Investigating the standardisation of English spelling
Caxton’s eggs language trail
The resources entitled Caxton’s eggs are all part of a Teachit Language scheme of
work for language change, focusing on standardisation, and particularly the
standardisation of spelling. The complete OED definitions for 40 words selected
from Caxton’s preface to the Eneydos, referred to within this scheme of work, are
available in the Language Sputnik only. Many teachers will want to pick and choose
how they use and adapt the activities for their groups; these notes give some ideas
for a possible ‘trail’ through them.
Introduction

Historical fact: William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476 and
printed over 100 books in his lifetime.

A Level examination answer fiction: he single-handedly standardised the English
Language.

Historical fact: Samuel Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language,
published in 1755.

A Level examination answer fiction: he single-handedly standardised the English
Language.
Time and again AQA B principal examiner reports for the language change question have
focused on these common student misconceptions. You might find these quotations
useful in working with a class on this issue:
“As before, Caxton and Johnson, often waltzing together, were given a Zeus-like
significance which does not square with either history or this data-set.”
“…the surprising number of candidates hanging on to a mythical gold standard of
correctness which came into being overnight with the publication of Johnson’s
Dictionary (or the Great Vowel Shift, or Caxton, or the BBC) against which all language,
spoken or written, is measured, and by comparison with which, much is found
wanting.”
“Most candidates… displayed some relevant knowledge for AO4 (though Dr Johnson’s
importance as the sole creator and codifier of Standard English seems to grow
annually).”
Perhaps it is not terribly surprising that this happens, given the coverage of Caxton and
Johnson in accounts of language change, and the dominance in popular historical
treatments of dramatic events and amazing individuals.
This resource is designed to help students develop a more textured understanding of
standardisation, more specifically when the standardisation of spelling occurred, and in
comparison with the idea that one or both of the waltzing twins did it. Its method – a
close focus on particular items of historical data, rather than generalised historical
accounts – could also be used to help students develop a more critical understanding of
historical narrative and of the unevenness of language change. It might also provide an
empirical methodology which students adopt and adapt for their coursework
investigations.
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Investigating the standardisation of English spelling
Caxton’s eggs language trail
What’s in the box?
Caxton’s eggs: spelling variations starter
A starter activity to get students thinking about
contemporary spelling variations that they might be
familiar with, including txt, brand names, popular
music, children’s developing writing, and dialect
representation (especially in literature).
Caxton’s eggs: Exploring the roots of
standardisation using Caxton’s Eneydos
A sequence of activities designed to introduce
students to Caxton and his preface to the Eneydos,
with a structured worksheet (and some indicative
answers), guiding students to explore some specific
features of language change evident in this very early
text.
Caxton’s eggs: mini-investigation
An instruction sheet, providing students with
introductory framing, aims, methodology and
guidance on how to log and represent the findings,
and questions to help with the analysis, conclusion
and evaluation. There are 40 words to be
investigated, so this works best with each student
adopting a couple of words from the list to work on,
and then everyone pooling the findings.
Caxton’s eggs: annotated OED <Day>
The OED entry for <day> with annotations in pop-up
yellow “sticky notes” to explain how an OED entry
works. This is designed to show students the general
principles, but there are also some comments specific
to the mini-investigation. If students haven’t used
the OED before, it would be sensible for them to read
this before tackling the investigation.
Caxton’s eggs: OED entries
In the Language Sputnik: complete OED entries for
the 40 words selected from Caxton’s preface to the
Eneydos. Where there is more than one entry for the
word in the OED online (for example, a verb form and
a noun form), the Caxton form has been chosen for
this specific task, i.e. whatever use is made of the
word in Caxton’s text.
Caxton’s eggs: data logging sheet
This provides a structured framework for logging the
different senses and spellings of the word/s. The
investigation can be done perfectly well without this,
but logical thinkers in your class will probably prefer
this methodical approach. This comes with full
instructions and a worked example in the teachers’
notes.
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Investigating the standardisation of English spelling
Caxton’s eggs language trail
Caxton’s eggs: findings spreadsheet
This is the spreadsheet a whole class could use to log
its collective findings. These could be printed off for
individual perusal and small group discussion. You
can also immediately re-present the data in graphical
form.
Caxton’s eggs: tree diagram template: ‘please’
This is an extension activity to help students to
visualise spelling variation and change over time as a
tree. The roots are the pre-standardisation variants,
the trunk is the hyperstandardised ‘correct’ spelling,
and the leaves are contemporary spelling variations.
In the example provided, these are drawn from a txt
corpus.
Some ways of working with the resources
You could start with student reflection on what they already
know about spelling variation, from txt, brand names, children’s
writing, popular music, and other unregulated print contexts.
This could be used to develop an initial discussion about why
some spellings are standardised and some are not. You might
want to come back to this activity at the end, to explore the
question of whether or not standardisation has been as successful
as textbooks generally claim, and indeed whether or not it could
ever be said to be finished.
You might then move on to look at the spelling variation in
Caxton’s preface to the Eneydos, and his comments about
language variation and change. This passage is popularly cited as
one of the catalysts for standardisation, at the very start of the
development of print culture. The resource includes a variety of
activities which you could work through, or you could just select
the passage and focus on spelling variation. Getting students to
highlight and classify the different kinds of variation (e.g. words
spelled with a <y> where we would now use an <i>) might be a
useful way into this.
Having established Caxton’s story, you could then offer a critique
of the idea that this meant English - including its spelling - was
somehow standardised by Caxton overnight. You could extend
this by referring to that other waltzing partner, Dr Johnson, and
the alternative or additional idea that his dictionary miraculously
achieved the same effect in 1755. The introduction to the miniinvestigation resource offers some questions to encourage critical
thinking about these common propositions, and to expose the
fallacies inherent in them. You could introduce the idea of the
mini-investigation, to find out where the truth in this matter lies.
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Investigating the standardisation of English spelling
Caxton’s eggs language trail
The mini investigation
Before starting the mini investigation, you might want to
introduce students to the OED and its conventions. The
annotated OED entry for <day> would be one way to do this, with
pop-up yellow “sticky notes” inserted at key points in the entry
to explain how it works. The word <day>, in all its variant
spellings, has been highlighted in a large section of the text, so
that students can see the kind of thing they will be looking for.
You might want to use this word to model how to answer the four
questions of the mini-investigation, so that everyone has had a
chance to see what they need to do before you send them off
individually.
Students could then be allocated the word(s) they are going to
investigate. It’s a good idea to use all 40 words (see the
Language Sputnik for the full OED entries), as this is a reasonable
data sample to work with, and will produce a more interesting
graph. Some of the entries are incredibly long so students may
need reminding that the task only needs scanning for
information, not detailed reading. If time is pressured, or
students unwilling, you could limit the number of pages of data
to 5. This mostly works, and it still produces useful findings – the
exception is for one or two of the words, where there is so much
etymological description that the citations don’t start until after page 5! Use your judgement,
adapt the number of pages, but do keep it consistent (i.e. everyone does 3 pages, 9 pages, or all
pages) so that the findings are methodologically sound. You could give each student one word to
start with, and see who gets on with it best before allocating additional words; you could give
stronger students more words to work with; you could have weaker students working in pairs.
It’s very flexible and everyone should be able to contribute something.
Some students may find it more helpful to log the dates of the
words on a spreadsheet, and one has been formatted and
provided for this purpose. It comes with instructions and screen
shots to show how to use it. Not everyone will prefer this
approach, but students with a logical orientation probably will.
It can of course be adapted. It is easiest to use this in an
electronic format, as new rows can be added as needed.
As students complete the answers to the 4 questions, you could
get them to log them on the findings spreadsheet. Displayed via
an IWB or data projector, this can create a “live before your very
eyes” sensation! This can be enhanced by immediately representing the data for the date standardised in graphical form.
To do this, highlight all of column D, then click >Insert >Chart.
Select >XY (Scatter) from the charts menu and then click >Next 3
times, and then >Finish. The instructions in the student miniinvestigation guide give more detail about changing the axis
values if needed, and how to read this scatter graph.
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Investigating the standardisation of English spelling
Caxton’s eggs language trail
This graph will help you explore the question of when English was standardised, and whether or
not that had much to do with either Caxton in 1476 or Johnson in 1755. If your students
answered all four questions, this feedback will make for interesting discussion too: students
often find the number of spelling variations documented in the OED surprising; and it can be
interesting to explore how many years lie between the first appearance of the spelling that was
to become the standard form, and the date at which it can be said to have been standardised.
The questions in the student mini-investigation instructions could guide class or small group
discussion further.
Thinking it through
You could return to the original focus on the fallacious idea that either Caxton or Johnson, or
both, single-handedly standardised English. Students should now have the idea that neither did,
and that much of the standardisation of spelling occurred somewhere in the time between these
two lives. The question many may now have is, if Caxton and Johnson aren’t responsible for it,
who is? There will be different ideas about this available, but one that might provide a useful
starting point for discussion is Le Page and Tabouret Keller (1985), who identified these agencies
of focusing that work to reduce variation in language form:




