Pete Scully

It is hard to avoid speaking of languages in anthropomorphic terms. Philologists have long created language family trees in order to simplify matters of linguistic heritage, likening their development to the evolution of species, which can often mask the true nature of linguistic development. English, for example, is a West Germanic language, closely related historically to Frisian, yet the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking English more of a Romance tongue. The heart of its grammar and its most commonly used words are Germanic in origin, but great swathes of its vocabulary and indeed to some extent its orthography are based on French. It is the result of a ‘marriage’ of two tongues – or more than two, if you include the extensive pre-Norman Danish influence. It was a marriage that, if ever it were harmonious, turned sour, for while French was the language of administration in England until the fifteenth century, it was eventually abandoned in favour of the native vernacular. The question of why English re-emerged after centuries of ‘submission’ has been the source of debate between scholars for many years. Traditionally, we have been led to believe that this shift was largely due to the political saga of the Hundred Years War, in which Anglo-French antagonism reached its zenith, and French was increasingly seen as the ‘language of an enemy’ (Baugh & Cable, 1993: 138). The social upheavals in fourteenth century England, following the Black Death, gave political credence to the English-speaking underclass, and although it is usually anathema to use the phrase ‘nationalism’ when referring to the Middle Ages, there is a feeling that there existed some awareness that language was tied up with national identity. Thorlac Turville-Petre notes that by the 1290s ‘the association between language and nation was well established; writers could adopt the powerful position of using the language that was distinctive to the English people and a demonstration of their common Anglo-Saxon heritage.’ (Turville-Petre, 1996: 9) When Parliament opened in English for the first time in 1362, it marked an important turning point in the already changing fortunes of the language. Though French continued to be employed in Parliament for another century, it nonetheless began to decrease in official circles as the upper classes chose to use English as their first language.

However, the situation may not have been so clear-cut. The degree of antagonism towards the use of French in England is matched by the antagonism between the Anglo-Norman (or, as it is usually known after the twelfth century, Anglo-French) variety and the increasingly prestigious Central French variety, used by the Kings of France. Negative attitudes towards Anglo-French were a feature not only in France but in England too. Chaucer famously quipped of the Prioress, in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly,

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,

For Frenssh of Parys was to her unknowe.

(General Prologue, 124-126) (Riverside Chaucer: 25)

Chaucer is mocking the Prioress here, for though she appears to be speaking the fair language of the higher class she is still a pretender to the real thing. William Rothwell described this as ‘a small reflection of the general movement towards standardization of the French language that originated in Paris before the end of the twelfth century.’(Rothwell, 1985: 42) It appears that, even during the period of the Hundred Year’s War, there was a general turning-off of the French spoken in England in favour of that of ‘the enemy’ in France. So did French fall into disuse in England because of its political connotations (much as Russian has been discouraged in the former Eastern Bloc), or did it just become considered such bad French that it was not worth learning any more?

Anglo-French antagonism has long been a feature of the two nations’ relationship. Even today, after a century of entente cordiale, the English and French cannot help but compete with each other, often taking swipes like over-zealous brothers. The recent contest to win the right to stage the 2012 Olympics came down to a stand-off between Paris and London, and took place against a background of political wrangling and media jingoism, with the French president Jacques Chirac even going so far as to criticize British cooking. The United States, despite Franco-American alliances around the time of that nation’s inception, has inherited some of this antagonism. This became evident in the government-encouraged racism against the French in 2003 for their opposition to the invasion of Iraq; on that occasion, the White House canteen apparently renamed French Fries as ‘Freedom Fries’, ignoring that the French helped them win their freedom, and that ‘French’ Fries actually originated in Belgium. On a linguistic front, however, the antagonism has gone global. The French, under the auspices of the acclaimed Académie Française, have long made attempts to stem the tide of anglicismes entering their language, encouraging more Gallic coinages such as ordinateur (rather than the English ‘computer’, itself a Latin-based word) and producing guides to correct English-free French such as Évitez le franglais, parlez français (Laroche-Claire, 2004). There has even been special legislation in France to preserve the ‘purity’ of French from English influence. The linguistic battlefront has spread across the world, from Canada, where a spirit of fierce independence from the Anglophone majority continues to stir amongst the French-speaking Quebecois, to Sub-Saharan Africa, where French is competing with English as the preferred second-tongue in many former colonial outposts. The struggle between the two languages has much history, some of which pre-dates the very existence of French and English. It could be argued that it is little more than an extension of the ancient Roman limes, the imperial and linguistic frontier between Germania and Romania. It is my intention within this study to look at the medieval basis for the antagonism between English and French, to find out if any antagonism between the languages even existed, and examine whether this perceived linguistic antagonism was behind the re-emergence of English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or whether it is merely a modern assumption. Since the Norman Conquest is seen as the starting point for the great influx of French ‘loanwords’ (though perhaps it would be wiser to call them ‘sharewords’, for as Rothwell notes (Rothwell, 2004: 314), they are not simply borrowed, but shared), I shall begin by looking at how speakers of French were perceived by the Anglo-Saxons before the arrival of the Conqueror.

Frenchmen in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

French, being the vernacular of its closest continental neighbours, was naturally not unknown in England before 1066. Having been previously exiled in Normandy during Danish rule, Edward the Confessor outlook was very much across the Channel, and Frenchmen held prominent positions during his reign. His own grandfather was a Norman, Duke Richard, and it was Edward who had allegedly promised his throne to Duke William (Carpenter, 2004: 63), a promise that would ultimately change the entire direction of the English nation, not to mention its language (Baugh & Cable, 1993: 105). Edward began to surround himself with Norman courtiers, “to the considerable irritation of the English, who then as now took a dim view of foreigners” (Claiborne, 1990: 95). When Duke William visited England in 1051, he was said to have felt quite at home, with so many of his countrymen holding posts there (Vising, 1923: 8). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offers plenty of evidence of the tense relationship between the pre-Conquest Normans and the local Anglo-Saxons. In 1048 Edward appointed ‘Rotbearde þan Freoncyscan’ (MS-D: 1048, Cubbin, 1996: 69) (‘Robert the Frenchman’, Swanton, 2000: 170) as Archbishop of Canterbury; other French clerics followed, such as William, bishop of London and Ulf, bishop of Dorchester. Edward also allowed Norman soldiers into England, which was not entirely without its advantages – when the Welsh launched an attack on Herefordshire, many Frenchmen died alongside the local English, as the Worcester MS explains:

‘On þam ilcan gere hergode Griffin se Wylisca cing on Herefordscire, þæt he com swyþe neah to Leomynstre, & men gadorodon ongean agðer ge landes men ge frencisce men of ðam castele, & man þær ofsloh swyþe feola engliscra godra manna, & eac of þam frenciscum.’ (MS-D: 1052, Cubbin, 1996:71)

(‘In the same year Gruffydd, the Welsh King, raided in Herefordshire, so that he came very near to Leominster; and men gathered around him, both local men and French men from the castle. And there were killed very many good men of the English, and also among the French.’) (Swanton, 2000:176)

Yet even here the chronicler chooses the description ‘engliscra godra manna’, while the French are simply ‘of ðam castele’. If anything this offers proof that the French word castel had already entered English vocabulary. Norman castles were more advanced than Anglo-Saxon forts, and the use of this new word indicates the distinction between the cultures. This pre-Conquest period saw a great increase in the displeasure felt by the Anglo-Saxons at having foreigners roam about the land as they pleased. An incident involving Edward’s French brother-in-law, Count Eustace, provoked a furious dispute between the King and Earl Godwin. The Chronicle describes how Eustace and his mounted companions entered Dover and appeared to go about the town at their own will, angering local residents and causing a riot in which over twenty English and nineteen Frenchmen were killed. Eustace complained to a sympathetic Edward of the unwelcoming manner of the people of Dover, but the chronicler clearly does not take a favourable view of the French Count, calling his views ‘one-sided’ (Swanton, 2000:173):

‘& weard se cyng swiþe gram wið ða burhware, & ofsænde se cyng Godwine eorl & bæd hine faran into Cent mid unfriða to Dofran, forþan Eustatius hæfde gecydd þam cynge þet hit sceolde beon mare gylt þære burhwaru þonne his, ac /hit\ næs na swa. & se eorl nolde na geðwærian þære infare, forþan him wæs lað to amyrrene his agenne folgað.’ (MS-E: 1048, Irvine 2004:81)

(‘…and the King became very angry with the townsmen; and the King sent for Earl Godwine and ordered him to go into Kent with hostility to Dover, because Eustace had informed the King that it must be more the townsfolk’s fault than his; but it was not so. And the earl would not agree to the incursion because it was abhorrent to him to injure his own province.’) (Swanton, 2000:173)

The arrogance of the Norman visitors and the willingness of Edward to side with them helped foster a spirit of fellowship among the English, displayed in Godwine’s decision not to take up arms against the people of Kent. The Abingdon MS entry for 1052 reiterates this feeling: ‘ac hit wæs heom mæst eallon læð þæt hig sceoldon fohtan wið heora agenes cynnes mannum,’ (MS-C: 1052, Connor, 1996:26) (‘it was abhorrant to almost all of them that they should fight against men of their own race,’ Swanton, 2000:180). The row with Edward culminated with the witenagamot outlawing all Frenchmen in England, including Archbishop Robert, who managed to escape the country along with Bishops William and Ulf. It was the French, according to the Chronicle, who ‘were most responsible for that discord between Earl Godwine and the King’ (Swanton, 2000:1052) (‘þe hi macodon mæst þet unseht betweonan Godwine eorle & þam cynge,’ MS-E: 1052, Irvine, 2004:84). MS D meanwhile states that the French ‘promoted illegality and passed unjust judgements and counselled bad counsel in this country’ (Swanton, 2000:182) (‘ealle þa frenciscean þe ær unlagon rærdon, & undom demdon, & unræd ræddan into ðissum earde’ MS-D: 1052, Cubbin, 1996:73). This was the ‘dim view’ held by pre-Conquest England of French-speaking Normans, yet the banishment was apparently extended to ‘none but actual offenders.’(Freeman, 1868:341)

