Readers of medieval texts often wonder how close poetic depictions of Middle English are to daily usage. Did real people remark that “smale foweles maken melodye,” or did they merely comment on the singing of the birds? When Alisoun slams the window and says “tehee,” is this a representation of a giggle, or is it something that a young woman might have said? We are now at a 600-year distance from Middle English, and we feel that remoteness most especially when we think about everyday language. Knowing that most speakers were not literate, we suspect that the spoken language was where the excitement lay: the site where the vernacular power of English took hold, the source of energy that the written language tapped into. Most language change, we posit, originated in spoken practice,1 and we itch to know more about it. But what can we know?
This chapter title should perhaps more properly contain distancing quotation marks (“Everyday English” in late medieval England), since our picture of what daily language looked like in the medieval period can only ever be a constructed one. With evidence solely from written language – and restricted genres of written language at that – we have no direct sources on what colloquial Middle English might have been like. Instead, we are obliged to rely upon impressions collected from sections of texts that seem mimetic of everyday language and upon evidence from different kinds of texts that permit us to theorize about features and usage that seem more or less colloquial. We can, however, employ these kinds of evidence in a thoughtful way and consider the sorts of information that each of them provides together with an assessment of the limitations of each.2 Providing this kind of framework will be the object of this chapter.
Describing colloquial language in the Middle English period, in fact, often becomes a discussion of what it is not. This is what in medicine is referred to as a diagnosis of exclusion: eliminating all of the aspects of language that are not quotidian, and trying to make a picture of what is left. Thus, “everyday language” is understood through its opposition to other kinds of language; it is not literary, not poetic, not legal, not formal, not technical, not standardized, not supralocal. We can perceive continua in texts and types of writing for each of these characteristics and then consider “colloquial English” as a guiding idea that animates one of the poles of each. Thus, in the same way that “standard English” is a notion rather than the dialect of any particular person, “colloquial English” is a concept rather than the register of any particular text or region.
James A. H. Murray famously presents a schema of the existing lexicon of English in the preface of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (see Figure 6). Murray depicts the center of the word stock as occupied by the “common” words, a category that unites the literary and the colloquial. The radiating branches denote sources of words that enter the common language. For him, then:
“Scientific” and “foreign” words enter the common language mainly through literature; “slang” words ascend through colloquial use; the “technical” terms of crafts and processes, and the “dialect” words, blend with the common language both in speech and literature.3
We note from this description that his sense of the “literary” seems more general than our present-day sense of the register of literary writing; he invokes an earlier usage of literature as referring more broadly to letters or learning, and thus scientific and foreign words that come in through scholarship are sources for the literary. The “colloquial,” meanwhile, he includes as the lower half of the circle, with words entering through slang or informal spoken registers.
Figure 6. The English lexicon, from A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
Murray’s literary/colloquial binary evokes and reproduces the binary between written and spoken language. His use of the earlier sense of literary is closer to its etymological root (with which, of course, he would have been very familiar): the Latin littera (letter), and he might also have in mind that colloquial derives from Latin colloquium (speaking together). The common lexicon, therefore, includes words characteristic of written and spoken kinds of language. This division is a central one, and it is more complicated than it may appear at first glance. (I will address it further in a later section.)
Murray’s placement of the colloquial on the lower half of the circle also serves to visually reify the ideological hierarchy of “high” and “low” kinds of language. We see this ladder metaphor applied to styles and types of English, serving to rank or order particular kinds of language as considered to be more “elevated” or “higher” than others.
The allegedly “lower” status of colloquial language, together with the difficulty in approaching spoken Middle English, meant that the topic was not pursued head-on during the nineteenth century. Henry Cecil Wyld’s 1920 book A History of Modern Colloquial English was one of the first works to probe colloquial English in particular, though he meant by “colloquial English” the phenomenon of spoken language in general. The sense of colloquial as “spoken” was more live for Wyld, as it was for Murray; the term has come to refer to informal, casual language, the language of everyday life. “Colloquial language” is, thus, related to the language of speech, but they are no longer synonymous terms.
The field of English language study gained more sophisticated tools for considering variation in Middle English in the second half of the twentieth century. In the post-war years, the introduction of modern linguistics and the construction of the dialect atlases transformed the study of Middle English language.4 This led to a bifurcation in the conversation, though, as linguists focused more on the phonetic and dialectical aspects of everyday English, and literary scholars focused more on the elements of colloquial style in literary texts, overwhelmingly the works of Chaucer.5 More recently, though, linguists have re-emphasized questions of style and genre through historical pragmatics – and so this chapter looks to the older conversations in literary scholarship together with these newer conversations in historical pragmatics as a productive synthesis from which to approach everyday Middle English.
