 explanations changed and came nearer the truth. Social and educational reasons provide the basic causes. The rhyming chronicle of Robert of Gloucester at the end of the thirteenth century summed up the situation admirably:
And the Normans could not then speak any speech but their own; and they spoke French as they did at home, and had their children taught the same. So that the high men of this land, that came of their blood, all retain the same speech which they brought from their home. For unless a man know French, people regard him little; but the low men hold to English, and to their own speech still. I ween there be no countries in all the world that do not hold to their own speech, except England only. But undoubtedly it is well to know both; for the more a man knows, the more worth he is.
Trevisa later put the matter even more strongly, observing that uplandish men (the very word used by Byrhtferth of his rustic priests) liken themselves to gentle- men, strive with great effort to speak French, so that they might be more highly regarded. Heavy social pressure made it essential for a man to speak French, initially (though this applied to few in the eleventh century) if he were to play an active part in the new feudal world, but increasingly as French became the language of commerce and of gentility on a much wider basis.
But let us take the argument back directly to the Norman Conquest and what do we find? In government and administration, writs were issued by the Conqueror in English but not for long. By the 1070s Latin was the language of the Chancery. Anglo-Saxon England had enjoyed two languages for permanent record, English and Latin. Now there was to be one, Latin alone. Yet remember that we treat of record and not of substance. The spoken language of the courts, shires and hundreds, was as it had always been, the vernacular in the full sense, the language of Devon or Norfolk or Yorkshire or the land between Ribble and Mersey. Legal texts in Anglo-Saxon continued to be copied, the laws of Edward the Confessor in theory, of Cnut in practice. But when half a century after the Conquest a creative local lawyer wanted to put the laws and customs of the courts (the so-called 'Laws of Henry I') in the Winchester area into shape, he did his work in Latin - of a sort - with a vast number of good English words, wergeld, bot, frith and grith, sake and soke, given proper Latin forms and endings to make them respectable. There was to be no new legislation in English, there were to be no new writs in English: the native language well had run dry as a language of record, though not as a language of use.
On the religious side affairs were more complicated. The Normans acted with strict propriety. They had no need to act illegally. They could get all they wanted, and still stay well within the law. At the top level this was easy. No Englishman was appointed to high office in the Conqueror's reign. And the new bishops and abbots, French-speaking to a man, brought with them their clerks, their households, their chosen followers who did military service for their new estates. French became the language of the inner group, but not of course still of the mass of the clergy and laity. The result was more complicated than is often realised. Many of the best manuscripts in Anglo- Saxon have been preserved for us in these generations immediately succeeding the Conquest. First-class scribes copied, used, and preserved Anglo-Saxon work in great Norman houses at Canterbury, at Rochester, and at Bury St. Edmunds, as well as in the West Country fastnesses of Worcester and Exeter. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be kept at some centres, certainly at Peterborough, with visible change of language to early Middle English, as late as 1155. The continuity of English Prose was assured. The Schriftssprache , standard Old English, remained intelligible, but after 1120 was no longer a reasonable vehicle for new composition; and your upland priest would interpret it as a country parson still interprets the Authorized Version for his flock, te