This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.

Separated from the rest of Europe by the English Channel, yet also linked to it through political and linguistic ties after the Norman Conquest, the musical culture of medieval England displays both connections to and differences from that of its neighbours. Latin song was composed in England and imported from elsewhere, and songs in the vernacular languages of Middle English and Anglo-Norman French also flourished. Songs in all three languages were often compiled together in manuscripts, and some existed in alternative forms, with texts switched to another language. This chapter examines the musical precursors of one of the most famous of all medieval songs, Sumer is icumen in, and shows that the production of polyphony and song in England (as well as Scotland and Wales) was vibrant and distinctive. Surviving pieces from the repertory of Worcester polyphony hint at English composers’ interest in the musical techniques of voice exchange and hocket, but the fragmentary state of many English sources suggests that the losses have been immense. We conclude the chapter with the genre of the English carol, cultivated briefly but fruitfully in the early fifteenth century.

Multilingualism played an important role in the development of Standard English, but previous generations of scholars downplayed the multilingual element in its history to the extent of ignoring late medieval institutional code-switching altogether. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, code-switched record-keeping was routine practice, from prestigious institutions to private individuals, although no history of English mentions it and very little of it is published. In this chapter, I firstly establish my claim that multilingualism led to Standard English by showing that Standard English is the descendant of coalesced supralocal Englishes that adopted both the written conventions of Anglo-Norman and much of its content-word stock when code-switching practices were reversed. What this means is that instead of a Medieval Latin grammatical matrix containing Anglo-Norman and English words, fifteenth century scribes switched to an English grammatical matrix containing code-switched Anglo-Norman and English words. Standard English was the eventual outcome of this reversal. I then track the “monolingual origin” story, still repeated in textbooks today – namely, the story that Standard English supposedly developed mainly from the dialect of the “East Midlands”, or “Central Midlands”, or “Chancery English”, or a mixture of the above, depending on the textbook. I show that the “monolingual origin” story goes back to the early 1870s and consider the reasons for why the monolingual-source explanation prevailed for so long.

This chapter uses a gendered lens to examine how individuals' identity changed over the course of their life-cycle in two of Wace's poems: the Roman de Brut – his retelling of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Brittonum – and the Roman de Rou - his verse history of the Normans. Following Patricia Skinner's challenge to consider the potential for rupture and repetition in the life-cycle, the chapter examines the following themes evident in both poems: the uncertainty surrounding succession, the conduct of rulers, the effects of old age, the order of marriage and children and the importance of otherwise anonymous groups (peasants, old women) at moments of crisis.

Across diverse medieval historical writings, the Anglo-Saxon period was envisioned as a coherent historical era and as a paradigm of England’s political and ethical potential. Starting with Bede and continuing through the twelfth-century Latin chroniclers, those writers invested in a providential historiography presented the Anglo-Saxons as a perfected people whose achievements the present should try to regain. Although Geoffrey of Monmouth’s vision of dastardly Saxons in the History of the Britons disrupted this narrative, it did not displace it; even late medieval writers sympathetic to Geoffrey’s Britons might depict the Anglo-Saxons as morally desirable. The mythos of the holy, just Anglo-Saxons was widespread in vernacular writings as well, from chronicle to romance to hagiography. This largely imaginary picture of an ethical “Anglo-Saxon future” was inherited by the sixteenth-century religious polemicists and continues to be felt in contemporary politics.