Anglo-Norman Cultures England 1066 1460

Chapter 2
A N G L O - N O R M A N C U LT U R E S
I N E N G L A N D , 1066–1460
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For more than three centuries of Norman and Plantagenet rule, the British
Isles were, with the exception of the Norman kingdom in Sicily, the most
significantly multilingual and multicultural territory in western Europe.
The interactions of William the Conqueror’s followers and peoples native
to Britain were not simply adversarial, nor were the ethnic conceptions
and political ambitions of the time equivalent to those inspiring Britain’s
modern attempts at empire. The conquerors and their followers were
unquestionably bent on dominating the inhabitants of Britain, but this
process was not entirely a matter of force, nor should the inhabitants’
responding manoeuvres and successes be elided into a model of helpless
subjection. The extent to which intermarriage, bilingualism and cultural
adoptions came to characterize Norman rule sharply contrasts with the
later British programme of empire-building and testifies both to the Nor-
mans’ desire to make Britain their permanent home and to the conquered
inhabitants’ success at imposing themselves and their ways on the new
arrivals. Chapters below on writing in Wales, Ireland and Scotland leave to
this chapter the conquerors’ experience of England.
Conquest and accommodation

To be sure, the process of conquest begins with ethnic as well as military
hostilities. Wace’s account of the minstrel Taillefer singing at the Battle of
Hastings about Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux, an anecdote also found
in William of Malmesbury’s chronicle, may indicate that the Normans
considered Charlemagne’s men to be their own heroic predecessors – how-
ever recently the Normans had borrowed them from the Franks after mov-
ing in about 911 from Scandinavia into northern France.1 Taillefer’s song
For their valuable suggestions I am grateful to John Gillingham, Brian Merrilees, John Carmi Par-
sons, Mary Speer, Paul Strohm and David Wallace. The Camargo Foundation supported this pro-
ject’s first stages.
1. Wace, Roman de Rou, ed. Holden, ll. 8013–18; William of Malmesbury, Chronicle, trans.
Giles, p. 277. See now the exhaustive census of Ruth J. Dean with Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-
Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999).
[35]
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, on 20 Apr 2018 at 12:41:10,
subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.004
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anticipates the Anglo-Norman copy of the Song of Roland, Oxford,

Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, made some seventy-five years after the
Battle of Hastings. His singing is the heightened expression of Norman
purpose, whereas, Wace continues, the English seemed only to bark like
dogs:
Quant Normant chient Engleis crient,
de paroles se contralient,
e mult sovent s’entredefient,
mais ne sevent que s’entredient;
hardi fierent, coart s’esmaient,
Normant dient qu’Engleis abaient
por la parole qu’il n’entendent.2
[When Normans fall the English cry out; they fight one another with
words and very often exchange defiant challenges, but neither side knows
what the other is saying. The bold ones strike, the cowards take fright; the
Normans say that the English are barking because they can’t understand
their speech.]
This bilingual divide simplifies the Conquest’s ethnic complexities, given
that a sixth to a fifth of William’s forces were leaders and troops from areas
beyond Norman control, notably Artois, Flanders, Brittany and Picardy;3
Britain too was a mixed world of Celtic, Danish and Anglo-Saxon for which
the conquerors were the last of several ethnic inmigrations. The distinction
between ‘French-speaking’ and ‘not French-speaking’ was sharper than
any single ethnic opposition, and language continued to be the most salient
di◊erence between conquerors and conquered. Yet the Normans and their
followers were bent on domination in part because they sought permanent
accommodation in England, and some of their means of domination, such
as intermarriage, commercial relations, rapid settlement and enfeo◊ment
of lands, and political deal-making, were pacifying and integrating as well
as repressive. Intermarriage, over which I will pause because of its implica-
tions for bilingualism, is one instance of Norman domination that shows at
the same time a persistence of the conquered.
The statistics in Domesday Book record immense losses for landholders in
England: in its (not quite complete) tally, William and his queen hold 17
per cent of the land, the invaders including the king’s half-brothers control
48.5 per cent, the Church 26.5 per cent, and pre-Conquest tenants-in-
chief just 5.5 per cent.4 At the same time, intermarriage on a significant
2. Wace, Roman de Rou, ed. Holden, ll. 8063–9 (and ll. 8229–32).
3. Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, pp. 10–11. 4. Ibid., p. 38.
Anglo-Norman cultures in England 37
scale between Norman men and Anglo-Saxon women moved disinherited

lines back into the circles of power, and English-speaking servants and
nursemaids reinforced the transmission of English language and culture to
the conquerors’ descendants. Cecily Clark assembles a range of evidence
sustaining widespread intermarriage, and adds her own analysis of the
much higher frequency of Anglo-Saxon names for women than for men by
the end of the twelfth century – even among peasants, who tended to use
their lords’ names for their children – suggesting that there were fewer for-
eign women’s names than men’s in circulation in England.5 The statistic is
the more striking in that English names carried less social prestige than
French. When William’s son Henry married Edith, direct descendant of
Edmund Ironside and Æthelred, she took or was given the continental
name Matilda, the name of Henry’s mother. None the less certain barons
who resisted Henry’s authority mocked the royal couple by calling them
Godric and Godgive, associating Henry’s opposition to their interests
with Anglo-Saxon inferiority.6 Walter Map is willing to admire Henry’s
gesture, concluding that during his reign (1100–35), ‘by arranging mar-
riages between them for both parties, and by all other means he could con-
trive, [he] federated the two peoples in firm amity’.7 In asserting that it was
Henry’s intention to unify ‘the two peoples’ through intermarriage, Map
assigns control over the assimilation to Henry. But when intermarriage
becomes widespread, the cultural superiority signalled by taking control
of conquered women is qualified by their acculturating counter-influence.
‘Nowadays’, according to the Dialogus de Scaccario just a century after the
Conquest, ‘when English and Normans live close together and marry and
give in marriage to each other, the nations are so mixed that it can scarcely
be decided (I mean in the case of the freemen) who is of English birth and
who of Norman’.8 Perhaps as early as the 1160s, families of continental ori-
gin that were settled in England (as opposed to the constantly arriving
immigrants from the Continent) preserved French as a ‘language of cul-
ture’, artificially maintained as the medium of polite exchange.9 In just a
century, the barking of the English had become the mother tongue of the
conquerors’ descendants, and French the more alien sound.
The settlers reached a parallel accommodation to insular religious and
5. Clark, ‘Women’s Names’. Marriages between Anglo-Saxon men and continental women
were less common; William I gave his niece Judith in marriage to Earl Waltheof: Orderic Vitalis,
Ecclesiastical History, ed. Chibnall, vol. ii, pp. 262–3.
6. William of Malmesbury, Chronicle, trans. Giles, p. 429.
7. Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. James, pp. 436–7.
8. Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. Johnson, pp. 52–3.
9. See Rothwell, ‘Role of French’, and Short, ‘On Bilingualism’.
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historical traditions, at first asserting their continental superiority and

di◊erence but later coming to venerate insular figures as their own prede-
cessors. By 1090 only one Englishman remained in the sixteen English
bishoprics, and monastic chronicles record the cultural and material
oppression visited upon them by their new abbots. The Abingdon chroni-
cler complains that the Norman Ethelem, abbot from 1071, ‘descended so
low that he forbade us to make any remembrance or commemoration of St
Ethelwold or of St Edward, for he said that the English were boors, and that
they ought not to have the churches which they themselves had founded’.10
Walter, Norman abbot of Evesham from 1077, seems to have been encour-
aged by Lanfranc to test his abbey’s relics by fire and to assume that only
those which survived the flames were genuine.11 Lanfranc himself struck
most of the saints from the liturgical calendar of Christ Church, Canter-
bury, in a gesture that his biographer Eadmer describes in ethnic terms: the
new archbishop ‘was but a half-fledged Englishman, as it were; nor had he
yet formed his mind to certain institutions which he found there’.12 But
many of the rejected saints were reinstated in the later eleventh and twelfth
centuries, initially through the e◊orts of native-born hagiographers writ-
ing in Latin and subsequently with the support and wider dissemination
provided by lives written in Anglo-Norman, the name generally given to
French that has acquired some insular phonetic and syntactic traits, or
more broadly assigned to French texts that were produced in England. The
Anglo-Norman record, the focus of this chapter, produces lives of saints
Osyth, Audrey, Modwenna, Edmund, Alban, and Edward the Confessor
during the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The conquerors’ turn towards insular saints again signals the per-
sistence of the conquered, even as it suggests as well that the conquerors
came to see advantages in identifying themselves with the insular past.
Lanfranc, who called himself ‘a novice Englishman’ (novus Anglus) when
revising the calendar of saints, was soon writing of ‘us English’ (nos Anglos),
aligning himself fully with his church and its interests; a roster of cele-
brated saints could only accrue to the dignity of that church.13
Insular hagiography intersects with wider appropriations in works such
as Benedeit’s Voyage of St Brendan (c. 1106) and Marie de France’s Espurga-
toire seint Patriz (c. 1190) which bring Celtic material into vernacular
10. Quoted in Coulton, ‘Nationalism in the Middle Ages’, p. 24.

11. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, vol. i, p. 105; see also vol. i, pp. 105–35.
12. Quoted in Coulton, ‘Nationalism in the Middle Ages’, p. 24.
13. Letters of Lanfranc, ed. Clover and Gibson, pp. 38–9, 156–7; Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England,
p. 39.
poetry. Both works trace journeys laden with spiritual meaning but also
with adventure and wonder. In that Benedeit’s work is the first to bring
Celtic material into French poetry, its dedication to Queen Matilda is con-
sonant with her own translation from Scottish and Anglo-Saxon parentage
into Henry’s Norman court.
The kings Edmund (r. 855–69) and Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–66)
are the most celebrated saints in Anglo-Norman works, the former in
Geo◊rey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (c. 1140), Denis Piramus’s La Vie Seint
Edmund le Rei (c. 1170), and the anonymous Passiun de Seint Edmund (c.
1225); the latter in Anglo-Norman prose and alexandrine fragments as
well as the Nun of Barking’s Vie d’Edouard le Confesseur (c. 1170) and
Matthew Paris’s Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei (c. 1240). The two kings’
association with foundations at Bury St Edmunds and Westminster pro-
vide religious contexts for honouring them, but in the Anglo-Norman
works both kings are significant secular figures as well. Denis Piramus’s
prologue condemns the dreamy untruths of Partonopeus and Marie de
France’s Lais, yet recommends Edmund’s story to the court audience as a
political more than a spiritual exemplum:
Rei deit bien oïr d’autre rei
E l’ensample tenir a sei,
E duc de duc e quens de cunte,
Kant la reison a bien amunte.14
[A king should hear about other kings and take their example to heart,
and dukes about dukes, counts about counts, when the account is a
worthy one.]
Edward the Confessor had a more specific historical importance for the
Norman dynasty in his descent from Emma, daughter of Richard I of Nor-
mandy, through whom William the Conqueror claimed a lineal right
which, he also claimed, Edward had acknowledged during his lifetime.
Endorsing these claims, the vitae of Edward contribute hagiographic wit-
ness to a widespread e◊ort to rewrite the Conquest as the deflection of
Harold’s attempted usurpation and the continuity of a rightful line of rule
reaching back from William to the Anglo-Saxon and Breton past.
Chronicles play an important part in this project. Eadmer’s Historia
Novorum in Anglia, begun around 1095, argues that Harold perjured him-
self in resisting William’s claim; William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum
Anglorum (c. 1120) further discounts Harold’s right in favour of William’s;
14. Piramus, Vie Seint Edmund, ed. Kjellman, ll. 87–90.
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and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (c. 1133) traces the

Conquest’s legitimacy to Ethelred’s decision to marry Emma of Nor-
mandy.15 Yet all three writers protest Norman cruelties, and all would
endorse William of Malmesbury’s conclusion that England has become
‘the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers’ who ‘prey upon
its riches and vitals’.16 Geo◊rey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (c. 1140), the
first chronicle written in French, is also the first to represent the Conquest
as an accommodation between peoples. Barely mentioning Harold,
Gaimar provides a version of the Battle of Hastings that represents the
English combatants’ experience. Taillefer, for example, rather than
singing of Roland, has trained his horse to charge with its mouth wide
open. The wordless mouth intimidates the English (‘Alquant quident estre
mangié / Pur le cheval que si baiot’ [some thought they would be eaten
because the horse’s mouth gaped so]), but it does not grant the conquerors
an ideological voice in contrast to which the English can only bark. Gaimar
consistently eludes assigning merit and blame in favour of uniting Anglo-
Saxon to Norman history, beginning with the Anglo-Saxon settlements in
Britain and ending with the death of William Rufus; he uses the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle extensively as well as local legends and other sources to
treat insular history as the Norman as well as the English heritage. Histor-
ical animosities blur in his praise of Waltheof, executed by William I for his
part in a rebellion in 1076 but later hailed by both Normans and English as
something like a saint, and in his account of Haveloc, which reworks the
Danish invasions into a success story of intermarriage and international
alliance. Gaimar is the principal source for the Lai d’Haveloc, predecessor at
some remove to the Middle English Havelok; the Anglo-Norman Waldef
(c. 1210) and a Middle English version now lost perpetuate the name
though not the accurate history of Earl Waltheof.
The drive to unite the conquerors’ history to England’s and to provide
them with an illustrious past in England is strong in Anglo-Norman litera-
ture during the later twelfth century. According to Waldef, the Conquest
temporarily suppressed English history, but the work of translation is
entirely su√cient to reinstate it:
Quant li Norman la terre pristrent
Les granz estoires puis remistrent
Qui des Engleis estoient fetes,
Qui des aucuns ierent treites,
15. See Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, p. 21; Gransden, Historical Writing in England, vol. i,
p. 138. 16. William of Malmesbury, Chronicle, trans. Giles, p. 253.
Pur la gent qui dunc diverserunt

E les langages si changerunt.
Puis i ad asez translatees,
Qui mult sunt de plusurs amees,
Com est le Bruit, com est Tristram.17
[When the Normans seized the land, the great histories that had been
made by the English and recounted by them were left behind, on account
of the peoples shifting and the languages changing. Since then much has
been translated, and greatly enjoyed by many, such as the Brut, such as
Tristan.]
It is unlikely that Waldef and the many Bruts and Tristans translate from
English ‘estoires’, but such an assertion is itself a way of linking Norman to
English culture. This view of translatio as a purely linguistic rather than a
cultural negotiation of di◊erence pervades the period’s literature. The
view may have sustained the integrative e◊orts I have imputed to lower
social strata, but it received o√cial sanction with the accession of Henry II,
the first post-Conquest king of mixed insular and Norman blood. By
paternity a Plantagenet, the son of Geo◊rey of Anjou, Henry drew his
claim to England through his maternal descent from Henry I and Matilda.
Bernart de Ventadorn praises Henry II by identifying with his lineage,
claiming ‘Pel rei sui engles e normans’ [on the king’s account I am English
and Norman], and Ailred hails him as ‘the corner stone which bound
together the two walls of the English and the Norman race’.18 Henry
embodies a union that literature endorses by recovering Anglo-Saxon and
more distant Celtic and Trojan predecessors for Britain’s current rulers.
The courts of Henry II (1154–89) and his wife and sons sponsored and
inspired an extraordinary volume and quality of writing. In part, the
Angevin courts’ importance to the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ is due to
the sheer range of their dominions. At his accession Henry controlled not
only England and Normandy but Anjou, Maine and Touraine through his
paternal line and Aquitaine, Poitou and Auvergne through marriage to
Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry and Eleanor held court throughout their ter-
ritories, often separately until Eleanor’s imprisonment in 1174 for sup-
porting her sons’ rebellion against Henry. Many continental writers are
thus in the Angevin orbit; works as diverse as Joseph of Exeter’s Frigii Dare-
tis Ylias (a source for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde), Ailred’s life of Edward
the Confessor, and treatises on shorthand, falconry and the astrolabe can
17. Waldef, ed. Holden, ll. 39–47.

18. Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, ed. Nichols, p. 115; Ailred quoted in Galbraith, ‘Nationality
and Language’, p. 124 note.
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be associated with Eleanor’s and Henry’s wide-ranging influence.19 Much

of the Latin literature addressed to the family – panegyric, historiography,
mirrors for princes, hagiography – is in the purview of subsequent chap-
ters. An inspirational occasion with unfortunate consequences for Henry,
the murder of Thomas Becket, generated several lives of the archbishop in
French as well as the Latin works that are a focal point for the chapter on
Latinitas. But the vernacular verse chronicles and romances associated
with Angevin courts are, in their preoccupation with the insular past, the
most characteristic literature of the dynasty. They illustrate that for the
early Plantagenets, as for the Normans before them, England holds a cru-
cial ideological function as the only kingdom among the shifting territo-
ries each dynasty controlled. Although Henry spent only about a third of
his reign in England (and Eleanor still less until her imprisonment), the
fabrication of a glorious insular past was a dominant royal interest.
Layamon asserts that Wace o◊ered his Brut (1155) to Eleanor of
Aquitaine.20 Wace’s translation adds to Geo◊rey of Monmouth’s Historia
Regum Britanniae more current material on Arthur, such as passages on the
Round Table ‘dunt Bretun dient mainte fable’ [about which the Britons
tell many tales].21 Wace’s Brut replaces Gaimar’s now-lost version of the
same material in all four manuscripts of the Estoire des Engleis; one of the
four, Durham Cathedral Library MS c.iv.27 (c. 1200), also follows
Gaimar’s Estoire with Jordan Fantosme’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle (c.
1174) concerning the revolt of Henry II’s sons, doubly emphasizing
Gaimar’s implicit argument for continuity between England’s deepest
past and its contemporary rulers. Whether through Gaimar or Wace, the
entry of Brut material into vernacular literature inaugurates a series of
Arthurian and Celtic productions. Most of these, however, do not appear
to have been sponsored by English courts. Marie de France’s Lais (c. 1170)
do address a ‘nobles reis’ (Henry II or his son Henry the Younger); Chré-
tien de Troyes’ romances and Thomas d’Angleterre’s Tristan (c. 1175) have
little claim to association with the Angevins.22 More significant to
Angevin patronage is Wace’s reiteration, from Geo◊rey of Monmouth and
ultimately from Nennius, that Britain’s founder Brutus is descended from
the Trojan Aeneas. This long-lived myth provides an ultimately classical
origin for England’s rulers, giving Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s dedication of
the Roman de Troie (c. 1160) to Henry a pointed political appropriateness;
scholars have argued on similar grounds for associating Eneas (c. 1160) and
19. See Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’; Salter, English and International, pp. 19–28.
20. Layamon, Brut, ed. Brooke and Leslie, ll. 20–4. 21. Wace, Brut, ed. Arnold, l. 9572.
22. Marie de France, Lais, ed. Ewert, Prologue, l. 43.
the Roman de Thèbes (c. 1150) with Angevin sponsorship.23 Finally, to cele-
brate his claim to England through his Norman blood, Henry supported
Benoît’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie (c. 1175) and – inadequately,
according to Wace – the latter’s Roman de Rou (1160s), a dynastic history
reaching back to Rollo’s conquest of Normandy.24 Such fictions of origin
were attractive well beyond Henry’s circle; these decades and the follow-
ing ones generate Anglo-Saxon predecessors whose interests sustain those
of the insular barony. Works such as the Romance of Horn, Boeve de Haum-
tone, Waldef and Gui de Warewic, to be considered in chapter 6, deserve
mention here for their part in creating a past for post-Conquest families.
How fully did England’s elite incorporate these Trojan, Celtic and
Anglo-Saxon predecessors into their own identity as rulers and inhabi-
tants of England? The Angevin courts antedate nations, in the modern
sense of centralized states that strive to make one people of diverse ethnic-
ities, and empires, in the sense of dominating states that exploit external
territory to serve their own economies and cultures. The ‘Angevin empire’
is a tenuous and temporary agglomeration held together in large part by
Henry’s personal assertion of identity with its regions through blood,
marriage, and more imaginative bonds. The political usefulness of his
claim to a diverse ethnic heritage is evident, but in other contexts, ethnic
tensions and a favouring of continental blood lines continued. Walter
Espec scorned ‘the vile Scot . . . with his half-naked natives’ at the Battle of
the Standard, and Giraldus Cambrensis insisted on the inferiority of the
English to the Normans and Welsh alike. Walter of Coventry shows one
response to ethnic pressure in noting that ‘the more recent Scottish kings
count themselves Frenchmen by race [genere], manners, habit and speech
and retain Frenchmen only in their service and following’.25 Yet the con-
ceptual oppositions shift slightly around 1200 as the variously Anglo-
Norman, Angevin and French inhabitants of England begin to call
themselves ‘English’, abandoning such earlier formulae as ‘rex Norm-
Anglorum’, ‘francis et anglis’ and ‘the English and the Norman race’.26
The loss of Normandy in 1204 and of most of the Angevin territories by
1243 sustains the conceptual shift. The inhabitants of England are no
longer continentals – yet French continues to be the language of courts, of
government and law, of polite communication, and to a large degree of
vernacular literature.
23. See Poirion, ‘De l’Eneide à l’Eneas’. 24. Wace, Roman de Rou, ed. Holden, ll. 11425–30.
25. Coulton, ‘Nationalism in the Middle Ages’, pp. 32–3; Davies, Domination and Conquest, p.
20; Davis, Normans, pp. 66–7.
26. Poole, Domesday Book, pp. 1–2; Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots’, pp. 246–7.
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Anglo-Norman precocity and perseverance
Two related puzzles of Anglo-Norman literature are its precocity and its
perseverance. Why should this newly conquered territory have flowered
so richly and precociously in French literature? And why did use of French
persist in literature, law and government for 200 years after virtually all
Britain’s inhabitants no longer had French as their maternal language?
Both circumstances are involved in the social conditions of insular speak-
ing and writing after 1066.
As stressed above, insular French speakers do not ever constitute a uni-
form linguistic group: they arrive at di◊erent times and from di◊erent
regions of France, or are raised speaking primarily English, perhaps with
some years of education in France; their French diverges more or less from
continental dialects and in more or less predictably insular ways. Given this
diversity, it is perhaps fortunate that the term ‘Anglo-Norman’ is political
and geographic, designating persons united by place and time more than by
dialect. ‘Anglo-Norman’ as applied to language falls roughly into two peri-
ods, with a turning point in the later twelfth century. In the earlier period it
was a true vernacular, among the powerful and educated strata to which the
Dialogus de Scaccario refers, and bilingualism (trilingualism for the clergy)
was probably common in those strata; in the later period Anglo-Norman
became an artificially maintained language of culture, English the mother
tongue. By far the majority of England’s population remained mono-
lingual, never acquiring French (or Latin), and that monolingualism influ-
ences the vernacular situation as well. From soon after the Conquest, as is
typical of contact between two vernaculars, French and English became
associated with di◊ering spheres of activity and registers of formality. Thus
the capacity to preach in English receives praise in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries, but French is the spoken language of monasteries and
schools, whose rules from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries attempt
to reinforce its place there against the increasing use of English; French is
the language ‘qe nuls gentils homme covient saver’ [which any gentle man
should know], according to Walter Bibbesworth’s treatise on French
vocabulary, and monolingual English speakers perceive from the first that
their inability to use French reinforces and perpetuates their repression.27
Yet the power di◊erential that French symbolizes in Britain is curi-
ously modified by the conquerors’ pressing ideological need to identify
27. Bibbesworth, Tretiz, ed. Rothwell, Prologue, 1. 10; for much detail see Wilson, ‘English and
French’; Rothwell, ‘A quelle époque’; Short, ‘On Bilingualism’.
themselves with English sovereignty and the insular past. Translatio, in

