100-410: Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (1368/69–1426) was a key figure in 15th-century Middle English literature, significant for promoting Chaucer as "the father of English literature", and as a poet in his own right. His poetry, especially his longest work, the didactic work Regement of Princes , was extremely popular in the fifteenth century, but went largely ignored until the late twentieth century, when it
200-502: A printer to be the first English retailer of printed books. His parentage and date of birth are not known for certain, but he may have been born between 1415 and 1424, perhaps in the Weald or wood land of Kent , perhaps in Hadlow or Tenterden . In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large , a wealthy London silk mercer . Shortly after Large's death, Caxton moved to Bruges , Belgium,
300-509: A boat sailing from London to Zeeland was becalmed, and landed on the Kent side of the Thames . A mercer called Sheffield was from the north of England. He went into a house and asked the "good wyf" if he could buy some " egges ". She replied that she could not speak French, which annoyed him, as he could also not speak French. A bystander suggested that Sheffield was asking for " eyren ", which
400-593: A copyist and/or corrector. He is Scribe E in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, John Gower's Confessio Amantis ; this manuscript includes work by four other scribes, including the prolific copyist Scribe D , and Scribe B, the copyist of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales . He may also be Hand F of the latter manuscript, who copied a few lines; it has been suggested that he
500-738: A demonstrative ( þis , þat ), after a possessive pronoun (e.g., hir , our ), or with a name or in a form of address. This derives from the Old English "weak" declension of adjectives. This inflexion continued to be used in writing even after final -e had ceased to be pronounced. In earlier texts, multisyllable adjectives also receive a final -e in these situations, but this occurs less regularly in later Middle English texts. Otherwise, adjectives have no ending and adjectives already ending in -e etymologically receive no ending as well. Earlier texts sometimes inflect adjectives for case as well. Layamon's Brut inflects adjectives for
600-815: A dialect of Old French , now known as Old Norman , which developed in England into Anglo-Norman . The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of Norman words were borrowed into English and used alongside native Germanic words with similar meanings. Examples of Norman/Germanic pairs in Modern English include pig and pork , calf and veal , wood and forest , and freedom and liberty . The role of Anglo-Norman as
700-502: A largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country) but a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the dative and instrumental cases were replaced in Early Middle English with prepositional constructions. The Old English genitive - es survives in the -'s of the modern English possessive , but most of
800-494: A lengthened – and later also modified – pronunciation of a preceding vowel. For example, in name , originally pronounced as two syllables, the /a/ in the first syllable (originally an open syllable) lengthened, the final weak vowel was later dropped, and the remaining long vowel was modified in the Great Vowel Shift (for these sound changes, see Phonology , above). The final ⟨e⟩ , now silent, thus became
900-495: A lesser extent), and, therefore, it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the vernacular . It is also argued that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse and English speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology,
1000-491: A more analytic language with a stricter word order. Both Old English and Old Norse were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. Communication between Vikings in the Danelaw and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages. Old Norse may have had a more profound impact on Middle and Modern English development than any other language. The effect of Old Norse on Old English
1100-529: A process called apophony ), as in Modern English. With the discontinuation of the Late West Saxon standard used for the writing of Old English in the period prior to the Norman Conquest, Middle English came to be written in a wide variety of scribal forms, reflecting different regional dialects and orthographic conventions. Later in the Middle English period, however, and particularly with
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#17327725280551200-571: A standard based on the London dialects (Chancery Standard) had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by Early Modern English , which lasted until about 1650. Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the Northumbrian dialect (prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast Scotland ). During
1300-709: A steady succession of editions of the small popular pamphlets which were started in Caxton's time. In 1820, a memorial tablet to Caxton was provided in St Margaret's by the Roxburghe Club and its President, Earl Spencer . In November 1954, a memorial to Caxton was unveiled in Westminster Abbey by J. J. Astor , chairman of the Press Council . The white stone plaque is on the wall next to
