For all the significance that has been attached to the Norman Conquest, it is becoming increasingly possible to see overlaps and continuities in the multilingual and multicultural England of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. In the opening essay of this section, David Trotter argues that the Conquest was not the defining linguistic event it became in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography and shows that French lexis was already functional in some kinds of texts. Elizabeth Tyler further argues that French can help us undo a prevailing narrative of Anglo-Saxon England as lost in the Conquest. Anglo-Saxon culture was already international, multilingual and in part francophone, and provided a context for the explosion of twelfth-century francophone writing in England. (The sole extant manuscript of Beowulf itself was of course copied in the latinate, francophone, Danish and English world of the cosmopolitan late Anglo-Saxon eleventh-century court, not too long before the Chanson de Roland was copied in the highly latinate, French and English world of Augustinian canons.)

There has been a great deal of valuable comparative literary study across the high Middle Ages inclusive of works and figures from England. But study of English literary history as such has sometimes been narrower. The twelfth century at one time for English literary studies consisted principally of The Owl and the Nightingale (then dated to Richard I's reign), the fables Dame Sirith and The Fox and the Wolf and the Peterborough continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to 1154, plus some Latin writers.