SILENCES AND SOURCES

A letter of 1353 from Marie de St Pol (d. 1377), Countess of Pembroke, to Edward III asks the king, if she still has his bon congié [permission] to proceed, to instruct the wardens of the Dover crossing (‘vos ditz gardiens del passage de Douere’) to let her and her entourage and baggage train through without hindrance, delay or searching. Even in 1353, in an intense phase of the Hundred Years’ War, the Countess of Pembroke is continuing to make one of her many journeys between England and France, some concerned with the management of her lands on both sides of the Channel, some with soft-power court diplomacy. To expedite her journey through its attendant bureaucracy she writes, or uses her clerical staff to write, directly to the king in French, their shared language and a standard petitionary register. Marie de St Pol's letter exemplifies the powerful voices of elite and meritocratic medieval women (voices that can be amplified in a number of medieval documents and text types), while also reminding us that travel between England and France, under all circumstances, including in war, was a routine feature of women's lives. And of course, as Susan Groag Bell long ago pointed out, their books and reading cultures go with them. This means that their Frenches – Anglo Noman, Anglo-French, central, Norman, Flemish, Picard and other varieties – go back and forth too, passing much more readily between European and Mediterranean regions than any form of English (which remained a local language and no kind of lingua franca, spoken or written, outside the British Isles, until well into the early modern period).

All this has long been known and, as underlined by Ardis Butterfield, applies to the fifteenth-century English conquest of France and its protracted aftermath in which Anglo-French engagement was, if anything, intensi-fied. So too, francophone devotional and doctrinal writings, two text-types particularly associated with women, continued to be produced and/or copied in England into the fifteenth century. A rough count from Ruth Dean's survey of several thousand manuscripts for the nearly 1,000 works composed or copied in England's Frenches shows that insular French is a strong fourteenth-and fifteenth-century presence: out of Dean's 544 religious texts, for instance, approximately 294 are of fourteenth-century or later composition.