It is estimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of the Viking and particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very existence of the English language looked to be in dire peril. In 1154, even the venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and, two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French that emerged as the language of England.
The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453) had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence. The Black Deathof 1349 - 1350 killed about a third of the English population (which was around 4 million at that time), including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the English-speaking laboring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts and Parliament, was adopted in 1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the language of instruction in schools.
Texts in Middle English (as opposed to French or Latin) begin as a trickle in the 13th Century, with works such as the debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” and the long historical poem known as Layamon's “Brut” .Most of Middle English literature, at least up until the flurry of literary activity in the latter part of the 14th Century, is of unknown authorship.
Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous “Canterbury Tales” in the early 1380s, and crucially he chose to write it in English. The “Canterbury Tales” is usually considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin. In the 858 lines of the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”, almost 500 different French loanwords occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucer’s vocabulary is French in origin. Chaucer introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts - these were almost certainly words in everyday use in 14th Century London, but first attested in Chaucer's written works.