1400-861: A theologically and psychologically astute verse translation of Henry Suso's Latin prose Ars Moriendi (Book II, Chapter 2 of the Horologium Sapientiae ). The theme of mortality and strict calendar structure of the Series link the sequence to the death of Hoccleve's friend and Privy Seal colleague John Bailey in November 1420. Two autograph manuscripts of the Series survive. Hoccleve has left behind more manuscripts and documents in his own hand than any other known medieval English writer. Four literary manuscripts are generally considered to have been solely or mostly in his hand; His hand has also been identified in sections of other literary manuscripts, as
1500-492: A third of the whole, contains reminiscences of London tavern life in a dialogue between the poet and an old man. The Series , which combines autobiographical poetry, poetic translations and prose moralizations of the translated texts, begins ( Complaint , 11.40 ff.) with a description of a period of "wylde infirmitee", in which the Hoccleve-character claims he temporarily lost his "wit" and "memorie" (this stands as
1600-480: A wealthy London mercer or dealer in luxury goods, who served as Master of the Mercers' Company, and Lord Mayor of London in 1439. After Large died in 1441, Caxton was left a small sum of money (£20). As other apprentices were left larger sums, it would seem that he was not a senior apprentice at this time. Caxton was making trips to Bruges by 1450 and had settled there by 1453, when he may have taken his Liberty of
1700-711: A wealthy cultured city in which he was settled by 1450. Successful in business, he became governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London ; on his business travels, he observed the new printing industry in Cologne , which led him to start a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with Colard Mansion . When Margaret of York , sister of Edward IV , married the Duke of Burgundy , they moved to Bruges and befriended Caxton. Margaret encouraged Caxton to complete his translation of
1800-462: Is Charles Blyth's TEAMS Middle English Text Series edition of The Regiment of Princes from the same year – particularly for modernised spelling that facilitates use in the classroom. These three recent editions all have introductions offering a thorough sense of a poet hitherto under-appreciated. Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME ) is a form of the English language that
1900-552: Is Thomas Caxton of Tenterden , Kent, who was like William, a mercer . He was one of the defendants in a case in the Court of Common Pleas in Easter term 1420: Kent. John Okman, versus "Thomas Kaxton, of Tentyrden, mercer", and Joan who was the wife of Thomas Ive, executors of Thomas Ive, for the return of two bonds (scripta obligatoria) which they unjustly retain. Caxton's date of birth is unknown. Records place it in 1415–1424, based on
2000-524: Is a homily on virtues and vices, adapted from Aegidius de Colonna 's Latin work of the same name, from a supposed epistle of Aristotle known as Secretum Secretorum , and from a work of Jacques de Cessoles ( fl. 1300) translated later by Caxton as The Game and Playe of Chesse . The Regement survives in at least 43 manuscript copies. It comments on Henry V's lineage, to cement the House of Lancaster 's claim to England's throne. Its proem, occupying about
2100-571: Is known of his life comes mainly from his works and from administrative records. According to the Regiment of Princes (c. 1411, 11.804–5), he obtained a clerkship in the Office of the Privy Seal at the age of eighteen or nineteen, which he retained on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about thirty-five years. On 12 November 1399 he was granted an annuity by the new king, Henry IV . It
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#17327725280552200-433: Is now rare and used only in oxen and as part of a double plural , in children and brethren . Some dialects still have forms such as eyen (for eyes ), shoon (for shoes ), hosen (for hose(s) ), kine (for cows ), and been (for bees ). Grammatical gender survived to a limited extent in early Middle English before being replaced by natural gender in the course of the Middle English period. Grammatical gender
2300-526: Is relatively simple and clear; as a metrist he is self-deprecating. While he confesses that "Fader Chaucer fayn wolde han me taught, But I was dul and learned lite or naught", this pose was conventional in Hoccleve's time, and an inheritance from Chaucer himself, whose alter-ego Geoffrey was portrayed as fat and dimwitted in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales . Later known as the "humility topos",
2400-512: Is uncertain, but estimates from the records of his burial in St. Margaret's, Westminster , suggest that he died near March 1492. However, George D. Painter makes numerous references to the year 1491 in his book William Caxton: a biography as the year of Caxton's death since 24 March was the last day of the year according to the calendar that used at the time and so the year change had not yet happened. Painter writes, "However, Caxton's own output reveals