close daily interaction in the community
the mechanisms of an education system
a sense of common cause or group loyalty, perhaps due to the sense of a common threat
the presence of a powerful role model, such as the usage of a leader, a poet, a prestige
group or a set of religious scriptures.
This might lead into further exploration of how these agencies were working in the period of
standardisation identified by the mini-investigation. The Channel 4 History website has some
unfussy timelines of events which might prove useful.
Taking it further
Students could go back to the starter activity and consider what their awareness of
contemporary variant spellings might add to their understanding of standardisation. This might
be likened to a tree, in which the many and various pre-standardisation spellings are the roots;
the trunk is the one (or possibly two) spellings permitted by print standardisation; and the
branches at the top are the contemporary variations now permissible in unregulated forms of
writing, such as txt. Students could take any of the words from their original list and research
real examples in use; they could look at the OED entry and note the pre-standardisation forms
found there; and then produce a tree diagram. A template and an exemplar (using the word
<please>) are provided to support this.
Other useful resources
The free Word Of The Day service from the OED – an entry drops into your email box every day –
sign up at www.oed.com.
In Verbal Hygiene (1995), Deborah Cameron explores some of the issues raised by this activity
about uniformity, standardisation and hyperstandardisation. Chapter 2, ‘Restrictive practices’ is
accessible further reading.
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