However, no ill feeling existed between the kingdoms of France and England, at least not until William of Normandy – previously answerable to the French King – was crowned at Westminster. ‘Betwixt England and France,’ wrote E.A. Freeman, ‘there was as yet no enmity or rivalry. England and France became enemies afterwards because the King of the English and the Duke of the Normans were one person.’ (Freeman: ‘William The Conqueror’) The gripes that people such as the Dover townsfolk had with the Norman presence in Edward’s England were with the Normans themselves, not with France, yet those gripes were all the worse because their language was French. This fact singled them out as ‘foreign’. Had the Normans not discarded their Scandinavian tongue over a century earlier, they would still have been seen as foreign, as the raiding Danes were. However there had by this time already been a fair amount of mixing between the English and Norse languages, largely in the Danelaw, besides which the Danish vernacular was a Germanic cognate of English; differences were far less pronounced than between English and French. The Normans were judged not on their ethnic stock, which as they descended from Norwegians was largely Germanic, but on their wholly foreign, wholly Romance speech. ‘The Normans, much more than the Danes,’ remarked Otto Jespersen, ‘were felt as an alien race.’ (Jesperson, 1938:78)

Yet as we have seen with ‘castel’, French words were already beginning to seep into English. Barbara Strang gives further examples such as ‘tūr’ (‘tower’) and prūd (proud) (Strang, 1991:316). This type of borrowing is to be expected from contact cultures, but the sociolinguistic politics that marked the post-Conquest era did not yet exist. The French of the Normans, as far as the Anglo-Saxons were concerned, was no more a ‘prestige’ language than their own. Norman culture was no more international in influence or outlook than English culture (Leith, 1997:26). The balance of power was tipped in favour of French only after 1066, when it became the language of the ruling classes in England. However, lexical borrowing did not necessarily increase immediately after the Norman invasion. In fact the language itself did not appear to change all that drastically for about another century, judging by the available texts. Originally, and unsurprisingly given the social barriers of early Norman rule, the two languages were kept fairly separate, although King William did apparently try (and fail) to learn English. In 1067, as if to underline what respect he had for English customs and language, he issued writs in English; David Crystal notes that this early enthusiasm did not last, for ‘it would be two hundred years before English monarchs routinely used English on public occasions.’ (Crystal, 2004: 122) Yet, according to Dick Leith, French was not exactly forced upon the Anglo-Saxons – quite the opposite. The Normans didn’t encourage the English to learn their language, which was ‘exclusive, the property of the major, and often absent, landowner.’ (Leith, 1997:27) Furthermore, French texts are virtually non-existent until the twelfth century, for the Normans, in line with most other cultures, preferred to record in Latin. With Latin the medium of officialdom and the clergy, and English the tongue of the general populace, French assumed its place somewhere in the middle, the spoken – and eventually written – language of the ruling Normans and their soldiers in what was about to become what has often been called a ‘trilingual’ nation. It is this triglossic situation that I would now like to investigate further, and determine how much linguistic antagonism or even early nationalism featured in the decline of this relationship.

A Trilingual England

In today’s world there are many places in which languages live side by side, each with vastly different issues. Many of these involve ‘smaller’ (by which I mean non-global) languages in diglossic relationships with ‘larger’ or ‘metropolitan’ languages. This means either colonial languages such as English or Spanish, lingua francas such as Tok Pisin (in Papua New Guinea and surrounding areas) or national standards such as Hindi (in India). Of course, in most major cities community languages co-exist without ever infringing upon each other. London, for example, is home to over three hundred languages. There are also areas in which two ‘major’ languages compete with each other while at the same time a local vernacular persists; such a situation exists in Luxembourg, where multilingualism and code-switching is the norm. Lëtzebuergesch, which is closely related to German, is spoken there alongside standard High German and French, and is heavily influenced by both. All three languages have a tradition of literature within the Grand Duchy, and while some domains rely more heavily on French and others on standard German, all are commonly used in politics, law, the media and in education (Hoffman, in Newton, 1996:138-139). It would be easy to make comparisons between the truly trilingual situation in Luxembourg and that of medieval England, but the outcome of the former is known, while the destiny of Lëtzebuergesch is much less certain. It is not a dying language in the same vein as Provençal or Gaelic, but the fact that it is regarded by many as a ‘dialect’ of German and not a language in its own right may see it go the way of Anglo-Norman, for it may ultimately lose prestige to the more politically powerful standard German. However for now at least the trilingualism of everyday life in Luxembourg looks likely to continue.

A different linguistic situation exists in Belgium, but it is one that has been at the root of much antagonism, another example of the continuing linguistic tension on the Romano-Germanic frontier. Baugh and Cable called it ‘an instructive parallel’ (Baugh & Cable, 1993: 112) to medieval England. Modern Belgium is a federal state in which the north speaks Dutch (locally known as Flemish) and the south French (although the traditional Walloons dialect has all but given way to the standard form). There are also some German speakers around Eupen in the east. Only in Brussels do the two main languages co-habit the same space legally, with everything from place-names to street-signs to judicial hearings being in both Dutch and French, though in truth around eighty-five percent of locals are francophone (Wardhaugh, 1987: 207). Traditionally, however, the French speaking ruling classes suppressed the vernacular of the Flemish majority, and Dutch was simply not seen as being anywhere near as attractive as the ‘language of opportunity’ (Wardhaugh, 1987: 205). It was many years before Flemish finally gained any sort of official status, and only in 1967 was the Belgian Constitution translated into the language of the majority. In this way can we compare Belgium to medieval England: in both did the local Germanic tongue survive despite Francophone governance. However, any comparison must surely end there, for the Flemish, unlike the English, do not inhabit the whole country, only Flanders. Each region has its own language, so while Belgium is officially a bilingual nation (trilingual if including German, which few seem to, including the Belgians), its people are on the whole monolingual. In medieval England, the languages were not separated geographically, only socially; anybody with aspirations in Norman and Angevin England would need to learn French (and possibly Latin). In Belgium, it helps to speak Dutch if you are from Charleroi, but it is hardly essential to become successful. Nevertheless the antagonisms that persist to this day in Belgium stem from the policy of linguistic oppression.

Of course there are still countries and regions today in which the co-existence of French and English has resulted in seemingly interminable antagonism. Canada is made up of mostly English-speaking provinces, but is officially and constitutionally a bilingual country, in the same way that Belgium is. Its linguistic make-up (excluding, of course, the native languages) is a result of the Anglo-French struggle for supremacy in North America in the earlier days of intercontinental conquest. Now, only Quebec is French-speaking, and they guard their language jealously. For them it is a ‘matter of cultural and even ethnic security and survival.’ (McArthur, 2002:208) Wardhaugh views the Canadian situation as highly antagonistic, ‘two peoples largely cut off from each other, each with its own view of Canadian history and identity, with little chance of reconciliation.’ (Wardhaugh, 1987: 223) Yet even in a supposedly consociationalist society in which the speakers of the two languages live in separate provinces, like in Belgium, the Quebecois have found their language being treated as second-class, even within Quebec. One prison-bound Quebecois writer, Pierre Vallières, has even gone so far as to call his downtrodden people the ‘white niggers of America’. (Vallières, 1971: 21) Immigrants to Quebec are increasingly opting to learn English over French, thus ‘offering a better future for themselves and their children.’ (Wardhaugh, 1987: 223) So here, as we are seeing elsewhere in the world, English is being seen as a more internationally useful language, as French once was. Yet, despite the obvious socio-economical advantages of learning French in medieval England, that language did not eradicate English. Is there any evidence to show us that English was in any serious danger of being wiped out, as many Quebecois feel their language is today?

Triglossia in the Anglo-Norman period

In just a few generations after settling in northern France, the Norsemen or Normans wholly abandoned their native Norse tongue in favour of the local Romance vernacular. This in itself, though apparently surprising to many historians, is not unusual per se. History is littered with examples of invading forces giving up their own tongues after settling down. The Franks who gave their name to France originally spoke a West Germanic language, Franconian, but eventually the language of the Gallo-Romance populace prevailed, albeit altered by the Frankish settlers, at least in the north. Similarly the German-speaking Langobardi assimilated with the northern Italian dialects in what is now Lombardy, as did the Visigoths and similar tribes who conquered Spain, leaving modern Spanish with little trace of their presence bar personal names (Penny, 2002: 16) and a few place-names (such as Andalucia, after the Vandals). There are traces of the original Norse existing in modern French, such as vague ‘wave’ (compare to modern Swedish våg); Dick Leith even calls the Norman dialect ‘Scandinavianised French’ (Leith, 1997: 26). But the overall impression from reading Anglo-Norman texts is that there was no wholesale transmission of Nordic vocabulary into the northern French on the scale of the Anglo-Norman words that were supplanted into English. This alone offers proof of the speed with which the Normans let their ancestral language go; they were not so quick to abandon French once they conquered England. It is possible that, having only begun to speak it less than a century and a half earlier, the Normans were reluctant to give up their now naturalized language. Of course, it has more to do with the fact that the Normans, and later the Angevins, still held large territories in France, and it was in their interest to conduct their affairs in that language.

