A history of the English Language

98.
French Cultural Ascendancy in Europe.
The stimulus given to the use of French in England by foreign additions to the upper class 
coincides smoothly with another circumstance tending in the same direction. This was the 
wide popularity that the French language enjoyed all over civilized Europe in the 
thirteenth century. At this time France was commonly regarded as representing 
chivalrous society in its most polished form, and the French language was an object of 
cultivation at most of the other courts of Europe, just as it was in the eighteenth century. 
Adenet le Roi tells us in one of his romances that all the great lords in Germany had 
French teachers for their children.
17
Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, in explaining 
why he wrote his great encyclopedia, 
Li Tresor
(c. 1265), in French, says: “And if anyone 
should ask why this book is written in Romance, according to the language of the French, 
seeing that I am Italian, I should say that it is for two reasons: one, because I am now in 
France, and the other because that speech is the most delectable and the most common to 
all people.” At about the same time another Italian, Martino da Canale, translated “the 
ancient history of the Venetians from Latin into French” “because the French language is 
current throughout the world and is the most delightful to read and to hear.” Similar 
testimony
(
Berte aus Grans Piés,
148 ff.) 
17 
Avoit une coustume ens el tiois pays
Que tout li grant seignor, li conte et li marchis
Avoient entour aus gent françoise tousdis
Pour aprendre françoise lor filles et lor fis;
Li rois et la roïne et Berte o le cler vis
Sorent près d’aussi bien la françois de Paris
Com se il fussent né au bourc à Saint Denis. 
A history of the english language 122

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comes from Norway and Spain, even Jerusalem and the East
18
The prestige of French 
civilization, a heritage to some extent from the glorious tradition of Charlemagne, carried 
abroad by the greatest of medieval literatures, by the fame of the University of Paris, and 
perhaps to some extent by the enterprise of the Normans themselves, would have 
constituted in itself a strong reason for the continued use of French among polite circles 
in England.