It is pointed out several times in this book that
'Frenches of England' might be a more accurate phrase than 'French of
England'; the sheer multiplicity of ways in which French was spoken,
written, and intermingled with the other languages of medieval England
means that there is no simple, single definition of the language. This
wide-ranging, stimulating and thought-provoking collection of essays,
edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne as part of the ongoing 'French of England'
research programme based at Fordham and York Universities in which she
plays a major part, goes a considerable way in teasing out the individual
strands, the 'micro-histories', of the ways in which French was woven into
the linguistic fabric of England over the 400-year period covered.
The essays in this book – some 34 contributions on topics ranging from
the readership of Gower to the consumption of fish by nuns at Campsey Ash
Priory – originated as papers given at three international 'French of
England' conferences. They cover an enormous amount of both temporal and
thematic ground. Rather than tracing a linear, rigidly bordered path
through the subject matter, The French of England
adopts a deliberately eclectic approach, loosely arranging its material
into four main sections: I: Language and Sociolinguistics; II: Crossing
the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories; III: After Lateran
IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories; and IV: England and French in the
late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.
Section I, Language and Sociolinguistics, begins with an essay by Serge
Lusignan giving an overview of social contact between French and English
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which makes invaluable
comparisons between the situation in England and its counterpart in
Flanders, a topic which is too rarely treated by English-language critics.
Richard Ingham's article in this section, 'The Persistence of Anglo-Norman
1230-1362: A Linguistic Perspective', rejects the traditional idea that
Anglo-Norman was 'a fossilized version of the French brought over with the
Conquest', analysing syntactic changes in the two varieties of French to
argue that both were living languages evolving in parallel. Meanwhile,
Marilyn Oliva's fascinating study of the French kitcheners' accounts of
Campsey Ash Priory, a Suffolk convent, suggests that the relatively modest
diet of the nuns at this house reflects their non-aristocratic status, and
presents these accounts as evidence of the use of French by a non-elite
group.
Section II, Crossing the Conquest, addresses the popularly received
idea that the events of 1066 caused a cataclysmic linguistic breach, and
explores overlaps and continuities in the languages, literatures and
cultures of England over the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In '“Stuffed
Latin”: Vernacular Evidence in Latin Documents', David Trotter examines
instances of French vocabulary in pre- and immediately post-Conquest Latin
legal documents to show that their authors were in contact with Normandy
well before 1066. Elizabeth M. Tyler's essay, 'From Old English to Old
French', challenges the myth of the 'narrative of loss' which has
traditionally been told about Anglo-Saxon literature following the death
of Wulfstan in 1023. She discusses the openness of Anglo-Saxon England
towards new learning from the end of the tenth century onwards and the
continuity of English historical and poetic writing after 1066, paying
particular attention to the role played by highly educated noblewomen such
as Edith, widow of Edward the Confessor, and Edith/Matilda, wife of Henry
I, as patronesses of literature during this transitional time.
Section III, After Lateran IV, looks at a number of devotional texts
produced in the wake of the Lateran Council of 1215. Jocelyn
Wogan-Browne's own contribution, '“Cest livre liseez...chescun jour”:
Women and Reading c.1230-1430', points out that the French pastoral texts
produced for the laity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fulfil the
same roles as the more frequently studied English-language religious
manuals for the 'lewed' circulating in the late fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and that the latter cannot be fully understood without the
former. Taking a striking image of a noblewoman from the Lambeth
Apocalypse as a starting point, she explores the 'feminised francophone
literary culture' which characterised not just women's devotional reading
but lay reading in general. Moving from literature for to literature by
women, Delbert W. Russell follows the travels of the nun of Barking's Life
of Edward the Confessor to Amiens, where a French prose remaniment
was written for the de Chatillon family, counts of St Pol. This example of
a francophone text crossing the Channel from England to France serves as a
useful illustration of the mobile nature of French and French texts, and
the possibility of their moving in both directions.
Section IV, English and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries, considers the ways in which French remained a working language
in England during this period. As Tim William Machan remarks, 'English did
not so much triumph over Latin or French as cease to compete against
them'. Machan's essay discusses at the evolving status and role of French
in England from the end of the Middle Ages to the early modern period,
looking at the teaching of French from Walter de Bibbesworth's
thirteenth-century Traitie to Princess Katherine's English lesson
in Shakespeare's Henry V. The collection's final essay, by
Stephanie Downes, examines the reception of Christine de Pizan's
Epistre d'Othea in England, and concludes that continuing
demand for French-language versions of Christine's works 'bears witness to
the multilingual and multicultural practice of fifteenth-century
manuscript production’.
The French of England is a book of filling in
blank spaces, of making links between areas of study which are often
artificially separated. For many years, 'Anglo-Norman' studies tended to
fall between the larger linguistic stools of 'English' and 'French'
studies; although the work of the last thirty years has done much to
counteract this, there is still much work that remains to be done on the
Frenches of England. Wogan-Browne's anthology is an invaluable and often
highly readable addition to the field, and anyone with an interest in the
languages of medieval England will find much to enjoy within its pages.
Elizabeth Dearnley