the powerfully cultural sense of appropriation licensed by continuity, of
making a new canon under the guise of respect for the past, feeds the
Anglo-Norman and Angevin dynasties’ recovery and contruction of a
cultural heritage in England. According to Elizabeth Salter, the astonish-
ing productivity of twelfth-century English milieux derives from an
‘international’ culture that drew on vast European holdings under the
Norman and Angevin dynasties; the point is indisputable, but more
striking than the range of talent available to these dynasties are the
alacrity and energy with which that talent is concentrated on fabricating
and elaborating insular institutions, histories and precedents.28 Gaimar
contributes the first chronicle written in French and Fantosme the first
chronicle of contemporary events. In addition to the production of insu-
lar saints’ lives already reviewed, clerical circles produce the first biblical
translations and scientific writing in French, the first French version of
Boethius, Simund de Freine’s Roman de Philosophie (c. 1200), and proba-
bly the first liturgical drama in French, the Mystère d’Adam (c. 1150).29
Benedeit’s Voyage of St Brendan introduces the tremendously successful
octosyllabic couplet as well as Celtic material to French narrative. The
Anglo-Norman traits to be found in all these works may suggest that the
prominence of Anglo-Saxon in learned writing before the Conquest
inspired writers resident in England to choose the new vernacular for
their works.
Women’s patronage and authorship sustain the precocity of Anglo-
Norman literary production. Queen Matilda is the first identifiable female
patron of Old French writing, generous to her ‘crowds of scholars, equally
famed for verse and for singing’; twelfth-century poets continue to address
women patrons at a significantly higher rate in England than on the Conti-
nent.30 The first Bestiary and Lapidary in the vernacular (c. 1125), translated
from the Latin Physiologus by Philippe de Thaon, are dedicated to Henry I’s
second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, though one manuscript, Oxford, Merton
College, MS 249, carries a dedication to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Philippe
dedicated his Livre de Sibille (c. 1140), which brings the sibylline tradition
into French, to Queen Matilda’s daughter, mother of Henry II; Gaimar
wrote for Constance, wife of Ralph FitzGilbert. Sanson de Nantuil’s
Proverbes de Salemon (c. 1150), written at the request of Alice de Condet,
join a translation of part of the Book of Proverbs to the first scholastic
28. Salter, English and International, pp. 11–28.

29. On these and other ‘firsts’ see Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots’.
30. William of Malmesbury, Chronicle, trans. Giles, p. 453.
46 susan crane
commentary translated into French. In any medieval context, femininity

stands in su√cient opposition to Latinitas that it licenses translation
through gender as well as laicity; in the insular context, dedicating works
to francophone women focuses the move from Latin into the vernacular at
a more elite level than would simply translating from the ‘learned’ to the
‘lay’ community. The privileged situation of Anglo-Norman is particularly
evident in dedications to Queen Matilda, descended of English kings and
educated in the convents of Romsey and Wilton: French must have been
her third language after English and Latin, yet poets position her as the
appropriate recipient for the earliest Anglo-Norman secular literature.31
For women who write in England, Latin might have been a plausible
vehicle, as it was for Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and continental authors
of religious poetry in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but French is their
chosen medium, perhaps again because of the elite status of that vernacular
as well as cultural pressures associating women with the vernacular rather
than Latin. As if resisting those pressures, Clemence of Barking’s Life of St
Catherine (c. 1175) honours a notably learned and disputatious saint. If they
predate Marie de France’s works as seems likely, the Life of St Catherine and
the Vie d’Edouard by a nun of Barking (perhaps Clemence again) are the ear-
liest French narratives by women writers. In the early thirteenth century
Marie of Ely contributes to the veneration of English saints a translation of
the Latin life of Audrey, Abbess of Ely, and a record of her miracles. Marie de
France similarly translates the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz from Latin, but her
Fables and Lais make more complex linguistic translations. She claims to
translate the Fables (c. 1175) from an English translation of Aesop’s fables
made by King Alfred; in fact her sources are primarily Latin although terms
such as welke, witecoc and sepande (from Middle English seppande, ‘creator’)
testify to some English influence.32 The lays of ‘li Bretun’ that Marie says
she has heard and is now turning into written compositions in the Lais have
no specified tongue, and the multiple translations she provides for some
titles record the mobility of languages that may well have informed their
composition: the Bretons’ ‘bisclavret’ is ‘garwaf ’ to Normans; English
‘gotelef ’ is ‘chevrefoil’ in French.33 The Fables and Lais are the first secular
narratives in French written by a woman, importantly extending the preco-
city of twelfth-century insular literature. It is plausible that Marie’s
ground-breaking work was facilitated by the peculiar status of French in
31. Ibid., p. 452.

32. Marie de France, Fables, ed. Brucker, Epilogue, l. 16; 12.3 (welke); 65.28 (wibet); 52.20 (wite-
coc); 74.10, 96.7 (sepande).
33. Marie de France, Lais, ed. Ewert: Guigemar, l. 20; Bisclavret, ll. 3–4; Chevrefoil, ll. 115–16.
post-Conquest England: a vernacular appropriate to women in its

inferiority to Latin, French was at the same time the vernacular of elite
milieux in contrast to English, so that Marie’s claim to be translating from
the English of Alfred or from oral Breton tradition into written composi-
tions aligned her work more fully with high culture and learning than
would choosing to write in French on the Continent.
Yet the high status French held in England begins early to contrast with
perceptions that insular speakers and writers of French do not sound con-
tinental. The Nun of Barking, writing between 1163 and 1189 and proba-
bly towards the earlier of these dates, confesses that ‘Un faus franceis sai
d’Angleterre / Ke ne l’alai ailurs quere’ [I know an irregular French of Eng-
land, for I didn’t acquire it by going elsewhere].34 In contrast, Guernes de
Pont-Sainte-Maxence, who came to England in the early 1170s to
research his Vie de St Thomas Becket, notes that ‘Mis langages est bons, car
en France fui nez’ [my language is correct, for I was born in France].
Marie’s self-description ‘de France’ may similarly point out the correct-
ness of her continental French in contrast to deviations she perceived
around her in England.35 Despite the variations within insular French
during the twelfth century, it appears to have developed characteristics
su√ciently predictable to constitute an Anglo-Norman dialect. Ian Short
puts together a succinct illustration of the possibility in noting that the
Voyage of St Brendan provides over a dozen examples of each of two confla-
tions that were still considered, early in the following century, to be typ-
ically insular: the hero of the Roman de Renart, in disguise as an English
jongleur, pretends he cannot distinguish between fut (estre, to be) and fout
(foutre, to fuck); in the fabliau Les deux Anglois et l’anel, two Anglo-Norman
merchants cannot make clear even to each other the di◊erence between
agnel (lamb) and anel (donkey), such that they are reduced to communicat-
ing through animal sounds: ‘Cestui n’est mie fils bèhè? / Cestui fu filz ihan
ihan?’ [This wasn’t the son of baa baa? Was this the son of hee haw hee
haw?]36 Curiously reminiscent of the conquerors’ sense that the Anglo-
Saxons barked like dogs, the fabliau’s animal cries announce the inferior-
ity of Anglo-Norman dialect in continental estimations – although in this
early period, cross-dialect mockery is a staple of mainland humour, with
targets as proximate as Artois, Normandy and Picardy.37 In the early
34. Vie d’Edouard, ed. Södergaard, ll. 7–8.

35. Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Vie de Saint Thomas Becket, ed. Walberg, 1. 6165; Marie de
France, Fables, ed. Brucker, Epilogue, l. 4.
36. Short, ‘On Bilingualism’, 469; fabliau quoted in Rickard, Britain in Medieval French Litera-
ture, p. 172. 37. See Pope, Latin to Modern French, p. 24.
48 susan crane
testimonies it seems to be pronunciation and limitations in vocabulary

that betray the Anglo-Norman speaker; by 1250, the Anglo-Norman of
insular writers and scribes can be distinguished on a number of measures
from continental dialects.38
Far from declining in importance after 1200, however, Anglo-Norman
became a language of law and government as well as of literature. At the
Conquest, Latin largely replaced Old English in judicial and administra-
tive documents, but the vernacular texts of the Leis Willeme (c. 1150) and of
Magna Carta (1215) that supplement Latin versions are early signs of a
shift towards French that proved remarkably durable: lawsuits ceased to
be conducted and recorded in French many decades after the statute so
ordaining in 1362; Parliament continued to work almost entirely in
French into the fifteenth century; and early in that century, many towns
were just beginning to translate their ordinances and books of customs
into English.39 Paradoxically, as Anglo-Norman moved from being an elite
vernacular to being a less naturally acquired language of culture, its
domain of use expanded.
In part, French persevered because its dominance over English had
always derived not so much from being a mother tongue as from associa-
tions with power and culture. The international role of French as the lingua
franca of schools and of all the territories under Norman and French rule
further enforced its continued use in England. Within England, however,
French was the reverse of a lingua franca. Just as the use of Latin both
expressed and helped to maintain the power of the clergy and the learned
by establishing a barrier of language di◊erence, so French in the insular
context limited access to the domains in which it was used. This hierarch-
izing function of French was not a◊ected by the reduced facility of speak-
ers; indeed, the prestige of the language within England seems to rise
higher just when its acquisition becomes problematic for most of its speak-
ers.
As early as 1200, a number of treatises on the language appear that
explain French conjugation, pronunciation and vocabulary. None of
the thirteenth-century treatises is designed for beginners: Walter
Bibbesworth asserts in his Tretiz (c. 1240–50), designed to help Diane de
Montchensy teach her children, that he will not be concerned with the
‘fraunceis ki chescun seit dire’ [French that everyone knows] but the
38. Rothwell, ‘A quelle époque’, p. 1085; Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft.

39. See Matzke, ed., Lois de Guillaume; Holt, ‘Vernacular Text of Magna Carta’; Woodbine, ‘Lan-
guage of English Law’; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 12–17; Baugh and Cable, His-
tory of the English Language, pp. 134–43.
‘fraunceis noun pas si commun’ [French that is not so common]. The focus
is on the family and estate management: ‘Ore aloms as prés e as champs /
Pur enformer vos enfaunz’ [Now let’s go into the meadows and fields to
teach your children] introduces a discussion of rye and barley, mowing
and threshing, with occasional English glosses in the margins.40
Bibbesworth’s domestic preoccupations suggest that facility in daily,
practical French was becoming a point of discrimination within the upper
echelons of English society as well as of di◊erentiation between gentle and
common status. This redoubled capacity to stratify may have contributed
to preserving French as a language of culture; its expansion into law and
administration may have drawn impetus as well from a perceived relation
between French and Latin. Both languages now required study and e◊ort
to master and both were restricted to elite milieux. This analogy reveals
how oddly Bibbesworth’s fiction of Diane instructing her children evades
the role of his own book, as if to claim that French is still a mother tongue
in the face of the evidence. A later adaptation of Bibbesworth’s treatise
revises his scenario: ‘Liber iste vocatur femina quia sicut femina docet
infantem loqui maternam sic docet iste liber iuvenes rethorice loqui Gal-
licum prout infra patebit’ [this book is called Femina because just as a
woman teaches her child the maternal language, so this book teaches
young people to speak French properly (rethorice)].41 The book has taken
over the maternal role completely, but continues to claim an origin in
blood lines and family history.
The most substantial and wide-ranging corpus of Anglo-Norman writ-
ing comes from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Romances
and chronicles continue to appear; the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, by
a continental associate of the Marshal, is of particular interest to histori-
ans for its massive and minute account of the early Plantagenet courts.
Religious writing diversifies to include works directed towards the laity
after the Fourth Lateran Council. The domain of Anglo-Norman writing
also extends to treatises on husbandry, law and hunting, political poetry
on issues of the day, legal and parliamentary records, and books of medi-
cine and herbery. Such texts invite the culturally orientated investigations
that literary studies are beginning to undertake. For example, the four
Anglo-Norman treatises on husbandry (extant in eighty-four manu-
scripts) reveal much about the constitution of privilege in the most con-
crete terms; the Year Books of testimony from legal disputes are rich in
40. Bibbesworth, Tretiz, ed. Rothwell, ll. 82, 86, 326–7; Rothwell, ‘Teaching of French’ and ‘A
quelle époque’, 1082–4. 41. Quoted in Lusignan, Parler Vulgairement, p. 106.
50 susan crane
ideological claims about marriage and divorce, domestic conflict, and

crime and execution.42
Women continue to be strongly associated with works in French in the
thirteenth century: Matthew Paris wrote the life of St Edmund Rich in
both Latin and French, but dedicated the latter version to Isabel, Countess
of Arundel; Matthew translated for Eleanor of Provence a Latin life of
Edward the Confessor made for Henry II; John of Howden translated his
Latin Philomela into the Anglo-Norman Rossignos for Eleanor, while Henry
of Avranches o◊ered Latin saints’ lives to her husband Henry III.43
Whether or not kings could understand the Latin presented to them, a
symbolic bifurcation associating kings with erudition and queens with a
more nearly vernacular culture continues to be at work in the pattern of
thirteenth-century dedications.
Despite the contrasting social implications of writing in Latin, French
and English, the expanded domain of Anglo-Norman into the fourteenth
century is bound up with the resurgence of English that also characterizes
the period. The two languages encroach on Latin in the legal, govern-
mental and educational spheres.44 To be sure, both vernaculars begin to
displace Latin much earlier, for example in the parallel imitation of Latin
verse debates in the Owl and the Nightingale and the Petit Plet (c. 1200).
These light-hearted disputations are strikingly analogous, the more so for
appearing together in two early manuscripts, but they do not draw on each
other. During the thirteenth century, in contrast, pervasive interrelations
develop between works in English and French. Blancheflour et Florence (c.
1225), a debate on the merits of knights and clerics in love, claims an Eng-
lish source by ‘Banastre’ and uses tail-rhyme stanzas, which derive from
medieval Latin rhythmus triphthongus caudatus to become a favoured Middle
English as well as Anglo-Norman metre.45 Peter of Langtoft’s Anglo-Nor-
man Chronicle (1280–1307) features English satirical political songs, and its
versification parallels Middle English in its use of alliteration and rhythmic
rather than strictly syllabic principles. Indeed it is characteristic of Anglo-
Norman metres from the twelfth century onward to be accentually based –
‘English in a French dress’, in G. C. Macaulay’s phrase.46 Robert Mannyng
42. See for example Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley and Other Treatises; Hunt, Popular Medicine;
Pike, ed., Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third; Twiti, Art of Hunting, ed. Danielsson;
Aspin, ed., Anglo-Norman Political Songs.
43. Vaughan, Matthew Paris, pp. 168–81; Salter, English and International, pp. 90–1; Parsons, ‘Of
Queens, Courts and Books’. 44. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 159–64.
45. See Blancheflour et Florence, ed. Meyer, p. 222; and Strong, ‘History and Relations of the Tail-
rhyme Strophe’. Tail-rhyme is also used in Beneit’s Vie de Thomas Becket (1185), ed. Schlyter; and
Bozon’s ‘Bonté des femmes’, in Contes Moralisés, ed. Smith and Meyer, pp. xxxiii–xli.
46. Gower, Works, ed. Macaulay, vol. i, pp. xv–xviii; Pierre de Langtoft, ed. Thiolier, vol. i, p. 14.
of Brunne translates Langtoft together with Wace’s Brut and some

