This article investigates two grammatical variables - noun gender distinctions and object pronoun distinctions - in the 14th century Anglo-Norman petitions to Parliament (Given-Wilson et al. 2005). In these respects, the standard of French in the data showed no evidence of divergence from Continental French norms until the last quarter of the C14. Up to that point, AN petitions respected in a virtually error-free fashion, where grammatical markers were not vulnerable to phonological attrition. This finding casts doubt on the view that, long before that point, insular French was essentially different from CF in that it was an instructed second language. The grammatical accuracy of the petition writers on the variables studied here was such that French seems more likely to have been acquired naturally in a milieu where it had the status of a spoken vernacular, i.e. ‘absorbed’ rather than taught. In the respects investigated in this study, their competence in French was thus that of an early childhood bilingual. The numerous non-continental features observable in their French are seen as dialect features rather than errors. A further conclusion indicated by phonological conditioning of noun gender observance is that French was transmitted in the earlier C14 at least as a spoken language. The onset of numerous errors with the selected variables in petitions data from the last quarter of the 14^th century, however, suggests that a significant change took place in the circumstances in which French was transmitted in England around that time.