Anglo-norman and multilingualism in pre-modern England
1066 may be the best-known date in English history, but its significance for English education is less well-known. For hundreds of years English schools followed a decree apparently promulgated by William the Conqueror that required French to be used in schools as the medium of instruction for the main curriculum subject, Latin. That meant the whole educated class, known as clerks, were effectively trilingual by the time they left school. England was almost unique in Europe in fostering multilingualism through the educational system.
This situation only came to an end, we are told, around the time of the Black Death, in which teachers and the clergy were especially heavily affected. In the intervening three centuries, some of the finest and earliest literature of the high Middle Ages, numerous legal texts of outstanding sophistication, a range technical treatises, works of religious devotion, and records of central and municipal government were produced in England using French. This is in addition to the vast amount of writing of similar types composed in Latin by English authors.
In recent years, the English have acquired something of a reputation as the foreign language dunces of Europe, and questions are raised about the teaching of languages in our schools. But it was not ever thus: our trilingual forbears were the product of English schools and English teachers, and achieved language skills that surely put them among the most competent linguists of Europe. Their variety of French, often referred to as Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French, differed from continental varieties, and was never standardised. Yet it was served well to express concepts of great intellectual subtlety, and it long persisted in legal usage for that very reason, only yielding to English as the language of the law in the 18th century.
The richness of England's multilingual past has tended to go unrecognised, largely thanks to traditionally negative evaluations of Anglo-Norman both by British and by French scholars. The latter have often dismissed it out of hand as merely 'bad French'; in this country there has long been a standard textbook narrative of the 'triumph of English', which has imposed on Anglo-Norman the role of the loser, victim of declining proficiency in French and rising confidence in English as the emergent language of the nation. There are signs that the tide of opinion is now turning. Literary scholars have in recent years been in the forefront of a revival of interest in the French-language heritage of England, notably at the universities of York, Leeds, University College London, Bristol and Manchester. Historians at Oxford, York, Nottingham, Southampton, and Fordham in the USA have been putting in place a much more extensive body of information than before of how French was used in legal, political and military life.
To complete the picture, a more linguistically informed analysis of the language has long been overdue. At the University of Wales detailed work on the vocabulary of Anglo-Norman has been made possible by the work of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary project. The multi-genre range of texts available is now attracting interest for other areas of language description such as grammar and discourse. A framework issue is the question of how knowledge of the French language was transmitted in England to at least a dozen generations of non-mother tongue speakers. Contacts with French-speaking continental regions and the practice of using French in English schools must both have played a role. A closer examination of the language of the textual material should yield results as to the effects these factors may have had.Two recent research events hosted at Birmingham City University have brought together internationally acclaimed researchers from this country and abroad, seeking to build a platform for future research on the status of Anglo-Norman, interactions between the languages of later medieval England, and multilingual language practices in the context of social and political history. Following earlier conferences at the University of Wales in 1997 and 2004, these have established Anglo-Norman and multilingualism in pre-modern England as leading themes of research into our linguistic history.