English 12 / Unit 1: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Literature
1.4 Middle English and the Frame Narrative
Notes
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French became the language of the ruling class. English changed into Middle English (about 1100 to 1500), with many French words added. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late 1300s) is written in it.
- Spelling differs from today's: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote" means "When April with its sweet showers" (spring opens the poem).
- A frame narrative is a story that contains other stories. In The Canterbury Tales, about thirty pilgrims travel from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
- The Host, Harry Bailly, suggests that each pilgrim tell tales on the road; the best storyteller wins a free supper.
- The tales are mostly written in rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter.
Practice
Why did English change so much between Old English and Middle English?
Norman French influence shaped Middle English vocabulary and spelling.
In the Canterbury Tales, what is the frame narrative?
The pilgrimage and the storytelling contest hold all the separate tales together.
These lines open the General Prologue: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote." What season does the poet describe?
"Shoures soote" means sweet showers, and the rain ends the dry March.
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