The version of The Canterbury Tales you are reading in this course is a modern translation by Neville Coughill. The original text was actually composed in Middle English, the language spoken in England during the Middle Ages. Middle English was an evolution of Old English (the language of Beowulf), and originated after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The Normans established the use of French for the ruling classes, a change that accounts for the many cognates—words sharing the same language ancestry—between English and the Romance languages.