The status of French in medieval England

At issue in this article is the linguistic competence of later Anglo-Norman users: whether their output profiles them as L2 speakers whose French was subject to L1 interference, or whether they should be seen as balanced bilinguals whose French was not usually influenced by English. This question matters as regards the status of Anglo-Norman in relation to other varieties of French: many earlier authorities ghettoised Anglo-Norman, considering it with Bruneau (1955) to have been ‘une langue à part’ because of the status it had of a second-language variety. This perspective was also adopted by Kibbee (1996: 7–11), who emphasised the ‘essential difference’ between Anglo- Norman and Continental French, citing Anglo-Norman gender errors and ‘special syntactic constructions’ that reflect English rather than French. ‘By the 13th and 14th centuries, [Anglo-Norman] shows its imminent death by exhibiting the standard features of a dying language’ (Kibbee 1996: 15). He cited among these ‘standard features’ a tendency for syntax to align itself with that of the dominant language, English in this case. Earlier commentators, notably Vising (1923), Meyer (1889), Pope (1934) and Tanquerey (1916), also observed a decline in the quality of French from c. 1250 onwards, so one might conclude that by that time Anglo-Norman was no more than an imperfectly learned second language, and can be disregarded as a French dialect. Berndt (1972: 354) followed this trend, claiming that later Anglo-Norman was ‘clearly a language learned at school’.

Yet in the field of Anglo-Norman studies the perils of uncritically following the assertions of earlier writers regarding the relationship between French and English in the medieval period have been made clear by Rothwell (1996), so some caution is in order. As Rothwell (2001) observed, if one followed the conventional textbook versions of the history of English, it is a surprise to find later Anglo-Norman existing at all, at least after 1362, since in that year the use of French in the law courts, supposedly its last remaining stronghold, is supposed to have been banned by royal decree. So it is by no means clear in what sense Anglo-Norman really was a dying language in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Lusignan (2004) has pointed out that it was in the fourteenth century that Anglo-Norman seems to have experienced its period of most widespread use as a medium of communication in England: this development is surely hard to reconcile with the earlier conventional notion of degeneration into a poorly understood jargon used by speakers whose native language was English.