However, the most important language in use in medieval Europe was still Latin. The Romance dialects were what was left of the original spoken Vulgar Latin, but the written form remained as a pan-European standard. It was the favoured medium of the Church, and of high learning: a knowledge of Latin unlocked many of the great treasures of European literature and philosophy. The Normans in England governed in Latin. According to M.T. Clanchy, they did not care to use the already well-established English language because such Norman clerics as Lanfranc, William’s newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘found it uncouth and could not understand it anyway.’ (Clanchy, 1998: 26) Perhaps this haughtiness extended to their own romanz, for French had not yet reached the level of prestige endowed upon Latin, which ‘was argued to carry greater weight than its rivals’. (Clanchy, 1979: 156 ) They may well have regarded French not only as lacking in dignity, but as not standing on solid ground. Latin, being text-based, was firmly standardised, while other ‘developing’ languages were as shifting sands. French would of course not remain in this position for long, but it would always be seen as a secondary. English, whose West Saxon variety had at least been a major written language, was relegated to third in the equation; the only way to escape the subjugation of society’s new bonds was to become bilingual. Charles Barber points out that ‘anybody whose native tongue was English, and who wanted to get on in the world, had to learn French.’ (Barber, 1993: 134) This must have irked the Anglo-Saxons, for theirs was not a backward culture at all, and Englishmen had traditionally travelled far and wide in Europe; it was they, for example, who had brought Christianity to the Germans and the Frisians. However, it appears that the Normans did have quite a lot of respect for English customs, and even language, at first. In the twelfth century they considered the English laws of Alfred and Canute important enough to translate into Latin, more for preservation than anything else; Gerry Knowles, in his Cultural History of the English Language, feels that this is not an attempt by the Normans to eradicate Anglo-Saxon, more ‘the transfer from a national standard to the prevailing European standard’, a common move all over Europe at that time (Knowles, 1979: 48). Latin, as far as written records went, was a single European currency. Johan Vising described how the 1164 Constitutions of Clarendon effectively barred sons of Englishmen from joining the clergy, thus discouraging preaching in English, but the existence of contemporary English homiletical texts proves that this was not enforced with much rigour (Vising, 1923: 14). If there had been a policy to wipe out or at least discourage the use of Anglo-Saxon, along the lines of French policy towards Breton and other regional languages since at least the eighteenth century (Lodge, 1993: 216), the copying of Old English texts well into the twelfth century might not have happened. Even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was kept up, though it is clear from this that the language was already evolving, at least in the written form where scribes adopted Norman practises and spelling conventions (Knowles, 1979: 48). Nonetheless, texts in English became sparse during the twelfth century, and it is altogether possible that as the language changed, and with no written standard upon which to base an orthography or grammar, the art of writing in what we now call Old English was simply forgotten.

The idea traditionally held by historians that the Norman invasion was one of brutish wanton destruction of the English state may have reflected a modern antagonism with the foreigner. R. Allen Brown felt that the Protestant Victorian views of E.A. Freeman coloured the way he portrayed events: ‘Freeman really did see the Norman Conquest in terms of clean-limbed Englishmen, all liberals and at least potential members of the Church of England, done down at Hastings by dirty foreigners, using dirty tricks.’ (Brown, in Saul, 1994: 36) That the very nature of ‘Englishness’ is likened only to the Anglo-Saxon element and not to the Norman is largely incorrect. Normans intermarried extensively with Anglo-Saxons, who themselves – particularly in the north of the country – had been intermarrying with Danes for some time now, the effects of which are visible in the language even today. The ethnic make-up of the ‘English’ has always been mixed; the very term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ suggests so. Within a few generations of the Battle of Hastings, many Normans had co-mingled with their English subjects, and bilingualism became more common. R.M. Wilson noted in his 1943 article English and French in England, 1100-1300 that assimilation between the two cultures was fairly complete by the time Henry II was king, but he was confident that it was more a case of the Normans ‘becoming’ English than vice-versa, due to ‘the fact that it is ultimately an English and not a French nation which emerges.’ (Wilson, 1943: 42) Any divisions in language, then, were no longer based on ethnicity, but on social class, for it was the literate classes that could use English, French and often Latin (Fennel, 2001: 117). The three-tiered nature of much of modern English vocabulary, so often illustrated by the ‘rise-mount-ascend’ example, has its origins in this triglossic society. With English the idiom of the peasant, French of the landowner, soldiery and, of course, the Royal court, and Latin of the learned classes and record-keepers, each language had its place and appropriate function in society. For example Latin, being a clearly structured and much less ambiguous language, was employed for legal matters, much the same way that modern English ‘legalese’ is the correct idiom for use in acts of legislation, where precision and coherence are required (Crystal, 2003: 374). There did not, in the twelfth century at least, appear to be a great deal of antagonism between the three, for as Turville-Petre points out, they ‘existed in harmony, not just side by side but in a symbiotic relationship; not three cultures but one culture with three voices.’ (Turville-Petre, 1996: 181)

Such an idealistic state of affairs could not continue ad infinitum – a blurring of boundaries was inevitable (as the etymology of that sentence proves). But the polyglossic England Turville-Petre describes is not without modern parallels. Even in the UK today, many people have two registers, speaking in a local dialect, but writing in modern standard English – one being more appropriate for certain situations than the other. Nevertheless it is clear that the languages did soon encroach into each other’s spheres. The early Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, probably composed around the end of the twelfth century, displays characteristics – such as its rhyming couplets and its ‘debate’ theme – usually associated with French or Latin verse (Turville-Petre, 1996: 183). More and more learned writers, such as the late twelfth century verse chronicler Jordan Fantosme, were choosing to write in French – or rather, Anglo-Norman – over Latin, the knowledge of which was ‘declining’, according to debates at the time (Clanchy, 1979: 158). Thanks in part to the rising stock of Old French culture it was becoming more acceptable to use the Romance vernacular not just in literature but also within official documents. M.T. Clanchy has even suggested that England itself might have had a hand in the widespread acceptability of written French, for it had a ‘long tradition of non-Latin literature’ (Clanchy, 1979: 168). What is remarkable about the thirteenth century’s sudden increase in the use of French was that it coincided with further tensions between England and the Capetian Kings of France.

Nigel Saul noted in England and Europe that in cultural terms England and Normandy were moving further apart during the twelfth century: ‘the English found a new pride in their Anglo-Saxon past, and the Normans drifted into the orbit of Capetian Paris, as their reception of Parisian architectural styles shows.’ (Saul, 1994: 13) England was, after all, politically independent of France itself, though clearly within its sphere of influence, while Normandy and Anjou and other areas were nominally under Parisian suzerainty. This meant that the Norman and Angevin rulers always had mixed interests in both England and France, a situation that encouraged Anglo-French tension. These tensions came to a head during the troubled reign of King John, who lost control of Normandy in 1204. Some language historians have seen this loss as a decisive point in the history of English, (Baugh & Cable called the loss ‘wholly advantageous’ to the English language; 1993: 125) because it effectively began England’s split from the continent, forcing Norman landowners to choose whether to be ‘English’ or ‘French’. Louis XI of France made it clear that to have allegiance to both was now ‘impossible’ (Fennel, 2001: 118). John still held power in much of France, namely Poitou and Aquitaine, but as John Gillingham has pointed out, ‘as King of England John was sovereign but on the Continent he was the King of France’s vassal and subject to his court’ (Gillingham, in Saul, 1994: 89). ‘The bitterness of Anglo-French relations in the reigns of John and Henry III,’ noted Clanchy in England and its Rulers: 1066-1272, ‘only makes sense when it is understood that the king of England was still a threat to the king of France and that conversely the kings of England did not accept the loss of their overseas inheritance with equinamity.’ (Clanchy, 1998: 127) Given that the French-speaking English kings identified with these regions (and indeed spent much of their time there), it is unsurprising that they regretted this loss, but how did the English people see things? It appears that there was some antagonism felt towards many of the newly immigrated French during the thirteenth century, particularly towards the Poitevins. Coming from the warmer, more southerly parts of France, the Poitevin immigrants were much favoured by Henry III – and importantly they spoke a very different style of French to the Anglo-Normans who had been settled for over a century and a half (Clanchy, 1998: 129). A climate of tension grew between the native English and the king’s ‘Poitevin brethren’, startlingly mirroring the tensions described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle two centuries previous. They were particularly unloved by the St. Albans chronicler Mathew Paris. He often complained that the English had been greatly undermined by foreign governance, and contrasted them with the ‘warlike’ Welsh, writing in 1256 on their ‘refusal to desist from warlike proceedings’:

‘This manly and brave determination might justly shame the English, who lazily bent their necks to foreigners, and to every one who trampled on them, like vile and timid rabble, the scum of the human race.’ (Mathew Paris, Chronica Majora, 1256; translated from the Latin by J.A. Giles, 1854: 204)

Possibly reflecting a feeling of xenophobia among English and Anglo-Normans about the newcomers, he described London as being ‘full to overflowing of Poitevins, Romans, Provençals and Spaniards’ (Fennel, 2001: 118). At the Oxford Parliament of 1258, around the time of Simon de Montfort’s rebellion against Henry III, Paris noted that ‘the King and his Poitevin brethren would call on the foreigners to aid them against his own natural subjects’ (Giles, 1854: 285) and spoke of the ‘fear of the deceit of Frenchmen’ (Giles, 1854: 286). In 1260 de Montfort, in an echo of Earl Godwine’s outlawing of þa frenciscean, expelled the Poitevins from England, those whom Mathew Paris dubbed ‘disturbers of the peace’ (Giles, 1854: 334). But Simon de Montfort was himself Normandy-born, and Mathew Paris had been Paris-educated (Clanchy, 1998: 129); the antagonism here was clearly not one language-borne. In fact, the trilingual nature of England was becoming more apparent, not only with the ascendancy of written French, but also the rise or at least reappearance of English as a language of record. In what appears to be an effort to placate the resentful English, whose national identity had been stirred by de Montfort, Henry III addressed his subjects, ‘clergy and laiety’, in their own vernacular in a proclamation made on 18^th October 1258:

‘‘Henri, þur3 Godes fultume King on Engleneloande, Lhoauerd on Yrloande, Duk on Nomandi, on Aquitaine, and Eorl on Aniow, send igretinge to alle hise holde, ilærde and ileawede, on Huntendoneschire.’

