The History of the English Language, Part Two
At the same time, English speakers were very isolated from one another, and it takes very little isolation for dialect differences to grow. Within several generations, the pre-Norman small dialect differences had mushroomed into great differences. In his book "The Mother Tongue," Bill Bryson illustrates just how great the differences were:
"...a group of London sailors heading down the River 'Tamyse' (Thames)...found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer's wife and 'axed for mete and specyally he axed after eggys' but he was met by blank looks from the farmer's wife who answered that she 'coude speke no frenshe.' The sailors had traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to another speaker of English."
With few towns to serve as meeting points, and an inability to leave the estates to go to the few towns that did exist, English speakers were cut off into a thousand pockets of varied English.
The overall linguistic situation at the time in England looked bleak for the future of English. There were only a few thousand French speakers, but they had all the power. French was the language of the upper-class court and government. Latin was the language of the churches and universities. English was spoken by the vast majority of the population, but without power or prestige. Given these facts, it seems remarkable that English survived to flourish into the globally dominant language it is today. How was the tide turned?
Four historical events pulled English back from its bleak prospects. The first was a by-product of the Crusades. While the Anglo-Saxons did not go on the Crusades, the effect they had was a religious revival and the birth of the Christian pilgrimage. After the Crusades, peasants began to make pilgrimages to religious sites both near and far. Modern readers can gain a clear sense of what these pilgrimages were like by reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. One cannot underestimate the importance of these pilgrimages. First and foremost, they gave the serfs their only acceptable excuse for leaving the estates, and the feudal lords were strongly encouraged by the Church to allow them to go. Second, the thousands of travelers needed a place to eat and rest on the road--the birth of the English inn. Small towns began growing up around the inns, and these towns were largely Anglo-Saxon. Finally, travelers on pilgrimage were never just travelling with others from their
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