The Triumph Of French And The Medieval Neglect Of English
THE TRIUMPH OF FRENCH AND THE MEDIEVAL NEGLECT OF ENGLISH
The English language went through a period of severe neglect in the Middle Ages. The conquest of England by the Normans in 1066 had led to the suppression of English in public life. French—or, more accurately, the form of Anglo-French that arose after the Norman conquest—dominated public discourse, particularly government departments and the courts. The English upper classes spoke Anglo-French as a matter of principle, to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, who spoke Middle English, in much the same way as the Russian nobility in the nineteenth century preferred French to their native Russian.
It must be noted that this development was not restricted to England. Throughout Western Europe, the French culture and language were basking in their ascendancy. The French court was seen as embodying the noble ideals of chivalry in their most refined and advanced forms, and was widely imitated throughout Europe. The University of Paris came to be regarded as the embodiment of the ideals of scholarly excellence and educational achievement, and further increased the prestige of France as a cultured nation. The great thirteenth-century Italian writer Brunetto Latini, who numbered Dante Alighieri among his students, wrote one of his most influential works in French. On being asked to justify this decision, he commented:
If anyone should ask why this book is written in Romance, according to the French language, when I myself am Italian, I should say that this is for two reasons. First, because I happen to be writing in France. And second, because that language is the most delectable and common to all people.
This widespread perception that French had established itself as the lingua franca of the cultural elite of Europe inevitably led to English being dismissed as a crude language, incapable of conveying the subtle undertones necessary for diplomacy, the fine distinctions of philosophy, and the complexities of legal and financial negotiations. English would do very well for the common laborer; French was the language of choice for the elite.
But the form of French that was spoken in thirteenth-century England was the dialect associated with Normandy. While this enjoyed a certain prestige at that time, the political and cultural ascendancy of Normandy was already becoming seriously eroded. Shifting alliances during the thirteenth century meant that political power came to be firmly linked with the city of Paris. The French of the Paris region was now the language of choice. By the fourteenth century the form of French spoken in England had become the subject of ridicule in cultured French society. Aware of this, those English gentry who could afford it arranged for their children to be educated in Paris, to avoid the indignity of being thought crude and unrefined by the arbiters of cultural sophistication.