(‘Henry, through God’s help king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy, of Aquitaine, and earl (ie, count) of Anjou, sends greetings to all his faithful subjects, clergy and laiety, of Huntingdonshire.’) (Harry Rothwell, 1975: 367)

It was the first time English had been officially used by a reigning monarch since William I, and was, Harry Rothwell explains, ‘evidence of the exceptional nature of the occasion.’ Written not only in English but also in French by one Robert of Fulham, it is also evidence of ‘the multilingual competence of English administrators at the time.’ (Clanchy, 1979: 172) This in turn provides evidence of a period in which the three languages had begun to vie for supremacy, against a background of increasing Anglo-French antagonism.

Antagonism in the later Middle Ages

According to the Chronica Majora, the 1259 Treaty of Paris, in which Henry III relinquished his claim to Normandy, was down to ‘the most pious king of France’, Louis IX, desiring to make lasting peace with his cross-Channel neighbours, ‘in order that the two kingdoms may no longer gnaw each other at the instigation of the enemy of the human race, nor the inhabitants pillage and slay each other, and be thus thrust into hell.’ (Mathew Paris, Chronica Majora, 1259; in Harry Rothwell, 1975: 133) However, historian J.R. Maddicott is in no doubt that in this settlement lay the origins of the Hundred Years War, which would erupt less than a century later (Maddicott, in Saul, 1994: 133). Despite the reappearance of written English in 1258, fears about language death were voiced by no less authoritative a figure than Edward I. According to Barbara Fennell, he spoke English very well, and encouraged it to be spread throughout the nobility (Fennell, 2001: 118), though it was not his mother tongue. Faced with French invasion, Edward invoked what Turville-Petre calls ‘the nationalist associations’ of the English tongue, claiming that the French were ‘trying to exterminate the English language.’ (Turville-Petre, 1996: 8) This indicates that English must have been deemed worth saving, not just by the lower orders who spoke it but by the largely bilingual aristocracy. Being linked to the nation itself, English was perhaps becoming fashionable, but French was still rising in cultural importance. Gradually replacing Latin, Anglo-Norman acted in the role of standard language in England at a time when dialectal differences within English were still highly prominent. These differences, along with the existence of French and Latin, were huge stumbling blocks in the development of a standard form for English. John of Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century English translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon points out the usefulness of French as a standard:

‘Hit seemeth a greet wonder how Englisshe, that is the birth-tongue of Englisshemen and her owne language, is so dyversse of soune in this oon iland, and the language of Normandie is complying of another londe, and hathe one manere soun among ale men that speketh hit aright in Engelond… For a man of Kent, Southern, western and northern men speken Frenssche al lyke in soune and speche, but they can not speke theyr Englysshe so.’ (Legge, 1979: 115)

However this dialectalism may have hindered its development as a language of record, it did not get in the way of many more literary works appearing in English. The existence of trilingual manuscripts proves that the literate aristocracy were comfortable in all three languages. But the appearance of a manuscript in 1330s London whose works were, bar a few lines here and there in French, wholly in English marked ‘the appearance of a public whose literacy is essentially confined to English.’ (Scahill, 2003: 18) Thorlac Turville-Petre devotes a whole chapter of his 1996 study England the Nation to the Auchinleck Manuscript (Advocates MS 19.2.1). It contains many works which would have been of interest to patriotic Anglophone nobles of the time, such as the Liber Regum Anglie, an account of England’s royal history which reworks the earlier Short Metrical Chronicle to include Hengist, the ‘progenitor of ‘oure Inglis kynde.’’ (Turville-Petre, 1996: 109) On the whole, not only does the Auchinleck Manuscript nurse English national pride, but also validates monolingualism. The author of Of Arthour and of Merlin comments on the trilingualism of England, but justifies his own decision to write in English:

Auauntages þai hauen þare

Freynsch & Latin eueraywhare.

Of Freynsch no Latin nil y tel more

Ac on J[n]glisch ichil tel þerfore

Ri3t is þat J[n]glische vnderstond

Þat was born in Jnglond.

Freynsche vse þis gentil man

Ac euerich Jnglische Jnglische can;

Mani noble ich haue yseiýe

Þat no Freynsche couþe seye,

Biginne ichil for her loue

Bi Ihesus leue þat sitt aboue

On Inglische tel mi tale -

God ous sende soule hale.

(Of Arthour and of Merlin, 25-6; Turville-Petre, 1996: 138)

A general increase in literacy in the fourteenth century must have played its role in the steady rise of written English. After all, it stands to reason that for someone to be able to read letters the advantages of having those letters in your mother tongue are far greater than having them in one which must be learnt. Latin, as a non-vernacular, had to be learnt, but increasingly so did French. Back in the thirteenth century, Walter of Bibbesworthe wrote guides to learn French such as the Tretiz de Langage – but ‘correct’ French, not the common tongue ‘which everyone knows how to speak’ (Clanchy, 1979: 152). Many more appeared in the late fourteenth century, such as A Night at the Inn of 1396 (Myers, 1969: 1212), though Johan Vising pointed out that by then ‘French was not even taught regularly in the schools, nor to children of the nobles.’ (Vising, 1904: 2) English was making inroads even at the highest levels, and as Anglo-French relations deteriorated in the fourteenth century, the language became ever more the tool of patriots. Yet still there appeared to be no desire to abandon French among the upper classes, and certainly there was no patriotic preference of the insular variety to that spoken in Paris. Furthermore, as far as people at the time were concerned, while it may have been increasingly seen as an inferior form, Anglo-Norman was not perceived as a different language from French, just as northern English was not seen as a different language to southern English. Among the upper classes, there was no antagonism as such towards the French language; as the Auchinleck Manuscript displays, it was more that English was at last deemed worthy of promotion. Nothing can illustrate this feeling more than the way English was, for all intents and purposes, artificially propped up in Ireland by the Statues of Kilkenny in 1366. The Anglo-Normans had begun to conquer Ireland almost two centuries prior, but had assimilated to such a degree that ‘the Norman gentry had adopted Irish customs, Irish dress, Irish names and the Irish language; they had become hibernicised.’ (Todd, 1999: 31) The Statutes of Kilkenny preserved at least the ‘Pale’, in the east of the country, for the English language, allowing it a foothold that has grown steadily ever since. It is not clear how many of these Norman gentry spoke English, but it is interesting to note that this piece of legislation safeguarding the English language in Ireland was still passed in French (and in England). One of the things the Statutes stipulated was that ‘all clerics (whether English, Irish or Norman) should speak English, even if that meant giving them ‘respit de la lang Engleis apprendre’ (‘some extra time to learn the English language’; Todd, 1999: 31). Did this respit to learn English extend to the French-using authorities in England as well?

Politically, England as well as English was growing in stature and in confidence. When Edward III openly declared himself King of France in January of 1340, the actual King of France in Paris was outraged; ‘no such grand and presumptuous challenge to French power had been made by any previous monarch.’ (Maddicott, in Saul, 1994: 133) This in turn kick-started a series of conflicts known to history as the Hundred Years War. As far as the history of antagonism between France and England goes, these wars were the boiling point. Linguists often refer to this period as being the ‘death warrant’ for the use of French in England (Fennell, 2001: 120). There is no doubting that this ‘death’ was long and protracted. When Parliament opened in 1362 for the first time in English, it marked the beginning of the end for French in government, but it was still little more than a gesture to the populace. Sections of the upper classes clearly still wanted to continue using French and Latin – possibly due to the need for some form of standard, as noted above. According to Glanville Price, the Universities at Oxford and Cambridge actually imposed regulations demanding that students use only French or Latin, barring English even in conversation, thus ‘artificially propping up’ the French language (Price, 1984: 218). In legal affairs it was a different matter. The 1362 Statute of Pleading was an attempt to safeguard the linguistic rights of the common people by ordering that court proceedings be heard in English, because there were too many mistakes – ‘maulx et meschiefs’ – occurring due to people not understanding French:

‘P’ce q monstre est soventfoitz au Roi, p Prelatz, Ducs, Counts, Barons & tout la cõe, les g’ntz meschiefs q sont advenuz as plusours du realme de ce q les leyes custumes & estatutz du dit realme ne sont pas conuz cõement en mesme le realme, p cause qils sont pledez monstrez & juggez en la lange Franceis, qest trop desconue en dit realme.’

