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.