material from Nicholas Trivet in his Story of England (1338); several further
Middle English Bruts were drawn from Langtoft and one was published by
Caxton as Brut of England (1480). Trivet’s unpublished Anglo-Norman
chronicle (1328–35) informed Chaucer’s and Gower’s versions of the story
of Constance; a Middle English version of Trivet exists in Harvard,
Houghton Libary, fMS Eng 938.47 Nicholas Bozon’s Contes Moralisés (c.
1320), a major collection of exempla drawn from fables and natural history,
retells English stories such as that of the devil’s seven daughters and sprin-
kles the text with English proverbs and proper names. Robert Gros-
seteste’s Chasteau d’Amour (c. 1220), an allegory that restages the major
tenets of Christian faith, attracted four independent Middle English trans-
lators; Robert of Gretham’s verse sermons on the gospels exist in seven
Anglo-Norman manuscripts as the Miroir (c. 1230) and in four Middle Eng-
lish manuscripts as the Mirrur.48 Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (1303) adapts
the widely circulated Manuel des Pechiez (c. 1260) attributed to William of
Waddington.49 The post-Romantic discomfort with translatio as a source
of inspiration and a compositional principle has obscured the extent to
which Middle English is in fruitful dialogue with Anglo-Norman litera-
ture.
The close relations between Anglo-Norman and Middle English litera-
ture contextualize the period’s combative assertions that English is an
appropriate language for literature. The Metrical Chronicle attributed to
Robert of Gloucester (c. 1300) recognizes that ‘bote a man conne frenss,
me telt of him lute’ [unless a man knows French, he is held in little esteem],
yet he also observes that of all countries England alone ‘ne holdet to hor
owe speche’, ‘her own’ clearly referring to English and not French.50 The
Cursor Mundi (c. 1300) urges ‘Give we ilkan tare langage’ [let’s give to each
(country) its own language]; and in the first quarter of the fourteenth cen-
tury there are repeated assertions to the e◊ect that ‘bathe klerk and laued
man / Englis understand kan / That was born in Ingeland’ [both clerks and
unlearned men who were born in England understand English], that ‘bote
lered and lewed, olde and yonge, / Alle vnderstonden english tonge’.51 In
such passages English stakes its claim to be considered a literary language,
47. Pierre de Langtoft, ed. Thiolier, pp. 19–24; Dean, ‘Nicholas Trevet’; Lücke, Leben der Con-
stanze.
48. See Middle English Translations of Robert Grosseteste’s ‘Chateau d’Amour’; Aitken, Etude sur le
Miroir.
49. Furnivall published passages from the Manuel (extant in twenty-four manuscripts) in ‘Hand-
lyng Synne’ and its French Original. 50. Robert of Gloucester, Metrical Chronicle, ed. Wright, ll.
7542, 7545. 51. Quoted in Baugh and Cable, History of the English Language, pp. 137–8, 143–5.
52 susan crane
that is, to encroach on the status that Anglo-Norman had previously

appropriated as the language of culture in England. The claim that English
is universally understood and is England’s ‘own’ language bases the valid-
ity of writing in English on grounds quite di◊erent from Anglo-Norman’s
claim to exclusivity and refinement. Arthour and Merlin echoes Robert of
Gloucester in contrasting the status of the two languages: ‘Freynsche vse
tis gentil man / Ac euerich Inglische Inglische can’ [these gentle men use
French, but every English person knows English].52 When writers in Eng-
lish reassert the prestige of French alongside their own counterclaim to
universality, prestige slides towards marginalization, forecasting the
definitive passage of French from a ‘language of culture’ into a foreign lan-
guage.
French and Anglo-Norman during the

Hundred Years War
The reigns of Edward III and Richard II (1327–99) see both a resurgence of
mainland French influence in English literature and the beginning of a
decline in the role of insular French; under the Lancastrians Henry IV and
Henry V a decisive shift away from using French in England takes place. Dur-
ing the fourteenth century, Anglo-Norman continued to be the language of
legal pleading, parliamentary debate, guild and town records, and vernacu-
lar chronicle writing, with English alternatives increasing only slightly over
those of the preceding century. But in this century Anglo-Norman ceases to
be the foremost language for imaginative and personal writing in England,
and surprisingly in the very decades when the influence of continental court
poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Oton de Graun-
son and Jean Froissart was at its height. Most visible in the careers of John
Gower and Geo◊rey Chaucer, the turn to writing in English anticipates a
broader shift under the Lancastrians that is related to the heightened contact
and competition with France of the Hundred Years War.
The Hundred Years War (from 1339) is a time of curiously intimate as
well as adversarial contact with France. Edward III’s claim to the French
throne, the presence of French hostages and their retinues in England, the
circulation of large English retinues to sites of combat in France, and per-
haps above all Edward’s promotion of a chivalric ideology that allied noble
adversaries and made social occasions out of their surrenders, negotiations
and truces contributed to a heightened awareness of contemporary French
52. Arthour and Merlin, ed. Macrae-Gibson, vol. i, p. 5, ll. 23–4.
literature in English courts. Moreover, writing in French was politically

appropriate to Edward’s claim to France, a claim that may be the referent
for his only motto in French, ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ [shame to him who
thinks evil of it].53 During earlier campaigns for control of Gascony (1324),
Hugh the Despenser wrote to the English commanders there that ‘nous
conquerroms des Franceis . . . a grant honur du roi et d’entre vous et de tout
nostre lange’ [we will conquer the French to the great honour of the king
and yourselves and all our nation]. William Rothwell points out the per-
sistence of French as a national language evident in Hugh’s use of lange to
signify ‘nation, people’; there is also, if only latently, a political astuteness
in so using lange to naturalize England’s claims to French territory.54
French is thus an appropriate medium for the Vie du Prince Noir (c. 1385),
a verse commemoration of the Black Prince’s life that sits somewhere
between chronicle, biography and panegyric. Its author Chandos Herald,
perhaps a native of Hainault who came to England in consequence of
Philippa’s marriage to Edward III, was the herald of Sir John Chandos by
1363, and in royal service by 1370.55 Like the Chroniques of Froissart,
another Hainaulter who lived more briefly in England, Chandos Herald’s
work attends less to the rights and wrongs of the claims on which hostil-
ities were based than to the shared values of chivalry and the exceptional
virtues of individual combatants. On a more local scale, many Anglo-Nor-
man chronicles continue the Brut tradition into the fourteenth century.
Most notable is Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica (1355–7), a compendium of
earlier histories with added emphasis on chivalric ideals and on the chival-
ric exploits of Gray’s father in Edward II’s Scottish campaigns and of Gray
himself in the continental campaigns of Edward III. The valuable passages
of the Anominalle Chronicle on the Good Parliament of 1376–7 and the Ris-
ing of 1381 focus on struggles internal to English politics with a precision
that suggests a civil servant as author.56 This author’s English-influenced
syntax and vocabulary concretize the vernacular give and take of contem-
porary England: in his interview with Richard II, Wat Tyler ‘schaka sa
brace durement’ [shook his arm roughly] and announced that the rebels
sought ‘touz estre free et de une condicione’ [all to be free and of one rank],
the English shaken and fre intruding appropriately to narrate Tyler’s sub-
versive challenge.57 Chandos Herald’s less insular French sustains his
53. See Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, pp. 79–85.

54. Rothwell, ‘“Faus françeis d’Angleterre”’, p. 309.
55. See Chandos Herald, Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Tyson, pp. 14–18.
56. See Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. Galbraith, pp. xli–xlv.
57. Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. Galbraith, p. 147.
54 susan crane
claim to an international scale of judgement for his hero: he assures us that

‘tiel prince ne trovast hom / Qi alast serchier tout le monde / Si come il
tourne a le ronde’ [anyone who searched all the world as it turns round
would not find such a prince].58 In the Vie du Prince Noir, French is the
international idiom of chivalry; in the Anonimalle Chronicle it is the dialect
of English institutional record.
A third positioning of French in fourteenth-century England continues
its dominant thirteenth-century role as the acquired vernacular, the ‘lan-
guage of culture’, of England’s powerful strata. The Livre des Seyntz Mede-
cines (1354) by Henry, Duke of Lancaster is a fascinatingly secularized
devotional treatise on sin and repentance, in which the strong influence of
clerical literature enumerating sins and their remedies vies with personal
confessions and details of social life: that one pleasure of scarlet cloth is its
odour (‘j’ai coveitee le drap pour le flerour plus qe pur autre chose’ [I have
coveted the cloth more for its scent than for other reasons]), that wounds
and disfigurements to the nose are the most common hazard of tourna-
ments, that the courting of women can be carried out ‘comme prod-
hommes’ [like a gentleman] if neither sex nor flattery is its goal. Henry of
Lancaster’s writing is prolix and fluent, yet he closes with the character-
istic insular apology that ‘si le franceis ne soit pas bon, jeo doie estre
escusee, pur ceo qe jeo sui engleis’ [if the French is not good, I should be
excused, because I am English].59 Medieval booklists, wills and letters
show that powerful families still owned a preponderance of works in
French rather than English at least until the time of Caxton. Thomas of
Woodstock, youngest son of Philippa and Edward III, owned 123 books at
his execution in 1397; most of them were in French, including Trivet’s
chronicles and romances of Bevis of Hamtoun and Fulk Fitz Warin, and
only three of them seem to have been in English. At a somewhat humbler
level, Simon Burley, who had been Richard II’s tutor, owned at his execu-
tion in 1388 several romances in French and just one English book of
twenty-two in all.60 Insular manuscripts of the late fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, such as London, College of Arms, MS Arundel xiv
which contains Gaimar’s Estoire, the Lai d’Haveloc, and further Anglo-Nor-
man works including an allegorical poem on virtuous love published as
‘Un art d’aimer anglo-normand’ (c. 1300) further testify to the continued
public for Anglo-Norman literature.
The best-known court poetry of the late Anglo-Norman period is that of
58. Chandos Herald, Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Tyson, ll. 1630–2.
59. Henry of Lancaster, Seyntz Medicines, ed. Arnould, pp. 21, 47, 138, 239.
60. See Krochalis, ‘Books and Reading’, 50–1; Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture’.
John Gower, whose French is more continentally influenced than insular.

