The ‘French’ of ‘England’

‘The French of England’ is a term designed to embrace medieval francophony in England, from the eleventh century to the fifteenth. In previous study of insular medieval culture, French has usually been divided into two periods and fields labelled respectively ‘Anglo-Norman’ and ‘Anglo-French’. The problem lies not in the inappropriateness of either term but in the division itself and the separateness and self-enclosure of the categories they have come to signify. ‘Anglo-Norman’, a coinage first found in the eighteenth century, generally denotes French texts composed in the British Isles from the Conquest to the early fourteenth century. ‘Anglo-French’, a usage from the nineteenth century, frequently refers to textual imports from the continent into England and to contacts between England and the continent in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (though, confusingly, it is also sometimes used of the texts more usually called ‘Anglo-Norman’).

The division has fostered notions of discontinuity in the French of England that fit comfortably with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anglocentric periodizations of vernacular literary history and of the languages of record in England. The two terms, Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French, helped consolidate a model in which English lies dormant after the Conquest, having been overwhelmed and replaced by Anglo-Norman, but rises again in a late fourteenth century efflorescence (by which time England's French is supposed to be chiefly a matter of importation from and communication with the Continent). Between the twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries, in this model, there is an early period of composition in Anglo-Norman as a mother tongue, followed by writing in an Anglo-Norman acquired as a second language.