2500-590: The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye , a collection of stories associated with Homer 's Iliad , which he did in 1471. On his return to England, heavy demand for his translation prompted Caxton to set up a press at Westminster in 1476. Although the first book that he is known to have produced was an edition of Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales , he went on to publish chivalric romances, classical works and English and Roman histories and to edit many others. He
2600-482: The Clarendon Press (a division of Oxford University Press ) in 1981, provides an excellent sampling of the poet's major and minor works for readers seeking a sense of Hoccleve's work. J. A. Burrow 's 1999 Early English Text Society edition of Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue is becoming the standard edition of the two excerpts from the Hoccleve's later works (collectively known as The Series ), as
2700-616: The Early Modern English and Modern English eras. Middle English generally did not have silent letters . For example, knight was pronounced [ˈkniçt] (with both the ⟨k⟩ and the ⟨gh⟩ pronounced, the latter sounding as the ⟨ch⟩ in German Knecht ). The major exception was the silent ⟨e⟩ – originally pronounced but lost in normal speech by Chaucer's time. This letter, however, came to indicate
2800-578: The Golden Legend was based on the French translation of Jean de Vignay . Caxton produced chivalric romances (such as Fierabras ), the most important of which was Sir Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485); classical works; and English and Roman histories. These books appealed to the English upper classes in the late 15th century. Caxton was supported by (but not dependent on) members of
2900-549: The Mercers' Company . There, he was successful in business and became governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London . His trade brought him into contact with Burgundy and it was thus that he became a member of the household of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy , the third wife of Charles the Bold and sister of two kings of England: Edward IV and Richard III . That led to more continental travel, including to Cologne , in
3000-594: The Norman Conquest , had normally been written in French. Like Chaucer's work, this new standard was based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Clerks using this standard were usually familiar with French and Latin , influencing the forms they chose. The Chancery Standard, which was adopted slowly, was used in England by bureaucrats for most official purposes, excluding those of
3100-722: The Northern England (corresponding to the Scandinavian Kingdom of Jórvík ), the East Midlands and the East of England , words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English. Influence on the written languages only appeared from the beginning of the 13th century, this delay in Scandinavian lexical influence in English has been attributed to
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3200-401: The Regiment , Hoccleve experienced a period of severe mental illness. He recovered in 1415, but writes in his Complaint (1420) that five years later he continued to experience social alienation as a result. The episode caused his voice to be "publicly regarded as being unstable" – a poor quality for an author whose most successful work to date was a didactic text. In Dialogue with a Friend ,
3300-406: The "father" of English literature, acknowledging the importance of John Gower and positioning himself as an heir of this tradition. However, despite the initial runaway success of the Regiment of Princes , his popularity was soon superseded by his more prolific contemporary, John Lydgate . Later readers found the Regiment boring and overly didactic; Caxton did not print it, and it was not until
3400-645: The 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group , religious texts written for anchoresses , apparently in the West Midlands in the early 13th century. The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the AB language . Additional literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include Layamon's Brut and The Owl and
3500-422: The 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century and was replaced by ⟨th⟩ . Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation [REDACTED] ( þe , "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as ⟨ y ⟩ in this context; see ye olde . Wynn, which represented the phoneme /w/ , was replaced by ⟨ w ⟩ during
3600-409: The 13th century. Due to its similarity to the letter ⟨p⟩ , it is mostly represented by ⟨w⟩ in modern editions of Old and Middle English texts even when the manuscript has wynn. Under Norman influence, the continental Carolingian minuscule replaced the insular script that had been used for Old English. However, because of the significant difference in appearance between
3700-473: The 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy . In the aftermath of the Black Death of the 14th century, there was significant migration into London , of people to the counties of the southeast of England and from the east and central Midlands of England, and a new prestige London dialect began to develop as a result of this clash of
3800-663: The 1540s after the printing and wide distribution of the English Bible and Prayer Book , which made the new standard of English publicly recognizable and lasted until about 1650. The main changes between the Old English sound system and that of Middle English include: The combination of the last three processes listed above led to the spelling conventions associated with silent ⟨e⟩ and doubled consonants (see under Orthography , below). Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from