(‘Because it is often shewed to the King by the Prelates, Dukes, Earls, Barons, and all the Commonalty, of the great Mischiefs which have happened to divers of the Realm, because the Laws, Customs and Statutes of this Realm be not commonly [holden and kept] in the same Realm, for that they be pleaded, shewed and judged in the French Tongue, which is much unknown in the said Realm.’) see [www.languageandlaw.org/TEXTS/STATS/PLEADING.HTM]

The Statute insists however that while folk are judged ‘en la lange engleise’, court procedures must still be recorded ‘en latin’. The Statute itself, as was the norm, was recorded in French, and this norm continued for more than a century, beyond even the most hostile hours of the Hundred Years War. Price notes that it was as late as 1485 that Parliamentary Statutes first came to be written in English alongside French, and ‘after 1489 French is no longer found.’ (Price, 1984: 218) If French had been the language of the enemy back in the mid-1300s, the English were in no hurry to stop using it, which would suggest that antagonisms between France and England did not extend to the use of French.

In fact, it was during this prolonged period of intermittent conflict that the largest amount of French loanwords – or sharewords – entered the English vernacular. During the second half of the fourteenth century, a good deal of the literature produced shows extensive use of French-originated vocabulary, largely from Anglo-Norman but also from the prestigious Central French variety, or Francien. While English continued to slowly encroach upon traditionally French-speaking areas of society, its lexis was vastly increased. If we look at words as people and languages as countries, then it could be said that the French words entering English were refugees from a language being taken over or replaced by English. One reason that this process took the amount of time that it did is perhaps precisely because the English did not want to give up French, while they still had interests on the continent. If the use of English was a nationalist thing, as I will discuss further, then holding to French was a pragmatic thing. It is as if French was a currency, and England still had vast amounts of that currency in reserve, but was not prepared to exchange it for English currency while there was a chance they would be back in France. By the late fifteenth century, it was clear that chance had gone.

Nationalism and language

From a twenty-first century point of view, language and nationalism often go hand in hand. Had the Normans of England been at the throats of the Capetian French these days, they would undoubtedly have chosen to call their own, distinguishable form of French by the name philologists now give it, that is, Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French. Yet they did not, for to them it was always la lange franceis, or at the least romanz. Ronald Wardhaugh has stated that ‘it is probably only in the modern world that language has become such a powerful political symbol.’ (Wardhaugh, 1987: 4) A quick look at the dictionary section of any well-stocked bookstore may reveal separate dictionaries for Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, languages which, alphabet issues aside, are actually all the same language, each with slightly different turns of phrase. Before the dissolution of Yugoslavia it was called Serbo-Croatian, and though Serbs used the Cyrillic alphabet, the orthography was exactly the same as in the Latin type found in Croatia. After the bitter civil war having a language with its own name became a matter of national identity. The languages of Urdu and Hindi, used in Pakistan and India respectively, are also considered to be the same language with only regional differences and of course, different writing systems. Only recently has Belgium officially begun to call Flemish ‘Nederlands’, which it is called by the Dutch with whom they share a standard. Were Belgo-Dutch relations not as good as they are, perhaps it would be forever Flemish, with efforts to play up the differences made to prove that they are not mere dialects of each other. As for within Belgium, many in the Flemish north (such as the right wing party Vlaams Blok) wish to see a Dutch-speaking state for themselves separate from the French-speaking Walloons. Language, at least in modern times, is bound with national identity.

As for whether the idea of ‘nation’ or even ‘nationalism’ was a feature of the Middle Ages, scholars seem to be coming around to the idea that it was, and that language did play some part in its promotion. Thorlac Turville-Petre’s 1993 paper ‘The ‘Nation’ in English Writings of the Early Fourteenth Century’ approached this subject from the first appearance in English of the word ‘nacion’, to show that ‘the term was available to express the concept of the community bound together by emotional and political as well as ethnic ties.’ (Turville-Petre, in Rogers, 1993: 129) He showed that by the fourteenth century the English language was considered the mark of national identity at a time when an English sense of self needed promoting, in the face of conflict with not only France but Scotland. I have already mentioned that despite the huge dialectal differences, each regional variety was still perceived as English. The author of Cursor Mundi, says Turville-Petre, attempting to avoid problems of intelligibility, adapted a text from sotherin Englis to the langage o northrin lede ‘for his own northern readers’ (Turville-Petre, in Rogers, 1993: 137) yet it was always English. The Germanic Anglo-Saxon heritage was used to draw the people together, with French seen increasingly as alien to the commoner. Though the English had little else but condescension for the Celts and a mixture of antagonism and admiration for the French, the Germans were seen as brethren to the English, sharing a common ancestry. Benjamin Arnold noted that ‘the politics of the ruling elite in England did tend to perceive the French court, if not France itself, as the enemy. On the other hand the Germans were generally perceived as a nation amicable to the English, whose remote ancestry as a people who had originally emigrated from Saxony was never forgotten in the Middle Ages.’ (Arnold, in Saul, 1994: 87) Mathew Paris held that the Germans in turn despised the proud French, but felt differently toward the English, as in 1257 when their nobles chose the English Earl Richard as their ruler, ‘on account of his speaking the English language, which is similar in sound to the German, as of their common origin, both ancient and modern.’ (Giles, 1854: 209) There is a sense of continued Saxon identity that refuses to die in the face of Norman lordship. Clanchy tells us that the notion of English identity was ‘maintained as an ideal by Benedictine monasteries with their roots in the Anglo-Saxon past.’ (Clanchy, 1998: 173) But the English language had changed enormously by the thirteenth century, no longer resembling the language of Earl Godwine. So too had ‘English identity’ changed, though few English appeared willing to acknowledge it. As I have mentioned, that identity was by already quite mixed by Norman intermarriage. By living in England and governing its affairs, the Normans became English – not Anglo-Saxon, but English nonetheless – and they brought their anti-French sentiments with them.

As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle demonstrates, there was some anti-French feeling in England before the Conquest, but it was only with those Frenchmen residing in England that came from Normandy and were seen to be causing problems among the natives. It was not with France. England inherited the culture of antagonism with France from the Normans, who along with the later Angevins were seen as a threat to the French King. Hugh M. Thomas’s masterful book The English and the Normans (2003) explains how despite antagonism between the Anglo-Saxon and Norman elements of post-Conquest England, once they became assimilated they tended to draw on a shared identity when coming into conflict with others. This meant against the Celts, the Jews (who had begun to migrate to England after 1066) and of course the French. ‘As English identity grew among the immigrants, and as enmity between Normans and French created enmity between French and English, hostility to France could reinforce that new identity, just as ethnic hatreds against the Celts did.’ (Thomas, 2003: 319) One of the greatest texts to illustrate the two countries’ mutual ill feeling was the Debate between the Heralds of France and England. Apparently written by Charles, Duke of Orleans in the mid-fifteenth century, it was inspired by a dispute at the Council of Constance about forty years previously (Pyne, 1870: xii). Two heralds argue over the virtues of their respective kingdoms in a fairly even-handed way, but as the text is by a Frenchman, it is largely pro-French. In on of his first responses to the English herald, the French herald puts England down with incredible scorn:

‘I say, Lady Prudence, that the English are great boasters, despising every other nation than their own; and ready to begin wars which they do not know how to finish. They are likewise so presumptuous that they think their kingdom is of greater value and dignity than any other Christian kingdom.’ (Pyne, 1870: 9)

As far as England’s ethnic heritage and ‘nation’ status is concerned, and despite the fact that its rulers have used French for so long, the herald also has this to say about the English:

‘When the clergy of Christendom are assembled there are four nations: France, Spain, Lombardy and Germany. You are no nation, but are under the German nation. Thus it appears that the clergy of France is ten times greater than that of England, for it is a nation of itself, while you are only a member of the German nation.’ (Pyne, 1870: 70)

The English herald is not so brutal about the French, however, calling France ‘one of the most powerful nations of Christendom’ before going on to list the many battles the English have won against them (Pyne, 1870: 15). The wars with France intensified English identity in a way that the skirmishes with the Welsh or the Scots could not – for they ultimately respected and admired France. It was the birthplace of chivalry, and the hub of European literature. Culturally, France led the way for England. There was certainly a good deal of praise among the English for the French, and their kings (Thomas, 2003: 316-7). Clanchy even postulates that ‘it is probable that French literary language would have been introduced into England whether or not there had been a Norman Conquest.’ (Clanchy, 1998: 183) Perhaps the use of French was clearly not as much of an issue in determining national identity as one might imagine; you could still be English and speak French. An Anglophone Irishman today would likely be quite offended if you told him that he didn’t share national identity with someone from the Gaeltacht. So if France was such a guiding light for English culture in a period where there were also feelings of antagonism, are there any cultural examples where the English apparently reject the influence of the French?

A Germanic literary revival

I believe that one such example lies in the so-called ‘Alliterative Revival’ of the mid-fourteenth century. Alliterative poetry had been a feature not only of English but of Germanic literature in general for many centuries. It was also a feature of Welsh poetry, according to Gerald of Wales (or Giraldus Cambrensis), but was not found in Romance:

‘In no other languages which I know is this device of alliteration used as much as in England and Wales. It is remarkable, for instance, that French, which is so richly adorned with other figures, should never make use of this particular one, whereas other languages are full of it. I cannot believe that the Welsh and the English, so different from each other and so antagonistic, could ever consciously agree about the rhetorical device.’

