 This Introductory presentation is intended for students and others in academic areas such as historical
linguistics, history and literature who would like to benefit from the greatly increased availability of Anglo-Norman source
material in recent years, but whose academic training may not have equipped them with knowledge of the relevant resources
and how to exploit them.
To use Anglo-Norman sources profitably, you will need a good
reading knowledge of pre-modern French. One or two of the sources provide English translations, but they are the exception.
If you have studied modern French at school, you will find that you can eventually cope with the language
of Anglo-Norman texts, but you will need to put in an extensive period of further study and familiarisation, preferably with
pedagogic guidance, if you are to read Anglo-Norman with ease.
If you have already made
considerable use of texts in Latin or French, as is the case quite often with historians, you are likely to find Anglo-Norman
manageable via a self-study programme.
If you are a linguist, you are likely to make
extensive use of electronic corpus search procedures in order to obtain desired information. For lexical searches, you will
find the Anglo-Norman Dictionary an invaluable resource. For sentence-level and discourse issues, by regularly carrying out
concordancing you will gain an excellent understanding of Anglo-Norman sentence construction and meaning.
If your area of specialisation is literature, it will deepen your understanding of medieval English
texts by close textual comparison with Anglo-Norman counterparts, including those featured on the Anglo Norman Hub. Looking
for similarities and differences between the texts will rapidly sharpen your ability with the language, even though it may
not be easy at first.
In all cases, you are certain to need the assistance of the Anglo-Norman
dictionary, not only for help with unusual words and meanings, but so as to deal with the notorious vagaries of insular spelling.
Background
External language historyThe Norman conquest brought
in a period of domination by Norman, Angevin, and Plantagenet royalty, and their associated nobility lasting until the end
of the 14th century. The first post-1066 King of England not to have spoken French as a native language was Henry IV (1399-1413).
French was used extensively as a literary language in England until the 13th century, and enjoyed a further period of use
from the later 13th to the early 15th centuries as a language of routine public administration, a role that it had not enjoyed
for the first two centuries or so after the Conquest, when only Latin was used for this purpose.
Anglo Norman gained ground in a number of genres in the 13th and 14th centuries: Wills, charters, recipes, technical
treatises, private and public correspondence, petitions and accounts were written in Anglo Norman well before they were written
in English.
Making possible this expansion in the range of uses and the Norman was a
growing number of school educated English clerks and administrators who had a quiet familiarity with French through its use
as a medium language in grammar schools, which they began attending at age 7. There was as yet no evidence that the French
language was taught as an object of formal instruction at this time: the first extant grammar of French was that of John Barton,
written in 1415.
 Internal language history
Texts in Anglo-Norman tend to ignore trends in continental
French orthography, and to conserve earlier spellings such as k for qu, ei for oi, etc. They also display idiosyncrasies such
as un for an, oun for on. The pronunciation of Anglo Norman also seems to have departed from continental French, largely under
the influence of English.
A very detailed discussion of spelling and phonology is found
in Pope 1934, and the phonological evidence derived from rhyming is revisited by Short 2007. Anglo-Norman morphology was studied
by Tanquerey 1915 as well as by Pope 1934 and AN syntax by Kunstmann 2007 Larrivee 2010 and in Ingham (2006a,b, 2009).
Extensive differences from continental old French, evident in phonology and to some extent morphology,
have not been identified in syntax, though a few distinctive traits appear in relative and personal pronouns.
Literary and philological aspects
Anglo-Norman poems from the early 12th century, such
as the Life of St Brendan, count among the earliest literary productions in the French language. A flourishing verse literature
continued well into the 13th century, with outstanding works still being written in the last half of the 14th century.
Many literary texts have been published by the Anglo-Norman Text Society. The great majority of these
are in verse, and in many cases come with useful editorial matter relevant to phonological study.
Non-literary texts have been published in very diverse places. The Rolls Series offers numerous chronicles, registers,
and Law Yearbook compilations. Other series of Year books are published by the Selden Society and its United States counterpart
the Ames Society. The Camden series and the Société des Anciens Textes Français have also published a
few notable later AN texts.
Some controversy surrounds certain texts as to whether they
are of continental or of insular origin. Especially with the earlier literary works, texts may be difficult to identify as
definitely having originated in England. Nonliterary materials, however, are almost always easy to localise and the date of
composition can very often be identified.
Electronic resources
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The following websites contain AN texts and are free access:
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1.
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The Anglo-Norman Hub, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
The
largest AN textbase: about 70 texts in various types, verse and prose, grouped by genres. Texts may be browsed, and lexical
search procedures include proximity and wild card searches. No tagging.
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www.anglo-norman.net
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2.
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The Anglo-Norman correspondence corpus; Webcorp, Birmingham City University, UK.
c.30,000 words; private correspondence from bishops’ registers etc. written between the later
C13 and the mid-C14. Texts may be browsed, and searched. Most sections have some morphological tagging, though this is currently
under development.
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wse1.webcorp.org.uk/anglo-norman/
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3.
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Electronic Campsey Corpus, University of Waterloo, Canada
Saints’
lives from the C13 Campsey manuscript. Almost all texts are in verse, mostly from the later C12 and C13. No tagging. Browsable,
simple lexical searches possible.
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margot.uwaterloo.ca/campsey/cmphome_e.html
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The following CD-ROM text sources both feature English translations of AN material:
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1.
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Narrations et dialogues: the Anglo-Norman Yearbook corpus (available free of charge from Ms Maria
Lopez, School of English, Birmingham City University)
c.800,000 words of Law Yearbook
narrative and dialogic material, exclusively in a legal setting. Facing page English translations for most texts.
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maria.lopez@bcu.ac.uk
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2.
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The Parliament Rolls of Mediaeval England (available from Scholarly Digital Editions 12, The
Old Silverworks, 54a Spencer St. Birmingham B18 6JT UK
All texts have translations into
modern English.
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sales@sd-editions.com
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