wished the nuns of Polsloe Priory fully to understand his meaning, he drew up his injunctions not in English but in Anglo-Norman.[1] When native production began to run thin, continental writers lent their good offices. The exploits of the Black Prince were told by a Walloon for the benefit of an English audience,[2] and for generations the chronicles of Froissart continued to find appreciative readers in this country. Although pleading in English was allowed after 1362, French remained the official language of the law down to the reign of Henry VIII, and lingered on until the eighteenth century.[3] Even to-day the Royal assent to a Bill is still expressed in French. But notwithstanding these late survivals, Anglo-Norman was a dead language by the middle of the fourteenth century.
Between the Norman tongue of the eleventh century and the French spoken in England at the close of the fourteenth, the difference is obviously enormous, but there is considerable evidence that, in spite of rapid changes, the language was at all periods substantially the same in every part of the country. No doubt, writers of continental birth, like Marie de France, Denis Piramus, or Frère Angier, retained some of the idiosyncrasies of their native dialect. Hesitation prevailed in the pronunciation of certain sounds for which English had no exact equivalent, e.g. French u. Investigations in this field are very complicated on account of the notorious inconsistency of Anglo-Norman scribes. The
- ↑ The Register of Walter de Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, ed. F. C. Hingeston-Randolph, 1892 (A.D. 1319), p. 316.
- ↑ Life of the Black Prince, ed. M. K. Pope, and E. C. Lodge, Oxford, 1910. Tanquerey, however, questions Miss Pope's conclusion that the author was a Walloon and claims the work for the A.-N. literature. Cf. Évolution du verbe, pp. 818-19, 840.
- ↑ The Reports of Cases by E. Lutwyche († 1709) are drawn up half in French, half in Latin. Cf. Vising, Franska Språket i England, iii, p. 34.
