The beginner’s guide to Early Modern English

How English emerged from the Middle Ages

Detail from Old London Bridge (c1630), Claude de Jongh

The language you’re reading now — Present-Day English, or Modern English (AD 1700–present) — is the most analysed language in the history of the world.

It’s not hard to understand why: not only does it have hundreds of millions of speakers around the world, but much of the money dedicated to researching language is spent in countries where English is the dominant language.

This has an effect on what people study: for example, there are always classrooms of English-speaking undergraduates at hand when researchers need participants for experiments.

All this means that Present-Day English grammar has been analysed under a microscope for decades.¹

Some of this popularity has rubbed off on the earlier phases of the English language, too. Old English (AD 450–1100) is relatively well researched, at least for a dead language.

There may be no classrooms of Anglo-Saxons for us to consult, so it’s a lot harder to study than Present-Day English, but we do have a comparatively rich set of texts to analyse.

Above all, however, the fact that Old English is the oldest stage of the English language attracts a lot of attention from historically-minded researchers: You can find out a lot more about the deep background of the English language from Old English than from any later stage in the development of our language.

But if we turn to English as it existed between 1100–1700, we find less to read about. I’ve written before about the comparative neglect of Middle English (1150–1500), which, despite the wonders of its literature, is much less discussed than Old or Present-Day English.

But the prospective reader of Middle English will find more grammars, handbooks, and dictionaries available than someone who is interested in what came after: the gap of 200 years left between the end of Middle English and the beginning of Present-Day English.

What comes between AD 1500–1700? A phase we call Early Modern English — and it turns out to be rather important for the history of English literature. This is, after all, the language of Milton, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. But for all the wonderful, seminal things that were written in Early Modern English, the language itself gets rather ignored, including by this author!²

Well, no more.

This article will serve as your introduction to the language of this fascinating period, which not only gave us some of the best literature ever written in English, but also crystallized the norms of how English is written down to the present day.

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We owe you one, Brewers’ Guild

The story of Early Modern English begins around the year 1500 and lasts for approximately 200 years.

Of course, the English language didn’t change from Middle to Modern at midnight on New Year’s Eve of the year 1499. Language changes gradually, so any firm boundary we put between one stage of a language and the next will be a bit arbitrary.

But it has to be done, so we place a boundary between Middle and Early Modern English around 1500. Some people choose a slightly earlier date, as do the editors of the Cambridge History of the English Language, who start their “Early Modern” volume in 1476, to coincide with the introduction of the printing press into England.

Now, this was certainly a momentous event in the history of English, but I’m a sucker for a nice round number, so we’ll go with 1500. (There’s also another good reason to choose 1500, which I’ll return to in the next section.)

If we take a snapshot of the historical context that the English language was spoken in at that time, we can identify the beginnings of some historical and technological trends which would prove to be very important for how the language developed over those two centuries.

The England of 1500 was a kingdom of just over two million people, with an economy dominated by farming. Most of the population lived in the countryside. The largest city was London, with a population still under 100,000. London had grown over the past few centuries as the population bounced back from the Black Death in the 14th century, taking in many migrants from rural areas, especially from East Anglia.

As a result of this migration, London speech became characterized by a mixture of features from different dialects, and was the site of a lot of rapid changes. We’ll talk about some of these changes when we get to the language-specific part of the history.

For now, though, I need to mention another important fact about London. Not only was it a commercial centre, but it was the seat of parliament, royal government, and other decision-making bodies.

And, as we all know, government generates a lot of paperwork, even back then. Throughout the later part of the Middle Ages, this paperwork was recorded in French or Latin, but more and more of it began to use English as time went on, and literacy in English spread.

The first instance of official record-keeping in English was in 1422, when the Brewers’ Guild started writing their records in English. The Royal Chancery in Westminster followed suit soon after, sending out official proclamations written in English. The scribes who sent out these documents wrote in a variety of London English, which turned into a sort of standard form of writing, called the Chancery Standard.

It looked like this:

To the moste reuend ffader in god the Archibisshop of york Cardynall and Chaunceller of England. Sheweth mekely to youre gracious lordship Thomas Bodyn of london that where accord and covenaunt was made betwene hym and one Robert Chirche Citezin and haburdassher of london the xv^th day of the ffeuerere / the yere of the reigne of kyng henry the vj^the after the conquest the xx^th be the medeacion of the frendez. beyng thenne your said suppliant with in age of xiiij yere that he shuld be prentice to the / said Robert in and of the crafte of haburdassher fro the ffeste of Alhalowen then last passed vnto the yend xij yere thenne nexte comyng So alwey that the said Robert shuld fynd to scole at hys / awen costes and charge the said Thomas during two the furst yeres of the said time that is to say a yere and half thereof to lerne gramere and the resydue of the said two yeres which amounteth to half a yere to scole for to lerne to write…³

As you can see, this late Middle English is relatively comprehensible to us today. This is because the Chancery Standard was one of the major influences on the emerging standard form of English. More on this shortly.

Prior to the widespread adoption of the Chancery Standard, people who wrote in English would write in a variety of ways, reflecting local dialects and the idiosyncratic choices of the writer. And, while these idiosyncrasies continued for a long time in private correspondence, increasingly, the Chancery Standard became used as a model for public writing, which was done by scriveners, professionals who would write for those who could not, or would not.

Then, with the coming of the printing press in 1476, the Chancery Standard was also largely adopted by printers. So it was that the Chancery Standard had a foundational influence on the spelling of the increasingly standardized written English of the Early Modern period, although it would be further adjusted by later reformers.

How English turned modern

In their desire to polish and regularize English spelling, these reformers were influenced by another intellectual movement: the English Renaissance, the rebirth of classical learning in England beginning in the late 15th century and extending over most of the Early Modern English period.

Ironically, during the same period that the culture of the ancient world was becoming more and more influential in England, the use of the Latin language in various domains of life was gradually receding in the face of the steady expansion of the English language as it became used for more and more.

But as English expanded to fill the roles (such as official documents, as we discussed earlier) once filled by Latin, English fell under an even deeper influence of Latin than it had ever had before. This, more than any other, is the period of the greatest influx of Latin terms into the English language.

This was also the period of the English Reformation, which is linguistically important because it provided English with two works which would play an important role in the development of English idiom: the Book of Common Prayer (first edition, 1546) and the Authorized Version (i.e. the King James version) of the Bible (1611).

By the end of this period, in 1700, England was no longer a minor, peripheral kingdom of farmers. The England of 1700 was a major naval and commercial power at the head of a colonial empire. The population had more than doubled over the Early Modern period, to five million. London itself had grown five- or sixfold over the same period, to a population of over half a million.

It’s hard to choose a single year to mark the end of the Early Modern English period, just as it was hard to mark the beginning. But 1700, beyond being another round number, also marks a time when the spelling, sound, and grammatical structures of the English language were beginning to settle into the patterns the language still retains today. Here’s an example of English circa 1700 that shows what I mean:

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, though not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; he got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe; and so my Companions always call’d me. (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719)

While there are certainly archaic qualities to Defoe’s writing compared to the English of the present day, the differences are relatively minor compared to the similarities — it’s certainly much more like our English than the 1442 example of Chancery Standard I gave you above that marks English as it was just before the beginning of the period.

So what happened over the course of those 200 years to create Present-Day English?