THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRST STANDARD

In this section deals with the development that was completed at the latest by
the middle of the thirteenth. The standard associated with late West-Saxon was
strongest at the end of tenth and beginning of the eleventh century. A new series of
Danish invasions started at the end of the tenth century, the first of two major
conquests that England was to suffer over the next hundred years. One of the resulted
of the incursion is defeat of English levies under the Eldorman Bhyrnoth at Maldon in
1991 which had in its turn motivated the composition of the poem the Battle of
Maldon.
Danish invasion began with the aim of incorporating England within a
Scandinavian empire stretching across the North Sea and it was accomplished under
the Danish king Canute in 1016. Danish king Canute divided the country to up into
four major areas, each governed by an earl. The effect of the ruled of Canute as
English kings is to continue the polices of the previous Anglo-Saxon monarchy. The
church saw in Canute a protector and benefactor, who would strengthen its position
and support its polices.
Danish as a language posed no threat to this standard because the numer of
those who spoke Danish in England was limited, and there is every reason to believe
that the Danes assimilated quickly to Anglo-Saxon culture. When the Danish royal
line in England came to an end, the throne reverted to the who had spent twenty-five
years in exile in Frence.
When the Danish royal line in England came to an end, the throne reverted to
the Anglo-Saxon royal house in the person of Edward the Confessor who had spent
twenty-five years in exile in France. Meanwhile the other parts of Canutes empire
were being fought over by his relatives; in England the outcome of this struggle was
watched with some trepidation since whoever emerged asa the successful contender
in Scandinavia could then turn his attention to regaining control of England.
Nevertheless, Edward disbanded the fleet which had been held in readiness to prevent
the landing of any invasion force from Denmark or Norway.

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When Edward the Confessor died in 1066, Harold Godwinson was elected to
the throne. This election was perfectly legal, although Harold was not a member of
the royal family and had no royal blood. The death of Edward and the succession of
Harold prompted a rebellion in Northumbria against Tostig, who was both Harold
Godwinsons brother and the earl there. Tostig who was the earl there was
disposed as earl and went into exile. It caused by Harold Hardada to assert his claim
to the English throne.
To many people the Norman Conquest symbolizes the submersion of the
English language under the influx of French. It happened in the period 1066-1500 and
French completely changed the nature of English. William accompanied with small
people, and it would be reasonable to suggest that the native speaker of France not
more 10 percent. The greatest population in England consisted of the peasant who
tilled the land and the number of them almost 85-90 percent of all people here. They
would not have been affected by the introduction of French.
The man who accompanied William included not only Normans, but also
Frenchmen from other parts of France. They all spoke their own local variety of
French, for at this time the standardization of French based round the Ile de France,
which is today known as France, had hardly begun. The French spoken in England
was not the French that ultimately became accepted as the standard in the north of
France and spread from there to the rest of the century; it is that variety which we
know as Anglo-Norman. Because of the use of Anglo-Norman in England, French
loan-words borrowed before the thirteenth century often show the phonological
characteristics of Anglo-Norman rather than those of Central French.
Two examples can illustrate distinction, for in many cases English borrowed a
word in both its Anglo-Norman and its Central French from, with the second being
the later loan. Latin initial /k/ remained in Anglo-Norman as /k/, but in Central French
it developed the palatal form /t/. Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) explicitly
links French with Latin as a language to be learned, and thus also as a language which
a young man ought to learn if he is to get on in the world. Beside it, Gerald also
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mention that they had learned to speak excellent French even though he had never
been out of England.
One might assume from this that Anglo-Norman as a spoken language had
largely ceased to be common by the beginning of the thirteenth century except in
special households like that of the royal family. French was clearly the necessary
language in this kind of management, and it was imperative for noblemen to have
some understanding of the language if they were not to be cheated by their
employees.
Because works written after the Conquest increasingly used French or Latin
,there are few original writing in English. What is characteristic of this period is the
copying of many text written before the Conquest so that the Old English standard
was kept alive. When it became increasingly difficult for contemporaries to
understand what the Old English meant, then glosses to difficult words were inserted
in these copies. Sometimes translations were provided. The thirteenth century alone
provides examples of five manuscripts with glosses in English, seventeen with
glosses in English and Latin, and six with glosses in Latin.
The continuation of the writing system is attested to in various text written during
this early post Conquest period. The most significant is probably the Peterborough
Chronicle ,the copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle maintained at Peterborough until
1154.The Peterborough chronicle consists of three distinct parts. The first which
contains entries up to 1121 are in the same hand and ink, an so they must have been
copied from another text after 1121.The second consists of the entries from 1122 to
1131 and are written in the same hand that wrote the first part, but at different times.
the third part contains the rest of the Chronicle until 1154 written in a separate hand.
From the local references and the identity of the scribal hands with other text which
come from

