‘Romance’ is a capacious term, and as those who have tried to define it have discovered, it has an unnerving tendency to metamorphose from text to text or period to period. It is much easier to recognize a text as a romance than reduce the term to a single meaning. So far as the Middle Ages are concerned, however, when the word first appeared, both definition and recognition are made easier by its derivation: it first emerges in French as romanz, with the sense of a work in the vernacular as distinct from Latin. That is far more than just a difference of language. Latin was the language of learning and the Church; French was the language of the secular world. In England, for two or three centuries after the Norman invasion, French was specifically the language of the gentry, the aristocracy and the royal court. Initially it was spoken by all the new landholders who took over what had previously been owned by the (Anglo-Saxon) English; then gradually, over the years, it was displaced among the gentry and minor barons by English as their mother tongue, French becoming more isolated at the top of the social scale until by the mid-fourteenth century probably only the royal court, reinforced by a series of French queens and by the exigencies of the Hundred Years’ War, spoke French (or an Anglicized version of it, Anglo-Norman) as a matter of course and as the language in which they felt most immediately at home.

A romanz was therefore not just a work written in a language that people could understand without having a clerical education: it suggested a work deeply involved in the concerns of those of sufficiently high status to have access to books, and, in England, to hold land. From the moment of the word's inception, its derivation suggested a kind of literature with its central interests different from those of the Church: not necessarily at odds with it (many romances, not least in England, incorporate a marked strain of piety on the part of their heroes and heroines), but with its central ethos in ideologies that fell outside the core concerns of Christian doctrine as it had come down from the early Church.