Plantagenet Chronicles

Language: a link and a barrier

Norman French became the language of the English court and nobility after the Conquest in 1066, and remained so for several centuries. By the late 12th century, many town and city dwellers were bilingual, as were the lesser knights, many of whom, although born into French-speaking families, were cared for by English-speaking wet nurses. Most of the peasants, however, spoke only English.

The ruling classes were able to communicate across frontiers with other French-dominated regioins, including Outremer -- the Crusader states in Palestine -- and Sicily. When Joanna, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor, married the king of Sicily, she was not so isolated as other noble wives, who had to adapt to foreign environments while unable to speak the language of their new country.

In the Song of Roland, the French converse with impossible fluency with their Saracen enemies. In reality, armies of local interpreters were employed in the Holy Land, as they were in England in 1066. Duke William reputedly tried to learn the English of his new subjects. Henry II is flatteringly credited with an understanding of all European tongues, while his Sicilian son-in-law probably did, through necessity, possess more than a smattering of all the languages spoken in his kingdom, French, Italian, Greek and Arabic.

This babel was unified by the common heritage of the Church. Latin was the lingua franca of educated people everywhere, while the uneducated but powerful turned to clerics, fluent in the language of learning, to help them in international negotiations, as they did in law and administration, and in mediating between the laity and their God.