The presence of French in England, especially from 1066 onwards, created one of the most intricate linguistic situations in medieval Europe. Certainly, no society is ever truly monolingual, and England was already a meeting place for Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Scandinavian. Moreover England, and most other societies elsewhere in Europe, relied on Latin, a living language for clerics but the mother tongue of no one. With the arrival of the Normans, French asserted itself as the language of the ruling elites in society and the vernacular of a prolific written culture. Over time it became the second language for the greater portion of its users, which meant that in some ways it resembled Latin. I would like to analyse this situation from a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Administrative sources, rather than literary ones, seem most promising for this approach. The French that is of greatest interest for social history is that which was used in royal administration and judicial processes, since it concerns, directly or indirectly, all inhabitants of the realm.

Although the archives contain tens of thousands of documents that confirm the strong vitality of French in medieval England, it remains very difficult to evaluate the proportion of people who were able to read or to speak the language. Several institutional factors contributed directly to the diffusion of both oral and written forms of French within English society. The first of these was the royal court itself.