Introduction

Any assessment of the status of French in England in the later medieval period has to contend with a widespread perception that it was not really genuine French. Nineteenth-century editors set the tone, considering it was merely ‘une manière imparfaite de parler français’ (Paris and Bos 1881), ‘le mauvais français qu’on parlait, et surtout qu’on écrivait, en Angleterre’ (Meyer and Toulmin-Smith 1889). Pope (1934) followed suit, declaring that in its later stages Anglo-Norman became a ‘jargon’ barely understood by those who used it. This notion of deviance or incorrectness has generally been associated with the ‘foreign-language’ status of later Anglo-Norman, characterised by Pope (1934: 424) as a ‘period of degeneracy in which insular French … gradually became a dead language that … always had to be taught’. Later writers such as Price (1984) took the same line:

It is clear from the kind of French that was being written in England in the thirteenth and, even more so, in the fourteenth century that the writers had less than total command of the language … (it) was indeed a language in an advanced state of decline. Grammatically it was often little more than ‘bad French’… ‘Late Anglo-Norman is characterised by so many and such marked deviations from any other kind of French at the time as to lead one to the view that what we have before us is not just another authentic speaker French but incorrect French written by people for whom it was a foreign language and whose command of it was inadequate. (Price 1984: 224)

Kibbee (1996) similarly formulated the position in terms of an ‘essential difference’ between Continental and Insular French, which he located in the distinction between a mother tongue and a non-native language. He argued that apparent noun gender errors and syntactic constructions showing English influence provide evidence that, as time went on, Anglo-Norman became an imperfectly learned second language. With French specialists making such claims, it is no surprise to find historical linguists such as Thomason and Kaufman (1988) asserting that by the mid-thirteenth century there were ‘virtually no competent users of French’ in England.