The M 9 chronicle is an intriguing text, not least because it was written in French for an English recipient at a time when the routine use of French among England's literate population was dying out. In this contribution to the present volume, I explore what options were available to someone wishing to write a French text in England in the fifteenth century, and examine the linguistic features of the M 9 chronicle against that background. It will be shown how the varieties of French existing in that period differed from each other, reviewing the main features of the late medieval French language as used on the continent, and comparing them with those of the insular variety of French traditionally known as Anglo-Norman.

The later years of Anglo-Norman have benefited from greatly increased research attention since the millennium. A rough consensus has emerged that it remained ‘a perfectly serviceable variety of medieval French’, though a highly distinctive one in various linguistic respects, until its demise in the fifteenth century. In conventional textbook presentations, continental French, sometimes labelled ‘Parisian’, is taken as representing a prestige norm from which the French of England deviated in various ways. As will be seen, continental French was far from being uniform, but in any event by the thirteenth century at the latest Anglo-Norman was clearly idiosyncratic in its spelling and grammar. When it finally died out is debatable: records were still being kept in this form by some administrators in the 1420s and occasionally even beyond. However, it is safe to say that outside the law courts little use was still being made of insular French as a distinct variety by the 1450s, when the M 9 chronicle was composed.

The M 9 chronicle is in fact ‘the only known example of a chronicle of the fifteenth-century phase of the [Hundred Years] war written in England in French’. Its singularity in that respect was explained by McFarlane as due to the fact that the scribe responsible for composing the chronicle, Luket Nantron, was a Frenchman. In this current volume, an argument has been made for the various contributions of all those involved: Basset, Hanson and Worcester.

The idiosyncrasies long noted in Charles d’Orléans’ English verse pose questions of linguistic interest, not least whether they should be viewed in terms of incomplete second-language learning, or else as stylistic innovation. This issue is considered here within an interpretive framework of L2 (second language) acquisition, ultimate attainment, and residual error. The claim by Antonella Sorace and others that in high proficiency L2 syntax is mainly vulnerable at interfaces with discourse and semantics is taken as a starting point of an investigation of the poet's use of verbs. It is first shown that Charles's frequent inversion of auxiliary and main verbs in auxiliated clauses does not engage with the semantics of the clause, but is better seen as influenced by medieval French Stylistic Fronting. The chapter then turns to verb complementation. Charles's use of cause as a bare-infinitive taking auxiliary, otherwise unattested in MED, is discussed here, as are numerous other verb argument structure peculiarities with items such as prevail, repair, lust, yield, comfort, ravish, weep, speak, etc.

A further question is whether Charles's French-speaking interlocutors might have used with him a variety influenced by Anglo-Norman, still in use in the early fifteenth century. This possibility is discussed in connection with the poet's lexical imports into English, and his prolific use of verbal prefixation: some unique attestations in Fortunes Stabilnes are prefixed with a- or en-/in-, the two most productive aspectual verbal prefixes in later insular French.

Background to the Study

Studies of L2 acquisition usually acknowledge what is commonly cited as a ‘fundamental difference’ between acquiring a mother tongue and a second language: first-language acquisition normally results in the successful acquisition of the phonological and grammatical structures and the core vocabulary of the child's home variety. In L2 acquisition, however, especially when it takes place after childhood, the usual outcome is somewhat less than full mastery: even in communicatively competent L2 users, typically some traces of a foreign accent and foreign-sounding turns of phrase will be found. This imperfect acquisition outcome in L2 is of course a generalisation over learners in very diverse settings and with very different aptitudes and motivation to learn another language. In modern times, exceptional cases are known, among them Joseph Conrad, who acquired English sufficiently well to be able to write highly regarded novels in that language.

This book's title – Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices – raises the question of who or what is collaborating. The reading of the title most immediately available might be that the collaboration is between communities and those that work in archives. Yet we want to focus on another type of collaboration here, one that is equally crucial in developing new collaborative practices for archives. In a recent action research project to develop an Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History, it became clear that in seeking to produce an archive we needed to conceive of collaboration not only in terms of people but also in terms of a collaboration between different political theories. In developing the Inclusive Archive, we recognised that we needed to seek a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics – public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity – and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. While there was constant debate in the team with some of us favouring one set of political logic and some the other, we realised that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, we needed to develop an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue.

The nature and scope of language use in mediaeval England were for a long time framed by the ‘bounded perceptions’ that arise when compartmentalised academic disciplines shape complex realities into pedagogically manageable narratives. Framed through the disciplinary lens of English, the French of medieval England tends to be cast in the role of the protagonist to be ousted from the field, after having passed on some language traits to Middle English, the victor in the supposed linguistic contest. Seen in a French disciplinary frame, the French of England is no more than an eccentric offshoot which withered and died after a short-lived period of moderate literary interest that contributed to the francophone authorial canon only the reassuringly surnamed Marie ‘de France’.

In recent decades a number of researchers in the UK and elsewhere have established a research agenda that allows new perspectives to be taken. It has become possible to envisage the linguistic landscape of medieval England as one in which languages, and the literary production in them, co-existed and interacted so closely that to carve out boundaries around them now seems not just artificial but actually damaging to the character of the objects of study. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's work stands out for encouraging the use of French as a medium for writing in England to be seen as an integral part of the literary and spiritual context of the time, and the present article pursues one such aspect of the converging perspectives that her research and that of others has made possible: the integration of French lexis with English in the context of religious writing. In particular, we explore what the language of religious writing for a popular audience can reveal about the diffusion of French vocabulary in English, at a point well before the so-called ‘Frenchified’ vocabulary of Gower and Chaucer makes itself felt at the end of the fourteenth century.

The status of French in medieval England has undergone substantial reassessment in this century. It has been shown by several authors that insular French survived as a viable multi-genre communicative medium well into the fourteenth century.

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.

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.