The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts ed. by Richard Ingham (review)

The volume publishes the proceedings of two workshops held at Birmingham City University in 2007 and 2008. The exploitation of many new resources available for the study of Anglo-French illuminates a number of aspects of language choice and usage in late medieval England. A consistent and welcome theme throughout the volume is the need to unite studies of Anglo-French with studies of Middle English and, for that matter, Medieval Insular Latin. While no Latinists contributed to this volume, there are interesting and important contributions from scholars whose focus has been on Middle English, such as Laura Wright, Mark Chambers, and Louise Sylvester.

The fundamental contention of the editor, in his introduction and two other pieces (“Later Anglo-Norman as a Contact Variety of French,” pp. 8–25; “The Transmission of Later Anglo-Norman: Some Syntactic Evidence,” pp. 164–82), is that bilingualism (Anglo-French and English) was maintained into the last quarter of the fourteenth century and that differences between Anglo-French and Continental French should be construed as an example of contact linguistics rather than as imperfect second-language learning. The difference between the two approaches is blurred by his working definition of a contact variety as “a language variety (which may, but need not, be learned as a mother tongue)” (p. 11). If it is not learned as a mother tongue, then it is perforce a learned second language. In his last contribution to the volume, he looks at contemporary theories of bilingualism to contend that until roughly 1370 a significant professional class existed in England in which French was a mother tongue, or learned from infancy, outside of formal instruction.

This is some three hundred years after the Conquest, and two hundred years after the last significant immigration of native French speakers, which makes this contention seem unlikely though certainly not impossible. Other minority-language communities have survived for similar lengthy periods, though the comparisons to recent German immigrants in Australia (p. 12) are not very relevant. Some compelling historical corroboration of the maintenance of French-speaking communities throughout England several hundred years after the Conquest would be helpful, but is not offered. If such communities did exist, their rapid transition to English circa 1370 could be explained by the nativist pressures at the time of the Hundred Years War and changes in English society following the Black Plague (1347–1350).

Ingham does present convincing proof of the linguistic competence among those who kept the rolls of Parliament and other official records, and he is supported by the evidence of linguistic competence of English army officers presented by Anne Curry, Adrian Bell, Adam Chapman, Andy King, and David Simpkin (“Languages in the Military Profession in Later Medieval England,” pp. 74–93). The question then is whether such competence could be attained from successful instruction of one sort or another, or whether it indicates early childhood learning (before age 5). There is increasing evidence of instruction through the fourteenth century, and the kinds of texts considered are highly formulaic (accounting and legal records, Rolls of Parliament), further complicating an assessment of the source of linguistic abilities. Ultimately this question cannot probably be resolved, but Ingham does provide interesting data on changes in later Anglo-French.

Pride seems to be an important consideration as Ingham and several other contributors take umbrage at the work of various scholars, from Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer in the nineteenth century, through Mildred Pope, Glanville Price, and, for the sake of full disclosure, the author of this review. The earlier scholars came to the conclusion that in later Anglo-French there is evidence of imperfect learning and influence of English. Several authors in this volume find such characterizations insulting, where they were merely meant to be descriptive. Tendentious rhetoric about the failings of the earlier scholars is repeated at several junctures. It would be a pleasant change if the editor and some of the other authors in this volume [End Page 376...