the.com/middle english
the language mid-collapse: french words looted, grammar half-melted, chaucer laughing in the wreckage.
means the stage of english spoken roughly 1150 to 1500, between old english's germanic grammar and modern english's stabilized spelling and syntax.
from the norman conquest of 1066 buried old english under a ruling class of french speakers, and by the time english clawed back into official use it had shed most of its case endings and swallowed thousands of french and latin words along the way.
case endingsold english had five, middle english basically none
vocabulary boomabsorbed over 10,000 french loanwords
no standard spellingsame word spelled five ways, one manuscript
great vowel shiftended it, launching modern english pronunciation
for instance
canterbury tales — chaucer, 1387 to 1400, london dialect
gawain and green knight — anonymous, 1400s, northwest midlands dialect
ancrene wisse — 1225 nun's guide, early middle english prose
piers plowman — langland, 1370s, alliterative dream vision