His first major work, the Mirour de l’Omme (c. 1376–9), is a hugely ambi-
tious verse treatise on the place of sin in God’s plan for the universe and the
failings typical of di◊erent social estates. Gower returned to French in the
ballade sequence on loving in consonance with religious teaching titled
Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz (c. 1398) and in the Cinkante
Balades (c. 1399) dedicated to Henry IV and designed ‘por desporter vo
noble court royal’ [to amuse your noble court].61 In the latter sequence,
both the ballade form and thematic concerns such as Fortune’s role in love
and the integration of courtship with moral virtue show the influence of
Gower’s continental contemporaries Oton de Graunson (who lived
twenty years in England), Jean Froissart (who served Queen Philippa for
several years in the 1360s) and, at a generation’s remove, Guillaume de
Machaut.
It is likely that Geo◊rey Chaucer began writing in French, and in imita-
tion of these continental poets, before moving to composition in English
with the Book of the Duchess. Short, fixed-form lyrics of the kind marked
‘Ch’ (for Chaucer?) in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15 may have
begun Chaucer’s poetic career and established his reputation su√ciently
to explain the commission for the Book of the Duchess and that work’s
accomplished grace.62 And of course the Book of the Duchess is itself closely
bound up with contemporary French poetry of the longer dit amoureuse
form. Influences from more than a dozen dits of Machaut, Froissart and
others link the Book of the Duchess to an important poetic movement – but
shift it to a new vernacular.
What might have attracted Gower and Chaucer from French to English
as a literary medium? The conditions of war with France tended to rein-
force the use of French in government circles; and only in the fifteenth cen-
tury did English come to be seen as the national tongue, an expression of
national identity.63 Beyond London there are many indications that the
lesser nobility and gentry were losing Anglo-Norman: at mid-century
William of Palerne was translated for Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Here-
ford; and many of the century’s translations may have been destined for
local courts and baronial households. But Gower and Chaucer moved in
bilingual London milieux where Anglo-Norman was still the dominant
61. Gower, Cinkante Balades, in Complete Works, ed. Macaulay, vol. i, pp. 335–78, ballade 2, l. 27.
62. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’.
63. Galbraith, ‘Nationality and Language’; Fisher, ‘Language Policy’; but Chaucer’s Treatise on
the Astrolabe (c. 1391) may earlier express an association between language and nationality in clos-
ing the defence of translation into English with a prayer that ‘God save the king, that is lord of this
language’ (ll. 56–7).
56 susan crane
language of record for guilds, government administration, law and noble

households. Richard II read Froissart’s collected lyrics – according to
Froissart – with delight, yet also commissioned Gower to write the Confes-
sio Amantis in English.64 Gower rededicated the Confessio Amantis to Henry
IV, yet presented him as well with the Cinkante Balades. Chaucer opts deci-
sively for English, even when a potential presentation or an implied
commission might have urged French, as for the Book of the Duchess and
John of Gaunt, or the Legend of Good Women and Queen Anne. His choice
involves, in Salter’s excellent formulation, ‘the complex, often enigmatic
relationship of the English language to English as a respected literary
medium’.65 The chapters below on Chaucer, Gower and Lollardy are well-
positioned to examine these complexities; here it is relevant to mention a
fourteenth-century shift in the status of Anglo-Norman that reinforces
the shift to English.
Anglo-Norman had, as we have seen, the characteristics of a dialect
from the mid-twelfth century. At that time its peculiarities began to dis-
tinguish insular speakers and writers from those of Picardy, Normandy,
the Ile de France, and so on. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, as
French royal power became more centralized and its records and
administration more standardized, the French of Paris became normative
and other dialects subordinated as deviations from the norm.66 It became
evident in England, particularly as the decades of war led to closer interac-
tion, that Anglo-Norman had become not merely the dialect of a particu-
lar region but inferior and incorrect. The later English treatises on French,
in contrast to Bibbesworth’s, invoke Parisian French as their model: John
Barton’s Donait françois (c. 1400) claims to teach the ‘droit language de
Paris’ [correct language of Paris], and Richard Dove’s treatise is titled
Donait soloum douce franceis de Paris (c. 1400–1425).67 Froissart provides
some evidence that the English perceived standardization as a dis-
advantage to them. He attributes English di√culties in the peace negotia-
tions of 1393 first to the conservative and lexically constrained French of
the dukes of Lancaster and Gloucester, in which words did not carry cer-
tain resonances useful to the French negotiators: ‘en parlure françoise a
mots soubtils et couvers et sur double entendement, et les tournent les
François, là où ils veulent, à leur prou√t et avantage: ce que les Anglois ne
sçauroient trouver, ne faire, car euls ne le veulent entendre que plaine-
64. Froissart, Œuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vol. xv, p. 167; Gower, Confessio Amantis, in
Complete Works, ed. Macaulay, vol. ii, pp. 1–6. 65. Salter, English and International, p. 4.
66. See Lusignan, Parler Vulgairement, pp. 121–4.
67. Merrilees, ‘Donatus’; Lusignan, Parler Vulgairement, pp. 101–5.
ment’ [in the French language there are subtle, dissimulating words with
double meanings, and the French turned these words to the senses they
wished, to their profit and advantage – which the English did not know
how to do, because they only wanted to understand things in a
straightforward sense]. This explanation recalls the artificial maintenance
of French in England, but Froissart goes on to endorse the negotiators’
perception that their plight is not one of linguistic disadvantage but of lin-
guistic di◊erence: ‘pour euls raisonnablement excuser, ils disoient bien
que le françois que ils avoient apris chiés eulx d’enfance, n’estoit pas de
telle nature et condition que celluy de France estoit et duquel les clers de
droit en leurs traittiés et parlers usoient’ [in order to excuse themselves
reasonably, they explained that the French they had learned at home in
childhood was not the same as that of France which legists were using in
their arguments and negotiations].68 The English delegates find them-
selves alienated from their own ‘native’ language when confronted with
‘standard’ French. The standardization of French during the fourteenth
century may well have worked against the literary prestige of Anglo-
Norman even within England.
The remarkable mobility and expansiveness of the English language
during the same decades, in contrast, makes it an attractive alternative to
insular French. In the pattern typical of bilingual contact in which one ver-
nacular is privileged, lower-status English underwent extensive influence
from French after 1066, an e◊ect that reached its high point in the four-
teenth century with a 50 per cent increase in lexical assimilation over the
later thirteenth-century rate, when borrowing already doubled that of the
century from 1150 to 1250.69 To be sure, Anglo-Norman takes over Eng-
lish words – the very early Voyage of St Brendan uses raps [ropes] and haspes
[clasps] – but at a rate far behind the 10,000-word total for the Middle Eng-
lish period.70 English of the later fourteenth century borrows heavily from
Latin as well, and syntactic and metrical incorporations further contribute
to a mobile, expansive vernacular that invites artistic experiment and per-
mits a breadth of expression not available in Anglo-Norman – particularly
as Anglo-Norman becomes constrained by the standardization of
French.71 More than writers of legal, household and parliamentary
68. Froissart, Œuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vol. xv, pp. 114–15.
69. Baugh and Cable, History of the English Language, pp. 166–79. Christopher Cannon’s doctoral
dissertation ‘The Making of Chaucer’s English’ (Harvard University, 1993) provides a closer and
more nuanced account of lexical borrowing and linguistic innovation in Middle English literature.
70. Short, ‘On Bilingualism’, pp. 469–70; Benedeit, Voyage of St Brendan, ed. Short and Mer-
rilees, ll. 461, 686.
71. See Robert Yeager, ‘Learning to Speak in Tongues’, on English as a ‘vernacular-in-process’,
virtually a ‘tri-lingua franca’, in this period (pp. 116–17).
58 susan crane
records, imaginative writers would appreciate the shifts in register and