3900-586: The 1970s that his work came to be valued as insight into the literate culture of England under the Lancastrian regime. It is especially valued by contemporary scholars for his frank autobiographical descriptions, in particular his description of his mental illness in the Complaint and Dialogue (1420). His La Male Regle (c. 1406), one of his most fluid and lively works, is a mock-penitential poem that gives some glimpses of dissipation in his youth. His diction
4000-572: The Church and legalities, which used Latin and Law French respectively. The Chancery Standard's influence on later forms of written English is disputed, but it did undoubtedly provide the core around which Early Modern English formed. Early Modern English emerged with the help of William Caxton 's printing press, developed during the 1470s. The press stabilized English through a push towards standardization, led by Chancery Standard enthusiast and writer Richard Pynson . Early Modern English began in
4100-569: The Danelaw, this endings tended gradually to become obscured and finally lost, "simplifying English grammar" in the process. In time, the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged. Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in pronouns , modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like hence and together ), conjunctions, and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings; however, texts from
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4200-410: The English language further toward standardisation. It is asserted that the spelling of "ghost" with the silent letter h was adopted by Caxton from the influence of Flemish spelling habits. In Caxton's prologue to the 1490 edition of his translation of Virgil 's Aeneid , called by him Eneydos , he refers to the problems of finding a standardised English. Caxton recounts what took place when
4300-531: The John Rylands Library, Westminster Abbey, and Cambridge University Library. Caxton printed 80 percent of his works in the English language. He translated a large number of works into English and performed much of the translation and the editing work himself. He is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles, including the first English translation of Aesop's Fables (26 March 1484 ). Caxton also translated 26 of
4400-411: The London dialect. That facilitated the expansion of English vocabulary, the regularisation of inflection and syntax and a widening gap between the spoken and the written words. Richard Pynson started printing in London in 1491 or 1492 and favoured what came to be called Chancery Standard , largely based on the London dialect. Pynson was a more accomplished stylist than Caxton and consequently pushed
4500-418: The Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English literary variety broke down and writing in English became fragmented and localized and was, for the most part, being improvised. By the end of the period (about 1470), and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439,
4600-675: The Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective, and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Anglo-Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in
4700-557: The Nightingale . Some scholars have defined "Early Middle English" as encompassing English texts up to 1350. This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances (especially those of the Auchinleck manuscript c. 1330 ). Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman (and subsequently French ) remained the dominant language of literature and law until
4800-644: The Norse speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings. Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the Peterborough Chronicle , which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the Ormulum , a biblical commentary probably composed in Lincolnshire in the second half of
4900-544: The Old English -eþ , Midland dialects showing -en from about 1200, and Northern forms using -es in the third person singular as well as the plural. The past tense of weak verbs was formed by adding an -ed(e) , -d(e) , or -t(e) ending. The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also served as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i- , y- , and sometimes bi- . Strong verbs , by contrast, formed their past tense by changing their stem vowel (e.g., binden became bound ,
5000-470: The approximate time of his death, for none of his books can be later than 1491, and even those which are assignable to that year are hardly enough for a full twelve months' production; so a date of death towards autumn of 1491 could be deduced even without confirmation of documentary evidence." Wynkyn de Worde , a Fleming, became the owner of the printing plant after Caxton's death and carried it on for forty-three years. Wynkyn prospered, continuing to put out
