French Literature of the British Isles after the Norman Conquest: A Digital, Data-Driven Investigation

Abstract

Abstract According to the traditional model, the use of French in Great Britain was fundamentally tied to the Norman Conquest of 1066. The language of the conquerors rapidly replaced English within administrative and cultural domains, and it maintained its foothold in these domains until the thirteenth century, when English began to regain prestige. Yet research of the past few decades has shown that this model is significantly flawed. This article is aimed at supporting an ongoing revision of this model through a quantitative approach centred around a catalogue of manuscripts containing French literature and copied in the British Isles. The results presented here indicate clearly that, in the century following the Conquest, English literature was being produced in much greater quantities than French literature. Indeed, the peak of French literary production did not occur during the century following the Conquest, but rather during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the analysis presented here reveals that in the centuries following the Conquest, works in French circulated most commonly with works in other languages — especially Latin. The approach adopted here thus sheds light on the history of French while decentring the canonical works that typically lie at its heart.