The James Ford Lectures 2025 - French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500

Lecture Two: Langue des reines: The Importance of Women to French and French to Women​​​​​ (30 January 2025)

The francophone education and patronage of British and European queens was significant throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and French was an important language both for them and for women from a wider range of class groups. This lecture looks at women’s  French-language writing and cultural patronage in the British medieval centuries and at some of the domains of discourse and activity where French increased medieval women’s access.   The literacies of women open new questions around personal and societal language acquisition and use.  

Lecture Three: Expansions: ‘Everyone knows that French is better understood and more widely used than Latin’: Matthew Paris (in French, 1253-59) (6 February 2025)

Recent scholarly work on the linguistic history of French in England, on French’s changing socio-cultural domains and increased participation in the administration of Britain, and on its widened ‘global’ reach in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries have combined to overturn older histories of Britain’s medieval French as rapidly ossifying into an artificial and moribund language. Under the Angevins and Plantagenets, French remained a language of conquest and trade within Britain and beyond it, offering meritocratic opportunities to a wider spectrum of social groups, many not initially elite. The Frenches to which francophone people from Britain now had access include the French of Outremer (the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, where French was a lingua franca for Europeans and Arabic speakers) and the Italo-French in which Marco Polo recorded his Eurasian experiences.  One result of such expanded contact and awareness was a greatly increased French-language corpus of Latin-mediated natural science and encyclopaedic knowledge.   

Lecture Four: ‘That each may in his own tongue … know his God’ (Grosseteste, in French, 1230s): Bible Translation in Medieval England (13 February 2025)

The history of the Bible in medieval England becomes a different story once the plethora of French-language scriptural translations enters the picture.  Early twelfth-century psalters and their commentary, vigorous reworkings and commentary for individual books of the bible, and whole bibles and theological encyclopaedias in French in the later Middle Ages are an important part of the history of doctrine and devotion and lay-ecclesiastical relations.  Their existence complicates historical narratives about English-language translation in England, especially in relation to the so-called ‘Wyclifite’ Bible, that have been in place since the sixteenth century.    

Lecture Five: “Lette Frenchmen in their Frenche endyten”(Thomas Usk, c.1384-87): French in the Multilingual Fourteenth Century (20 February 2025)

This lecture has to perform a double act, resisting the nationalizing teleology attached to the late fourteenth century that makes French always already about to die, while acknowledging the vigorous growth of English as a written language of culture (though not an official language of the crown) in the later part of the century.  Accordingly, it anchors the continuing but shifting multilingualism of the fourteenth century by looking forward from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries before turning to some domains of literature, record, and administration to address changes and continuities in the latter half of the century. As some eloquent modern scholarship has shown, the fluctuations of war and truce between English and French contemporaries entangled them more intensely in their shared French vernacular.  English’s expanding domains and the great English-language late medieval literary experimentation and consolidation are neither the outcome of conflict nor evidence of serial monolingualism.

Lecture Six: “Et lors que parlerez anglois /Que vous n’oubliez pas le François” (manuscript dedication, c. 1445) : Off-shoring French? (27 February 2025)

While the idea that Henry V made English a state language cannot survive close inspection, English became an established language of culture and (to some extent) a language of record in Britain in the fifteenth century. But francophone continuities persisted in culturally specific ways in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland alongside shifts in the relations between French and English. Some of these are seen in the pioneering teaching of French in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when manuals for French (first seen in thirteenth-century England) began to conceptualize French less as a language of England and more as an adjunct of external relations.  French texts continued to circulate, and were printed in greater numbers than English-language works.  English was a regional language throughout the Middle Ages and French and Latin remained important vectors of communication for Britain’s external relations well into the early modern period. The medieval history of Britain’s French helps challenge any sense of English as ‘naturally’ attaining its current prevalence.