5100-598: The book by hand and so he "practiced and learnt" how to print it. His translation had become popular in the Burgundian court, and requests for copies of it were the stimulus for him to set up a press. Bringing the knowledge back to England, he set up the country's first-ever press in The Almonry area of Westminster in 1476. The first book known to have been produced there was an edition of Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales (Blake, 2004–07). Another early title
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#17327725280555200-507: The comparative and superlative (e.g., greet , great; gretter , greater). Adjectives ending in -ly or -lich formed comparatives either with -lier , -liest or -loker , -lokest . A few adjectives also displayed Germanic umlaut in their comparatives and superlatives, such as long , lenger . Other irregular forms were mostly the same as in modern English. Middle English personal pronouns were mostly developed from those of Old English , with
5300-479: The course of which he observed the new printing industry and was significantly influenced by German printing. He wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with a Fleming , Colard Mansion , and the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye was a translation by Caxton himself. In the epilogue of the book, Caxton tells how his "pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed" with copying
5400-486: The development of the Chancery Standard in the 15th century, orthography became relatively standardised in a form based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Spelling at the time was mostly quite regular . (There was a fairly consistent correspondence between letters and sounds.) The irregularity of present-day English orthography is largely due to pronunciation changes that have taken place over
5500-495: The different dialects, that was based chiefly on the speech of the East Midlands but also influenced by that of other regions. The writing of this period, however, continues to reflect a variety of regional forms of English. The Ayenbite of Inwyt , a translation of a French confessional prose work, completed in 1340, is written in a Kentish dialect . The best known writer of Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer , wrote in
5600-752: The door to Poets' Corner . The inscription reads: Near this place William Caxton set up the first printing press in England. In 1976 the Quincentenary of the Introduction of Printing into England exhibit was held at the British Library. There were forty-five events during the quincentenary including the Caxton International Congress at the Printing Historical Society , and exhibits at
5700-531: The double consonant represented a sound that was (or had previously been) geminated (i.e., had genuinely been "doubled" and would thus have regularly blocked the lengthening of the preceding vowel). In other cases, by analogy, the consonant was written double merely to indicate the lack of lengthening. The basic Old English Latin alphabet consisted of 20 standard letters plus four additional letters: ash ⟨æ⟩ , eth ⟨ð⟩ , thorn ⟨þ⟩ , and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ . There
5800-499: The earliest autobiographical description of mental illness in English). He describes recovering from this "five years ago last All Saints" ( Complaint , 11.55–6) but still experiencing social alienation as a result of gossip about this insanity. The Series continues with "Dialog with a Friend," which claims to be written after his recovery and gives a pathetic picture of a poor poet, now 53, with sight and mind impaired. In it he tells
5900-525: The early 15th century, which would soon result in the resumption of hostilities in the Hundred Years War . Having failed to secure a church benefice , by 1410 he had married "only for love" ( Regiment , 1.1561) and settled down to writing moral and religious poems, including his most widely circulated poem, the Regement of Princes , which he wrote c. 1411 and dedicated to the future Henry V . He
6000-468: The end of the Middle English period only the strong -'s ending (variously spelled) was in use. Some formerly feminine nouns, as well as some weak nouns, continued to make their genitive forms with -e or no ending (e.g., fole hoves , horses' hooves), and nouns of relationship ending in -er frequently have no genitive ending (e.g., fader bone , "father's bane"). The strong -(e)s plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak -(e)n form
6100-418: The exception of the third person plural, a borrowing from Old Norse (the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped). Also, the nominative form of the feminine third person singular was replaced by a form of the demonstrative that developed into sche (modern she ), but the alternative heyr remained in some areas for a long time. As with nouns, there
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#17327725280556200-459: The fact that his apprenticeship fees were paid in 1438. Caxton would have been 14 at the date of apprenticeship, but masters often paid the fees late. In the preface to his first printed work The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye , he claims to have been born and educated in the Weald of Kent . Oral tradition in Tonbridge claims that Caxton was born there; the same with Tenterden. One of
