The History of the English Language, Part Two
their estate; as they traveled, groups would merge. The great differences in their speech posed problems for communication, so they were forced to learn the nuances and variations in others' speech in order to understand. Ultimately, the pilgrimages undid much of the rampant dialect splintering that had been going on since the Norman Conquest. So as you can see, pilgrimages eased isolation, increased the intelligibility of dialects, and gave birth to the Anglo-Saxon meeting point, the town.
The second important event occurred in 1204, when King John of England lost Normandy. This forced the French nobility of England, most of whom had estates in both France and England, to make a choice, either to remain in England, or return to France. Those that stayed Anglicized, not only by learning English, but by adopting some English-like accents in their French. Recall that the French spoken by the Normans had always been different than Parisian French, given the Normans Danish base in French. The anglicizing of the Norman French in the 13th century increased the differences, and made the French spoken in England the butt of many jokes in Paris. By the 14th century, children of English nobility were largely speaking English and had to go abroad to France to learn French. As we shall see below, England's French would soon not wish to feel French at all.
The third historical event to elevate English was ironically the Black Plague, ironic in that it killed more Anglo-Saxons than Norman French in England. The Black Plague swept Europe from 1348-1351, travelling with those fleeing it, infecting everyone in their path. Two-thirds of Europe was infected and sickened, and of those, half died, leaving a third of the total population dead. Further, the death toll was worse the poorer one was, meaning that while the death rate among the nobility was in some areas only one-in-ten, on some estates and in some towns, the death rate was nine-in-ten. Society was in chaos, unable to treat the sick or bury the dead, and no one knew the cause, though theories ranged from God's wrath to Jews poisoning the wells. The chaos was the first effect of the Black Plague to help out the still-living Anglo-Saxons. In the confusion, serfs officially bound to their estate found no one guarding the gates, and they were able to escape in large numbers, swelling the populations of the towns. Also, between the dead
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