4 - Complaining about the King in French in Thomas Wright's Political Songs of England

Summary

We are increasingly inclined to see oral and written use of French in medieval England as a capability open to many, rather than something reserved to a privileged few. In considering the political poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we have moved well beyond Thomas Wright's suggestion that complaint in French was a brief post-Conquest deviation shared among courtiers, separate from the larger tradition of popular complaint by ‘the people with their good old English’. Rather than a succession of disparate political and legal languages, each the province of a particular social class, from English to Latin to French then back to ‘good old English’, we now see languages and their speakers as overlapping and intermingling. Some words inhabit all three languages; some are newly imported from one language to another to supplement a technical vocabulary; many have vernacular meanings in everyday life but also specialized senses within a particular realm of competency, whether law or commerce or shipbuilding. In some settings language choice may well have been constrained by convention or by the competencies of speaker or audience, but for the highly literate trilingual clerics who wrote and revised and recopied the poems we will examine here, complaining in French was a choice. French allowed them the greatest latitude to address political and legal ideas that had until then mainly been discussed in Latin, yet that were figured by a key term and concept at home in all three languages: consent.

To be sure, consent was (and is) an everyday word as well as a juridical term, and ordinary and legal discourses could find themselves in contact over precisely this term, as for example in the treatment of marriage cases in the ecclesiastical courts. The same is true of any number of other words, as William Rothwell has observed: medieval poetry in French is replete with a legalizing vocabulary whose resonances can be missed by the modern reader because it emerges as a specialized use of ordinary language. Some words pass fluidly between languages, not always separately anchored by language-specific spelling or morphology, especially in overtly mixed-language contexts: the Assize of Clarendon, for example, a legal document recorded in Latin, consists largely of French loan-words, as William Rothwell has pointed out.