ABSTRACT
Although Anglicists have been aware for generations that French made an enormous contribution to the lexis of English in the later Middle Ages, not all the first-hand evidence o f this contribution now available from non-literary sources has yet been thoroughly explored. For example, a comprehensive lexicological analysis of the thousands of Anglo-French and Middle English forms used to gloss the Latin in Tony H unt’s Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England would add to a better understanding o f the relationship between these two vernaculars in close contact from the twelfth to the fifteenth century as illustrated by the reactions o f scores o f glossators towards the Medieval Latin o f their originals. Similarly, an exhaustive examination o f the Middle English glosses used to explain the Anglo-French terminology found in teaching manuals from the middle o f the thirteenth century onwards could, in its turn, add significantly to current knowledge regarding the historical development o f English as well as French. Up to the present time histories o f English have dealt piecemeal with individual items of French vocabulary taken into Middle English from a variety o f backgrounds or have put together lists of ‘borrowed’ French words belonging to certain registers or categories:2 no attempt has so far been made to compare the vocabulary o f a complete Middle English translation set down specifically to make possible the understanding o f its Anglo-French original.