6300-412: The indicator of the longer and changed pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ . In fact, vowels could have this lengthened and modified pronunciation in various positions, particularly before a single consonant letter and another vowel or before certain pairs of consonants. A related convention involved the doubling of consonant letters to show that the preceding vowel was not to be lengthened. In some cases,
6400-583: The lack of written evidence from the areas of Danish control, as the majority of written sources from Old English were produced in the West Saxon dialect spoken in Wessex , the heart of Anglo-Saxon political power at the time. The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers who spoke
6500-760: The language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman, such as court , judge , jury , appeal , and parliament . There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the chivalric cultures that arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism , seigneurialism , and crusading . Words were often taken from Latin, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms, including kingly (inherited from Old English), royal (from French, inherited from Vulgar Latin), and regal (from French, which borrowed it from Classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of
6600-403: The later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift . Little survives of early Middle English literature , due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer , whose Canterbury Tales remains
6700-575: The manors of Hadlow was Caustons, owned by the Caxton (De Causton) family. A house in Hadlow reputed to be the birthplace of William Caxton was dismantled in 1936 and incorporated into a larger house rebuilt in Forest Row , East Sussex . Further evidence for Hadlow is that various place names nearby are frequently mentioned by Caxton. Caxton was in London by 1438, when the registers of the Mercers' Company record his apprenticeship to Robert Large ,
6800-417: The masculine accusative, genitive, and dative, the feminine dative, and the plural genitive. The Owl and the Nightingale adds a final -e to all adjectives not in the nominative, here only inflecting adjectives in the weak declension (as described above). Comparatives and superlatives were usually formed by adding -er and -est . Adjectives with long vowels sometimes shortened these vowels in
6900-427: The more complex system of inflection in Old English : Nouns of the weak declension are primarily inherited from Old English n -stem nouns but also from ō -stem, wō -stem, and u -stem nouns, which did not inflect in the same way as n -stem nouns in Old English, but joined the weak declension in Middle English. Nouns of the strong declension are inherited from the other Old English noun stem classes. Some nouns of
7000-460: The most studied and read work of the period. The transition from Late Old English to Early Middle English had taken place by the 1150s to 1180s, the period when the Augustinian canon Orrm wrote the Ormulum , one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English. The influence of Old Norse aided the development of English from a synthetic language with relatively free word order to
7100-738: The nobility and the gentry. He may also have been paid by the authors of works such as Lorenzo Gulielmo Traversagni, who wrote the Epitome margaritae eloquentiae , which Caxton published c. 1480 . The John Rylands Library in Manchester holds the second-largest collection of printing by Caxton, after the British Library 's collection. Of the Rylands collection of more than 60 examples 36 are complete and unsophisticated copies and four are unique. Caxton's precise date of death
7200-693: The old insular g and the Carolingian g (modern g ), the former continued in use as a separate letter, known as yogh , written ⟨ȝ⟩ . This was adopted for use to represent a variety of sounds: [ɣ], [j], [dʒ], [x], [ç] , while the Carolingian g was normally used for [g]. Instances of yogh were eventually replaced by ⟨j⟩ or ⟨y⟩ and by ⟨gh⟩ in words like night and laugh . In Middle Scots , yogh became indistinguishable from cursive z , and printers tended to use ⟨z⟩ when yogh
7300-423: The other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of the roughly one dozen forms of the definite article ("the"). The dual personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) also disappeared from English during this period. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages (though more slowly and to
7400-521: The period in Scandinavia and Northern England do not provide certain evidence of an influence on syntax. However, at least one scholarly study of this influence shows that Old English may have been replaced entirely by Norse, by virtue of the change from Old English to Norse syntax. While the Old Norse influence was strongest in the dialects under Danish control that composed the southern part of
7500-660: The poem that follows the Complaint in his Series , he describes his worsening eyesight, which further hindered his work as a scribe. On 4 March 1426, the Exchequer rolls record a last reimbursement to Hoccleve (for red wax and ink for office use). He died soon after: on 8 May 1426 his corrody (allowance for food and clothing) at Southwick Priory in Hampshire was passed to Alice Penfold to be held "in manner and form like Thomas Hoccleve now deceased". Hoccleve, more than any other 15th-century writer, worked to cast Chaucer as
