The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg Page A

carry on their lessons and their affairs in French, and have done so since the Normans first came to England. Also the children of gentlemen are taught to speak French from the time that they are rocked in their cradle and learn to speak and play with a child’s trinket, and rustic men will make themselves like gentlemen and seek with great industry to speak French to be more highly thought of.
    Higden’s view is tougher than the more easy-going view of intermarriage, that it bred English-speaking children who would carry native language with them inside the fortresses of the foreigner. No doubt there is truth in both accounts, but I like Higden’s stern note, its reminder of what occupation meant and how it affected not only the progeny but the generality, not only the children in the cradle but the rustics learning French, seeking to join the ruling club.
    However, Trevisa’s own footnote to this part of his translation, written about fifty years after the original, says: “is manere was moche y-vsed tofore þe furst moreyn . . .”
    This practice was much used before the first plague and has since been somewhat changed. For John Cornwall, a teacher of grammar, changed the teaching in grammar school and the construing of French into English; and Richard Penkridge learned that method of teaching from him, and other men from Penkridge, so that now, AD 1385, the ninth year of the reign of the second King Richard after the Conquest, in all the grammar schools of England, children abandon French and compose and learn in English . . .
    This was a sea change.
    As education and literacy spread, so did the demand for books in English. The language was recommencing its long march.
    In 1362, for the first time in almost three centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded, defended, debated and judged in English. In that same year, Parliament was opened in the hammer-beamed Great Hall in the Palace of Westminster. For the first time ever, the Chancellor addressed the assembly not in French but in English. Surprisingly, there is no record of the words spoken: what follows is a reasonable guess, based on forms of words used in other contemporary documents. “For the worship and honour of God, King Edward has summoned his Prelates, Dukes, Earls, Barons and other Lords of his realm to his Parliament, held the year of the King . . .”
    But that was not the crown. It took thirty-seven more years for Norman-French royalty to bend the kingly knee to the English language. Stoked no doubt by an interminable war with France which had already lasted on and off for sixty-one years, those who sat on the throne of England felt forced to use their people’s tongue.
    The country had not had a monarch take the crown in English since Harold Godwineson in 1066. It is debatable whether it had a first-language English-speaking king since then. But English was about to capture the crown.
    In 1399, King Richard II was deposed by Henry, Duke of Lancaster. The document deposing him and his speech of abdication are in English. Parliament was summoned to the Great Hall at Westminster. The dukes and lords, spiritual and temporal, were assembled. The royal throne, draped in cloth of gold, stood empty. Then Henry stepped forward, crowned himself, and claimed the crown. In a great symbolic moment he made his speech not in the Latin language of state business, not in the French language of the royal household, but in what the official history, tellingly, calls “His Mother Tongue.” English.
    In the name of Fadir, Son, and Holy Gost, I, Henry of Lancaster chalenge this rewme of Yngland and the corone with all the members and the