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The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court.
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The venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry.
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The university of Oxford was founded and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very expensive.
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The Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called Anglo-Norman or Norman French which is known as Francien. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France.
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The Normans also became “Anglicized”, particularly after 1204 when King John’s ineptness lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France and the Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties.
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The university of Cambridge was founded. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education.
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During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the second half of the 12th Century, many more Francien words from central France were imported in addition to their Anglo-Norman counterparts.
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The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire. It is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced.
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Bilingual word lists were being compiled. Many near synonyms acquired subtle differences in meaning adding to the precision and flexibility of the English language. Even today, phrases combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman French doublets are still in common use. (e.g. law and order, lord and master, love and cherish)
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The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453) had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence.
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The Black Death killed about a third of the English population including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the English-speaking laboring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over.
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The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), was adopted.
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English had become the language of instruction in schools.
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The Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years while Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture,
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The London dialect of Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English, whereas text in the Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely foreign language.
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Noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English.
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The passage Mandeville's Travels about travels in foreign land was created at the end of this century.
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The final “e” in many, but not all, words had ceased to be pronounced (e.g. it was silent in words like kowthe and thanne, but pronounced in words like ende, ferne, straunge, etc).
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The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age” or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters of crown and nobility of government and administration, court, war, combat, authority and control.
