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By the later 13th century, Anglo-Norman has no more monolingual native speakers. It was not taught as
a school subject, as ought to be clear from its remarkably inconsistent spelling. Yet aside from areas of phonological interference,
its grammatical complexities were mastered, though they followed insular rather than continental norms. Word order errors
that would be typical of L2 learners were generally avoided, especially those that would be produced by transfer of syntactic
properties from L1 English. It seems that those responsible for the many AN writings that have come down to us from the late
C13 and C14 learned it as a second language in early childhood. They acquired it as a language with which adults communicated
with them in a here-and-now context that facilitates child language acquisition. But this context was not that of the home,
but of the first school.
In what contexts could AN have been transmitted to the non-aristocratic
classes, if it was not an instructed second language? Before embarking on the study of grammar, school pupils learned to read
at school either in a preparatory class that was on the same premises as the grammar school, or in a separate locale. The
latter are often referred to as ‘song schools’, whose first duty was to provide children with the ability to read
prayers and hymns. Leach (1915) compared them to elementary schools, whereas grammar schools formed the equivalent of secondary
education. The modern comparison is not exact, since pupils usually seem to have started the medieval grammar school at about
age 7. However, there is no doubt that the grammar school curriculum was not the first educational experience of an English
child. My hypothesis is that in order to cope with French as a vehicle language for the teaching of Latin at grammar school,
children were initiated into the everyday use of French at their first school, the ‘song school’, a term which
derives from medieval usage (scolae cantus). These schools took charge of teaching literacy, and thus provided the foundation
on which the teaching of grammar schools and thus the training of medieval England’s literate class, not just of choristers,
was built. AN texts were produced by people who would initially have attended such schools, which were run by the clergy.
Leach (1915: 7) describes the role of the song school thus:
‘To a
large extent the song schools performed the function of elementary schools, while the grammar schools were the secondary schools.’
In addition to singing, song schools taught the alphabet and a basic understanding of the Latin used in
church services ‘for those engaged in actual performance of services’. They were normally distinct from grammar
schools though according to Leach in small localities the same building might combine the two. From regulations and correspondence
we know that the English clergy in the C13 and C14 made extensive use of French. If they spoke French to pupils from the start
of their school experience, children would have received a kind of language immersion at a very young age, when they would
have been more likely to pick it up without conscious effort than when they were older. Church schools fostered child bilingualism.
Here, a language ‘immersion’ environment at around 5 years old would have offered the possibility of picking up
the complex grammatical rules of Old French in a largely error-free way. Once some French was known, its use in the grammar
school as a daily medium of communication would have given children the opportunity to hear and speak French in a communicative
setting, as required for its accurate transmission.
Of course, direct historical evidence of the use of French
in church schools is highly unlikely to be forthcoming. That is because by their very nature the informal activities of initial
schooling in the medieval period, and even more so the nature of the spoken interaction that took place in that context, has
left little or no written trace: no textbooks, no sets of regulations, no account books; no endowments, and no legal disputes.
Still, we know that members of the clergy used French, we know that French was a vehicle language used for teaching Latin,
and AN writers are known to have been surprisingly native-like in the sort of grammatical domains where post-critical period
L2 learners’ performance is distinct from that of native speakers. Those pieces of evidence can be assembled to construct
a picture of how AN was transmitted that makes the initial schooling experience, in church schools at around age 5-6, the
most plausible candidate for where that transmission took place.
The hypothesis that church schools provided
the matrix for the transmission of AN to the literate class of medieval England does not entirely deny the view of certain
earlier scholars that it was learned at school, but shifts the scene to that of children’s pre-grammar school experience.
It crucially sees that experience as not that of planned language instruction but of natural learning. This proposal can account
for the key features of the AN texts that have come down to us. Evidence can only have been indirect, and is provided by what
we do have in abundance, the writings in French produced by the literate class who went to school in the medieval period.
Reference
Leach, A. (1915) Schools of medieval England. London: Methuen
Back to: The transmission of French in medieval England
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