13 - Fashioning a Useable Linguistic Past: The French of Medieval England and the Invention of a National Vernacular in Early Modern France

Summary

Sometime in the 1530s, Henry VIII's chaplain Thomas Starkey addressed a text to the king in which he argued that:

our common law is written in the French tongue and therein disputed and taught, which, beside that it is again the common weal, is also ignominious, and dishonour to our nation, forasmuch as thereby is testified our subjection to the Normans. This thing appeareth to me not well, for common law would ever be written in the common tongue, that every man that would might understand the better such statutes and ordinances as he is bounden to observe.

Starkey articulates several criticisms of the persistence in sixteenth-century English legal life of Law French – the Anglo-Norman French idiom taught to law students and in which much medieval case law was transcribed. First, he sounds a clarion call for the vernacularization of English law, arguing that the public good depends on legal texts being drafted in an idiom everyone can understand. Second, he couches his translational injunction in terms not only of utility, but of national honor, arguing that English law's reliance on a foreign tongue represents nothing short of an odious stain on the kingdom. Third, he justifies his gallophobic language-planning initiative with a historical narrative that characterizes the Norman Conquest as a ‘subjection’ to a foreign power and the subsequent introduction of French into England as a humiliating mark of submission. Fourth, he traces sharp distinctions between ‘we’ English and ‘our’ English language, on the one hand, and Normans and the ‘French tongue’, on the other.

Starkey's condemnation of the linguistic and legal legacies of the Norman Conquest is interesting in several respects. It demonstrates that the French of England still mattered in his own day, as linguistic reality, object of historical reflection and subject for polemic. By proposing a radical break with this state of affairs, it represents nothing short of an attempt to denaturalize a language that had served as an important medium for English political, cultural and social life for centuries. For Starkey, there was nothing truly English about the French of England, and the sooner the Tudor kingdom's laws and lawyers were rid of it, the better.