This chapter will address several questions as a means to considering colloquial language, then: what kinds of evidence do we have for approaching everyday English in the medieval period? How can written language be a tool for considering the divide between written and spoken English? Which types of Middle English texts provide sources for colloquial English? Which styles of writing provide sources for colloquial English? Literary studies and historical English language studies have both approached aspects of these questions, so in order to theorize everyday English, this chapter looks at style and at genre as ways to contextualize and frame notions of ordinary usage.
Style
Rhetorical styles
One way to approach everyday language is to read contemporaneous writers’ constructions of a plain language style and to conceive of writing as a continuum between greater or lesser degrees of elaborateness and decoration in stylistic choices. Examining the stylistic conceptions of different registers permits us to see which features and diction were adjudged by medieval writers to be elevated and which were deemed ordinary.
Medieval rhetoricians distinguish between three levels of style which they import from classical rhetorical descriptions of Greek and Latin. These classical rhetorics (Ciceronian, in particular) describe a high (or grand) style, a middle style, and a low style, each to be employed for different amounts of verbal adornment.6 The ideological model of a hierarchical ladder of style is evoked, with the styles characterized as high or low by the level of ornateness of the language: how “impressive” the words, phrasing, rhythms, and figures are. Typically, the low style, also called “simple” or “plain,” is taken to resemble quotidian spoken idiom (indeed, the Latin phrase used to describe the effect is “cotidianum sermonem”). Plain style, though, as Cicero and others warn, far from being a transcription of ordinary language, is actually a crafted effect, and it is not as simple as it appears.7
The effect of plainness, then, is one that is fashioned by the writer through diction, sentence structure, and ornament. Medieval scholars would have been familiar with these levels of style, either through the classical texts themselves or as they were invoked or adapted by medieval humanists – in patristic writings by St. Augustine and others or in later scholastic writing by Hugh of St. Victor – who acknowledged these three styles.8 The extent to which they were part of the common knowledge is less certain, though the Clerk’s Prologue in the Canterbury Tales alludes to the rhetorical training that the clerk would have had when the Host directs him to speak in plain language and save his high style for the proper setting:
The Host’s speech connects fancy figurative language to the high style, and easily understood language to the plain style. This suggests that writers and readers might have had at least a passing familiarity with these stylistic categories.
Acknowledging that medieval thinkers had a category for a style that is designed to evoke everyday language is very different from being able to isolate the features that make it seem colloquial, however. Scholarly attempts to generalize about “colloquial style” have often fallen back on our present-day grammatical intuitions as the criteria for colloquialness – which risks conflating “colloquial” with “modern,” as Dennis Rygiel discusses in his analysis of scholars who have called Ancrene Wisse’s style “colloquial.”10 Our sense of what sounds most speech-like and casual will often correlate more with what sounds like our contemporary diction or grammatical structures, and less with Middle English everyday diction and grammatical structures.
Further, even if we are able to isolate particular features that make plain style seem like ordinary speech, we are really examining colloquialisms rather than genuinely colloquial language. Certain usages become stereotypic of a particular kind of language, and examining constructed everyday English gives us only a picture of the literary conventions that signal ordinary language to readers or listeners of medieval texts. Consider, for comparison, modern blog posts. These are stylistically intended to be casual in tone, but the fashioning of this casual tone often employs tropes that resemble actual spoken style less than they resemble the usage of similar blogs, tweets, or other sites for constructed casual style. As these features get passed around and between users, stylistic constructions become as viral as images, videos, and messages. Although the community of writers producing a colloquial style is much smaller in late medieval England, we can presume that some of this fashioning must go on with respect to colloquialisms.
An examination of stylistic choices in Middle English shows a range in register and degree of elaboration with respect to both lexicon and syntax, and we can examine each of these to see how particular features serve as evidence for the continuum of colloquial style.
