{"id":8132,"date":"2021-12-07T13:20:55","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T12:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=30293"},"modified":"2021-12-07T13:53:09","modified_gmt":"2021-12-07T12:53:09","slug":"the-normans-had-a-profound-influence-on-britain-so-why-do-we-not-speak-french","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/the-normans-had-a-profound-influence-on-britain-so-why-do-we-not-speak-french\/","title":{"rendered":"The Normans had a profound influence on Britain \u2013 so why do we not speak French?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By Charlotte Hodgman\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 07 December 2021 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

After 1066<\/a>, with French the polite language of the upper classes, and Latin the language of the church and hence of the clerks employed in government, we might expect English to have declined to the status of a peasant patois. Two factors seem to have been crucial in its survival and eventual resurgence.<\/p>\n

Firstly, as with many later experiments in empire (for example, the Habsburgs<\/a> in eastern Europe), the simple number of colonists was never large enough to overwhelm the native majority. Instead, a proportion both of the colonists and of the colonised elite became bilingual.<\/p>\n

Read more | 9 surprising facts about William the Conqueror and the Norman conquest<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
In the process, not only was the \u2018old\u2019 English spoken before 1066 fundamentally altered into the language known as \u2018Middle\u2019 English, but the high-status language, French, became warped into a distinctive \u2018Anglo-Norman\u2019 dialect, mocked as early as the 12th century by Frenchmen who found the accents of those Englishmen who attempted to speak French hilarious or bizarre.<\/p>\n
Secondly, the rivalry that emerged between the kings of England and France<\/a> ensured that the ruling classes increasingly emphasised their Anglo-Norman or English identity as a means of distinguishing themselves from their \u2018foreign\u2019 enemies.<\/p>\n
In the 1230s, Henry III<\/a> became the first king of England<\/a> since 1066 to give distinctively \u2018English\u2019 names<\/a> \u2013 Edward and Edmund \u2013 to his sons. At much the same time, official government documents, such as Magna Carta<\/a>, written in Latin, began to be proclaimed in English as well as in French.<\/p>\n
By the 1290s, Edward I<\/a>, himself a French-speaker, was warning his subjects that a French invasion of England might bring about the destruction of \u201cthe English language\u201d, here presented as the very essence of Englishness.<\/p>\n
Read more | How Cnut\u2019s invasion of England set the scene for the Norman conquest<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Henry\u00a0IV<\/a>, after 1399, was perhaps the first king of England for whom English was the language of choice. Even so, by royal command from 1362, all pleas in the law courts \u2013 and from 1363, the majority of discussions in the parliamentary Commons \u2013 had to be conducted in English.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, skills that today we assume to be confined to the bilingual inhabitants of a country such as Switzerland, were a part of daily life for an educated minority of medieval England.<\/p>\n
Answered by Professor Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia<\/strong><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n
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