Middle English

In the prologue to his Eneydos (1490), William Caxton told a story about eggs. Some merchants on the Thames, waiting for a wind, went ashore, and one asked a woman for "eggys." She answered that she spoke no French. Another man asked for "eyren," and she understood. Egg came into English from Old Norse, the language of the Danish and Norse settlers. The older English word was ey, plural eyren; Otto Jespersen wrote that it went out of use very soon after Caxton wrote.

Middle English is English from about 1150 to 1500. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French was the language of the court and the nobility. As late as the 1300s, boys in grammar schools learned their Latin through French. Henry Bradley thought the Conquest did not change ordinary speech at once, but with foreign monks running the monasteries the old spelling lapsed, and early in the 1100s writing began to show changes already under way in speech. Different vowel endings became a single -e. Gender that did not follow meaning disappeared. In the Ormulum, a poem written about 1200 in the East Midland dialect, he, she and it follow meaning alone.

French words came in fastest between about 1250 and 1400. In a dictionary sample of a thousand French loanwords, Jespersen found nearly half first recorded in those years. Many belong to law and government (court, judge, jury, parliament, rent) or to rank (duke, baron, countess). French gave English beef, mutton, veal and pork, words that in Middle English could also mean the living animals; only later did they come to mean the meat alone, beside English ox, sheep, calf and swine. The smith and baker kept English names; the butcher, tailor and carpenter took French ones. From 1362, English was the official language spoken in the law courts, though a form of French lasted there for centuries. Chaucer's adjectives, at the end of the 1300s, still kept a few old endings, such as a plural final -e; these dropped away in the next century.

In the library, A year in a sentence: entries from the Chronicle ends with entries written at Peterborough in the 1150s in early Middle English, with was, king, þe (the) and the French word curt, court. Recipes from the king's kitchen, from about 1390, uses Middle English kitchen words that stayed in the language, such as salat, mustard and frytour, fritter.