The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c. 1420–1450

Gwilym Dodd

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Medieval Literature and History Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

Abstract

It is now some thirty years since the researches of John H. Fisher and Malcolm Richardson highlighted the importance of the records of the central government in the process of English-language “vernacularization” in early-fifteenth-century England. Their publication of the Anthology of Chancery English provided irrefutable evidence of a linguistic transition that overtook some key types of government records, which began to be drafted in English where previously they had been written in Anglo-Norman French and, to a lesser extent, Latin. But while the existence of these early examples of “official” written English cannot be doubted, the forces that underlay this linguistic shift are less clear. From the very outset, doubts were expressed about the hypothesis advanced by Fisher and Richardson, that the spread of English in the records of the central government could be directly attributed to a “language policy” put into place by the Lancastrian regime and, in particular, to the personal initiative of Henry V, who made the momentous decision—from a linguistic point of view—to have his signet letters written in English rather than French in July 1417. But it is only more recently that a more detailed and robust criticism has been directed toward these ideas. In an article published in 2004, Michael Benskin rightly pointed out that the very term “Chancery English,” or “Chancery Standard,” as applied in the work of Fisher and Richardson is a misnomer, since only a minority of the documents contained within the Anthology were actually produced within the Chancery itself. He also questioned the extent to which the Chancery could be credited with an enlightened attitude toward written English, given that some of its most prestigious records—the close, patent, and statute rolls—continued to be written in Latin or French throughout the fifteenth century.

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References

2004Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 1995Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409 1946The Use of French in England in the Later Middle Ages 2009The Familiar Enemy 1977Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Century 1992A Language Policy for Lancastrian England 1986Curial Prose in England 1980Henry V, the English Chancery, and Chancery English

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