Vocabulary
The words of Middle English texts can give us clues to the words of ordinary English speakers in late medieval England. Just as James Murray divided up the word stock of English into different kinds of English from different sources, so we can divide the functions of different kinds of words in Middle English. Content can be a clue: texts or passages that deal with everyday occurrences and the trappings of daily life are a possible source for the kinds of words that constituted the active vocabulary of colloquial Middle English. Another promising context can be found in passages that are framed as representations of casual spoken language. Our instincts for quotidian life can lead us astray, however, when we project contemporary ideas of simplicity and ordinary life upon the past. For example, in present-day English, we create a distinction of register between medical texts and cookery texts: medical works are considered highly specialized works for trained professionals, and cookbooks are written for the general reader. In medieval English, though, these kinds of books were often composed in a similar register and were sometimes a combined project.11 We can use daily contexts as a helpful cue, then, if we bear in mind that our everyday contexts are not always in one-to-one correspondence with medieval everyday contexts.
If context is one kind of clue, etymological origin is another. It is a truism that Latin and French words are taken as characteristic of high style; the use of complicated latinate words is understood to make writing more formal, more elegant, or more beautiful. This aureate diction is so named in the fifteenth century and invoked directly by John Lydgate in “A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady”:
The poet calls upon the “wind of grace” and the “aureat licour” of the muse Clio to inspire his pen – the very phrase “aureate liquor” instantiating the elevated latinate borrowing that it invokes. And yet we cannot conclude from this the fact that all Anglo-Saxon-derived words are associated with low style and all Romance-derived words are associated with high style. While some borrowed French words would probably have sounded new or specialized in late Middle English (words like abjure or magnify, for example, have earliest citations in the OED between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and most of their medieval quotations are from formal, legal, or religious contexts13), the Anglo-Norman words that were borrowed in the post-Conquest years would have become part of the established common stock and would not probably sound particularly elevated centuries later (the OED includes words like granger [c. 1112], council [c. 1123], and war [1154] that seem to occur in a variety of more common contexts14). Similarly, some semantic fields borrowed extensively from French. Cooking may seem to us a very quotidian practice, and yet many of the culinary words in Middle English are drawn from French: broil (c. 1375), salad (1481–90), sausage (fifteenth century).15 We do not know to what extent these common food words would have sounded foreign and to what extent they would have been easily naturalized. While we can say that a high frequency of ornate, recently borrowed words from Latin and French might disqualify a text from exemplifying plain style, therefore, it is not helpful to simply compare proportions of Romance-origin words and Anglo-Saxon-origin words in the lexicon of a given passage to look for plain style.16
One place that we might look for everyday words is in the particular categories of the lexicon that have a more marked level of pragmatic content. These are communicative words that express subjectivity or affective response; they tend to be brief, inherently informal, and interpersonal. Such words or expressions are lexical items or short phrases which are particularly formulaic, so they can be easily slotted into passages of directly quoted speech to signal spoken language. Interjections, for example, are easily syntactically separable from the rest of a section of discourse – their use gets the reader’s (or listener’s) attention, marks speech-like passages, and organizes passages of discourse. I will discuss several pragmatic fields for these kinds of words: greetings, leave-takings, insults, and expressions of gratitude, apology, surprise, and distress.17
(a) Greetings and leave-takings: Opening and closing a conversation is a fundamental communicative task – a phatic act – so conversational language presents many pragmatic strategies for these. We know that everyday Middle English must have had a multiplicity of ways to enter and leave conversations, and it seems likely that these are easily co-opted by literary texts to accomplish this end in representation of spoken utterances. Such utterances build social connection; they can also serve to establish speakers’ respective locations in the social hierarchy, their acquaintance with one another, and their power relationship.18
how!: Thanne wol I clepe, “How, Alison! how, Iohn! Be murye!” (Canterbury Tales)19
what!: “What how, Mankynde!” (Mankind)20
Fare wel!: Now fayre well, felows all, ffor I must nedis weynd. (Towneley Plays)21
God save yow: God saue yow sire, what is youre swete wille? (Canterbury Tales)22
(b) Insults: Abuse has always been considered one of the primary categories for colloquial language. Maligning and belittling one another is apparently a long-standing pragmatic use for language,23 and it is more likely that these insulting words in language were developed in everyday speech and then invoked in written contexts.24
villain: Goddys treytour, and ryʒt vyleyn! Hast þou no mynde of Marye Maudeleyn? (Mannyng, Handling Sin)25
dog: Fy on you, lousy doggys! (Ludus Coventriae)26
harlot: Go hens, harlottys, in xx dewill way! (Towneley Plays)27
whoreson: What doostou here, þou mysbiʒete gome? … Fy, vyle ateynt hores sone [vr. hore sone]! (King Alexander)28
quene: Whom callest thou “queane,” scabde dogge?29
(c) Formulaic words for expressions of gratitude, apology, surprise, or distress: Particular words are used communicatively in subjective expressions that are often inserted as interjections or as single syntactic units. It seems likely that literary texts can use these words to invoke stylistically the affectual immediacy of expressions of thanks, sorrow, anger, despair, etc.