7600-487: The posture would become a conventional form of authorial self-presentation in the Renaissance. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Hoccleve as the first recorded user of many words, including annuity , causative , flexible , innate , interrupt , manual , miserable , notice , obtain , pitiless , slut and suspense . The Regement of Princes , written for Henry V of England shortly before his accession,
7700-569: The resulting doublet pairs include warden (from Norman) and guardian (from later French; both share a common ancestor loaned from Germanic). The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same dialects as they had before the Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that evolved individually from Old English. Early Middle English (1150–1350) has
7800-740: The second half of the 14th century in the emerging London dialect, although he also portrays some of his characters as speaking in northern dialects, as in " The Reeve's Tale ". In the English-speaking areas of lowland Scotland , an independent standard was developing, based on the Northumbrian dialect . This would develop into what came to be known as the Scots language . A large number of terms for abstract concepts were adopted directly from scholastic philosophical Latin (rather than via French). Examples are "absolute", "act", "demonstration", and "probable". The Chancery Standard of written English emerged c. 1430 in official documents that, since
7900-458: The second person singular in -(e)st (e.g., þou spekest , "thou speakest"), and the third person singular in -eþ (e.g., he comeþ , "he cometh/he comes"). ( þ (the letter "thorn") is pronounced like the unvoiced th in "think", but under certain circumstances, it may be like the voiced th in "that"). The following table illustrates a typical conjugation pattern: Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving
8000-409: The strong type have an -e in the nominative/accusative singular, like the weak declension, but otherwise strong endings. Often, these are the same nouns that had an -e in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English (they, in turn, were inherited from Proto-Germanic ja -stem and i -stem nouns). The distinct dative case was lost in early Middle English, and although the genitive survived, by
8100-420: The titles himself. His major guiding principle in translating was an honest desire to provide the most linguistically exact replication of foreign language texts into English, but the hurried publishing schedule and his inadequate skill as a translator often led to wholesale transference of French words into English and to numerous misunderstandings. The English language was changing rapidly in Caxton's time, and
8200-472: The unnamed friend of his plans to write a tale he owes to his good patron, Humphrey of Gloucester , and of translating a portion of Henry Suso 's popular Latin treatise on the art of dying – a task the friend discourages, saying that too much study was the cause of his mental illness. The Series then fulfils this plan, continuing with moralized tales of Jereslaus' Wife and of Jonathas (both from Gesta Romanorum ). The Series next turns to Learn to die ,
8300-417: The woman said she understood. After recounting the interaction, Caxton wrote: "Loo what ſholde a man in thyſe dayes now wryte egges or eyren/ certaynly it is harde to playſe euery man/ by cauſe of dyuerſite ⁊ chaũge of langage" ("Lo, what should a man in these days now write: egges or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language"). Works published by Caxton from
8400-470: The works that he was given to print were in a variety of styles and dialects. Caxton was a technician, rather than a writer, and he often faced dilemmas concerning language standardisation in the books that he printed. He wrote about that subject in the preface to his Eneydos . His successor Wynkyn de Worde faced similar problems. Caxton is credited with standardising the English language through printing by homogenising regional dialects and largely adopting
8500-786: Was Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres ( Sayings of the Philosophers ), first printed on 18 November 1477, translated by Earl Rivers , the king's brother-in-law. Caxton's translations of the Golden Legend (1483) and The Book of the Knight in the Tower (1484) contain perhaps the earliest verses of the Bible to be printed in English. He produced the first translation of Ovid 's Metamorphoses in English. His translation of
8600-526: Was born in 1368, as he states when writing in 1421 ( Dialogue, 1.246 ) that he has seen "fifty wyntir and three". Nothing is known of his family, but they probably came from the village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire . In November 1420, Hoccleve's fellow Privy Seal clerk John Bailey returned land and tenements in Hockliffe to him, which suggests that Hoccleve may indeed have had family ties there. What
8700-425: Was indicated by agreement of articles and pronouns (e.g., þo ule "the feminine owl") or using the pronoun he to refer to masculine nouns such as helm ("helmet"), or phrases such as scaft stærcne (strong shaft), with the masculine accusative adjective ending -ne . Single-syllable adjectives added -e when modifying a noun in the plural and when used after the definite article ( þe ), after
