Student Resources

Chapter 8

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8.1 A macaronic poem

Here are the first two verses of a fifteenth-century love poem that uses French, English and Latin. Identify the words and phrases from each language:

To the one I love most

A celuy que pluys eyme en mounde,
Of alle tho that I have founde
Carissima,
Saluz od treyé amour,
With grace and joye and alle honour,
Dulcissima.

Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
That I am ryght in good heele,
Laus Christo!
Et moun amour doné vous ay,
And also thin owne nyght and day
Incisto.

‘To the one that I love most in the world, of all those that I have found, dearest one, may love grant you greetings, with grace and joy and all honour, sweetest lady.

Be assured, pleasing and beautiful one, that I am really in good health, praise be to Christ, and have given you all my love, and also thy own night and day, I persevere.’

8.2 Boterfiles and gnattes

Walter of Bibbesworth was a gentleman who lived in Hertfordshire and Essex. Between 1240 and 1250 he produced a book entitled the Tretiz de langage. It was written for one Madame Dyonise de Mountechensi, the wife of a wealthy landowner. She had three children for whom a knowledge of French was going to be very important. One of them, William, became a politician, and another – Joan – was to marry into royalty. Dyonisie’s own French was not good enough to teach them, and she wanted a ‘textbook’ to help.

Walter’s book was written in Anglo-Norman, but there were English glosses for difficult words. For example, palet, is glossed as ‘roof of the mouth’, papiliouns are ‘boterfleus’, and oyseuz are ‘smale brides (birds)’. Also as an aid to tuition, similar-sounding words in French were distinguished, as for example, la levere (‘lip’), le leverer (‘hare’), la livere (‘pound’), and le livere (‘book’). Short sentences are given to provide contexts to distinguish these words. The idea was that Dyonisie, or perhaps a teacher, would read the book aloud to the children, and this would help them to learn French. The book was written in verse, perhaps because it was thought this would aid the memory.

The Tretiz was really for vocabulary learning, and dealt with various practical topics to do with husbondrie e manaungerie (‘husbandry and management’). The names of the parts of the body were taught (palet came in here), clothes, food, daily household arrangements, the names of trees, flowers, animals, topics to do with farming.

The Tretiz was an early example of a book intended to be read for children. It was also one of the early manuals for teaching French as a foreign language. Though such a book could be used as evidence of the desire to spread French, some have claimed that what it evidences is a decline in the use of French, so much so that it had to be treated as a foreign tongue.

A copy of Walter’s book can be found here. A number of similar manuals appeared after 1250.

8.3 A collection of passages

Here are some passages (mostly given in modern English) exemplifying points made in this chapter. Decide what points are being illustrated. If you find you need some prompting to be able to do this, after the passages is a list of these points, and you can simply match the passages with the items on the list. The ‘answers’ are given below the activity.

  1. In 1330, Ranulf Higden, a monk from Chester, wrote a chronicle called the Polychronicon, stretching from the Creation to the fourteenth century. He wrote (in Latin):

    This corruption of the mother tongue is because of two things. One is because children in school . . . are compelled. . . to construe their lessons and their tasks in French, and have since the Normans first came to England.

    The book was translated by John of Trevisa in 1385. He added a note of his own about the ‘custom’ of using French that Higden mentions. The ‘first plague’ mentioned below was the Black Death of 1349:

    This custom was much in use before the first plague and since then has somewhat changed … So that now, in … 1385 … in all the grammar schools of England children are abandoning French, and are … learning in English.

  2. Robert Grosseteste was a bishop and statesman (he has a university named after him in the English city of Lincoln). In 1252 he railed against the importation of foreign blood into the English church (Boniface of Savoy was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time). He was complaining about:

    the uses of aliens, while the native English suffer. These aliens are not merely foreigners; they are the worst enemies of England. They strive to tear the fleece and do not even know the faces of the sheep; they do not understand the English tongue …

  3. Narratives called ‘romances’ were very popular in medieval times. The following lines occur in the opening section of one called The Romance of Richard the Lion-hearted, dated about 1300:

    Lewede men cume Ffrensch non,
    Among an hondryd vnneþis on

    Common men know no French
    Among a hundred scarcely one.

  4. Another passage from Higden’s Polychronicon:

    it is amazing that the proper language of Englishmen should be made so diverse in pronunciation, in one little island, since the language of the Normans is just one, pronounced the same way amongst them all.

  5. This quotation is from a document dated about 1422. The ‘common idiom’ mentioned is English:

    [because] our most excellent lord king Henry the Fifth hath, in his letters … procured the common idiom (setting aside others) to be commended by the exercise of writing; and there are many of our craft of brewers who have the knowledge of writing and reading in the said English idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French, before these times used, they do not in any wise understand, for which causes … [we] have begun to make … matters to be noted down in our mother tongue …

  6. In about 1265, Brunetto Latini, Dante’s guardian after the death of his father, wrote the first encyclopaedia in a modern European language. It was called Li Livres dou Trésor. Though Italian, he wrote in French. One reason for this choice of language:

    because that speech is the most delectable and the most common to all people.

  7. Here is Edward I reporting to Parliament in 1295:

    It has now gone forth to every region of the earth how the king of France has cheated us out of Gascony. But now, not satisfied with this wickedness, he has beset our realm with a mighty fleet and army, and proposes … to wipe out the English tongue altogether from the face of the earth.

  8. This is part of a document mention in 8.2. Which document?

    Concerning the parliaments … there are to be three … a year … To these three parliaments the chosen councillors of the king shall come … So too it should be remembered that the community is to elect twelve good men, who shall come to the three parliaments and at other times, when there is need and when the king and his council summon them to consider the affairs of the king and the kingdom.

Here is a list of the points the passages make, in random order:

  1. illustrating the diversity of English, with its many dialects;
  2. anti-foreigner feeling in England;
  3. an accusation that the French were trying to eliminate English;
  4. words from the 1258 Provisions of Oxford;
  5. illustrating that English, not French, was used by the lower classes;
  6. a declaration henceforth to use English to communicate in writing;
  7. revealing the esteem in which French was held;
  8. showing the change from French to English as the language of instruction in schools.

Passage 1 is taken from Barber et al. (2009:152). Passages 2, 3, 5 and 6 are from Baugh and Cable (2013), pages 152, 128, 120, 148 and 129 respectively. 4 is from Wright (2006: 43); 7 is from Tout (1922: 94), and 8 is from the website.