Peterborough

there can be little doubt about its localization. The

language of annals up to 1121 is essentially Standard Old English, though there are
one or two interesting forms with suggest the influence of the standard on those for

The Aftermath of the First Standard | 3

whom it did not represent their spoken language. In several words the scribe uses <y>
were one might have expected <e>:wyrre war for the Anglo-Norman were.
To return to the copy of the early annals, wemay also note that they contain no
words wich would be out of place in Standard Old English; rather the vocabulary is
notable for the many archaic or obsolescent words they contain. The annals from
1122 onwards more adequately represent the dialect of the East Midlands, though
they are strongly influenced by the Old English Standard.
The punctuation uses a full stop, though sometime it is possible that the
manuscript has a punctus elevatus, which is difficult to read.
As for spelling the text still preserves the old English wynn <,p>,although it
also uses <uu> and <u>. later the symbol <y> which was used only as other, suythe.
The use of <th> is more common medially than initially ,where <p> and <o> are used
as well as <t> in the article.
No distinction continued to be made between the voiced and voiceless forms
written indiscriminately as </>.<> <wynn> is no longer used regularly ,for <u>
or <uu> are employed.
This letter was to fall out of the language in the thirteenth century. The
vocabulary of this passage is rather traditional ,and although new words were
introduced into the chronicle from other languages, the basic vocabulary was
unchanged/the older word Angelcynn has given way to newer form Engleland, though
this was also found. In earlier texts. The meaning of eorl is that found in aristocracy
holding land from the king ,rather than man, warrior which it had had in earlier
English. The new word castles from French had been used once or twice before the
conquest ,but was now becoming a regular replacement for OE burh, which was
restricted to the sense town/but OE ferd has not been replaced by the French armee
yet.
Change were taking place in English phonology in this period though naturally
not all of them are attested in this brief passage. It is appropriate to review all these

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changes now whether they occur in this passage or not. At or before the time of the
conquest a series of changes to vowel and diphthong length occurred ,though these
changes are not found in the writing system till much later. Consonant groups
consisting of a liquid or nasal ,r,l,n,m, followed by a voiced sound of a similar nature,
lengthened the preceding vowel or diphthong. The change did not take place if there
were three consonants of which the first two constituted a lengthening group, thus we
would expect words like land and helpan to have long vowels, andcild would have a
long vowel, but the plural cildru would not because of the group of three consonants
(cf. ModE child/children). This change was not introduced in all dialects and the
variation between different parts of the noun and verb paradigms led to many
variations. Long vowels and diphthongs were shortened if they occurred before two
consonants or in the antepenultimate syllable of a word.
The first change in the vowel/diphthong system is the monophthongisation of
the old English diphthongs so that o( : ) became (:) and fell together with
existing (:). Diphthong eo (:) was monophthongised to a rounded e sound, which
may sometimes be represented as <e/ee> or as <o/oo>. forms of a verb like OE
ceosan in middle English may appear as chose or chese. The spellings <ea> and <eo>
continued to be used in this period because of the influence of the standard, even
though words such as OE clne and beam now had the same vowel sound. Although
many unstressed syllables had become leveled as schwa, usually written <e>, the
were still pronounced and could cause this lengthening process to operate. The effects
of this change are various throughout the different dialects, for it seems to have been
more influential in the south than the north, and the results are far from uniform.
The major developments in the consonants took place with the fricatives
,liquids and nasals. In old English there was no distintion, as we have seen, between
the voiced and voiceless fricatives, and the symbols <v> and <z> were rarely found
in old English texts.