alas!: Alas! hit is shame that evir ye were made knyght. (Malory, Works)30
harrow!: Ther was many “weylaway,” “Harrow,” “alas,” and “out ay.” (Laud Troy Book)31
pees!: Peese, dame, lat be, do way. (Dublin Play of Abraham and Isaac)32
gramercy: “For grete luf I it ʒow take,” … Sir Ywayne said: “Dame, gramercy.” (Ywain and Gawain)33
ha!: Then carpys þe conquerour crewell wordez, “Haa, crauaunde knyghte, a cowarde þe semez!” (Morte Arthure)34
parde: Parde, I haf do hym seruice; I was with hym at Northampton … and now agayn at Seynt Albones. (Paston Letters)35
All of these conversational, “speech-like” words have been taken to suggest lexical items that might come from everyday English, and this seems a fair assessment. Always, though, our lists must come with caveats: these are the words that are selected as speech-mimetic and thus the role of literary convention must be present to some degree. Similarly, these words are polyfunctional in texts and perform roles of organization and narration as well as representation. So, for example, Vivian Salmon lists terms of family relationship in her description of colloquialisms in Chaucerian English (sone, doghter, wif, fader, etc. as address terms).36 The use of these terms in dialogue may indicate (and probably does) that these terms were more readily used in everyday Middle English (and this makes sense). But the higher frequency can also be a product of the narrative need to clarify the relations between speakers, and the discursive need to mark speech onsets – it is not necessarily evidence of their higher frequency in speech. Examples like this demonstrate that it is not always possible to tease apart the multiple discursive functionalities of words; often, we must accompany suggestions about colloquial usage with qualifications about other possible functions.
Another way to target colloquial language is to consider its discursive environment – words like those listed are most common in particular locations in literary texts. One such site is the onset of passages of direct speech. I have previously argued that with quotation marks not yet part of the conventions of written language, Middle English texts must draw upon lexical items as signals of the beginning of passages of directly reported speech. So we see these “speech-like” words appearing to flag direct speech onsets. Interjections form part of a group of speech-internal “perspective shifters” that also includes vocatives (sire), deictic pronouns (ye), spatio-temporal deictics (here, now), tense switching, and other pragmatic markers (yis) that have the function of clarifying that a text has switched from narrative to quoted direct speech.37 Looking through my data sample, I see a general adherence to this principle – quite formulaically in some texts, more varied in others. Here are several lines from the sample, taken from the section from Cursor Mundi (emphasis added):38
Notice how the first word of the reported speech (which would not have been set off with quotation marks in Middle English) is often one of the “perspective shifters” or “speech-like” words. We can, therefore, look at this position in discourse – the onset of direct speech – as a site for particularly interpersonal or “speech-like” items. This discursive slot, therefore, can illuminate vocabulary that writers and readers might have found to be notably characteristic of speech – at least to the extent that it could help to clarify that the narrative has switched to represented speech.
Syntax
Colloquial syntax may be even more difficult than colloquial vocabulary to approach, because, while words can be lifted more easily from speech into writing to signal a speech-like effect, sentence structures are harder to pop in, and typically less distinctive as marked stylistic choice. Syntax is also more subject to the problem of representation: representations of speech structures are famously unlike actual speech structures.39
A broader application of the list of words with higher pragmatic and interpersonal content can be found in the kinds of sentence structures co-occur with them. In other words, if we observe that certain words were used to create a “speech-like” effect in medieval texts, then what kind of syntactic structures accompany these words? Features that have been suggested to characterize speech-like language include:
(a) A greater use of
regional or local grammar
second-person pronouns
questions
imperatives
negation
certain discourse markers (e.g., well)
inserts (e.g., nay)
pro-forms (personal pronouns, DO as a pro-verb)
ellipsis
lexical chunks or formulae
dysfluencies and reductions (contractions, missing auxiliaries, dislocations)
(b) A lesser use of
elaboration (phrase length)
token–type ratio (producing more repetition)
complex lexis.40
This is a list of forms that has been suggested to correlate with colloquial English, but not a list that has been fully investigated with respect to Middle English texts. For an example of how one might probe the accuracy of the selection of these forms as characteristic of colloquial Middle English, see the case study of second-person pronouns in the Middle English Grammar Corpus below.