8800-457: Was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll. Caxton's family "fairly certainly" consisted of his parents, Philip and Dionisia, and a brother, Philip. However, the charters used as evidence there are for the manor of Little Wratting in Suffolk ; in one charter, this William Caxton is referred to as "otherwise called Causton saddler". One possible candidate for William's father
8900-408: Was not always paid as regularly as he would have wished, or in full; he is known for complaining about his lack of funds. Hoccleve is not known for his successful career. His first known, datable poem, The Letter to Cupid , was a 1402 translation of Christine de Pizan 's L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours , may have been seen as inappropriately francophile in the context of the rising English nationalism of
9000-492: Was not available in their fonts; this led to new spellings (often giving rise to new pronunciations), as in McKenzie , where the ⟨z⟩ replaced a yogh, which had the pronunciation /j/ . William Caxton William Caxton ( c. 1422 – c. 1491 ) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as
9100-520: Was not yet a distinct j , v , or w , and Old English scribes did not generally use k , q , or z . Ash was no longer required in Middle English, as the Old English vowel /æ/ that it represented had merged into /a/ . The symbol nonetheless came to be used as a ligature for the digraph ⟨ae⟩ in many words of Greek or Latin origin, as did ⟨œ⟩ for ⟨oe⟩ . Eth and thorn both represented /θ/ or its allophone / ð / in Old English. Eth fell out of use during
9200-417: Was ousted by it in most dialects by the 15th. The following table shows some of the various Middle English pronouns. Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources because of differences in spellings and pronunciations at different times and in different dialects. As a general rule, the indicative first person singular of verbs in the present tense ended in -e (e.g., ich here , "I hear"),
9300-580: Was printed for the Roxburghe Club in 1860 and by Early English Text Society in 1897. (See Frederick James Furnivall 's introduction to Hoccleve's Works; I. The Minor Poems , in the Phillipps manuscript 8131, and the Durham manuscript III. p, Early English Text Society, 1892.) Furnivall 's edition of Hoccleve's complete works, still largely standard for scholars, was reprinted in the 1970s; however, Michael Seymour's Selections from Hoccleve , published by
9400-444: Was re-examined by scholars, particularly John Burrow . Today he is most well known for his Series , which includes the earliest autobiographical description of mental illness in English, and for his extensive scribal activity. Three holographs of his poetry have survived, and he also copied literary manuscripts by other writers. As a clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal , he wrote hundreds of documents in French and Latin. Hoccleve
9500-475: Was some inflectional simplification (the distinct Old English dual forms were lost), but pronouns, unlike nouns, retained distinct nominative and accusative forms. Third person pronouns also retained a distinction between accusative and dative forms, but that was gradually lost: The masculine hine was replaced by him south of the River Thames by the early 14th century, and the neuter dative him
9600-667: Was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages . Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography . Writing conventions during
9700-480: Was still married in November 1420 when he and his wife receive bequests in a will. The marriage was costly for his career; married clerks were traditionally unable to hold government office, and in the political instability of the early 15th century, Henry V leaned on the legitimizing power of tradition. He appears to have been something of a loner, poor at leveraging social connections in the service of his career or personal wealth. Worse still, at some point after writing
9800-411: Was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character. Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with some words and grammatical structures in common, speakers of each language roughly understood each other, but according to historian Simeon Potler the main difference lied on their inflectional endings, which led to much confusion within the mixed population that existed in
9900-761: Was the first editor of Chaucer's work. Hoccleve also wrote out the majority of the Privy Seal Formulary, British Library, MS Add. 24062, and wrote hundreds of documents in his capacity as a Privy Seal clerk. Hoccleve found a 17th-century admirer in William Browne , who included his Jonathas in Shepheard's Pipe (1614). Browne added a eulogy of the poet, whose works he intended to publish in their entirety (Works, ed. W. C. Hazlitt , 1869, ii. f 96–198). In 1796 George Mason printed Six Poems by Thomas Hoccleve never before printed . De Regimine Principum
10000-487: Was the first to translate Aesop's Fables in 1484. Caxton was not an adequate translator, and under pressure to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, he sometimes simply transferred French words into English; but because of the success of his translations, he is credited with helping to promote the Chancery English that he used to the status of standard dialect throughout England. In 2002, Caxton
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