FROM MIDDLE ENGLISH TO MODERN ENGLISH

FROM MIDDLE ENGLISH TO MODERN ENGLISH
1. The Norman Conquest
When Edward died in January of 1066, he left no direct heir. There were two possible oblique. One was Edgar Atheling and the other one was Harold II. Edgar Atheling was too young to assume the throne, so Harold II was finally chosen to be a king.
On September, 25, 1066, Harold II could defeated a force led by Harold Hardraada but William, Duke of Normandy landed. English was defeated and Harold was killed. William simultan eously deprived the English earls of their power by breaking up the last vestiges of traditional mini-kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and the others, and repleacing them with a system of shires and baronies with his own local official, all Norman.

2. The Lingustic Concequences
The greatest changes in middle English are in vocabulary an semantics although certain gramatical and phonlogical changes.
In the towns, the great mass of citizen were skilled and unskilled laborers. Above them were the tradesmen and businessmen. A third less statistically significant element of the population was the the clergy.
Some axioms :
1. When social orders is fluid, upwarsly mobile lower clases are more likely to behave in ways they believe upper middle clases behave than when the society is rigrid.
2. Social orders become more fluid during periods of social up heaval.
3. In areas of high population density, contact between social clases is greater than when they are thinly distributed.
4. Contenporary observers of a social scene are more likely to comment on the unusual than the usual.

3. Norman French Vs. English (1066-1450)
There are two dates mark the major turning points in the influence of French on English after 1066. The first is 1204, when King Philip of France seized the Norman estates of barons whose primary alligiance was to King John of England and forced them to choose between France and England. The second date is 1348 , when the Black Death began to sweep across England, accelerating the social changes tha had been underway for some years.
Before 1204, the dialect of Normandy was naturally enough the prestige dialect of those French in England. Norman French was very likely spoken : (1) by the vast majority of the French invaders and colonists (the Normans), but not by all the French who settled in England; (2) relatively soon after 1100 by most, if not al upper-class native Englishmen; (3) by those middle class commercial Englishmen who had to deal with Normans; and (4) by most of middle management personel on the large estates who served French lords and supervised English serfs.
Evidence for the use of French among the 90 percent or so lower-class English peasants and laborers is hard to find and evaluate. The vast majority of English speaker, the lower class, were undoubtly monolingual.
For a century after 1066, written English continued to be use for occasional official purposes after spoken Frnch had widely replaced English as the working language of everyday goverment and law. In the last fifteenth century London English as linguistic standard was irrevocably assured when Caxton set up his printing shop in th London area.

4. Rebirth of Classical Learning
Under Norman rule, English learning declined, until by thirteenth century, Paris had replaced England as the center of European intellectual life. Paradoxically, it was probably the very resurgence of English described above in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that led English to adopt, with the thousand of French words it borrowed, thousands of Latin words as well.