English in the Post‐Conquest Period

Abstract

On 14 October 1066, William, duke of Normandy, defeated Harold, the Anglo-Saxon king, at the battle of Hastings, thereby precipitating arguably the most significant political and governmental upheaval of the medieval period. William's reign saw the consolidation of the Anglo-Norman kingdom and the virtual wholesale replacement of the Anglo-Saxon aristocratic and ecclesiastical personnel by Norman successors. This imposition of a new ruling class was to have serious consequences, not only for the English people themselves, but also for the production and survival of their native literature. While the pre-Conquest period witnessed the parallel use of English and Latin for the recording of texts - both literary and documentary, secular and religious - the post-Conquest period introduced a third language into the equation: French or Anglo-Norman. Latin was the language of the church and its courts, of a substantial proportion of the government's documentation, and of scholarship. French was used, increasingly throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the language of law, administration, and secular aristocratic and religious literature. English, displaced to a degree by the dominant modes of expression of French and Latin, was confined to religious and educational materials, to chronicling by some native writers, to a scattering of legal materials, and to some other more individualistic productions until the end of the twelfth century. It should be remembered, however, that in spite of the relegation of English to the minor written language, it was still the spoken language of the vast majority of the population.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.