Until recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a few exceptions to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language.

This article was first published in MLR 94 (1999), 647-59.