This section offers a series of linguistic and socio-linguistic forays revitalizing the existing accounts of how French was used in England and showing how its history is longer, its class range wider, and its uses more specific, more part of particular linguistic politics, than is allowed for by the reflex conservatism often assumed to explain continuing composition in Anglo-Norman.

The section opens with further reflections by Serge Lusignan on his important work on royal and administrative French in England, whose linguistic situation, he concludes, may be typical rather than unusual in medieval Europe. Mark Ormrod shows the continuing value of studying documentary records and the importance of such work for linguistic and cultural history: linguistic changes in petitions to the crown, he argues, are a function not of global shifts towards English in royal administration and the legal system, but of specific usages as between oral and written forms, with exceptional uses of English being explicitly defended and explained by clerks and others as against the more usual French. Richard Ingham's study confirms from a linguistic point of view the living status of such clerical Anglo-Norman, still evolving as part of a French dialect continuum late in the fourteenth century. His essay signals an important shift in the study of later Anglo-Norman, now to be taken seriously as a language and not as a decayed remnant of one. Pierre Kunstmann offers an equally important model for earlier Anglo-Norman: the linguistic development of French in England early shows changes that happen later in continental French.