A History of English Language

Middle english 175
native population. In the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 we are told that “many fflemmynges
loste here heedes…and namely they that koude nat say Breede and Chese, But Case and
Brode.” 35 Trade between these countries and England was responsible for much travel to
and fro. Flemish and German merchants had their hanse at London, Boston, Lynn, and
elsewhere. The English wool staple was at different times at Dordrecht, Louvain, Bruges,
and other towns near the coast. Add to this the fact that the carrying trade was largely in
the hands of the Dutch until the Navigation Act of 1651, and we see that there were many
favorable conditions for the introduction of Low German words into English. At the end
of the Middle Ages we find entering the language such words as nap (of cloth), deck,
bowsprit, lighter, dock, freight, rover, mart, groat, guilder. Later borrowings include
cambric, duck (cloth), boom (of a boat), beleaguer, furlough, commodore, gin, gherkin,
dollar. Dutch eminence in art is responsible for easel, etching, landscape, while Dutch
settlers in America seem to have caused the adoption of cruller, cookie, cranberry,
bowery, boodle, and other words. The latest study of the Low Dutch element in English
considers some 2,500 words. Many of these are admittedly doubtful, but one must grant
the possibility of more influence from the Low Countries upon English than can be
proved by phonological or other direct evidence. 36
146. Dialectal Diversity of Middle English.
One of the striking characteristics of Middle English is its great variety in the different
parts of England. This variety was not confined to the forms of the spoken language, as it
is to a great extent today, but appears equally in the written literature. In the absence of
any recognized literary standard before the close of the period, writers naturally wrote in
the dialect of that part of the country to which they belonged. And they did so not through
any lack of awareness of the diversity that existed. Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth
century remarked that the language of the southern parts of England, and particularly of
Devonshire, was more ar-
35
C.L.Kingsford, Chronicles of London (Oxford, 1905), p. 15.
36
The fullest discussion of the Flemings in England and English relations with the Low Countries
generally is J.F.Bense, Anglo-Dutch Relations from the Earliest Times to the Death of William the
Third (London, 1925). J.A.Fleming, Flemish Influence in Britain (2 vols., Glasgow, 1930), is rather
discursive and concerned mostly with Scotland. The Low German influence on English has been
treated by Wilhelm Heuser, “Festländische Einflüsse im Mittelenglischen,” Bonner Beiträge zur
Anglistik, 12 (1902), 173–82; J.M.Toll, Niederländisches Lehngut im Mittelenglischen (Halle,
Germany, 1926); J.F.Bense, A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary
(The Hague, 1939); H.Logeman, “Low-Dutch Elements in English,” Neophilologus, 16 (1930–
1931), 31–46, 103–16 (a commentary on Bense); T.de Vries, Holland’s Influence on English
Language and Literature (Chicago, 1916), a work of slighter value; and E.Ekwall, Shakspere’s
Vocabulary (Uppsala, Sweden, 1903), pp. 92 ff.