Late Middle English

The Late Middle English period was a time of upheaval in England. After the deposition of Richard II of England in 1399, the House of Plantagenet split into the House of Lancaster and the House of York, whose antagonism culminated in the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487). Stability came only gradually with the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII.

During this period of social change, with new rulers coming into positions of power, some of them from other parts of the country or from lower levels in society, many linguistic changes occurred.. Towards the end of the 15th century a more modern English began to emerge. Printing began in England in the 1470s, which helped stabilize the language. With a standardized, printed English Bible and Prayer Book being read to church congregations from the 1540s onward, a wider public became familiar with a uniform language, and the era of Modern English began.

Chancery Standard

Chancery Standard was largely based on the London and East Midland dialects, since those areas were both political and demographic centers of English society. However, it used other dialect forms where they made meanings clearer; for example, the northern "they", "their" and "them" (derived from Scandinavian forms) were used rather than the London "hi/they", "hir" and "hem." This was perhaps because the London forms could be confused with words such as he, her, and him. (However, the colloquial form written as "'em", as in "up and at 'em", may well represent a spoken survival of "hem" rather than a shortening of the Norse-derived "them".)

The clerks who used Chancery Standard would have been familiar with French and Latin, which must have influenced the forms they chose. Chancery Standard was not the only influence on later forms of English—its level of influence is disputed and a variety of spoken dialects continued to exist—but it provided a core around which Early Modern English could crystallize.

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.

In the late 1490s and early 1500s, the early printer Richard Pynson favored Chancery Standard in his published works, and consequently pushed the English spelling further towards standardization.