This chapter considers the shared experiences of humans and plant-life in the vernacular traditions of medieval England c. 700–1500, considering their representation in Old English and Old Norse, Middle English, and associated literatures. In particular, it focuses on those instances in which plants, principally trees, undergo physical and emotional suffering, highlighting the ways in which these articulate the experience of individual humans and broader kinship groups. In several instances, whether directly or indirectly, these literary plant-lives also serve didactic purposes, and are used to express religious, folkloric, and/or gnomic wisdom, ranging from the elevated to the everyday. Thus, The Dream of the Rood and The History of the Holy Rood narrate the role of the rood-tree in the crucifixion of Christ and human spiritual history, whilst those of Le Fresne and The Floure and the Leafe reflect moral and social preoccupations and contemporary belief. Raising questions about the literary-cultural exploitation of plant-life to represent medieval human experience, this chapter considers the inescapability of arboreal metaphor – a consequence not only of the shared world of humans and trees, but of our shared vulnerabilities.

Couched in socio-economic history, the first chapter provides an overview of the origins and development of the English language in Britain from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Both internal and external factors for language variation and change are considered when discussing the major orthographic, lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic developments. The English language and its development will therefore also be viewed in relation to other languages that were spoken, written or printed in the British Isles over the last 1,500 years. The creation and increasing availability of new data sources (access to hitherto un- or underexplored social layers, text types, regions) during the last decade (e.g. historical corpora like the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online) have led to many new studies on a range of different linguistic variables. Many of the new findings form the basis of the chapter, which aims to complement traditional histories of English.

A bitch, as most people already know, is a female dog. As a trendy word we hear (and say) all the time, it might be tempting to guess that it isn’t very old. But if we look up its etymology, that is, the origins of the word, we discover that bitch meaning “a female dog” has a far longer pedigree that goes back over one thousand years. Over the course of a millennium, bitch became stigmatized by its association with social taboos such as prostitution, promiscuity, “bad” women, and “unmanly” men. This led to its offensive senses pushing out the inoffensive one. Bitch – which was once just the literal word for a female dog – eventually became what it is today, arguably one of the most insulting words in the English language. But on the other hand, bitch has developed positive uses in slang and has even been reclaimed in some ways.

Separated from the rest of Europe by the English Channel, yet also linked to it through political and linguistic ties after the Norman Conquest, the musical culture of medieval England displays both connections to and differences from that of its neighbours. Latin song was composed in England and imported from elsewhere, and songs in the vernacular languages of Middle English and Anglo-Norman French also flourished. Songs in all three languages were often compiled together in manuscripts, and some existed in alternative forms, with texts switched to another language. This chapter examines the musical precursors of one of the most famous of all medieval songs, Sumer is icumen in, and shows that the production of polyphony and song in England (as well as Scotland and Wales) was vibrant and distinctive. Surviving pieces from the repertory of Worcester polyphony hint at English composers’ interest in the musical techniques of voice exchange and hocket, but the fragmentary state of many English sources suggests that the losses have been immense. We conclude the chapter with the genre of the English carol, cultivated briefly but fruitfully in the early fifteenth century.

Vernacular literature in English first developed in two separate iterations: the first ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the fifth century, and used (alongside Latin) in writing from as early as the seventh century; the second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, the twelfth-century re-emergence of ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardized rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. This chapter discusses each in turn, arguing that Old English literature, for all its astonishing precocity, variety, and brilliance, provides us with a fascinating study of a centuries-long, and eventually truncated, ‘beginning’: a vernacular literature sustained over time by a particular, and crucially coterminous, audience and patronage context (the royal or aristocratic court; the monastery) without ever reaching the point of being self-sustaining. In contrast, Early Middle English emerged spontaneously in the margins of multilingual manuscripts, and as an act of translation and adaptation without institutional support or aristocratic patronage; but it emerged into a different world, in which growing community literacy gave it an audience – potentially the whole population – that would drive its development ever forward.

This chapter introduces the principal methodologies used in the book. It describes the existing tools for the study of Old and Middle English, including grammars, dictionaries, handbooks and corpora, and explains that while their direct documentation of twelfth-century English is scanty, the information they contain can be reconceptualised to help date texts to the twelfth century, assess the likely effect of twelfth-century texts on their readers and evaluate the extent to which they inherited earlier conventions for writing English. This approach is exemplified with reference to four different English versions of Ps 111.9 found in manuscripts copied in the final two-thirds of the twelfth century and which are typical of the kinds of text that the book as a whole treats: understudied, textually complex and requiring a gamut of philological techniques to be fully understood and contextualised.

