A History of English Language

The reestablishment of english, 1200-1500 127
Selden was for ani chance
Praised Inglis tong in France;
Give we ilkan 40 þare langage,
Me think we do þam non outrage.
To laud 41 and Inglis man I spell
Pat understandes þat I tell…
(Cursor Mundi, Prologue, II. 232–50)
The Provisions of Oxford, mentioned above, were in Latin, French, and English. Latin
was naturally the language of record. It is certain that the document was sent in English
to the sheriffs of every county to be publicized. Whether it was also sent in French is not
known but seems likely. At all events, fourteen years before (1244), the Annals of Burton
record a letter from the dean of Lincoln asking the bishop of Lichfield to proclaim a
directive from the pope excommunicating those who broke the provisions of Magna
Carta, the pronouncement to be in lingua Anglicana et Gallicana. 42 In 1295 a document
was read before the county court at Chelmsford, Essex, and explained in gallico et
anglico, 43 but this may represent no more than the survival of a custom of making
important announcements in both languages. We may sum up the situation by saying that
in the latter part of the thirteenth century English was widely known among all classes of
people, though not necessarily by everyone.
100. Attempts to Arrest the Decline of French.
At the close of the thirteenth century and especially in the course of the next we see clear
indications that the French language was losing its hold on England in the measures
adopted to keep it in use. The tendency to speak English was becoming constantly
stronger even in those two most conservative institutions, the church and the universities.
Already in the last decades of the thirteenth century the great Benedictine monasteries of
Canterbury and Westminster adopted regulations forbidding the novices to use English in
school or cloister and requiring all conversation to be in French. 44 Similar regulations
were found necessary at the universities. A fourteenth-century statute of Oxford required
the students to construe and translate in both English and French “lest the French
language be entirely disused.” 45 Supplementary ordinances drawn up for Exeter College
40
each one
41
ignorant, lay
42
Annales Monastici, I, 322 (Rolls Series).
43
W.A.Morris, The Early English County Court (Berkeley, 1926), p. 173.
44
Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter,
Westminster, ed. E.H.Thompson, Henry Bradshaw Soc., XXIII, 210; XXVIII, 164.
45
Munimenta Academica, II, 438 (Rolls Series).