Middle English–an overview The chronological boundaries of the
Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly
opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500.
(Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being
the early modern English period.) In terms of ‘external’
history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-
effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the
arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important
social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the
1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.
The most important linguistic developments Two very important
linguistic developments characterize Middle English: - in
grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and
more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we put
this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and
more ‘analytic’.)Change was gradual, and has different outcomes
in different regional var