Anglo-Norman and the ‘Common Tongue’

My title, a play on the title of a famous article by Anne Hudson, is supposed to produce a frisson of donnish surprise, ideally accompanied by other affects, ranging from a shocked ‘What in heaven?’ to the curious ‘My goodness, how interesting’, all the way to the weary ‘Here we go again’. On the one hand, the title may seem opportunistic in its attempt to link Anglo-Norman to a heresy that, particularly over the last decade, has represented the dernier cri in late medieval scholarly fashion. On the other, the title's insistence on positing a link between a movement whose demotic radicalism is implied by the word ‘lollard’ itself and a language that, until recently, was widely associated with social and religious conservatism may make the title seem merely unbelievable. Admittedly, as the evidence this volume amasses for the vigour of Anglo-Norman into the fourteenth century and beyond attests, it is becoming steadily less workable to speak of the late fourteenth century (the period in which Lollardy, with its forceful ideas about the use of the English vernacular, came to the fore in England) using the well-worn language of ‘the triumph of English’, a phrase that still smacks of the old topos of the ‘Norman Yoke’. But our deepest scholarly narratives – and ‘the triumph of English’ is a deep narrative indeed – do not live by evidence alone. Core national, religious and literary historical beliefs are bound up in their survival. If they die at all, they die slow and die hard.