England and French

When, in the second eleventh-century conquest of England, William, duke of Normandy, led a coalition of Normans, Bretons, Flemings and other French speakers in the 1066 invasion, there was no question of his imposing a written French-language bureaucracy. The English court already included French among its languages, exchanges between clerics in England and in francophone areas of Europe had a long history and French-speaking landholders were present in England before the Norman Conquest. But William retained the governance of the country by shires and hundreds and his initial writs were sent out in English drafted by the staff of the king's chapel, with greetings to all the king's people ‘frencisce  englisce’ (sometimes also ‘englisce ge denisce’). In so far as William used a standard or ‘official’ language for establishing his rule, it rapidly became Latin: as Richard Sharpe argues, the most practical arrangement (in line with continental practice) was to have written Latin documents from which English and French (and Cornish, Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic, or, in continental domains, Norman, Breton and Flemish) translations could be given to differing groups of laypeople involved in government. Certainly, spoken French quickly consolidated its elite status after the Conquest from being one among several languages used in the eleventh-century Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Saxon courts to being the vernacular of England's rulers. But French had as yet no full existence as a written language (some isolated texts from the ninth to the eleventh century survive, but they are specific to particular, usually para-liturgical or other ritual occasions, rather than part of a systematic use of French as a written language of secular culture or record). In England the invaders encountered a different distribution of written and spoken language as between Latin and the vernaculars than in their home culture. Late Old English standardised West Saxon functioned much more like Latin, in that it was a written language used across historiography, law, biblical translation, pastoral care, science, learning, medicine, travel and romance.

This volume presents single manuscript editions and translations of prologues, epilogues, and other excerpts from French-language texts composed or circulating in medieval England. The French-language writing of England offers an indispensable corpus for the history of French-language literature at large and for the understanding of England's literary, documentary and cultural history over some four hundred years and more. We concentrate here on literary and other texts in their most self-reflexive moments: identifying themselves, discussing their own production and strategies, interpellating their audiences, and positioning their materials. This focus provides access to the assumptions and strategies of medieval England's literary and literate corpus of work in French. Our volume is not a conventional literary history so much as an argued anthology making a case for the interest and significance of the field from which this book draws its demonstrations.

No anthology of whatever kind can include all the texts an editor or reader might wish to have. A handful of texts in the French of England have been well served in modern translations and discussion and are omitted here: others are fully translated and introduced in our French of England Translation Series (FRETS) and its occasional publication series (FRETS OPS): see https://acmrs.org/publications/catalog?field_mrts_tax_ tid=14. Nevertheless, by offering direct contact with edited texts and some mappings of French-language writing in England's regional and supra-regional cultures, we hope to have provided many reasons for others to make their own further explorations.

Contributors and Acknowledgements

The volume has been long in the making and has many debts. In the first instance, the editors want warmly to thank all those who have contributed entries. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell are ultimately responsible for the editions and commentary: we have each edited, introduced and cross-checked each other's entries, but we have also been delighted to work with colleagues and with our former and current graduate students. Dr Cathy Hume (Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK) originally prepared Part VI, §3, Middle English Versions of French Entries, and contributed the Lumere as lais (19) as a post-doctoral Modern Humanities Reseach Associate to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne at the University of York. Dr Joshua Byron Smith, Assistant Professor in English at the University of Arkansas kindly undertook to prepare (31), for which knowledge of Welsh was a desideratum. Dr John Spence, an expert in Anglo-Norman prose chronicle writing, contributed the Mohun Chronicle (42).

Introduction

Like some of the language treatises (7a–e) and the Speculum ecclesie of St Edmund (22), our final excerpt, the Débat des hérauts (44) is a work with both manuscript and print lives. Composed in France in probably the mid-fifteenth century, the Débat provoked a riposte in English in 1549 from John Coke, Clerk of the Staple under Edward VI, who encountered it in Flanders (see Part VI, §2.10). The Débat is chosen here for its review of late-medieval and early-modern cultural traditions, shared, across a patchwork of regional differences, between several adjacent and interlinked cultures, England, France and Flanders. These cultural overlaps are in some respects continuous with those of twelfth-century England and Britain and the vigorous diffusion of Brut materials in and beyond insular culture. England and France are represented in the Débat as pulling apart into oppositional identities, a process that cannot help but testify to all that is common to them (in the excerpt here, principally traditions around Brutus, but around many more cultural figures and resources in the text as a whole). The Débat's imbrication of cultural traditions as between England and France can be compared with the A tous nobles genealogical roll of 1443 (20d). Here a version of the French royal genealogy is displayed, in order to assert superior English claims to the French throne through the female line, and the roll's account of continuity and succession reaches back behind Brutus to Albina.

