Middle English

When William the Conqueror defeated Harold at Hastings in 1066, he did not simply change who sat on the English throne — he split the language in two. For roughly two centuries after the Conquest, England ran on a linguistic double standard: Norman French for the court, the law, and the church; Old English for the kitchen, the field, and the cradle. A peasant plowing a field spoke of cows and pigs; the lord who owned that field spoke of beef and pork. The animal lived in English, the meat arrived at the table in French, and that gap between barn and banquet hall is still visible in Modern English today.

But languages refuse to stay separated when people cannot. By the thirteenth century, the Norman ruling class had been cut off from their French estates by war and politics; they were English landlords who happened to remember French. Meanwhile, the church's grip on Latin was loosening as universities and trade brought literacy to merchants and craftsmen who had no Latin and wanted none. The result was a three-way collision — Old English grammar, Norman French vocabulary, and Latin learning — that produced a language nobody planned: Middle English, a synthesis that borrowed shamelessly from every direction and shed the elaborate case system of its Old English parent in the process.

The Black Death of 1348 to 1350 accelerated everything. When a third of England's population died in two years, the surviving laborers and craftsmen held unprecedented social leverage. English speakers moved up in the world, and their language moved with them. In 1362, Parliament passed the Statute of Pleading, requiring that legal proceedings be conducted in English rather than French. In 1363, the Lord Chancellor opened Parliament in English for the first time. By 1399, Henry IV became the first king since the Conquest to deliver his coronation speech in English. The tongue of the commons had become the tongue of power.

Geoffrey Chaucer understood this better than anyone. Writing the Canterbury Tales in the 1380s and 1390s, he chose the East Midlands dialect — the speech of London, Oxford, and Cambridge — and gave it enough literary weight to outlast a dozen competing regional forms. When William Caxton set up England's first printing press in 1476, he printed in a language recognizably descended from Chaucer's. The Great Vowel Shift was already reshaping the sound of every long vowel in the language, pushing Middle English toward something a modern reader could almost, but not quite, understand. It lasted roughly four centuries. In that span it transformed from a battered survivor under Norman occupation into the template for a global tongue.