tone provided by the layered lexicon of fourteenth-century English. Thus
it seems likely that Chaucer’s and Gower’s decision to write in English
facilitated, rather than followed on, a shift in their London milieux from
Anglo-Norman to English.
The universal use of English seems to have received its o√cial sanction from
the Lancastrians. Supporters of Henry Bolingbroke addressed Parliament in
English in 1397 and 1399, and Henry likewise made his challenge to the
throne of 30 September 1399 in English; perhaps not incidentally, Henry IV
was the first English king since Henry III (d. 1272) whose wife (Mary de
Bohun) and whose mother (Blanche of Lancaster) were not both from French-
speaking territories. Henry V regularly used English in his correspondence
and in public addresses; in 1422 the Brewers Guild credits him with having
‘honourably enlarged and adorned’ English by having so ‘willingly chosen . . .
the common idiom’ for his letters and other personal communications.72 John
Fisher argues that the Lancastrians’ use of English and their patronage of
Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Henry Scogan may partake of
‘a deliberate policy intended to engage the support of Parliament and the
English citizenry for a questionable usurpation of the throne’.73 Whether by
Lancastrian endorsement or by a wider consensus of England’s bilingual
milieux, English almost entirely replaces Anglo-Norman in the speech and
writing if not the reading habits of all the English by mid-century.
England’s most prolific bilingual writer in the fifteenth century is thus a
French captive, Charles d’Orléans, who spent twenty-five years in England
after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Towards the end of his captivity he
wrote ballades, roundels and caroles which he organized loosely into a
sequence involving separation from a beloved, Beauté, then her loss, the
lover’s passage into age, and a dream allegory introducing the possibility of
loving again. Charles’s own manuscript, now Paris, Bibliothèque nation-
ale, f. fr. 25458, contains two of his lyrics in English versions in his own
hand, but the 121 English lyrics in British Library, MS Harley 682, many of
which have French versions in Charles’s manuscript, are likely to be his as
well.74 The French lyrics elegantly deploy the limited imaginary field that
might be imputed to a prisoner: allegorization of the interplay of hopes,
memories and fears; imagery drawn from enclosure, writing and the body
itself as a scene of narrative:
72. Quoted in Fisher, ‘Language Policy’, p. 1171.
73. Fisher, ‘Language policy’, p.1170. But see also Pearsall, ‘Hoccleve’s Regement’, pp. 398–9.
74. See Charles d’Orléans, English Poems of Charles of Orleans, ed. Steele and Day, pp. xix–xxvi.
See now Charles d’Orléans in England, 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Woodbridge: Boydell and
Brewer, 2000).
J’ay ou tresor de ma pensee

Un mirouer qu’ay acheté.
Amour, en l’annee passee,
Le me vendy, de sa bonté. . . .
Grant bien me fait a m’y mirer,
En attendant Bonne Esperance.75
Within the tresoure haue y of my thought
A myrroure which y bought but late perde
Of god of loue. . . .
Gret good, god wott, hit doth me in to prye
In abidyng my gladsom in good hope.76
Charles d’Orléans’ English acquaintance William de la Pole, Duke of

Su◊olk, anticipates and may have inspired the French captive’s project.
According to John Shirley, Su◊olk wrote French lyrics during his impris-
onment (1430–2) in the castle of Charles’s half-brother Dunois; on his
return to England he obtained guardianship of Charles and housed him at
his properties thereafter. Shirley’s MS, Cambridge, Trinity College,
r.3.20, preserves four roundels and two ballades from the time of Su◊olk’s
captivity.77 Like Charles’s works, Su◊olk’s could be described as ‘Chaucer-
ian’ in imagery, subjects and treatment, such that it would be appropriate
to consider both writers alongside the fifteenth-century Chaucerians who
write in English only. That Su◊olk married Alice Chaucer immediately
upon return from captivity suggests that his homage to courtly forms of
her grandfather’s era had biographical as well as literary motives.
Su◊olk’s choice of language is a rare anachronism in fifteenth-century
poetry. Traces of some English court poetry written in French remain; and
as late as 1460 one ‘Chester the Herald’ still chooses French, perhaps to
recall Chandos Herald, to lament the death of Richard, Duke of York: ‘le
roy Francoyez et son doulfin chassa. . . . / D’Engleterre fut long temps
prottetur, / Le peuple ama, et fut leur de◊endeur’ [He drove out the king of
France and his dauphin. . . . He was long the protector of England; he loved
the people and defended them].78 The capacity of French to represent
international court culture persists in these records of the highest nobil-
75. Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Champion, ballade 35, ll. 1–4, 8–9 (vol. i, pp. 54–5).
76. English Poems of Charles of Orleans, ed. Steele and Day, ll. 1250–3, 1257–8.
77. Lyrics published by MacCracken, ‘English Friend of Charles d’Orléans’. On the (lost)
French poetry of John Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, admired by Christine de Pizan, see Laidlaw,
‘Christine de Pizan, the Earl of Salisbury and Henry IV’.
78. Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, vol. ii, p. 257.
60 susan crane
ity’s exploits and amours, but now decisively as a foreign language that
lifts its users above the oppositional strife between England and France.
Despite the extended afterlife of Anglo-Norman in fifteenth-century legal
and government records, English becomes the national language as soon as
the concept of a national language develops.

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Chapter 2

Conquest and accommodation

anticipates the Anglo-Norman copy of the Song of Roland, Oxford,

scale between Norman men and Anglo-Saxon women moved disinherited

historical traditions, at ﬁrst asserting their continental superiority and

10. Quoted in Coulton, ‘Nationalism in the Middle Ages’, p. 24.

14. Piramus, Vie Seint Edmund, ed. Kjellman, ll. 87–90.

and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (c. 1133) traces the

Pur la gent qui dunc diverserunt

17. Waldef, ed. Holden, ll. 39–47.

be associated with Eleanor’s and Henry’s wide-ranging inﬂuence.19 Much

Anglo-Norman precocity and perseverance

themselves with English sovereignty and the insular past. Translatio, in

28. Salter, English and International, pp. 11–28.

commentary translated into French. In any medieval context, femininity

31. Ibid., p. 452.

post-Conquest England: a vernacular appropriate to women in its

34. Vie d’Edouard, ed. Södergaard, ll. 7–8.

testimonies it seems to be pronunciation and limitations in vocabulary

38. Rothwell, ‘A quelle époque’, p. 1085; Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft.

ideological claims about marriage and divorce, domestic conﬂict, and

of Brunne translates Langtoft together with Wace’s Brut and some

that is, to encroach on the status that Anglo-Norman had previously

French and Anglo-Norman during the

52. Arthour and Merlin, ed. Macrae-Gibson, vol. i, p. 5, ll. 23–4.

literature in English courts. Moreover, writing in French was politically

53. See Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, pp. 79–85.

claim to an international scale of judgement for his hero: he assures us that

John Gower, whose French is more continentally inﬂuenced than insular.

language of record for guilds, government administration, law and noble

records, imaginative writers would appreciate the shifts in register and

J’ay ou tresor de ma pensee

Charles d’Orléans’ English acquaintance William de la Pole, Duke of

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