Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500 (review)

Unlike many collections of essays that have originated from a series of academic conferences, this volume is notable for its singleness of purpose. The thirty-four essays included here have been compiled, organized, and revised with two closely related goals: first, challenging long-held assumptions about the relationship between French and English in medieval England and, second, transforming the traditional linear narrative to one that represents more accurately a complex multilingual culture—with its wealth of lexical borrowing, code switching, and resonances—that spans the entire four centuries indicated in the title. Inspired by the French of England teaching and research program initiated by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Thelma Fenster, the papers included here were chosen from sixty presented at three related conferences held in 2007 in New York and York, UK, and they will serve as a foundation for other publications yet to come, including a French of England translation series.

The essays in the first of the book’s four sections take a primarily linguistic or sociolinguistic approach. The main question being addressed in this part of the book is the status of French in England as it appears in specific contexts, such as petitions to the crown, historiography, account keeping in nunneries, maritime communication, and, finally, the works of Insular literary writers. Here, and throughout the volume, the use of the phrase “French of England” to conceptualize the full range of francophone linguistic activity is vital since in many contexts the contrast implied by the traditional terms “Anglo-Norman” and “Anglo-French” suggests an oversimplified discontinuity between the French developing directly from the language of the Norman invaders and that introduced in later centuries through contact with the Continent. As Richard Ingham demonstrates, even the French of clerks keeping administrative records is not a “fossilized version of the French brought over with the Conqueror” but rather a living language “evolving in parallel with continental French” (pp. 44–45). And, as Pierre Kunstmann points out, sometimes the distinctive grammatical features of Anglo-Norman, traditionally thought to be corruptions, simply anticipate changes that will take place in continental French somewhat later, and thus remain part of the same dialect continuum.

Among the ten essays in the first section, Serge Lusignan’s historical overview of the “diffusion of French into English society” from the aristocracy to the rural gentry and urban elite (p. 21) most directly addresses the issue of lexical influence by showing how Anglo-French (“French in the style of the English”) could easily have moved from its essential role as a common technical language in law and administration—used as far away as Gascony—to a source of new vocabulary at many social levels, since those who used French professionally would naturally begin to introduce words they “found particularly efficient or pleasing” to their English-speaking associates. Other essays in this section present the numerous reasons for which French itself persisted, ranging from a very practical need for a lingua franca in kitchens and ships to more subtle attempts to establish or maintain political advantage. Likewise, explorations of the particular type of French used, whether Norman, Continental, or some combination of the two, provide insight into a cultural environment that could, at times, lead to “uncommon linguistic self-awareness” (p. 144) of the type that Robert F. Yeager attributes to Gower, whose “consciously literary” idiolect of French (p. 125) was, as Brian Merrilees and Heather Pagan suggest, perhaps an attempt to secure a broader audience than he found in England alone.

If the first section of the volume is defined by its overarching sociolinguistic methodology, the remaining three sections are organized mainly by chronology. In section two, entitled “Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories,” the concept of the Norman Invasion as the single event that defined the shifting language...