(Gerald of Wales, The Description of Wales: Book 1, chapter 12; transl. Lewis Thorpe, 1978: 241)

Gerald was writing in the late twelfth century, and the English were clearly still using alliteration at this time. It was evident in La3amon’s Brut, an English adaptation of Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut, itself an adaptation of the Latin Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth. That La3amon was conscious of ‘Englishness’ is clear – and there must have been a need for such a text to be in the vernacular, otherwise one might as well read Wace or Geoffrey. His use of alliteration also marks the text out as ‘English’, or at least ‘not French’ – contrasting it with the choices made by the English author of The Owl and the Nightingale. Hugh Thomas points out that La3amon, by choosing to adapt a text that was about England but not exactly pro-Saxon, was not trying to rub the noses of the already assimilated Anglo-Norman elite (Thomas, 2003: 389), and perhaps it would be too much to suggest the use of alliteration was a statement in itself, being merely a continuation of an already established English poetic form. However, from the manuscript evidence we have, it does appear that alliterative verse did give way not too long after this, and only reappeared at the time when Anglo-French relations were at their lowest ebb.

Turville-Petre says that ‘it is logical to associate the Revival with the decline of French as a literary language in England in the mid-fourteenth century as well as the growth of a prosperous, literate and fairly sophisticated audience.’ (Turville-Petre, 1977: 26) Some of the early poems of the Revival were re-workings of French originals, such as William of Palerne, reflecting the desire to anglicise French works rather than reject them completely. The author of that poem, composed around 1350, makes it clear why the work was commissioned in English:

‘He let make þis mater in þis maner speche

For hem þat knowe no Frensche, ne neuer vnderston.’

(William of Palerne, lines 5532-33; in Turville-Petre, 1977:40)

Works such as this represent a translation of the admired French culture, but how much was the added ingredient of traditional Germanic form a conscious effort to promote Englishness? The readiness of works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the alliterative Morte Arthure to reference and use as subject matter non-Saxon legends and events, i.e. King Arthur and the Trojan origin myth continue the tradition of La3amon, but also serve to place ‘Englishness’ not in an ethnic or linguistic sense, but in a geographic one. The peoples of ‘England’ are a racially mixed bunch, but they all have that island in common (though this spirit of fellowship hardly extends to the Welsh and Scots, who are so often kept separate). This type of Englishness was not peculiar to the later medieval period, as Thomas attests: ‘English landed society was successful in assimilating precisely because it was heterogeneous: because Englishness meant just being in England and under the English king.’ (Thomas, 2003: 139) He uses Italian-born, Norman-raised Archbishop Lanfranc as an example of someone who considered himself a ‘new Englishman’ (Thomas, 2003: 139). Considering the imperial ambitions of fourteenth-century England, the affinity felt towards Britain by the English explains some of their desire to rule the whole island, and the affinity towards King Arthur also explains how they saw their role in Europe.

The alliterative Morte Arthure opens with a long list of the many lands supposedly conquered by an extremely imperial Arthur:

Orgayle and Orkenay and all this owte iles,
Irelande vttirly, as occyane rynnys;
Scathyll Scottlande by skyll he skyftys as hym lykys,
And Wales of were he wane at hys will;
Bathe Flaundrez and Fraunce fre til him seluyn,
Holaund and Henawde they helde of hym bothen,
Burgoyne and Brabane and Bretayn the Lasse,
Gyan and Gothelande and Grace the ryche;
Bayon and Burdeux he beldytt full faire,
Turoyn and Tholus, with toures full hye;
Off Peyters and of Prouynce he was prynce holdyn,
Of Valence and Vyenne, off value so noble,
Of Ouergne and Anyou, thos erledoms ryche,
By conqueste full cruell þey knewe hym fore lorde;
Of Nauerne and Norwaye and Normaundye eke,
Of Almayne, of Estriche, and oþer ynowe;
Danmarke he dryssede all by drede of hym seluyn,
Fra Swynn vnto Swetherwyke, wiþ his swerde kene. (lines 30-47) (Krishna, 1976: 42)

England is not mentioned in this list, for ‘England’ did not exist in Arthur’s time – yet its absence in name only is of course implied, for it was the base of all his conquests. Such a list infers that as heirs to Arthur, the English too have rights in these lands. This may be where the French herald gets the idea that the English are such great boasters (Pyne, 1870: 9). The large number of French regions mentioned is important, as this poem was likely to have been written in the years after the Hundred Years War had erupted. Despite these conquests, Arthur is told by the Roman Emperor, ‘Sir Lucius Iberius’, that he must pay him homage if he is to hold such continental lands ‘that awe homage of alde till hym and his eldyrs’ (line 99), but Arthur refuses, and to war in France he goes. This offers an interesting parallel to the stand-off between the ambitious English under Edwards III and the King of France which led to the Hundred Years War. This parallel has been noted before, as Chism points out, and Edward himself ‘found it in his political interests to promote himself as a second Arthur.’ (Chism, 2002: 190) Some of the battles described in Morte Arthure are particularly reminiscent of real ones fought by the English. Valerie Krishna notes that ‘the disposal of Arthur’s army before the battle with Lucius, according to George Neilson, resembles Edward III’s disposal of his troops at Crécy (1985-2005).’ (Krishna, 1976: 31) The subject matter of Morte Arthure promotes geographic Englishness, but does the use of alliteration prove an anti-French bent on the part of the poet? I think it is difficult to say whether the Alliterative Revival was a true reaction to French cultural imperialism, or whether it was another aspect of the burgeoning sense of Englishness. However, it appears that the texts of the Alliterative Revival were mostly from the midlands or the north, judging by the dialects used (St Erkenwald, for example, is a poem centred on London but written in the English of the north midlands) and also by a comment made by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Parson’s Prologue:

‘But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man;

I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre,

Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre.’ (42-44) (Riverside Chaucer: 287)

The inference here is that as a Southerner, the Parson is unable to tell tales in the alliterative verse as Northerners do, though he readily admits that he cannot rhyme either. Pearsall explains that ‘it was recognized that the practice of writing alliterative verse was to be regarded as a non-southern phenomenon,’ and that ‘there must be some suspicion that the literary establishment of London and the south-east found it difficult to take alliterative verse seriously.’ (Pearsall, in Lawton, 1982: 39) Since the greatest exposure to the French-speaking world was naturally in London and the south, it makes sense that the rest of the country did not fall so deeply into their cultural circle. There may never have been a ‘Revival’ at all, as it may have just been part of an unbroken tradition. But the fact that the texts involved all date from a period beginning at the time of renewed Anglo-French antagonism and a heightened sense of the English nation, it appears to be a coincidence that one cannot ignore.

Language issues in Gower and Chaucer

Nevertheless, England was firmly within the French intellectual sphere of influence, and on the whole its writers and rulers appeared happy to remain so. John Gower was obviously keen on the trilingual state of affairs, and his three major works – Confessio Amantis, Vox Clamantis and Mirour de l’Omme – were purposefully written in English, Latin and French respectively. His choice of writing in English for Confessio Amantis is interesting, for he opens the poem in Latin, and appears to apologize for the limitations of ‘Hengist’s tongue’ and those of himself:

Torporm ebes sensus, scola parua labor minimusque

Causant quo minimus ipse minora canam:

Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti

Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar.

(Dull wit, slight schooling, torpor, labor less,

Make slight the themes I, least of poets, sing.

Let me, in Hengist’s tongue, in Brut’s isle sung,

With Carmen’s help, tell forth my English verse.’ (Prologue, 1-4) (Watt, 2003: 22)

Diane Watt believes that this apology is somewhat insincere, and that ‘the inference we are forced to draw from the parallel between the author and the vernacular is that the English language has greater potential than the poet is willing to admit.’ (Watt, 2003: 22) There is pro-English patriotism exhibited within Confessio Amantis, particularly in the line where he informs us that he is writing in English because so few do:

‘And for that fewe men endite

In oure Englissh, I thenk make

A bok for Engelondes sake’ (later version, prologue, 29-31) (Wogan-Browne et al, 1999: 175)

Yet on the whole I would not say that Gower displays any anti-French sentiments. His promotion of the English language is just in line with the general mood of a country that was slowly losing its French, and realising that the English language did indeed hold great potential for literature, alliterative, stanzaic or otherwise. That there was any awkwardness in using English among writers has modern parallels: many pop groups from around Europe – Scandinavia in particular – still record the lion’s share of their music in English even if it is not for an Anglophone audience, because it is often perceived that English is the ‘natural language’ for pop music. Latin, and then French, were the medieval equivalents of modern English, internationally, so it is not unusual that there was any trepidation in using it. There was another reason to be hesitant about using English in the late fourteenth century – the spread of lollardy, the ‘English heresy’. In an age where even owning an English text could be cause for accusation (as when, in the 1460s, a copy of the Canterbury Tales owned by a suspected heretic was used as evidence of lollardy) (Hudson, 1985: 142), the major writers made a conscious effort not to appear too political where religion was concerned. Chaucer, in the epilogue to The Man of Law’s Tale, makes an affrmedly anti-lollard statement:

Oure Host answered, “O Jankin, be ye there?

I smelle a Lollere in the wynd,” quod he.