Any attempts to describe particular syntactic forms as colloquial, of course, run into the problem that pre-modern texts are differently organized. Margaret Schlauch, for example, in her analysis of Chaucer’s colloquial style, makes much of repetition. She discusses as a particular example the repetition of inquit clauses: the “wearisome hammering refrain of pet phrases often introduced: the ‘he said’s’ and ‘leave it to me’s’ of undisciplined speakers.”41 In previous work, I argue that (in an age before quotation marks) the he saids would have had more grammatical content as markers of textual organization and that they would not have seemed as repetitive to Middle English readers – just as the word the does not sound like a “wearisome hammering” to us today. In early written texts, with no quotation marks or other punctuation to demarcate directly reported speech, the words of the text, particularly the quotative verbs, are used for this function.42 While repetition may indeed characterize colloquial language (as Schlauch claims), we cannot dismiss the other pragmatic purposes of repetition.
It takes care, then, to tease apart the usage of these syntactic structures that have been posited to be colloquial. Each one needs to be evaluated with respect to its syntactic and pragmatic contexts – work that will, one hopes, become more straightforward and more effective as our electronic resources become more developed. By taking usage and context into account, we begin to have a clearer picture of the stylistic choices in lexicon and syntax, and a clearer picture of the continuum in degrees of colloquialness. To look effectively at diction and sentence structure, then, we must consider them in their sociopragmatic and textual contexts. This involves a consideration of their genre-specific contexts.
Genre
Another vector that scholars have used to approach everyday English is genre: the differences between types of texts and the ways that each might provide clues to ordinary usage. The genre of a text correlates to its function, its readership, its level of formality, the register of vocabulary that it employs, and the different syntactic and pragmatic strategies that are used to position a text with respect to the genre.
We see a contemporaneous understanding of the ways that lexicon is adapted for different genres and registers in the usage of the Middle English word termes. The word termes indicates particular words that are used in larger proportions in a certain genre or register of texts and therefore begin to characterize these texts. It is often associated with jargon.
This kind of specialized vocabulary can be associated with many domains: legal, religious, ecclesiastic, medical, scholarly, and so forth. Termes, therefore, are attached to particular genres, typically of written language, but the word is appropriated to refer to any specialized discourse. This usage is established enough that Chaucer can mock it in his phrase “cherles termes” (Reeve’s Tale 3917) to refer to a set of dedicated lexical items common to villains. For Chaucer, collocates that co-occur with termes include:
cherles termes (Reeve’s Tale 3917)
Owing to the association with specialized language, termes gets indexed as a marker of register and formality; the use of the word indicates a rhetorical awareness of the differences in vocabulary between different types of texts.
Different genres, therefore, provide alternative angles on the construction of written language and integrate spoken strategies in different ways, and we can learn about everyday English by considering the ways that each genre varies its relationship to speech.
Speech-related texts
The elusive notion of “everyday English” in Middle English texts continues to return to the question of the relationships that forms of writing have to the spoken language. Scholars have famously expressed frustration with the uphill struggle of using written sources to examine spoken language. Wyld begins his study of the history of colloquial English with a question: “We are bound, therefore, to make the best use we can of the written records of the past, always bearing in mind that our question in respect to the writers of these documents is ever – How did they speak?”44 And William Labov later echoed this sentiment in his oft-quoted remark that historical linguistics is “the art of making the best use of bad data,” a phrase which inspired scholars of historical pragmatics to confront the “bad data problem.”45 To consider everyday English entails an examination of the ways that we have approached the spoken language of the past, and genre has been one of the primary analytic categories that scholars have used.
Speech is functionally different in its communicative aims than writing, of course – in James Milroy’s characterization, speech is used to communicate with people who are present at the time and writing is used to communicate with people who are not.46 But writing is not monolithic in this respect, and written texts and genres have differing relationships to the kind of communicative immediacy used when addressing people who are present. Norman Blake has noted that “the conventions of speech are processed in writing to produce particular effects,”47 and we can examine different types of writing to see how these effects are differently produced. Late medieval written genres, therefore, provide alternative angles on the construction of written language and integrate spoken strategies in different ways; we can learn about everyday English by considering the ways that each genre varies its relationship to speech.
