Historical background and the linguistic situation

The Wars of the Roses. In 1453 England was defeated by France in the Hundred Years’ War. England lost practically all the territories in France. But the peace was not long. In two years England was involved into a civil war which is known under the poetic name of The Wars of Roses. It lasted for thirty years from 1455 to 1485 and finally brought the period to a close and completed the self-destruction of the nobles as a ruling class.

The Wars of the Roses were actually a dynastic struggle between the noble family of Lancaster, represented by a red rose, and the noble family of York, represented by a white rose, to make their man king of England.

The first open battle between the parties that had rival claims for the throne took place on May 22, 1455, at St. Albans. In this battle King Henry VI of Lancaster was wounded and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset killed. In 1460 Edward, Prince of Wales, was disinherited and York was recognized as Henry’s heir. But very shortly afterwards, in 1461, York was killed in a battle and his son Edward who won a victory at Mortimer’s Cross was crowned as King Edward IV. Edward IV severely suppressed the opposition of the Lancastrians. In 1464 Edward secretly married Elizabeth Woodville. His support of the Woodville family caused the hostility on the part of his brother George, Duke of Clarence, and his supporter Warwick. They managed to restore Henry VI of York to the throne and Edward fled to the Low Countries. In 1471 Edward returned and again destroyed the Lancastrians. Henry VI was taken to the Tower of London where he was soon killed.

In 1483 after Edward’s death war was resumed. His brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, seized the throne as Richard III, so colourfully depicted by Shakespeare in his famous drama. In 1485 Richard III was killed by Henry Tudor of Lancaster, Earl of Richmond, in the battle of Bosworth. The dynasty of Tudor succeeded to the throne.

Henry Tudor, crowned as Henry VII founder of the new monarchy was a symbolic figure. He managed to consolidate his kingdom, developed industries and avoided wars as he well understood that wars demanded money.

The stability and unity of the country caused further spread of the London literary norm which gradually replaced the territorial dialects and acquired the features of the national language.

 

The Introduction of Printin g. Guttenberg’s press was an invention that had the greatest impact on the development of culture. In the middle of the 15th century the first book by way of printing from movable type was made in Germany.

The first English printer was William Caxton. He was born in 1422 in Kent. As a young man Caxton was an apprentice in a mercer’s shop in London. Later, in 1446, he started his own business at Bruges. In 1465 William Caxton was appointed a governor of the Merchants Adventurers. His duty was negotiating commercial treaties. In early 1470s at Cologne he met Johann Guttenberg from whom he learned the art of printing. In 1476 Caxton returned to London and founded a press at Westminster.

Unlike J. Guttenberg whose first printed book was the Holy Bible (now known as Guttenberg’s Bible), Caxton started with producing books for entertainment. His first books printed in 1477 were The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers and Histories of Troye. Later Caxton printed Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Chaucer’s poems.

Though being a native of Kent, William Caxton mainly reflected the features of the London dialect in his books.

The introduction of printing caused the establishment of the spelling standards. Caxton used the spelling forms which were obsolete even for his time, they corresponded to the pronunciation norms that existed in the earlier epoch and did not take into consideration the phonetic changes of the 14th and 15th centuries. So the normalised English orthography was archaic from the very beginning of its existence. Later further considerable development took place in the English phonetic system but the spelling remained practically unchanged. As a result there appeared a gap between what is pronounced and what is written in English.

It took long to come to complete uniformity in spelling. It is only in the 16th century that the existence of the language standard becomes more or less evident. The literary language becomes an example which was to be followed in everyday speech. Yet for a long time there remained variants in pronunciation and spelling. E.g., there were such forms as bisie ‘busy’ (in the East Central dialect) and besie ( fromtheKentish dialect, than and then, geve and give, fader and father, moder and mother, service and sarvice, derk and dark, etc.

In morphology such variant forms of the plural number coexisted as houses and housen, shoes and shoon, etc.

Contribution of Printing:

– the works of the authors of that time were edited and brought into conformity with the London Dialect and as far as all the book were written in this dialect, it spread quickly and became the true standard of the English language;

– as far as printing allowed to multiply books in great number, they were sold and thus the literacy of the population grew;

– before the introduction of printing different scribes could spell the same words differently; with the introduction of printing the spelling became fixed and it hasn’t changed since that time though the pronunciation has changed greatly (this fact explains the difficulties of the English spelling).