“Now! goode men,” quod oure Hoste, “herkeneth me;

Abydeth, for Goddes digne passioun,

For we schal han a predicacioun;

This Lollere heer wil prechen us somewhat,”

“Nay, by my fader soule, that schal he nat!”

Seyde the Shipman, “Heer schal he nat preche;

He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. (1172-1180) (Riverside Chaucer: 104)

Geoffrey Chaucer can be rightly regarded as one of the great promoters of English, yet he too was highly continental in his outlook and indeed his vocabulary. For Chaucer, who was much admired by the French for his work as a translator of texts, using and writing French was a normal, everyday thing. ‘By allowing ourselves to see French as a natural language for Chaucer rather than an imported or alien tongue,’ Ardis Butterfield wrote in the Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ‘we can better understand the truly international character of his English.’ (Butterfield, 2004: 34) To what extent he adopted French words in his style of English or whether London English was by the late fourteenth century already armed with an extensive Romance vocabulary is a matter for debate (Rothwell notes that the Canterbury Tales would have been ‘incomprehensible’ if people were not already familiar with the French terminologies he uses; Rothwell, 2004: 315), but the influence of the French upon his work is unquestioned. Even he, though, appeared to make apologies for using English. In The Complaint of Venus he complains that his language is insufficiently designed to imitate the French style of Oton de Grandson, who was the original source for the poem:

‘And eke to me it ys a gret penaunce,

Syth rym in Englissh hath such skarsete,

To folowe word by word the curiosite

Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce.’ (79-82) (Riverside Chaucer: 649)

The accompanying note in the Riverside Chaucer states ‘that English has fewer rhymes than French is incontestable.’ (Riverside Chaucer: 1081) Could this be one reason to use so many French words within a literary piece? If English lacked the words, a poet might import them from French, since literate people would understand the word and its context anyway. I believe that many words must have entered the language in this way, as English writers who preferred to reject the alliterative style searched for a way to imitate French whilst promoting the ascendant English language. I don’t think Chaucer is inherently mocking the English language by pointing out its lack of rhymes, since he shows that the language is flexible enough to easily import some, any more than he is complaining about it in The Book of the Duchess:

‘Allas, myn herte ys wonder woo

That I ne kan discryven hyt!

Me lakketh both Englyssh and wit

For to undo hyt at the fulle’ (896-899) (Riverside Chaucer: 341)

Butterfield sees this as another dig at English itself, pointing out that Chaucer sees it as ‘a cultural, and not merely a personal, problem,’ (Butterfield, 2004: 20) but I think in this case it is more of an acknowledgement that English does have the potential, but the character just has not found it yet. After all, if he lacks both the English and wit, it does not imply that the English itself is lacking. Similarly, when the Canterbury Tales host interrupts Chaucer at the end of his tale of Sir Thopas, it is because he can no longer stand his dreadful rhymes, it is really just another of Chaucer’s self-deprecating ‘apologies’:

“By God,” quod he, “for pleynly, at a word,

Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord!” (Sir Thopas, 929-930) (Riverside Chaucer: 216)

I cannot see that Chaucer is using English for any other reason than because it was by then of great importance among the aristocratic classes in England, not because of a patriotic desire to eradicate the use of French. His ‘apologies’ for English are not mockeries, but on the other hand Chaucer provides us with one of the most famous examples of mocking a language, that of the French of Stratforde atte Bowe. By the end of the fourteenth century, particularly in London, insular French was jeered at as ‘a bastard variety’ (Rothwell, 1985: 39) by those who saw continental French as the superior, and it was the antagonism between those two forms of French that I believe held the key to its apparent downfall as a language in England.

Insular versus Continental French

I have already shown that much of the antagonism that existed between England and France was not actually between the Anglo-Saxons and the French, but between the Anglo-Normans and Angevin Empire and the kingdom of France. Though English was in many senses kept under the heel of foreigners for years, it was not purposely suppressed, and in fact came to be used as a tool by French-speaking English nationalists and those wishing to curry favour with the masses, such as when King Richard II addressed the mob in their own tongue during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. Anglo-Norman was not politicised in this way. Though, as I have mentioned, the Normans’ speech was not considered much of a variation of more central forms at the time of the invasion, the subsequent rise to prominence of Parisian speech highlighted the differences to the ultimate detriment of insular French. However, Anglo-Norman literature was rich and plentiful, and many of the greatest Old French works are found in this dialect. The best manuscript of Roland is the Anglo-Norman version (Menger, 1904: 16). Traditionally it was believed that Anglo-Norman simply deteriorated once England lost its continental possessions, and it became ‘bad’ or ‘broken’ French, little worthy of serious consideration, but much work has been done recently to reverse this view. William Rothwell for one sees it as his personal crusade. In his paper on Anglo-French: the Missing Link in English Etymology he roundly dismisses the idea that late thirteenth and fourteenth century insular French was ‘just Parisian French marred by comic errors introduced by the ignorant natives of an offshore island,’ (Rothwell, 1991: 175) demonstrating that late Anglo-French played a crucial role in the development of English, beyond mere lexical ‘borrowing’. The theory that Middle English is the result of a ‘creolization’ of the two languages has also been widely debated, having first been posited by Bailey and Maroldt in 1977. If this is the case, then it throws doubt that Anglo-French was ever actually given up by the English, less rejected outright as an enemy’s language. In this final section I will discuss the undoubted antagonism that existed between Anglo-Norman/Anglo-French and Francien, and show how their mutual tension led ultimately to a monolingual England.

One interesting thing to be noted about the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is that nowhere does it call the Normans ‘Normans’ (Lewis, 1995: 129). They are only ever ‘French’; the Saxons were not fussy about making a distinction, for they never needed to. Besides to them, a ‘Norman’ was still exactly that – a Northman, as in the Chronicle’s description of Harald Hardrada’s Norse invasion force defeated at Stamford Bridge in 1066 (Thomas, 2003: 33). The Normans, however, apparently had a strong sense of who they were, and so did the kings in Paris. The Normans were supposed to be vassals to Francia, but their Viking ancestry made Paris uncomfortable. They had their own history, their own mythology, and their military power was evident. Hostility with the French was ‘perpetual’; Norman monk William of Jumièges stressed that the French had envied the Normans ever since they arrived in Neustria (Thomas, 2003: 39). This general hostility increased somewhat post-1066, but did not become a linguistic issue until about the twelfth century, when Francien was becoming prestigious. In 1174, Guernes de Pont-Saint-Maxence, in La Vie de St Thomas Beckett, reassured his readers that his tongue was not Anglo-Norman: ‘mis languages est bons, car en France fui nez’ (‘my language is good, for I was born in France’, line 6165; Rickard, 1989: 41). Similarly, the Nun of Barking, who translated The Life of Edward the Confessor in the 1160s, made apologies for her French (Legge, 1979: 108). Gerald of Wales also bemoaned the ‘barbarous French’ spoken in England (Rothwell, 1985: 39). Walter Map joked derisively about Henry II’s son Geoffrey speaking ‘Marlborough French’ when resigning as Bishop of Lincoln: ‘He resigned at Marlborough, where there is a spring of which they say that whoever tastes it speaks bad French; hence when anyone speaks that language faultily, we say that he is speaking Marlborough French.’ (Wilson, 1943: 57)

The French had no problems ridiculing Anglo-Norman, as attested in the parodic Fabliaunce des Deux Angleys et l’Anel, which makes fun of the English inability to discern the finer points of pronunciation (Legge, 1979: 109). Differences in pronunciation that had not been an issue now seemed important, as the two forms moved away from each other. Of course, there were other dialects of the langue d’Oïl that also differed from the Parisian form, such as Picard (the dialect in which chronicler Jean Froissart wrote). William Rothwell notes that these forms too were subject to Francien snootiness: ‘Within the bounds of what is now northern France and Belgium dialectal variations were frowned upon as soon as a strong literary tradition began to develop in the Ile de France.’ (Rothwell, 1985: 41) It is unfortunately natural for one variety to be seen as ‘correct’ while another appears ‘uneducated’, simply because it is not the style of the area that has the power. However, when there are two centres of power, such as there were in England and France, competition between the forms becomes more noticeable, and often leads to antagonism. Today such a situation could be said to exist between American and British English. The British ‘Received Pronunciation’ accent has traditionally been used to discourage other dialectal forms within the U.K., while British people tend to sneer at the usages and spelling of their American cousins. Shifts in pronunciation in the prestige areas had varying effects on English, such as when the south-east began to lose it’s rhotic quality – pronunciation of the letter r in words such as ‘word’ or ‘four’ – in the seventeenth century. While much of the country slowly followed suit, most American dialects did not, yet some of those around Boston and New England did, wishing to follow the prestige (Leith, 1983: 189). Nowadays the cultural prestige lies largely with the United States, and despite protestations Britain is following the American lead in terms of new vocabulary. Yet of all the different forms of English that exist in the world, these two are still the two with the most clout. In medieval Europe, despite Francien cultural hegemony, Anglo-Norman still stood out among the Oïl dialects, as Rothwell explains: ‘Far from being a fairly obscure dialect in a state of rapid decline, the French used in England from the early thirteenth century to the end of the fourteenth century is the only variety to be on a par with ‘Francien’ in the sense of being an official language of record widely used by the dominant classes in a vigorously developing nation.’ (Rothwell, 1985: 47) That is not to say, however, that later Anglo-French resisted French influence any more than American English initially resisted British. However, had England retained its French possessions, then matters may have been different, but since the majority spoke English in late medieval England, the Anglo-Norman tongue was simply not worth saving as a national language, for it just could not compete.

