Middle English

Brief Introduction

—  Extending from 1066 to 1485, this period is noted for the extensive influence of French literature on native English forms and themes.

—  From the Norman-French conquest of England in 1066 until the 14th century, French largely replaced English in ordinary literary composition, and Latin maintained its role as the language of learned works.

—  By the 14th century, when English again became the chosen language of the ruling classes, it had lost much of the Old English inflectional system, had undergone certain sound changes, and had acquired the characteristic it still possesses of freely taking into the native stock numbers of foreign words, in this case French and Latin ones.

—  Thus, the various dialects of Middle English spoken in the 14th century were similar to Modern English and can be read without great difficulty today.

Poetry

Themes, characteristics, and famous works and authors:

—  Religious teaching; “Ormulum”, “Ancren Riwle”, “the Owl and the Nightingale”.

—  History; “Brut” (the history of “England”) èLayamon

—  Heroes, great manè Ballads (tales told from mouth to mouth, which the origin and the authors were unknown); Robin Hood, King Arthur and His Knights

—  Love, knight èRomance (tales of extra-ordinary deeds and events, which be possibly happened only on imaginative world, adopted from French literature); “Chanson de Roland”,  Alexander, the Pearl (mostly by unknown authors).

—  Realistic (unlike the previous themes, in the 14^th C the themes of the poems were ordinary man, such as Oxford scholar up to common farmer)è Geoffrey Chaucer (the pioneer)è “Canterbury Tales”; William Langlandè  “Piers Plowman”(alliteration).

Prose

—  Prose in Middle English was also dominated by a large number of religious works.

—  John Wyclif, religionist and scholar, known as the translator of Bible, which has great influence not only in the teaching of moral values but also the style of language, through his language prose style represented in his work “Mandeville’s Travels” helped much the organizing of Standard English language used by the society.

—  Strongly influenced by French not only in terms of lexicons, many borrowed terms from French language found, and the language style used, romance, but also in terms of the atmospheres, styles, and forms.

Drama

—  Its first appearance was used as a media to teach Christianity doctrines, which was usually delivered by the religionist to the people orally by using Latin language (mostly the people did not understand about it).

—  The themes for the first time concerned with stories told in the bible such as: the birthday of Christ (Christmas day), the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ (Easter day), in which all the actors were the religionist them selves and it was played in the church (the language introduction was Latin then replaced by English) .

—  The themes developedè “Miracles” (the stories of Saints) and “Mysteries” (themes adopted from the bible).