This chapter emphasises the principal finding of the book, that the practices for writing English developed before 1066 survived the Norman Conquest. It offers a reading of the short poem, ‘Sanctus Beda was iboren her’, taking it as typical of the texts considered in the book, with no agreed title, an uncertain date of composition and viewed here as “Old” English, there as “Middle” English. It argues the poem, often read as an indictment of post-Conquest cultural rupture, in fact speaks powerfully to the continuities between twelfth-century texts and earlier works. The chapter closes by considering other genres the book has not mentioned but for which English was occasionally used in the long twelfth century, including non-homiletic religious texts, prognostics, glosses, medical works and memoranda.

This chapter examines ten or so English language or bilingual documents obtained, produced, copied, adapted and forged at Christ Church Canterbury between the 1090s and the mid 1150s. Beginning with a remarkable series of bilingual writs issued by Henry I and his successors, it also analyses a purported bilingual notification of Cnut, apparently confected around 1100, and a remarkable English-language version of a diploma of Cnut, relating to the port of Sandwich, produced at approximately the same time, as well as a document of Æthelred contrived from it fifty years later. Consideration of the documents suggests this activity involved monks, both English and French, who felt the use of English made their contentious claims more plausible. In the hundred years after the Norman Conquest, these men continued, and even expanded, the range of ways in which English could be used as a language of documentary record.

This chapter considers the maintenance of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Christ Church Canterbury in the first decade of the twelfth century, as well as the acquisition, adaptation, expansion and recopying of earlier manuscripts of the Chronicle contemporary with it. It argues those involved were of both English and foreign descent and worked with a knowledge of the template for vernacular annalistic writing laid down in King Alfred’s reign and developed over the succeeding 150 years. However, in their overt monastic chauvinism, length, use of first person pronouns and direct speech and disregard for chronological organisation, their additions, especially of documents, also anticipated developments in twelfth-century historiography. The Chronicle tradition in effect came to an end at Christ Church by the 1120s, elsewhere by the 1130s, a consequence of changes in the twelfth-century linguistic ecology, the success of Latin translations and, arguably, the innovations introduced by its early twelfth-century adapters.

The Introduction shows that English language writing from the long twelfth century (1050 - 1215) has been seriously neglected in existing literary and linguistic histories because it falls between the subperiods of ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English. It argues for a rapprochment between literary and linguistic approaches, finding this in philology and seeing the question of the continuity between the two subperiods as residing primarily in the extent to which texts composed after the Norman Conquest inherited the conventions developed for writing in different genres before 1066 during the process of textualisation (Verschriftlichung). In addition to this focus on genre, the new literary history offered in the book, the chapter explains, sees English texts as the product of a multilingual literary environment, integrates consideration of the revision, adaptation and remediation of older texts alongside the investigation of the composition of new texts, and explores regional modulations in the writing of English.

This chapter argues that sermons are the one genre where there is a more-or-less continuous tradition of using English through the long twelfth century, a consequence of the pragmatic necessity of communicating with a largely monoglot laity. It begins with an account of twelfth-century preaching and the role of written texts vernacular and Latin in its performance. It then considers the Vespasian Homilies, a booklet of four sermons produced in Kent around 1200, focusing on Vespasian 2, which it argues is a distinctively Middle English text, probably composed around 1150, but which shows substantive debts to Ælfric and pre-Conquest textual culture. The final section of the chapter considers, along with two other related manuscripts, the Lambeth Homilies, copied around 1200 in Worcestershire, showing that similar continuities and developments can be traced there. Sermons, in short, were the primary vehicle for the continuity of practices for writing English in the period.

This chapter offers an analysis of the shifting fortunes of Latin, English and French between the mid eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, through the lens of linguistic ecology, drawing evidence from metalinguistic commentary in narrative sources, surviving texts, prosopography and onomastics and the findings of the linguistic subdiscipline of language contact. It argues for distinguishing between the period between 1066 and 1140, when the relatively high status English had enjoyed before the Norman Conquest reduced primarily at the hands of Latin, from that between 1050 and 1215, when emergence of French as a literary language, coupled with other late-twelfth-century social changes, more significantly diminished English’s importance as a written language. The chapter closes with some reflections on the factors that condition language choice in multilingual societies, rejecting a simple equation of language and identity.