EARLY fourteenth century England witnessed a resurgence of interest in Anglo- Norman historiographical texts, the likes of which had not been seen since the period following the accession of Henry II in the second half of the twelfth century. During the reigns of the first three Edwards, multiple texts narrating the history of the kings of England were written in Anglo-Norman: the Prose Brut, the Livere de Reis de Britannie, the Anonimalle Chronicle, the Livere de Reis de Engleterre, the Brute, the Lignee des Bretons et des Engleis and the Petit Brut. More recent scholarship has shown an interest in the reception of these types of works, as the great number of manuscripts with Anglo-Norman prose chronicles suggests they were quite popular during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ownership and readership of Anglo-Norman prose chronicles in the fourteenth century was varied; as John Spence notes:

The writing of these vernacular national chronicles preceded the composition of Anglo-Norman works that attempted to be more universal in nature, incorporating the foundation myth and lineage of British and English kings into the framework of biblical history and the history of Rome. One of the first to successfully accomplish the writing of such a universal chronicle in Anglo-Norman was Nicholas Trevet in his work known as Les Cronicles.

Early in the fifteenth century John Barton, a native of Chester who had studied in Paris, makes the following claim in his Donait (‘grammar’):

Barton's own French seems to have a relatively high degree of conformity with standard Middle French but of course with a good sprinkling of insular characteristics such as the absence of weak e in spellings, occasional loss of gender distinction and Anglo-French verb forms such as apperera, the future of apparoir. The suggestion of a model elsewhere is, however, an important feature to note and one that surely did not touch all of the French written in England in the later period.

For centuries insular writers of French had been excusing their ability in the language, from a nun of Barking Abbey in the twelfth century who, in the Vie de seint Edouard, deplored her ‘faus franceis d'Angletere’ to John Gower in the late fourteenth century who explains in the envoi to his Traitié pour essampler les amantz mariés that his lack of facunde or ‘fluency’ results from his being English.