Editor's Introduction

Standard accounts of the Anglo-Norman language still represent it as an emigrant language that flourished in England for a hundred years or so, and thereafter rapidly degenerated, to be replaced by Middle English in all its functions except its use in law. This volume shows that English–French bilingualism remained a central fact of the linguistic life of England well into the late medieval period, and gives detailed consideration to profiling what later Anglo-Norman was like, and how it functioned.

At the heart of our subject is a challenging paradox: if certain contemporary reports are to be believed, at one point early in the fourteenth century French looked like becoming the official language of England. Over two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it had become adopted across virtually the whole range of written registers: prose and verse literature, technical writing, commerce, central- and local-government business, legal proceedings and private correspondence. Yet most authorities agree that by this time the descendants of the Norman conquerors of 1066 were no longer ethnically distinct from the native population, and hardly ever spoke French as a mother-tongue. Languages without native speakers are supposed to die, or else they survive, like Latin, as highly specialised formal written codes. However, French existed to a considerable extent as a spoken vernacular in later medieval England: even its continental detractors, who mocked it as ‘le faus franceis d’Engleterre’, derided specifically its spoken features. In short, the paradox is that French in England, conventionally referred to as ‘Anglo-Norman’, had few or no native speakers, yet was quite commonly spoken and enjoyed the status of a prestige written language.

To the extent that Anglo-Norman continued to be spoken outside royal and seigneurial court circles, this is likely to have been within particular specialised professional domains such as law and estate management, where we have technical manuals in Anglo-Norman written from the later thirteenth century onwards. As David Trotter's work emphasises, the textual record shows that French was in fact used across a whole range of contexts where accurate and efficient communication was essential, and for purposes where major financial and economic issues were at stake. How this state of affairs can be reconciled with the still commonly purveyed notion that Anglo-Norman was no more than ‘bad French’, imperfectly learned as a foreign language, remains unclear.