ABSTRACT
Within the community the most important division linguistically was between those with urbanised speech (cf. §61) and those in pre-urbanised groups, that is, those speaking a variety of English which had had up to a thousand years of more or less undisturbed history in one place. These types are extremes; naturally, people from one village met and married people from another, and sometimes the sharper edges of local peculiarity were worn down by the development of a regional standard language, but the extremes are useful points of reference. When the period began, the process of urbanisation, already under way through the natural evolution of the economy, had been powerfully boosted as a result of the Black Death. A very sharp drop in population-size increased the value of labour and heightened the role of money, and so of urban residence and employment. London was the only major city, not just in terms of size but rather in terms of metropolitan status and range of population-sources. The generation that came to maturity in 1370 saw the last brilliant flourish of regional standard varieties of English. Its more cosmopolitan souls were acutely aware of the state of the language, and the range of varieties, but it is doubtful whether any except those who spoke the London type of Standard recognised that this was a variety already different in kind from any other Standard. By the 15c, London was the only location of a Standard in England (another was,
andhascontinuedtobe,Edinburgh);soithasremaineduntilthe colonies(astheywere)startedtodevelopStandardsoftheirown. Fromaretrospectiveviewpointwemaydrawaprettydirectlinefrom ourowneducatedusagetothatofShakespeare'scontemporariesand thencealmosttothecourtforwhichChaucerwrote;butforitscontemporariestheuniquenessofChaucerianLondonEnglishwaslessevident, andforthefirsttimeinourbackwardpathweshallneed,aswereach 1370,toseehowitcomparedwithprovincialStandards.