Scholars of historical pragmatics (working with early modern and modern texts) posit not a clean separation between spoken and written, but a cline between different levels of “speech-related” written texts.48 Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö suggest three categories to nuance the relationship between writing and speech: “speech-like” genres (e.g., personal correspondence), which contain the aspect of communicative immediacy; “speech-based” genres (e.g., trial proceedings), which are based on an actual speech event; and “speech-purposed” genres (e.g., plays), which are designed to be articulated orally.49 These categories will translate differently to different historical and cultural contexts, certainly. It is possible, for example, that literary writing is more of a speech-purposed genre in medieval English than it is for Culpeper and Kytö’s work in the early modern period, since we know that in the Middle Ages some forms of literary writing were experienced aloud – that public reading was popular among courtly audiences.50 To use genre for considering the relationship of speech to writing is to study the practical foundations in how texts are constructed and used: the socioeconomic conditions, the readership, the polyfunctionality of texts.
Sample genres
Literary scholars turned first to literary texts as examples: Chaucer’s fabliaux, in particular, have often been cited as examples of colloquial English. Norman Blake writes a history of the fabliau as a colloquial genre, examining French fabliaux as a clue to the genre as it is imported into English. Fabliaux, he suggests, employ dialogue with “a veneer of realism.”51 The speeches mimic the language of the street and of the house; they sound like bawdy stories told in rowdy settings. They contain words about sexuality, genitalia, and lewd behavior which have no other witnesses – giving us a small window into what was surely a much more developed semantic field of spoken words about sex and bodily functions. And yet, even as they are purportedly written in a low style, they are certainly unlike colloquial English in many ways (most obviously, we trust that speakers of Middle English did not typically converse in rhymed couplets). Further, they are constructed as part of a fundamentally literary project. E. Talbot Donaldson points out the intertextuality of the Miller’s Tale, for example: it contains and mocks courtly phrases from works like Middle English minstrel romances and secular lyrics.52 Chaucer’s fabliaux, then, are, on one level, common, vulgar stories, but they are common, vulgar stories filtered through literary edifice: the fabliau is a genre borrowed from French (with a fancy French name) that employs inversions of courtly and poetic tropes. In a circular way, then, while the fabliau is crafted to offer a constructed sound of the street and the house, the very fact that it is a construction makes it more literary and less colloquial.
Other genres that are potentially promising as sources of everyday English included playtexts (which often purport to mimic speech), saints’ lives (a popular genre with a wide audience and a broad appeal), correspondence, and science writing. Each genre has its own strengths and limitations as a source of evidence. Scientific exposition is a genre that would be considered highly technical in present-day English, but not necessarily so in Middle English. A Treatise on the Astrolabe, for example, has been held up by Margaret Schlauch and others as being an example of more colloquial style.53 First, it purports to be written for Chaucer’s ten-year-old son Lewis (“Lyte Lowys”), so Chaucer declares in his Preface that he will employ simplified syntax, using “rude endityng” (because “hard sentence is ful hevy at onys for such a child to lerne”). And yet the treatise itself does not necessarily conform to our ideas of “rude endityng” – is this because we are judging the syntax by modern standards or because Chaucer is not quite honest in his claims about how straightforward the writing is? It has even been suggested that Chaucer is not quite honest in his claim that the work is directed to Lewis either – that Lewis is a straw man rather than the actual intended reader.54 Looking at texts as examples of colloquial language, therefore, should also involve a consideration of their generic context.
The next section will pursue two brief case studies of different genres of texts and explore the ways that different linguistic features are realized.
Case studies
A full study of daily language in Middle English would ideally combine quantitative and qualitative methods for examination. On the one hand, quantitative study can turn up variables that might be harder to intuit (being more a product of the texts than of our intuitions based on modern usage), and it can better pull together different kinds of genres and registers for cross-comparison. Such comparative work is less subject to the anecdotalism inherent in qualitative examination: it attempts to be more representative, and thus to use large amounts of data to correct for variations in usage. A qualitative pursuit of everyday English, for its part, can better accommodate different kinds of context. It allows for closer analysis of finer points and does not require the categorizational amalgamating that can sometimes send data-driven work astray (or can drive down values of n to the point that they are scarcely conclusive). The study of colloquial English, then, should engage in a little of both. There are limitations, certainly: the existing corpora and databases do not make quantative examination of such questions very straightforward. Tagged corpora are few and not representative across genres, and the existing databases do not facilitate syntactic comparisons. This small investigation will present suggestive examples, therefore, of the kinds of questions and conclusions that can be pursued with different kinds of tools. (It aims to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.) First, I will provide a limited quantitative glimpse at the word your in the Middle English Grammar Corpus. Then I will offer a small qualitative look at a particular text, Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English, in order to give context on the kinds of insights into daily language use that it provides.
