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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
The study of Middle English and that of medieval English history need to take account of the trilingual character of the civilization of medieval England, especially the pervading influence of Anglo-French between 1066 and about 1450. Specialists in medieval French have failed to offer their colleagues dealing with English a coherent and comprehensible picture of this Anglo-French element, on account of their traditional concentration on the questionable phonological aspect of its limited early literary legacy to the detriment of the lexis and semantics of the much greater mass of non-literary texts from the later period. The lives and works of Lancaster and Chaucer embody the need to redress this imbalance.
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Traditionally, these two famous historical characters from the middle and later fourteenth century belong to different and separate spheres, Henry of Lancaster to medieval English history and Geoffrey Chaucer to medieval English literature. They are near-contemporaries, Lancaster being about thirty years older than Chaucer, so their periods of activity overlap to a certain degree, but this is as far as the comparisons between them usually go. The medieval historian will know about the chivalrous exploits of Lancaster on the battlefields of France in the Hundred Years War and the medieval English scholar will not be unaware that Chaucer's English has a French content, but both are accustomed to stay within the confines of their respective disciplines, in which French is regarded as no more than a marginal and often troublesome extraneous element, rather than as an integral component of the intellectual fabric of the medieval England in which their speciality is located. Yet, in fact, French played a major role in the lives of both Lancaster and Chaucer, at once linking and separating them. In a sense they are two sides of the same French coin. That this situation has not been explored up to the present time is to be attributed in large measure to a third group of scholars, those dealing with medieval French. Like the historians and the Anglicists, these too remain within the confines of their speciality, where for many decades the Anglo-French of later medieval England has been regarded as so degenerate as to be unworthy of serious study. In fact, however, the volume of writings in this form of French, made up of thousands of pages of official documents of a broadly administrative nature stemming from governmental and municipal bodies, covering the reigns of several kings, together with a mass of legal reports from the royal courts of justice extending over many decades and an abundance of records dealing with trade and commerce, not to mention a wide range of medical and other technical works, vastly outweighs the relatively small number of earlier insular texts, largely of fiction, judged to be more linguistically 'correct'. The lack of consideration shown to all this later material by scholars dealing with medieval French leaves an important linguistic gap between medieval English history and medieval English literature, a gap which conceals the links between Lancaster and Chaucer.
This failure on the part of their colleagues specializing in medieval French to provide historians and Anglicists with any broad understanding of the nature, role, and influence of later Anglo-French has resulted in the conventional assessments of these prominent figures, in which Lancaster is enshrined as the English epitome of the dashing medieval knight and Chaucer as the 'father' of English literature, being less than complete in one important regard. They fail to take account of the French civilization that formed the cultural background of all the principal groups who wielded power and influence in the English society of the fourteenth century. In all the literate sections of the community French played a major role, being used right down to the level of personal communications among native English speakers. (1) This fact helped shape the lives of both Lancaster and Chaucer. Not only was the reputation of Lancaster the warrior made on the soil of France, but, no less importantly, both he and Chaucer were actively engaged as diplomatic representatives of the English king in a number of the negotiations with the French that led to the succession of truces and peace agreements which mark the course of the Hundred Years War. These negotiations took place in spoken French and, as in the Treaty of Bretigny, (2) for example, were recorded in written French. Consequently, neither Lancaster nor Chaucer was a stranger to France, its people, or its language: France and French were part of their make-up and their lives, and so French needs to be taken into consideration in any balanced assessment of their place in English history.
Although the French component in Chaucer's work has not gone unnoticed, it has for long been regarded by the specialists in Middle English as an adjunct rather than an integral part of his daily vocabulary. The term 'borrowings' currently used to describe the high proportion of French terminology in his works is a euphemistic misnomer and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Chaucerian scholars of the linguistic situation in Chaucer's England. In the normal world outside linguistics something 'borrowed' does not become the personal property of the borrower and ought to be returned to its rightful owner, but the 'borrowings' attributed to Chaucer have stayed on this side of the Channel for over six hundred years and have been completely absorbed into the lexis of English, only a few, such as 'record', finding their way back to France with an altered semantic content. (3) If Chaucer's Man of Law in The Canterbury Tales uses French terminology, (4) it is not as an 'adjunct' or 'foreign borrowing', in order to lend 'colour' to the narrative, but because the tools of his trade were, in effect, French, and had been so since the Conquest. (5) About a century before The Canterbury Tales the extensive legal compendia Britton (6) and The Mirror of Justices (7) had brought together the many diverse strands of jurisprudence in French as used in the English courts of law, and even non-specialist writers such as Guernes de Pont-Sainte Maxence and Marie de France display a knowledge of legal terms and practice as early as the twelfth century: (8) English law is very largely French. Nor was the French input into Middle English restricted to the elevated and polite registers of the language. English 'bastard', 'bawd', 'bugger', 'coward', 'glutton', 'harlot', 'lecher', 'traitor', 'vile' are all French immigrants from the lower registers of the language that have survived into modern times, while others such as 'holard' (< Anglo-French holour 'lecher') and 'sote' have subsequently disappeared. (9) This breadth of French elements in Middle English is shown in the works of Chaucer himself. To take just one example: his Pardoner's Tale is full of high-minded French 'borrowings' from the 'noble' registers of Middle English, but it also contains 'baudes' (p. 196, l. 479), (10) 'lecherye' (p. 19, l. 481), 'glotonye' (p. 196, l. 482), etc. The Host's ribald (11) rejoinder to the Pardoner's demand for money is that he would like to cut off the Pardoner's testicles (coillons) and help him carry them enshrined in a pig's turd in place of his 'sacred' relics (ll. 952-55). The OED (s.v. cullion) credits Chaucer with the introduction of the word into Middle English on the evidence of this passage, but under the disguise of a different spelling--quilunt--it had been in Anglo-French from the early thirteenth century as a term of abuse, exactly like the modern French couillon. (12) The figurative sense of a word usually develops from the literal sense, which would suggest that the literal sense in this case had been in the French of England even before the early thirteenth century, (13) so it is most unlikely that coillon(s) would have spent nearly two hundred years waiting in the wings for Chaucer to introduce it into Middle English. This shows that the misleading notion of 'borrowing' ignores the role of Chaucer's readers. If those who read or heard the Man of Law's Tale or the the Pardoner's Tale had been ignorant of the French...
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