A History of English Language

8
The Renaissance, 1500–1650
152. Changing Conditions in the Modern Period.
In the development of languages particular events often have recognizable and at times
far-reaching effects. The Norman Conquest and the Black Death are typical instances that
we have already seen. But there are also more general conditions that come into being
and are no less influential. In the Modern English period, the beginning of which is
conveniently placed at 1500, certain of these new conditions come into play, conditions
that previously either had not existed at all or were present in only a limited way, and
they cause English to develop along somewhat different lines from those that had
characterized its history in the Middle Ages. The new factors were the printing press, the
rapid spread of popular education, the increased communication and means of
communication, the growth of specialized knowledge, and the emergence of various
forms of self-consciousness about language.
The invention of the process of printing from movable type, which occurred in
Germany about the middle of the fifteenth century, was destined to exercise a farreaching
influence on all the vernacular languages of Europe. Introduced into England
about 1476 by William Caxton, who had learned the art on the continent, printing made
such rapid progress that a scant century later it was observed that manuscript books were
seldom to be seen and almost never used. Some idea of the rapidity with which the new
process swept forward may be had from the fact that in Europe the number of books
printed before the year 1500 reaches the surprising figure of 35,000. The majority of
these, it is true, were in Latin, whereas it is in the modern languages that the effect of the
printing press was chiefly to be felt. But in England over 20,000 titles in English had
appeared by 1640, ranging all the way from mere pamphlets to massive folios. The result
was to bring books, which had formerly been the expensive luxury of the few, within the
reach of many. More important, however, was the fact, so obvious today, that it was
possible to reproduce a book in a thousand copies or a hundred thousand, every one
exactly like the other. A powerful force thus existed for promoting a standard, uniform
language, and the means were now available for spreading that language throughout the
territory in which it was understood.
Such a widespread influence would not have been possible were it not for the fact that
education was making rapid progress among the people and literacy was becoming much
more common. In the later Middle Ages a surprising number of people of the middle
class could read and write, as the Paston Letters abundantly show. In Shakespeare’s
London, though we have no accurate means of measurement, it is probable that not less
than a third and probably as many as half of the people could at least read. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there arose a prosperous trades class with the means
to obtain an education and the leisure to enjoy it, attested to, for example, by the great