Late Middle English[edit]
Official documents, which since the Norman Conquest had generally been written in French, began to appear in English from about 1430.[15] From here on the Chancery Standard of written English begins to emerge – based, like Chaucer's work, on the East Midlands-influenced London speech. The clerks who used this standard would have been familiar with French and Latin, which probably influenced the forms they chose. By the mid-15th century, Chancery Standard was used for most official purposes except by the Church, which still used Latin, and for some legal purposes, for which Law French and some Latin were used. It was disseminated around England by bureaucrats on official business and slowly gained prestige.[16]
Chancery Standard was not the only influence on later forms of English—its level of influence is disputed, and of course a variety of spoken dialects continued to exist—but it provided a core around which Early Modern English could crystallise. Towards the end of the 15th century, a more modern English began to emerge. Printing began in England with the introduction of the printing press by William Caxton in the 1470s, and this helped stabilise the language. In the late 1490s and early 1500s, printer Richard Pynson favored Chancery Standard in his published works, and consequently pushed the English spelling further towards standardisation.[citation needed] A wider public became familiar with a uniform language with a standardised, printed English Bible and Prayer Book being read to church congregations from the 1540s onward, and the era of Modern English began.
The end of the Middle English period is taken to occur at some point around the end of the 15th century, possibly with the introduction of printing in the 1470s, or the start of the Tudor period in 1485. The next phase in the development of the language is that of Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare), which lasted until about 1650.