Chaucer's Prioress's ‘Frenssh’, spoken ‘after the scole of Stratford atte Bowe’, has been taken as an icon of insular Francophone degeneracy over time, when judged by the reconstructive standards of the ‘French of France’ – especially the phantom category of ‘Francien’ – applied to the ‘eccentric cousin’. But as the French of England is now reinstated in a continuum of evolution and variability with the dialects of ‘French French’, it may be worth emphasising that for all the irony in the Chaucerian depiction, there is no overt derogatory pronouncement on the French ‘form of speche’ itself: rather, this French is spoken ‘ful faire and fetisly’, and simply in ignorance of Paris French – as might be customarily expected in any late medieval English religious setting, in this case a Benedictine nunnery dedicated to St Leonard. It may well be, rather, that such a form of French stands in potential contradistinction to other English local realisations of French – here perhaps, as once suggested, the geographically close nunnery of St Leonard at Barking – and that the topical references to ‘Stratford atte Bowe’ and ‘Parys’ serve more essentially to project forms of French onto a linguistic map where issues of locality and situational sociolinguistic difference are brought into relief.

This article is a report on early work planned for a long-term project on just one area of that topic – insular forms of the French language investigated according to their locality, or indeed, localisability – with the purpose of highlighting the assumptions underlying this project, the limitations it may face, together with some of the potential solutions and results attainable through flexible yet rigorous approaches spanning various bibliographies and methodologies. The substance of this essay relies on a corpus of manuscript data which is slowly being assembled and interpreted, and some relevant illustrative manuscripts are briefly mentioned. For reasons which are discussed below, this corpus is concerned with the manuscript and scribal context of French texts in an insular situation of production and transmission, and what it can tell us if we look at socio-cultural and book-making (codicological and palaeographical) features, and simultaneously at spellings and spelling variants, the relationship between spelling and underlying phonetic data, lexicography, and syntax. On account of the format of this contribution, of its work-in-progress nature, and of its attempted multi-disciplinary dimension, the bibliographical references supporting the theoretical framework are far from exhaustive for each of its classic constituents (manuscript studies, linguistic theory and literary history), and its disciplinary subcategories (‘French’, ‘Anglo-Norman’ and ‘Middle English’ studies) which are still insufficiently interactive.