I Correspondence: the Middle English Grammar Corpus
Culpeper and Kytö’s category of “speech-like” genres includes personal correspondence; we can look to Middle English letters as one primary source for everyday language. Norman Davis says of the collection of letters of the medieval Paston family, for example, that “for the most part, the language is manifestly the speech of the time, plain and direct, only organized and sometimes heightened a little for the written page.”55 Many surviving letters of the period, of course, are business or political correspondence: these do not provide much insight into daily chatter. While collections like the correspondence of the Paston, Stonor, Cely, and Plumpton families, then, provide a little more talk on informal subjects, we cannot take medieval letters as a recorded form of common conversation.
While they cannot be taken as transcribed speech, however, letters do seem to be structured in a more immediate interpersonal way, since they are often communications from one person directly to another about a subject on which they share knowledge. As such, they can resemble daily language in using a more connected style and the features that go along with this, such as, for example, a greater frequency of second-person addressing pronouns.
I take a look at the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), here, to see if these impressions might be supported by comparing their samples from a range of genres.56 Separating the twenty-five samples that have the genre tag “letter” from the rest of the corpus permits us to compare the usage of second-person pronouns between letters and other genres (although unfortunately ye, the most common second-person pronoun, could not be searched, since the forms for the pronoun ye are indistinguishable in the corpus from transcriptions of the article the spelled ye).
In the letters, there are 182 hits for the second-person form your. In the 385 samples of other genres (all of the corpus files excluding the letters) there are 69 hits for your. The difference is quite striking; the word your has 7.28 hits per sample in the letters and 0.18 hits per sample in the rest of the corpus. Indeed, the vast majority of hits for this word in the corpus occur in letters (73 percent of the total uses of your came from the very small section of the samples that are letters).
Table 9. Possessive second-person determiner your in the Middle English Grammar Corpus57
| Number of samples | Occurrences of your | Hits per sample | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Letters | 25 | 182 | 7.28 |
| All other genres | 385 | 69 | .18 |
If higher frequency of second-person pronoun forms is indicative of the connected style and interpersonal immediacy of daily language, then, the corpus samples suggest that letters are notably higher in this measure. In the MEG-C samples, the possessive second-person pronoun is substantially more frequent in letters than in other genres. Although this search is restricted in focus, it gives a glimpse of the kind of variation that we find in different genres. Letters are not always speech-like in their syntax, perhaps, but since they are often written from one person to another, they contain a heightened communicative immediacy, which can be seen in the greater use of the possessive second-person determiner. In this way, we can work through our generalizations about what speech-like language might have looked like.
II Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English
At first glance, Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English would seem to be a perfect candidate for information about everyday English in the fifteenth century. It is a paired list of phrases in French and English: a guidebook for basic vocabulary items. Its purpose and translator are not known;58 the early bibliographers speculated that it was a reference for travelers or businessmen (they referred to the work, which has no surviving title page, as Instructions for Travellers),59 and contemporary readers put it into conversation with early pedagogical texts of foreign language.60 It has been long understood as a kind of a reference work for late medieval ideas about daily phrases in French and English. Henry Bradley, the nineteenth-century editor for the Early English Text Society, describes it as “consist[ing] chiefly of a collection of colloquial phrases and dialogues.”61
The work begins with useful phrases: “Syre god you kepe,” “Ye be Welcome,” “Where haue ye ben so longe,” and then moves into phrases that itemize different semantic fields of daily life. First there are items around the house:
Now muste ye haue beddes
Beddes of fetheris
For the poure to lye on
Beddes of flockes
Sarges tapytes
Quiltes paynted
For the beddes to couere
Couerlettes also …
Now must ye haue
Platers of tyn
disshes saussers
Sallyers, trenchours62
(Now you must have beds, feather beds; for the poor to lie on: beds of flockes [wool or cotton], blankets, bed hangings, counterpanes to cover the bed, coverlets as well … Now you must have tin platters, dishes, sauce boats, salt cellars, serving dishes …)
Other inventories follow: clothes, food, kinds of meat and poultry, other animals and fishes, trees, vegetables, towns, fairs, spices, oils, waxes, measures, weights, metals, ecclesiastical and noble titles. Dialogues are also provided, including a sample dialogue of a potential bargaining conversation at a market: a male buyer and a female merchant haggle over how much he will pay for an ell of cloth.63
Embedded in dialogue, we find other catalogues: months, feast days, positions. We also find names and crafts: from Beatrice the launderer to Felice the silkwoman, from Everard the upholster to Zachary the proctor – the text provides an entertaining list of imaginary townspeople. Not all are professions, either; some are other kinds of identity markers (viz. Lucy the bastard). The text works out the aspects of medieval life.
