Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Introduction: What's in a Name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’
- Section I Language and Socio-Linguistics
- Introduction
- 1 French Language in Contact with English: Social Context and Linguistic Change (mid-13th–14th centuries)
- 2 The Language of Complaint: Multilingualism and Petitioning in Later Medieval England
- 3 The Persistence of Anglo-Norman 1230–1362: A Linguistic Perspective
- 4 Syntaxe anglo-normande: étude de certaines caractéristiques du XIIe au XIVe siècle
- 5 ‘“Fi a debles,” quath the king’: Language Mixing in England's Vernacular Historical Narratives, c.1290–c.1340.
- 6 Uses of French Language in Medieval English Towns
- 7 The French of England in Female Convents: The French Kitcheners' Accounts of Campsey Ash Priory
- 8 The French of England: A Maritime lingua franca?
- 9 John Barton, John Gower and Others: Variation in Late Anglo-French
- 10 John Gower's French and his Readers
- Section II Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories
- Section III After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
- Section IV England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Bibliography
- Index of Primary Texts and Manuscripts
- Index of Primary Authors
- General Index: Persons and Places, Subjects
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
6 - Uses of French Language in Medieval English Towns
from Section I - Language and Socio-Linguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Introduction: What's in a Name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’
- Section I Language and Socio-Linguistics
- Introduction
- 1 French Language in Contact with English: Social Context and Linguistic Change (mid-13th–14th centuries)
- 2 The Language of Complaint: Multilingualism and Petitioning in Later Medieval England
- 3 The Persistence of Anglo-Norman 1230–1362: A Linguistic Perspective
- 4 Syntaxe anglo-normande: étude de certaines caractéristiques du XIIe au XIVe siècle
- 5 ‘“Fi a debles,” quath the king’: Language Mixing in England's Vernacular Historical Narratives, c.1290–c.1340.
- 6 Uses of French Language in Medieval English Towns
- 7 The French of England in Female Convents: The French Kitcheners' Accounts of Campsey Ash Priory
- 8 The French of England: A Maritime lingua franca?
- 9 John Barton, John Gower and Others: Variation in Late Anglo-French
- 10 John Gower's French and his Readers
- Section II Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories
- Section III After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
- Section IV England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Bibliography
- Index of Primary Texts and Manuscripts
- Index of Primary Authors
- General Index: Persons and Places, Subjects
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
Summary
The use of French in medieval English towns has no simple explanation. Amongst highly born and better-educated members of English society, French was known as a high-status, international language of conversation, and as a means of access to literature of high quality. In the king's courts it was also an argot of common lawyers, and continued in use as a written language after it had ceased to be spoken in the courts. An explanation of these phenomena in terms of the sociology of social stratification, symbolic representation and social closure would seem to present few problems. But these considerations come nowhere near explaining why French should have been used in the business of urban communities, whose membership was not drawn from the aristocratic or better-educated classes of society, on the whole, and most of whom spoke nothing but English.
Like their counterparts in the shires, urban elites made use of another nonnative language, Latin, as the principal language of administration. Their most burdensome task was the management of borough law-courts, and some English boroughs began using written records to keep track of judicial business early in the thirteenth century. The Wallingford rolls date from the 1230s. We have enough surviving evidence to suppose that the keeping of borough court rolls became increasingly widespread during the course of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The normal language of all this legal recording was Latin, and this continued well into the early modern period.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and Culture in Medieval BritainThe French of England, c.1100–c.1500, pp. 81 - 89Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009