It is important to resist teleology and not to see the Débat as an inevitable result of a developing sense of national identity, versions of which are invoked in varying ways on occasion in earlier literature. Socio-political communities in any case polarise identity around a variety of axes. Matthew Paris's thirteenth-century Life of St Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury (13) is an example where the focus is the realm and its access to the sacred, rather than the nation. Edmund died in France en route to Rome, and the Cistercians at Pontigny had the burying of his body, so that his cult is shared across the Channel.

Introduction

Latin's pervasive use as an authorising language is clear in our texts, and it is an important ‘other’ in French texts, as discussed in Part I above (pp. 10–11). Nevertheless, in Part V, as throughout the volume, the diversity with which the question of textual lineage is handled is striking. A number of other languages are invoked as part of textual lineage, including (as discussed above in Part I, pp. 10, 14) English and British. The Greek authorising figures of Aristotle and Alexander are unsurprisingly found in many works with eastward-turning textual communities in Part IV: not only the encyclopaedic romance of the Roman de toute chevalerie (28), or the Secré de secrez (33) with its mirror for princes, but (32a), a treatise on menstruation, deploy Aristotle. For its defence and prescription of cosmetic remedies, the Ornatus mulierum (32b) cites a still more complicated textual lineage: the written authority of ancient Greek medicine (Galen, Hippocrates), Latinised Arabic medicine (Constantinus Africanus) and the direct oral teaching of a Saracen woman and that of ‘Trota’ at Salerno. When Part V's Simund de Freine considers how linguistic diversity limits earthly fame (Roman de Fortune (38), late twelfth century), he ranges over Lombard, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Danish, Scots and English.

The late twelfth and thirteenth century's intensified attention to the languages of the Mediterranean can be characterised by ambivalence or strategy. For all the power of Aristotle's name, in the late-thirteenth-century pseudo-Aristotelian Secré de secrez (33.31–6) both Greek and Arabic are treated as unreliable: Arabic is said to be too elaborate and unverifiable as to its truthfulness and Greek too obscure. (Waterford and Copale may not actually have translated from the Arabic or the Greek: these claims more probably concern the effects of these languages in the Latin source and thus serve to legitimate the Latin basis for the French-language translation, the Latin translator's competence, and the practice of making omissions or supplementing the translation (33.63–76)). These linguistic judgements of course also present the Secré as a work au fait with the new sources of knowledge in the thirteenth century's expanded world, and in spite of Secré's claim of unreliability, Arabic is often used to code knowledge as both exotic and authentic.

Introduction

These phrases from the Nun of Barking and Marie de France, two twelfth-century women writers who thought a great deal about language and the valences and strategies of vernacular writing, effectively thematise Part I. An important subset of ‘situatedness’ is linguistic choice, and in a multilingual translating culture, there is considerable linguistic choice available. But, like authorship, medieval language choice may work by different paradigms than our own. As David Trotter points out, ‘an awareness of the differences between languages is not the same as a consciousness of the nationality of an individual word’. References to ‘English’ within Middle English texts have often attracted intense attention because they seem to promise access to a supra-textual ‘national’ story, however locally situated and strategic they may be. References to French, especially given its regional and supra-regional character, have not had the same charge in scholarship on England (though they are often deployed in modern accounts of social and linguistic hierarchy). What we may identify retrospectively as a lexical switch from French to English or vice versa may not necessarily have been historically settled or even conceptualised as a switch by medieval users: much medieval lexis was interchanged between what has only subsequently become classified as French and English. Mixed language was relatively routine across a range of pragmatic text types and practised as an art in macaronic poetry and prose, and it is often more helpful to think of writers as changing or adding registers rather than switching languages. Whatever the matrix language of a text may be, other languages are not precluded from being present in various ways (borrowed, alluded to, implicit in, or breaking through, as Christopher Baswell has argued, in a pentimento effect, etc.): other languages offer further resources and bring additional registers to the matrix language.