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Generally voiceless consonants occurred initially and the voice ones medially
in voiced environments. For example the letters < v > and < z > were introduced to
assist the differentiation of what have become phonemes. In modern English we now
distinguish between fan and van and between mace and maze. Generally the symbol <
u,v > did not have the distribution characteristic of today, since < v > was used at the
beginning of words and < u > medially, giving such spelling as vp up and heue
have.
Two works in this early post Conquest period are notable are notable for their
attempts to create a regular writing system : Ormulum and the Ancrene Wisse.
The opening of the preface of the Ormulum reads :
iss boc is nemmnedd Orrmulum Fori att Orr mitt wrohhte.
The name of the author, which he spells Orrm,from ON ormr, is cognate with
OE wyrm. This name illustrates the penetration of Old Norse from. More important is
the spelling < rr >, for Orm choose to double all consonants after short vowels. This
tells us that the system of long consonant, which were written as double consonants,
found in Old English had disappeared, and hence there was no longer a distinction
between short and long consonants. The important feature of Orms poem is that he
tried to devise a new, regular system of writing, and in this activity he may have been
influenced by his knowledge of the earlier standard. He also uses three different form
of g to indicate the different sounds that might otherwise be represented by this
symbol. He invented a new symbol with a flat top to represent / g / , and used the
Caroline < g > for /dz/ which in OE writing systems had been written as < c z > as
in a word like ecz

( ModE edge ). Old English < z > he used for the palatal

sound / j /. Throughout his poem he shows his concern for accuracy. For example, he
starts representing OE eo as a diphthong, but gradually turns to representing it as a
monophthong. He also uses zho as a feminine nominative singular of the third person
of the personal pronoun which had been heo in Old English ( she in ModE ). The
Ormulum also contains many alliterative phrases whichare modeled on Old Norse as
well as phrasal verbs, consisting of lexical verb and an adverbial preposition. The

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alliterative phrases include flitenn & farenn to travel, go ,sammtale & sahhte
agreement and unnbedenn & unnonedd without being requestedand among the
phrasal verb there occur such forms as farenn for and zedenn forp to travel, go.
The Ancrenne Wisse and its related prose texts are found in several
manuscripts, of which two particularly significant: Corpus Christi College Cambridge
MS 402 [A] and Bodleian Library Oxford MS Bodley 34 [B]. The A and B are the
modern abbreviations used to refer to these manuscripts which are important only in
that their language is today is known as AB language. Although these two
manuscripts are written by different scribes, both are written in an English that
maintains a relatively consistent phonology, grammar and orthography. The
orthography is traditional and by this date somewhat old-fashioned. Although neither
manuscript is a holograph, for both are copies, the traditional orthography is retained.
The representation of the phonology is relatively uniform, an occurrence that was
unusual in Middle English and may reflect the influence of the former standard on the
originator of the spelling system. The author (s) of these texts must have used the
same dialect and spelling system as the two scribes, and that in turn means that in the
West Midlands, for the texts have been associated with Wigmore Abbey in north
Herefordshire.Those two manuscripts date from the early thirteenth century and the
texts themselves were probably written towards the end of the twelfth century .
The dialect is certainly that of the West Midlands and has certain affinities
with the language found in Lazamons brut. The scriptorium must have been attached
to a monastic house that contained a good library with texts in Latin and English.
Some of the English texts must have been associated with the Winchester school and
frequently copied. Although Wigmore is in remote spot, in was in contact with the
literary developments occurring in the West Midlands. Certain features of the spelling
system in the AB language are notable. It has three symbols < e, ea, a > to represent
the short vowels. Since < ea > was used in this dialect to represent French / / as in
deattses debts ( usually spelt dettes inmost dialect ). In the other words, the spelling
system had been devised when the dialect had three separate phonemes / e, o, a /.

The Aftermath of the First Standard | 7

This suggests that /a / developed from OE / / and that /e / was still a separate
phoneme and had not fallen together wit it. Other older features of this orthographic
system include the use of < h > to represent the palatal spirant / /. It also retains the
symbols < c, sc, z > which had been replaced in most writings by this time by
French-inspired spelling < ch, sch, g >. When these symbols represent palatals, they
are followed in the AB language by e so that they are distinguished from the same
symbols representing velar sounds. This was the system found in the Old English
standard. It is likely that this spelling system was established in the third quarter of
the twelfth century and survived at least fifty years in the area around Wigmore. This
spelling system was probably influenced by memories of the old English standard
although the system itself is considerably modified from that found in the preConquest period. It has been updated, but its genesis appears to depend upon the
earlier standard and is in many respects a development of it. From now on there were
no further attempts to created a standard English writing system which could be said
to look back to that found earlier, and Old English manuscripts ceased to be living
texts which were copied and recopied. A period of uncertainty as to writing in
English succeeded, and when a new standard started to arise it would be based on
different premises and different dialect area.

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