Abel 19 Channel

In 1066, a dynastic quarrel over the throne of England ended in victory for William, Duke of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings. William became King William I of England and his Norman companions (Normans were originally Norsemen who had conquered Northern France) became the feudal overlords of the Anglo-Saxon population.

England in the late 1000s, the 1100s, and 1200s became a bilingual country. Norman French was the prestige language, English the language of everyday folk. Few Normans learned English in this early Middle English period. French was the language of court, of law, of the literature of the period (though remember that Latin was still a significant literary and religious language).

Early Middle English (1100-1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (in the North, with many Norse borrowings). But it has a greatly simplified inflectional system. The complicated grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by means of the dative and accusative cases are replaced in Early Middle English with constructions that involve prepositions.

The Anglo Saxon Chronicles is consider the best writing references about the Middle Age because is maybe the only book that was able to survive through time and the one which describes the culture and traditions of this age.

The French and Latin were consider the languages of the "noble" people so all the wrtitings works related to the monarchy, the church, goverment and bussines were written in this languages.

English begins to re-establish itself in the 1200s, in the sense that native speakers developed the beginnings of a literary culture. As an example in the mid-1200s, an English friar named Thomas of Hales wrote a remarkable piece called "Love Rune," which has properties from the old English and the middle English so is consider one of the first works that goes from the old vocabulary to the middle one.

The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early Middle English, from about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in use; (2) the Central Middle English period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the gradual formation of literary dialects, the use of an orthography greatly influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation of final unaccented -e, and the borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words; the period was especially marked by the rise of the London dialect, in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer; and (3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500, which was marked by the spread of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish dialect and the other northern dialects. During this period the basic lines of inflection as they appear in Modern English were first established.

The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large groups: (1) Southern (subdivided into Southeastern, or Kentish, and Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of the River Thames; (2) Midland (corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old English times) in the area from the Thames to southern South Yorkshire and northern Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish Lowlands, Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham, northern Lancashire, and most of Yorkshire.