ABSTRACT
When Hoccleve and Dryden eulogised Chaucer [153] they each did so with reference to his influence on the English language. Caxton, too, contributed powerfully to our view of Chaucer as a significant force in the development of English, praising him in particular for having ‘enbelyssheyd, ornated and made faire our englisshe’ which, according to him, was previously ‘rude’ as in unpolished, unsophisticated (Crotch 1928: 90). Chaucer is thus regarded as not merely reflecting English in a time of considerable linguistic change, but as directly instrumental in those changes. His visibility, the fact that a corpus of work can be attributed to him with confidence, and his decision to write primarily in English, make him a pre-eminent source of examples of language use and expansion in the fourteenth century: pick up almost any study of the English language and Chaucer features in it.
