ABSTRACT
In the recorded history of the English language the late eleventh, twelfth and early thirteenth centuries constitute something of a black hole. Paradoxically, this period is one in which the English language developed very rapidly, but also one which is exceptionally poorly documented. These two factors are interrelated. Our meagre documentation results from the fact that French (in addition to Latin) replaced English as the official, written language of England for a time. The rapid development of English, on the other hand, was also an indirect consequence of the Norman Conquest: a language which is only spoken is not subject to the norms of an official, written language and will thus change freely and – often – rapidly. This process of rapid change was intensified, furthermore, by the extensive contact of English with two other languages: Old Norse in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and again in the early eleventh century; and French from 1066 onwards. All aspects of English were affected by the rapid transition from Old English to Middle English, but the gap between the two stages is most clearly marked in the lexicon. As far as the vocabulary is concerned, Old English appears to come to an end in the late tenth and the eleventh centuries, and the Middle English which is documented in texts from the very late twelfth century onwards is in many ways a new language. This gap, however, remains due only to our ignorance, and I will suggest here that a great deal can be learnt about the transitional period in question through looking at what I call very late Old English, namely, the language of twelfth- and, sometimes, early thirteenth-century copies of Old English manuscripts and, occasionally, English glosses found in such manuscripts. In an examination of very late Old English from the point of view of Old English lexicography, E.G. Stanley has called this Transitional English’, 1 while, much earlier and with different emphasis, Arnold Schroer opted for the term ‘neuangelsächsische Periode’:
wir haben gleichÆeitig in verschiedenen Gegenden Englands undunter verschiedenen Verhaltnissen auf der einen Seite schon in dieser sogenannten ‘neuangelsachsischen Periode’ eine nationale Schrift-litteratur mit sprachlich-graphischer und stofflicher Tradition, auf der andera Seite noch bis in 13. Jh. und tiber dasselbe hinaus litterarische Producte, die wesentlich auf altenglischer Tradition fussen und mit bewusster Absicht eine Sprache nachahmen, von der die Gespro-chene nicht weniger abwich als etwa Neuhochdeutsch vom Althochdeutschen.
För diese letztere tere Litteraturgattung scheint mir die BeÆ eichnung ‘neuangelsachsisch’ mit vollem Rechte anwendbar Æ u sein, aber auch nur för diese. 2
during this so-called ‘new Anglo-Saxon period’ [the period from the Conquest until the middle of the thirteenth century] two kinds of writing were produced in different regions of England and under different circumstances: on the one hand a national literature with a tradition of language, spelling and content, and on the other, well into the thirteenth century and beyond, literary works which are essentially rooted in an Old English tradition and which deliberately imitate a language from which the spoken idiom [of the time] deviated no less than Modern High German does from Old High German.
It is this, and only this, latter group of works which may justly be called ‘new Anglo-Saxon’.
