Early in the fifteenth century John Barton, a native of Chester who had studied in Paris, makes the following claim in his Donait (‘grammar’):

Barton's own French seems to have a relatively high degree of conformity with standard Middle French but of course with a good sprinkling of insular characteristics such as the absence of weak e in spellings, occasional loss of gender distinction and Anglo-French verb forms such as apperera, the future of apparoir. The suggestion of a model elsewhere is, however, an important feature to note and one that surely did not touch all of the French written in England in the later period.

For centuries insular writers of French had been excusing their ability in the language, from a nun of Barking Abbey in the twelfth century who, in the Vie de seint Edouard, deplored her ‘faus franceis d'Angletere’ to John Gower in the late fourteenth century who explains in the envoi to his Traitié pour essampler les amantz mariés that his lack of facunde or ‘fluency’ results from his being English.