Old French

 Old French, like the medieval versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, plus other variants (like Provençal), derived ultimately from Latin.  They are called Romance languages because they derive from the language of ancient Rome.  But Old French is much closer to modern French than what is called Old English is to modern English.

This is because what we call Old English is Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic language that was spoken in England before the Norman Conquest.  English had to incorporate a lot of French in the centuries after 1066, including going through the Middle English phase, before it became sort of what we think of as modern English in the seventeenth century.  Old French in contrast never had to incorporate an entirely different language.  (The number of words in modern English is roughly the same as the vocabularies of modern French and German put together.)

The first examples of Romance languages becoming distinct from Latin date to the ninth century.  At this point it was recognized that the pronunciation of a lot of words didn't exactly match the Latin spelling and that the grammar was increasingly different.  We should not of course be surprised at early medieval people accepting that spelling and pronunciation didn't match.  Look how English speakers pronounce though, through, tough, cough, and bough.

Written Old French came into its own in the twelfth century, primarily for stories, epics and romances.  Songs were also written in Old French.  A lot of stories had doubtless been told in the vernacular (that is, the everyday spoken language) for a long time, and songs sung in it, but now they were written down in it.

Most twelfth-century education was in Latin, and monks and bishops could converse and write fluently in correct classical Latin.  But as the century went on, more and more Old French was added to the educational mix.

During the middle years of the thirteenth century, some legal documents started being drawn up in Old French.  The spelling was subject to a great deal of variation, so that "I," ego in Latin, was spelled both je (as in modern French) and ge.  It seems clear that it was pronounced with the J sound, no matter how it was spelled.  But thirteenth-century French is close enough to modern French that a modern French speaker can read it relatively easily, with no more difficulty than a modern English speaker has in reading Shakespeare's sixteenth-century English.

Not everybody went over to using Old French.  For an especially important document, Latin was still preferred.  Stories might be told in Old French, but theological and political treatises were written in Latin.  Popes and bishops issued their documents in Latin, not the vernacular (popes still use Latin for official pronouncements).  For that matter, English scholars (like Isaac Newton) were still writing serious works in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

But the spread of Old French made it easier for more people to become literate, especially once paper started replacing the much more expensive parchment at the end of the thirteenth century.  Then one just needed to learn to read and write, not pick up a foreign language in the process.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval language and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Lost medieval manuscripts

 Most of the Middle Ages was pre-printing press.  Until the second half of the fifteenth century, everything had to be written by hand.  No printing, not even laser jets, no copy machines, only people writing or copying onto parchment or (by the fourteenth century) paper.  Understandably, there were far fewer books and documents than we have now.  This makes the loss over the centuries very noticeable.

Some medieval records we know only because the author's original manuscript (improbably) survives.  Others we know because the work was copied many times, such as the Arthurian stories I've previously discussed.  Property transactions at monasteries are known primarily if the records of these transactions were copied into cartularies.

It was not only the passage of time, with inevitable decay and fading, that did in medieval manuscripts.  Fire or flood will destroy parchment.  So will rats, who find parchment tasty good.  But the biggest losses were caused by humans.  Medieval bookbinders used old manuscripts in their bindings, a handy (free!) source of parchment.  The Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century destroyed many medieval records.  In France, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century destroyed many more, as these records were seen as oppressive tools of the ancien régime that was being overthrown.  Documents that survived into the twentieth century were sometimes destroyed during the two world wars.

And then a number of people set out deliberately to destroy medieval manuscripts.  They didn't do so with destruction per se on their minds, but due to seeing these manuscripts as sort of random pieces of interesting material, to be used or sold or recombined in ways to please the owners.  For example, there was a fad in the nineteenth century of carefully cutting out decorated initials from medieval manuscripts and gluing them to white paper, then framing them as attractive decorations.

Liturgical manuscripts especially, those which had been done with great care and artistry, were especially prone to such mutilation.  Even if the initials were not actually cut out, individual leaves might be separated from the rest of the book and sold individually.  Rare book dealers realized that they could make far more money selling individual leaves of medieval manuscripts than selling the entire book to one person.

A recent interesting example is the Beauvais missal.  It is a liturgical manuscript, highly decorated, which exists as a partial volume.  Recently a number of individual leaves, separated in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, have come to light, most in individual hands.  Some were picked up at an estate sale, where the deceased's heirs thought an attractive late medieval sheet of parchment ought to be worth something.  Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, has been on a mission to identify as many of these missing leaves as possible. This is what one of the missing leaves looked like.

 

I've had folks selling individual medieval manuscript leaves tell me, "Well, the leaves were already separated from the book when I got them."  I consider this similar to, "Well, the leopard was already dead when I made its fur into a coat."

It's disconcerting how limited our collection of medieval manuscripts must be compared to those that existed 500 years ago.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on manuscripts, writing, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.