J. A. Burrow - A Book of Middle English

Forms of the first and second person pronouns survived throughout the Middle English period with little change. From an early date ich is often reduced to I , as in I ne can ne I ne mai , 1/33, and in some dialects ich is attached to a verb beginning with a vowel or h or w , as in ichil , ‘I will’, 5/132, ichot ( ich + wot ), ‘I know’, 14g/10. Similarly þou is sometimes attached to the verb it follows, in which case its consonant is assimilated into the preceding /t/ of the verb‐ending: artow (for art þow ), 5/421; neltu , ‘will you not’ ( ne + wult + þu ), 2/150. Min and þin are often reduced to mi and þi , but the full forms are retained before vowels and h : þi reson … þin affeccion , 6/24–5. The second person plural forms show only few variations in spelling in our texts (e.g. ʒe and ye , ow and ʒou , ower and ʒour ). The general use of you as a nominative form is a development of Early Modern English, and in Middle English the distinction between the nominative ʒe and the accusative/dative ow or ʒou is generally well preserved. (On the usage of þou and ʒe see 5.4.1.)

The Old English ‘dual’ pronouns (meaning ‘we two’ and ‘you two’) survived for a short while; e.g. nominative wit , ‘we two’, 3/151, genitive unker , ‘of us two’, 2/151.

There were minor changes in the masculine and neuter pronouns. The masculine had an unstressed nominative form a , ‘he’, as in 7b/201. The accusative hine was rapidly superseded by the dative form him ; The Peterborough Chronicle already uses him as direct object, and it is universal by the fourteenth century.

In the neuter, genitive his was occasionally replaced by hit (e.g. 8/12, 11/ 309); the modern form its does not appear until the end of the sixteenth century. The dative neuter form him was also sometimes replaced by hit , but more commonly a periphrasis with ‘there‐’ was used to avoid it altogether; e.g. þarmid þu clackes , ‘you clack with it (your bill)’, 2/81; leyd þeron , ‘applied to it (harping)’, 5/30.

The changes affecting the feminine and plural pronouns over the period were far‐reaching. The forms were not sufficiently distinctive, particularly with the blurring of the quality of the vowel, and in any case varied greatly from dialect to dialect as the result of regular sound‐changes. The chaotic results are illustrated above from The Owl and the Nightingale , where he may represent either ‘he’ or ‘she’, hi may be feminine or plural, nominative or accusative.

The distinctive nominative feminine form she , the origin of which is disputed, was adopted at very different times in different parts of the country. In the spelling scæ , it first appears in the final section of The Peterborough Chronicle in the mid‐twelfth century, but two hundred years later the form ho is regularly used in the Gawain manuscript, side by side with occasional instances of scho . By the early fourteenth century, the old accusative form hi had been supplanted by the dative hire , a development that had already taken place in The Peterborough Chronicle , where hire is used as a direct object.

The forms of the plural pronoun also show major regional differences in their development. The oblique (non‐subject) forms derived from Old English survived particularly well, so that Chaucer and Gower at the end of the fourteenth century use hem , ‘them’, and here , ‘their’, but they for the nominative. The modern plural forms are Scandinavian in origin (cf. ON þeir , þeira , þeim ), and they are all recorded from the beginning of the thirteenth century in the East Midlands where Scandinavian influence was strong. (See map on p. 16.)

In later texts the genitive adds ‐s when it stands alone: for hores is þe hevenryche , ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’, 8/28.

The forms of the feminine and plural pronouns as they appear in the Gawain manuscript are set out for comparison with those of The Owl and the Nightingale above:

The definite article ‘the’ had in Old English no fewer than ten different forms depending on gender, case and number, but these distinctions could not survive the decay of the system of noun inflexions, with the result that there remained only the indeclinable form þe (or in some dialects te following ‐d/‐t , as in and te , at te ). þe is the invariable form in all texts in this book except in two early works from the South and South‐West Midlands (texts 2 and 3). Forms there for the singular definite article are:

The nominative and accusative neuter form is þat , still used as the definite article as well as the demonstrative: þat alre worste , ‘the worst of all’, 2/10.

Plural forms are:

In later texts there are occasional fossilized remains of an inflected form, as in the phrases after þan , ‘after that’, 5/597, and for þe nones , ‘indeed’, 5/53, 11/38, from the earlier for þan anes .

As þe became the invariable form of the definite article, þat , originally its neuter form, became restricted to demonstrative use for all genders, though in early texts it is used only with singular inanimate nouns, as in al ðat iren , ‘all that iron’, 1/32–3. At first its plural is naturally that of the definite article, þa/þo , ‘those’, used for all genders: þa men , ‘those men’, 1/17, of þat stering or of þoo sterynges , 6/50.

The plural demonstrative ‘these’, þās or þs in Old English, has a range of forms in Early Middle English, as in þos word , ‘these words’, 2/139, þeose bemeres , ‘these trumpeters’, 4/8–9, þes rikeneres , ‘these auditors’, 4/46–7. In addition, a new plural þise was coined on the basis of the singular þis . Eventually two sets of forms were distinguished in sense, so that þese and þise became the forms for ‘these’, as in þise gentyle kniʒtes , ‘these noble knights’, 9/42, while þase and þose became the forms for ‘those’, as in þose traytoures , 8/77, and so displaced the earlier þa/þo as the plural of þat . In Northern texts only, the word for ‘these’ is thir/ther (15/145), of obscure origin.