Medival talk?

Question

I'm doing a craetive story with my character set in the medival time. My teacher wants these stories as relistic as possible so I need to research how my characters would talk and carry themselves. Does anyone know any good websites or how I could go about doing this?

My story has a king in the beginning. Then I will include the poor people of his kingdom.

What is the difference between the rich and poor? I mean speech-wise.

Answer 1

There's a whole society out there who actually practices these things: http://www.sca.org/

Here's an intorduction to the lingo:
http://www.sca.org.au/politarchopolis/library/speaking.htm

Read anything by Shakespeare. Or this: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/gchaucer/bl-gchau-can-pri-m.htm

Answer 2

You might want to try browsing through a good interpretation of Geoggrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. You get a great idea of the kinds of language that was used at that time, the turn of phrase, and what was expected of the people. There is also the influence of class and station in life, which Chaucer plays a great deal of attention to in the Canterbury Tales, and he also delves into several regional dialects. You can check out a great direct translation of the Canterbury Tales here:

http://courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/CTlist.html

If you are writing about the Court, you may want to do a bit of Medieval court research too to understand the requirements and traditions of Courtly Romance and expectation.

Good Luck.

Answer 3

Ask Chaucer! www.houseoffame.blogspot.com (Note that GC's English there isn't 100 percent accurate, but will give you some gist of the matter.)

You might want to try reading Beowulf or else Sir Orfeo or even anything by Chaucer (he's got the most comprehensible English) to get an idea of this.
There's also a book called "The Book of Middle English" by J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre that gives the basics of the language.
Personally, however, I would suggest you leave the language modern if you don't know what you're doing.

Answer 4

I suspect your teacher wants you to research as much as possible, and that there is no quick answer. Canterbury Tales and Chaucer are a wonderful start... Your spelling of "medieval" might help you find online possibilities...

Answer 5

The Caterbury Tales. I wouldn't try to go past the middle English. The trick to reading middle English is to read it aloud. It sounds closer to the Modern than it looks.

Answer 6

I would try reading the Canterbury Tales. That is possibly the best portrayal of speech patterns of that time period.

Answer 7

Just google it!