dude (2019) on The Canterbury Tales General
Prologue, lines 1-42, read in Middle English in the link https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzevRTpAga0 which features Jordan
Ashley Moore, an author who reads the prologue.
Vocabulary

The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English

(about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a
huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-
ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with
the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”.
 Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters:

of crown and nobility (e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke,

viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry);

of government and administration (e.g. parliament, government,

governor, city);

of court and law (e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest,

sentence, appeal, condemn, plaintiff, bailiff, jury, felony, verdict,
traitor, contract, damage, prison);

of war and combat (e.g. army, armour, archer, battle, soldier,

guard, courage, peace, enemy, destroy);
of authority and control (e.g. authority, obedience, servant,
peasant, vassal, serf, labourer, charity);

of fashion and high living (e.g. mansion, money, gown, beauty,

mirror, jewel, appetite, banquet, herb, spice, sauce,
roast, biscuit); and

of art and literature (e.g. art, colour, language, literature, poet,

chapter, question) (Mastin, 2011).

More Loan Words from French :

abbey, battle, castle, chaplain, charity, council, duke, empress, folly,
fruit, gentle, honour, journey, office, purity, silence, treasure,
(Townend, 2006) and figure, marriage, cell, champagne, chateau,
catch, equal, etc. (Langfocus, 2019).
General Notion:

Loanwords enter a language on account of either need or

prestige. Nouns and adjectives are by far the most frequently
transferred word-classes, followed by verbs and adverbs, and far
ahead of ‘grammar-words’ such as conjunctions and pronouns
(Townend, 2006).