How representative, then, is Caxton’s text of everyday English? It does provide nice catalogs of everyday objects: a helpful list of household things. In this way, the book resembles some present-day books intended to teach children to read – instead of giving everyday objects as pedagogical examples of words for reading in their native language, though, the texts provide lists of everyday objects as a hook into an unfamiliar language. In presenting organizational words for professions, people, and objects, the work models for us the lexicon of town and market: the words that speakers needed for the commercial interactions of daily life.
There are, however, several obstacles to taking Caxton’s text as a representative source. First is the fact that it is adapted from the Livre des Mestiers, an early medieval phrase-book or conversation guide. The Livre consists of a French text with Flemish equivalent in parallel columns, which means that the English column in Caxton’s work is a translation of the French one. As has been remarked by readers and editors, the English is often too slavish in imitating both the syntax and vocabulary of the French. L. C. Harmer gives examples like “se vous aves de quoy” (6), rendered as “Yf ye haue wherof,” and Alison Hanham gives as an example “il se lieve touts les nuyts” (25), rendered as “he ariseth alle the nyghtes.”64 Second, the words of the text should not be taken as all attempts to render daily language; they play different structural roles in the organization of the text. Werner Hüllen enumerates and describes five kinds of discourse in the work: (i) framing utterances for the whole text; (ii) boundary utterances of smaller subsections; (iii) pedagogical remarks on foreign language; (iv) lists of lexical items in syntactic embeddings, and sometimes as addresses to imaginary people; and (v) illustrative dialogues demonstrating language in use.65 The words at any given point cannot be taken as data for ordinary language; they are always embedded in a generic and stylistic context with differing functional goals. Third, and finally, any work of this kind is subject to other pragmatic pressures besides faithfulness of reporting colloquial speech. The very first entry in the table of contents is “Fyrst, the callyng of the trinite” (1), and the beginning and end of the work are a religious invocation. These opening and closing prayers cannot be said to advance the purpose of describing everyday vocabulary, but they serve as an important part of a text (since the whole endeavor is through the grace of God) and particularly a pedagogical text (since learning is always a religious process). The invocation of God first in the contents also models the proper order of the world, a function echoed in the long lists of titles (“the grete lordes I shall name”) that begins with the Pope, the emperor, a list of kings, abbots, bishops, clerics, dukes, and so forth.66 This list goes on for pages, and it seems unlikely that it is motivated by the belief that familiarity with the “erle of flaundres” or the “Vycounte of beaumond” is critical to knowledge of ordinary vocabulary. It appears more as an attempt to delineate the order of the human world (similar, perhaps, to the way that a dictionary might contain not only lists of words but an appendix with famous names and places). In this sense, Caxton’s Dialogues is a description of the human world, with all of the objects, foods, places, people, and talk it contains, and, as such, provides a kind of evidence for the lexicon of ordinary life. With cautions about the other pragmatic factors that influenced the organization, syntax, and lexical choices of the text, it can be a valuable resource for approaching daily language.
Conclusion
The examination of everyday Middle English, then, involves significant hand-wringing and apologizing for our evidence. Of course, too many disclaimers, stipulations, and caveats can leave readers wondering whether there is anything to look at. It seems clear, in this case, that strategies do emerge for approaching the question in sharper ways, and this has been the subject of this chapter. To think about everyday Middle English, we can look at passages or texts that we believe to be constructed in plain style, since plain style was understood to be the English of ordinary people. We can also try to isolate parts of texts that have particular immediacy or interpersonal content, we can find discursive locations that have higher frequencies of speech-like words, and we can take into consideration the different kinds of evidence provided by focusing upon words or upon sentence structure. Finally, we can examine the usage of particular genres that have a functional tie to spoken language, and investigate the context for speech-like features in these genres.
The crux is that we are trying to read between the lines (or, rather, behind the lines) to the people behind the texts and the language that they used in most of their interactions. The texts both facilitate and impede our attempts to do this. But if we persist in our pursuit of better understanding of what Caxton called “the comyn termes that be dayli used,” we become better readers of early texts, and our picture of how our texts connect to daily life becomes a little clearer.