What then were the differences between Central and Norman French that caused such mockery? Many of them still exist today, in English. It has been argued that French influence on the English language fell into two stages, Norman being the first (including the dialect of the Picards that came over with the Conqueror), Central French (through the Angevin Empire and contact with Francien) being the second (Fennell, 200: 108). Structurally the two forms did not differ greatly, but in terms of phonology there was a good deal of variation that became more pronounced as the centuries wore on. One of the most obvious examples comes in the consonantal shift from W > G. This is evident even today in names such as William/Guillaume and Walter/Gautier. The two levels of French influence can thus be seen in the modern English binaries warden/guardian, win/gain, wile/guile and warranty/guarantee. Intervocalic examples of this shift exist also, as in reward/regard (Crystal, 2003: 46). Such binaries also exist between modern English and French, such as waffle/gauffre, war/guerre, and wasp/guespe. Even among Oïl dialects today the W > G shift is evident, as in Walloons, still spoken on parts of Belgium (as in French garder, Walloons wârder). Other consonantal shifts include the shift from Northern French [k] to Central French [t∫], and NF [t∫] to CF [s]. This is evident in such modern English words as catch/chase and launch/lance (Fennell, 2001: 108). Many of these points were evident in Anglo-Norman; Louis Emil Menger posthumously produced a manual detailing the peculiarities of Anglo-Norman back in 1904, in which he attempted to construct a grammar of Anglo-Norman ‘as if it were a most important language.’ (Menger, 1904: 37) However the dialect, judging from the texts, was certainly not uniform, and many of the phonological features of Anglo-Norman had a great deal of crossover with Central French, to the point where it is sometimes difficult to say whether a word is from Central French or whether it was just not subject to sound shift. However it is clear that the French charge towards standardization led to a great loss in confidence among users of Anglo-Norman. Chaucer’s ‘Stratforde atte Bowe’ quip shows us that, far from rejecting the French, the English are actually joining in with them in belittling the status of Anglo-French. Once they were doing this, its fate was effectively sealed.

Yet in truth the English haven’t actually stopped using Anglo-French at all. The language lives on in our multi-layered lexis. If cross-channel antagonism had been a cause in giving up French, then would the English not have made more of an effort to give up its vocabulary? Anglo-French was not a ‘failed’ language exactly, and it certainly was not simply a degenerate or rustic form. The fact that it was an official language of record in England should surely be proof enough of this; according to Rothwell, the language was as alive as any other, ‘not a preserver of archaisms but a propagator of semantic innovation.’ (Rothwell, 1993: 4) The existence of ‘faux amis’ in modern English – words which resemble similar words in French but have a different meaning, such as French travail (‘work’) and English travel, from Old French travaillier (‘to torment, harass, endure’; Orr, 1962: 126) – stem from the Anglo-French period when semantic shifts were produced as a result of the changing and increasingly mercantile English society. Additionally, many of our modern idiomatic phrases have their roots in Old French, as John Orr attested in a study in 1962, in the form of ‘loan-translations’, the result, he claims, not simply of contact with Anglo-Norman, but of the ‘all-pervading influence of medieval French literature and French courtly manners.’ (Orr, 1962: 30) However, the fact remains that Anglo-French did not survive as a separate language, and there has been some debate as to what actually happened to it.

William Rothwell has said that ‘the relationship of Anglo-French with Middle English was one of merger, not of borrowing, as a direct result of the bilingualism of the literate classes in medieval England.’ (Rothwell, 1991: 174) Approaching from another angle, C-J.N. Bailey and Karl Maroldt (The French Lineage of English) argued the case in 1977 for Middle English being a creole, with parentage not only in Old English and French but also, at an earlier stage, Old Norse. Their definition of creolization was a ‘mixing which is substantial enough to result in a new system, a system that is separate from its antecedent parent systems,’ going on to state that at least forty percent of Middle English is mixed (Bailey & Maroldt, 1977: 21). They make an interesting point about language family trees that I think has some merit, but could be seen as oversimplification, when they say that ‘each node on a family tree has to have, like humans, at least two parents,’ the implication being that for a new language to evolve there must be contact with another language. Essentially this idea turns upside down the traditional tree diagrams beloved by philologists, and puts the focus on the influences that shaped a language, which is in many ways a much more useful system. Middle English, they say, fits more neatly into this model because its French input is clear, but since most languages are the result of uncertain heritage does this make them automatically not creoles? Each of the Romance languages developed from Vulgar Latin, moulded by contact with languages both known and obscure – French for one was most likely shaped by contact with Celtic Gaulish and Germanic Frankish – so they too can be called creoles. Their theory has been scrutinised by Manfred Görlach, who asserts that such a definition of creole widens it far too much: ‘To call every mixed language a ‘creole’ would make the term useless. Yiddish, French, Albanian and Middle English (and many others) are composed of elements from various sources – but they are not creole languages.’ (Görlach, 1990: 77) ‘Creolization’ is not an inevitable effect of bilingualism or polyglossia, and it would be simplistic to think that it is. Judging by the varying degrees of contact that many languages are having with today’s world language, English, are they all thus ‘creoles’ of varying degrees? Of course not; Tom McArthur’s Oxford Guide to World English notes many instances of languages mixing or at least borrowing lexically or semantically with English, such as ‘Franglais’, ‘Spanglish’, and ‘Denglish’, but he is careful not to bandy about the term ‘creole’ (McArthur, 2002). The history of language is filled with examples of languages splintering or fragmenting, and contracting, consolidating with either other varieties or (in most cases, when standards are formed) with the various dialectal forms it had splintered into in the first place. Ishtla Singh is also sceptical of Bailey and Maroldt’s hypothesis, pointing out that ‘sociological studies show that not all situations of language contact are identical.’ (Singh, 2005: 129) Nonetheless, Bailey and Maroldt make an important point about the switch of the speakers of French to the ‘creolised’ Middle English – linguistic and ethnic politics played no role: ‘There is no cogent reason to assume that any socially relevant groups had a pro-Anglo-Saxon or anti-French attitude before the time when the dominant classes themselves turned to English as their mother tongue.’ (Bailey & Maroldt, 1977: 30)

Conclusion: the fate of Anglo-French

Perhaps the association of language with national identity is more of a modern view, an effect of living in a society in which French is not present, being safely locked across the Channel. David Crystal notes that even Shakespeare, in Henry VI part II, equated the speaking of French with being a ‘traitor’ (Crystal, 2004: 124), saying that linguistic antagonism during the time of Norman and Angevin rule must have been ‘inevitable’ (Crystal, 2004: 127). Baugh and Cable’s assertion that French was simply an enemy’s language just does not ring true when looking at the evidence, particularly when the use of English was for so long a source of embarrassment for many writers, who ‘did not explicitly link the use of the English language with pride or honour.’ (Thomas, 2003: 387) While it played some role, particularly if kings used it to appear superficially closer to their subjects, it was not seen in such significant terms as people see it today. I do not think that English, which in reality was no more than a collective term for the many often mutually unintelligible dialects spoken in England and a language vastly more prone to change and manipulation than its two cohabitant media, was the language that ‘defeated’ Anglo-French. Its fate was, I believe, similar in many ways to that of Scots. Scots was a Germanic language that developed from the Old English spoken in the Lowlands along similar lines to Middle English, but within its own country, with its own literature and with many dialectal differences (McArthur, 2002: 81). While an important official language in its own right, Anglo-French, like Scots, appeared to simply lose confidence in the face of its much more esteemed southern neighbour. The transition from a French-speaking government to an English one was made all the easier by the fact that the Anglo-French they were using had been devalued by the French of France. When that happened, Anglo-French was simply absorbed by English, as it adapted itself to fill the role French used to play. Neither internal antagonism, nor cross-Channel tensions, had anything to do with it.

©Pete Scully, London, September 2005

No part of this dissertation may be reproduced without written consent of the author.

Contact: rickyvilla81@yahoo.com

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· TODD, Loreto: Green English (Dublin: 1999)

· TURVILLE-PETRE, Thorlac: The Alliterative Revival (Brewer, Cambridge: 1977)

· TURVILLE-PETRE, Thorlac: The ‘Nation’ in English Writing of the Early Fourteenth Century, in ROGERS, Nicholas (ed): England in the 14^th Century (Watkins, Stamford: 1993)

· TURVILLE-PETRE, Thorlac: England the Nation – Language, Literature and National Identity 1290-1340 (Oxford UP: 1996)

· VALLIÈRES, Pierre: White Niggers of America, transl. Joan Pinkham (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto: 1971)

· VISING, Johan: Anglo-Norman Language and Literature (Connecticut: 1970; orig. Oxford UP: 1923)

· WARDHAUGH, Ronald: Languages in Competition – Dominance, Diversity and Decline (Blackwell, Oxford: 1987)

· WILSON, R.M.: English and French in England, 1100-1300, in History 28, pp37-60 (1943)

· WOGAN-BROWNE, Jocelyn, WATSON, Nicholas, TAYLOR, Andrew, EVANS, Ruth (eds): The Idea of the Vernacular (Pennsylvania: 1999)

· The Auchinleck Manuscript (facsimile), intro by Derek Pearsall and I.C. Cunningham (Scolar Press, London: 1979); also on [www.nls.uk/auchinleck]

· 1362 Statute of Pleading, from the website: [www.languageandlaw.org/TEXTS/STATS/PLEADING.HTM]