ABSTRACT
A second major factor in this period was the dynastic conflict between the French and the English crown, most especially the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453)1 (link: Hundred Years’ War), a war which ran remarkably parallel to the Black Death. The war was in reality a series of conflicts with sometimes quite long periods of peace in between: the Edwardian War (1337-1360), the Caroline War (1369-1389), the Lancastrian War (1415-1429), and English reversals and French revival (1429-1453) under Joan of Arc (1412-1431). The upshot was the loss of almost all the holdings of England on the Continent. The French language had clearly been in decline in thirteenth century England (cf. 4.1.2). By the end of the Hundred Years’ War and in part because of the nationalistic sentiments and resentments toward France that the war engendered, French was no longer a realistic option even among the English nobility, where it was increasingly artificial, as the often quoted lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (see 5.4.2) attest:
This quotation confirms the provincial character of French in England. Such attitudes are one of the consequences of French cultural ascendancy, which helped French as a language to maintain its prestige: it was seen as an object of cultivation, representing now outdated chivalrous society in its best form. Consequently, French continued to be used by the
Text 5.2 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (excerpt from the Prologue, ll. 124-126)
educated and in high society but was a matter of culture and fashion rather than an economic or political necessity as it had once been. In the fifteenth century it virtually disappeared as a language of everyday communication.
