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to reach agreement on which dialect should be taken as the standard. Early Modern Irish, for example, had a distinct code for courtly and literary use, which was lost when Gaelic lordship was overthrown at the end of the sixteenth century, and which it has been very hard to rebuild out of the three main varieties of the language current in twentieth-century Irish. In the history of English, it is still debated how close the language had come to having a national standard in the tenth and eleventh centuries before the Normans took over; but clearly, in the period of its re-emergence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was very difficult for anyone to decide what sort of language should be dignified with the title of ‘the best English’. And at first, no decision was made. The literature that has survived tends to show the speech style and vocabulary of the writer in idiosyncratic combinations that nonetheless usually identify him as a Midlander, a Londoner, a Kentishman, a Southerner, a Northerner or a Scot. When writing was all in manuscript, and important writing was all in Latin anyway, perhaps it mattered little that books in the vernacular were hard to read outside their local region. If a good book needed to be read more widely, someone could always convert its dialect, as the author of the Cursor Mundi did the story of the Assumption of Mary.

In sotherin englis was it draun, In southern English it was drawn

A nd turnd it haue i till our aun And I have turned it to our own

Langage o northrin lede, Language of northern folk

pat can nan oiper englis rede. That can read no other English.10

But the absence of a standard came to be a problem in two major areas of language use, the official and the literary. Once the sovereign and his courts again spoke English, it would have to be the pre-eminent English: but how should they express themselves in official laws and proclamations, so that they could be published, understood and acted upon, all over the land? And England was not just a government. It was a nation, increasingly felt to have a distinctive character, and a part to play in the world, and hence needing a distinctive, and distinct, voice. It was all very well to blandly name this ‘the English tongue’. But when an author got down to writing, which variety of all the English words and inflexions on offer should prevail, in the books that would more and more be known as English literature? This question became much more urgent when the printing presses began mass production of books in the late fifteenth century. Henceforth, identical copies of a single book might expect to go to all parts of the kingdom: what form of the language should appear in them to take full advantage of the new economies of scale?

This is not an artificial question of historians, put to dramatise a predicament confronting society as a whole, to which an answer emerged as if blindly. For some people it presented itself quite explicitly. Geoffrey Chaucer, in the final envoi of his poem Troilus and Criseide, written in London English in the 1380s, adds a verse:

And for ther is so gret diversit And because there is such great diversity

In Englissh and in writyng of oure longe, In English and in writing of our tongue,

So prey I God that non myswrite the, So pray I God that none mis-write you,

ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. Nor mis-scan you for ignorance of language.

And red wherso thou be, or elles songe And wherever you are read, or else sung,

That thou be understonde, God I biseehe! I beseech God that you be understood,

But yet to purpos of my rather speche. and in the sense meant by my earlier words.11

Here he is apparently as much worried about the corruption of the text that may come from copying from one dialect to another as he is for the poor reader or listener trying to make sense of the text.*

One possible solution that never seems to have suggested itself in England was for different dialects to become standard for different types of writing, although we have seen that this is what had happened in the