Recent years have seen a spate of publications that attempt to recontextualise the history of English in contact-linguistic (Miller 2012; Lutz 2013; Durkin 2014) and sociolinguistic terms (Millar 2012), and conversely to confront previous descriptions of contact phenomena with new data and theoretical insights available from situations of language shift and substratum influence (Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto 2008; Vennemann 2011), extensive bilingualism (Schendl & Wright 2011), language acquisition (Ingham 2012) and contact-induced grammaticalisation (Timofeeva 2010). Coupled with advances in our understanding of contact- and acquisition-induced language change (Heine & Kuteva 2005; Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008), and of the role of contact in the varieties of English around the world (Schreier & Hundt 2013), there is a clear need in this area of historical research for scholars to reinvestigate earlier stages of English as a contact language.

For Rothwell (1998: 156) ‘words of ultimately French origin became part of the lexis of English as a result of the myriad daily contacts between Anglo-French and Middle English in the minds and under the pens of a whole literate class’. Although such contact interfaces between Francophone and Anglophone speakers clearly must have existed, not enough is known as to the means by which French-origin lexis was borrowed and diffused. I argue that a principal agency of contact-induced lexical change in Middle English was the clergy in their everyday role of spiritual guidance, whether or not they themselves composed religious texts. French loans in works of spiritual guidance are known to be common from the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse onwards (Trotter 2003a). According to contemporaneous sources, English clerics received a Francophone-medium school education (Orme 1973), which would have familiarised them with the French vocabulary used in religious instruction in chantry schools and beyond.

The various manuscripts of the Cursor Mundi, a work of lay religious instruction probably composed around 1300, also offer a revealing window on the process of lexical innovation and replacement instigated by the clergy. An analysis of variant lexical forms, native and French-origin, found in the first 10,000 lines of this work shows that the latter would go on to replace native items the majority of the time. The loss of many native variants, e.g. niþ, mensk and þole, and their replacement, respectively, by envy, honour and suffer, can be attributed to the role played by the clergy in diffusing French-origin items in the domains of discourse they dominated. Rather than merely reflecting the pre-existing lexical knowledge of monolingual English speakers, the clergy's use of such items initially introduced and then maintained French-origin lexemes in at least the receptive competence of such speakers. Their regular and widespread contact with the population at large would have enabled the take-up of lexical innovation via the spoken medium, thus motivating the use observed in homiletic and devotional written texts of extensive French-origin lexis.

Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: while Old English is characterised more by lexical pattern replication of Latin (and Greek) etyma, Middle English is the period of matter replication. Due to the intake of new French religious words, English lexemes and also whole word families undergo semantic transformation and lexical replacement. Other terms, however, survive from the Old English period into the present day, resisting contact-induced pressure. This study shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.

In the context of multilingualism in later medieval Britain, the influx of French terminology into the emerging technical vocabulary of Middle English is likely to have produced synchronous synonyms. For functional reasons, some native terms are expected to be dropped from the language, others to undergo differentiation through semantic shift. A significant proportion of the French borrowings are often seen as having been new technical terms, but earlier historical research on the nature of technical vocabulary in English has not clearly characterized this lexical domain; ways are therefore explored here of identifying technical terminology in this period. Definitions contained in historical dictionaries, principally the Middle English Dictionary, provide the main diagnostic, specificity of meaning. As a case study, borrowings in a technical register are examined using the terms contained in the subdomain ‘Instruments’ within the Middle English vocabulary for Building (extracted from the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England project) supplemented with lexis from the Historical Thesaurus. Utilizing the components of meaning in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary definitions, the lexical items are classified into semantic hierarchies as was done for the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to dates of first usage, etymological information about the lexical items is included in the semantic hierarchies, allowing analysis of patterns of replacement by borrowed terms at different levels of the lexicon. It is found that the impact of French on the native lexicon in this dataset is most evident at the superordinate and basic levels of the lexicon, where we find almost equal numbers of native and borrowed terms, while at the hyponymic level native terms are in the vast majority. The study provides an insight into the vocabulary of speakers of the Middle English period with a high level of experience and expertise in technical fields and the findings suggest a resistance to borrowed vocabulary not at the lowest section of the social stratum, but rather by the class of skilled workers.

This article takes as its starting point the extent of borrowing in Middle English among the hundred meanings included in the Leipzig–Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a recently developed tool for exploring the impact of borrowing on basic vocabulary on a cross-linguistic basis. This is adopted for the possibility it provides for taking an empirically based approach to identifying at least a proportion of those loanwords that have most impact on the core lexicon. The article then looks in detail at a particularly striking example identified using this list: the verb carry, borrowed into English in the late fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman, and found with some frequency in its modern core meaning from the very beginning of its history in English. The competition this word shows with native synonyms, especially bear, is surveyed, and the systemic pressures that may have facilitated its widespread adoption are explored, as well as the points of similarity it shows with some other borrowings into the core vocabulary of Middle English; in particular, the hypothesis is advanced that a tendency towards isomorphism in vocabulary realizing basic meanings may be a significant factor here. The article also contends that the example of carry sheds new light on the receptivity of even basic areas of the lexicon to Anglo-Norman lexis in the late Middle English period. The trajectory shown by this word is particularly illuminating, with borrowing in a restricted meaning with reference to the commercial bulk transportation of goods, merchandise, etc. being followed by very rapid development of a much broader meaning, which even within the fourteenth century appears in at least some varieties (notably the works of Chaucer) to be a significant competitor for native bear as default realization of the basic meaning ‘to transfer/carry (something, especially in one's hands)’.

The major Old English adjective of certainty was (ge)wiss, which in early Middle English came to be replaced with sicker derived from very weakly attested Old English sicor, a word of ultimate Romance origin (from Latin sēcūrus). The relative paucity of occurrences of both adjectives in the Dictionary of Old English corpus is attributed to their use in mostly spoken language. The rapid increase in the usage of sicker in the thirteenth century is a mystery with possible, yet difficult to prove, Norse and/or Anglo-Norman influence. The fourteenth century marks the appearance of sure and certain borrowed from Anglo-Norman first by bilingual speakers and writers, and the quick diffusion of the new lexemes to all dialects and genres. This article looks at the adoption of the different senses of these polysemous adjectives into Middle English in the context of subjectification, which appears to affect not only semantic developments within one language but also the process of borrowing. When sure and certain were used epistemically, they tended to occur in the predicative position, usually following the copula. It took several centuries of lexical layering (coexistence of synonyms) before sicker was lost from Standard English in the sixteenth century.

Whereas object pronouns regularly occurred before the main verb in Old and early Middle English, such word orders were to a large extent lost in Middle English prose by the end of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, some isolated later texts still show regular preverbal occurrences of object pronouns. Such word orders are most frequent with three texts that are translations of French sources. This article closely examines one of these texts, the Middle English prose Brut, and its source, and argues that contact influence is the most plausible explanation for its distinct behaviour with respect to object pronoun placement. It is also shown that the translator does not slavishly follow his source and that the contact effects are mainly of the statistical type in that word orders occurring very marginally in other texts appear with high frequencies in the Brut while such a contrast is not found for a word order that is unattested elsewhere. These observations are compatible with the equally exceptional but slightly different distribution of object pronouns in another translation from French, the Ayenbite of Inwyt. The findings of this article show that translation-induced contact and, possibly, contact in bilingual language use more generally can have important quantitative effects and that these have to be seriously considered in any syntactic analysis of historical texts based on a foreign source text.