Writing in the vernacular is differently inflected for French than for Middle English, partly because of French's social prestige, its longstanding literary uses from the twelfth century on, and its increased deployment, in the later Middle Ages, as a language of record. Yet French texts almost never deprecate English. Linguistic hierarchies between French and English were initially complicated by overlaps and disjunctions between oral and written modes.

Introduction

The needs and responses of inscribed audiences are a frequent rationale for textual composition. Most vernacular works share a conceptualisation of audience-text relations as a face-to-face encounter with the people for whom a text is initially written, whether or not those specific relations were ever actualised or are pertinent to the version of the text in hand. Historical audiences are linked to but do not necessarily remain the same as production communities or textually inscribed communities. Nor are they defined by them as a single hypostasised community of one language or a particular social status. The audience for the ‘Londonisation’ of Brunetto Latini in the Liber custumarum (8a), for instance, probably identified itself not as a francophone community but as members of the occupational sub-groups of a highly variegated civic public: the court, plurilingual administrators, bureaucrats, merchants, urban dwellers of various kinds. So too the Crabhouse nunnery register (36), more concerned with verse and prose distinctions than its own trilinguality, testifies to the mixed and fluid socio-linguistics of female houses, witnessed in the linguistic ranges of their devotional, doctrinal, and administrative texts, and in their ecclesiastical and lay patronage networks.

Part IV's most explicit meditation on audiences and their formation as textual communities is Denis Piramus's prologue to his life of Edmund of East Anglia (27). As Ian Short has shown, this prologue offers considerable thought about vernacular writing (well worth consideration alongside more frequently discussed prologues such as those of Chrétien de Troyes or Marie de France).1 Piramus's prologue plays with the assignation of literary genre to specific class or occupational groups and then transforms, redirects and complicates such correspondences together with the whole question of whether texts are to offer sentence or solace to their audiences. Wace's late-twelfth-century Vie de saint Nicolas (25a) adapts estates theory to form a cult community of audience and narrator. The anonymous thirteenth-century Vie de seint Clement (25b) outlines with mocking wit the usual parameters of academic writing and its ambitions in order to create narration and audience as joined in a textual community pursuing more useful and less well-known material and readings. A stylish piece of niche marketing, this prologue sets up a pace and intimacy sufficient to sustain with brio the succeeding 15,000 line vernacularisation of the Clementine Recognitions.

French in and out of England

Older models of one language, one nation, one literature have increasingly come to seem inadequate for the study of England's medieval culture, in its internal dimensions as much as in its external exchanges and contacts. Recent work with multilingualism as an explicit paradigm for enquiry gives us ways to move beyond rigid associations between language and nation in the exploration of medieval European cultures. Not that multilingualism is in every circumstance a self-evident good, then or now: the medieval paradigm of the tower of Babel as a fall into mutually incomprehensible languages cast a long shadow, even if redeemed by Pentecost's endowment of the apostles with tongues of fire. The Herefordshire writer Simund de Freine observes in his late-twelfth-century French reworking of Boethius (see (38) below) that ‘linguistic diversity hinders the spread of fame’. To set against the richness and flexibility of lexicon, register, and allusion for multilingual speakers and writers there is much medieval commentary, serious or playful, on failures of comprehension. Nevertheless, whether perceived as advantageous or problematic, multilingualism has become a newly explicit approach for literary and linguistic study. In addition to new models for how we conceptualise language and new investigations into previously neglected aspects of language use in England, current scholarship's emphasis on the materiality of medieval textual culture necessarily embraces the multilingualism of medieval texts and manuscript collections on the page and in the codex, while socio- linguistic approaches to the uses and performance of text in both documentary and literary culture address the multilingualism and plurilingualism of medieval audiences.

In the light of these new approaches, it is clear that students and scholars of insular culture need to think multilingually. It may therefore seem perverse to offer a volume on the French of England rather than England's multilingualism as such.