Anglo-Norman language

The Anglo-Norman language is a term traditionally used to refer to the variety of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles following the Norman conquest in 1066.

When William the Conqueror invaded England, he, his nobles, and many of his followers from Normandy spoke an Oïl language called Norman. Others who came with him would have spoken varieties of the Picard language or western French. This amalgam developed into the unique insular dialect now known as Anglo-Norman, which was commonly used for administrative purposes from the 13th until the 15th century. It is difficult to know very much, of course, about what was actually spoken, and our knowledge is really only of the written language.

Nevertheless it is clear that Anglo-Norman was to a large extent the spoken language of the Norman nobility and was also spoken in the law courts, schools, and universities. Private and commercial correspondence was written in Anglo-Norman from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Other social classes than just the nobility became keen to learn Anglo-Norman; manuscripts containing materials for instructing non-native speakers still exist, dating from the fourteenth century onwards.

Although English survived and eventually eclipsed Anglo-Norman, the latter had been sufficiently widespread as to permanently affect English lexically. This is why English has lost many of its original Germanic words which can still be found in German and Dutch. Grammatically, Anglo-Norman had little lasting impact on English, although it is still evident in official and legal terms where the noun and adjective are reversed: attorney general, heir apparent, court martial, body politic, and so on.

Use and development

Among important writers of the Anglo-Norman cultural commonwealth are the Jersey-born poet, Wace, and Marie de France. The literature of the Anglo-Norman period forms the reference point for subsequent literature in the Norman language, especially in the 19th century Norman literary revival and even into the 20th century in the case of André Dupont's Épopée cotentine. The languages and literatures of the Channel Islands are sometimes referred to as Anglo-Norman, but this usage, derived from the French îles anglo-normandes, is archaic and can be misleading: the Channel Islanders spoke and still speak a variety of Norman, not Anglo-Norman.

Anglo-Norman was never the main administrative language of England, Latin remaining the major language of record in legal and other official documents for most of the medieval period. However, from the later thirteenth century until the early fifteenth century Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French succeeded in establishing a very significant presence in law reports, charters, ordinances and official correspondence.

The language of later Anglo-French documents adopted some of the changes ongoing in continental French and lost much of its specifically Norman character, so that Anglo-French remained (in at least some respects and at least at some social levels) part of the dialect continuum of French. By the late fifteenth century, however, what remained of insular French had become heavily Anglicised: see Law French. It continued to be known as "Norman French" until the end of the nineteenth century, even though philologically there was nothing Norman about it. Over time, the use of Anglo-French expanded into the fields of law, administration, commerce, and science, in all of which a rich documentary legacy survives, indicative of the vitality and importance of the language.

One notable survival of influence on the political system is the use of certain Anglo-French set phrases in the Parliament of the United Kingdom for some endorsements to bills and the granting of Royal Assent to legislation. These set phrases include:

• Soit baille aux Communes ("Let it be sent to the Commons", on a bill sent by the House of Lords to the House of Commons)
• A ceste Bille (avecque une amendement/avecque des amendemens) les Communes sont assentus ("To this Bill (with an amendment/with amendments) the Commons have assented", on a bill passed by the House of Commons and returned to the House of Lords)
• A cette amendement/ces amendemens les Seigneurs sont assentus ("To this amendment/these amendments the Lords have assented", on an amended bill returned by the House of Commons to the House of Lords, where the amendments were accepted)
• Ceste Bille est remise aux Communes avecque une Raison/des Raisons ("This Bill is returned to the Commons with a reason/with reasons", when the House of Lords disagrees with amendments made by the House of Commons)
• Le Roy/La Reyne le veult ("The King/Queen wills it", Royal Assent for a public bill)
• Le Roy/La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence et ainsi le veult ("The King/Queen thanks his/her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so", Royal Assent for a supply bill)
• Soit fait comme il est désiré ("Let it be done as it is desired", Royal Assent for a private bill)
• Le Roy/La Reyne s'avisera ("The King/Queen will consider it", if Royal Assent is withheld)

The exact spelling of the formulæ has varied over the years; for example, s'avisera has been spelled as s'uvisera and s'advisera, and Reyne as Raine.

Trilingualism in Medieval England

Much of the earliest recorded French is in fact Anglo-Norman. In France, almost nothing was being recorded in the vernacular because Latin was the language of the nobility, education, commerce, and the Church and was thus used for the purpose of records. Latin did not disappear in medieval England; it was used by the Church, the royal government and much local administration. Around the same time as a shift took place in France towards using French as a language of record in the mid-13th century, Anglo-Norman also became to some extent a language of record in England, though by now it was nearer to Parisian French than to Norman. English remained the vernacular throughout this period, eventually spoken as a mother tongue by even the highest social classes.

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