Why did French have such a lasting influence on the English legal lexicon?
<p>It seems so pervasive but, still confusing that we don't simply use French altogether for legal purposes, which I suppose was done at one time. But why were certain terms kept from French, while the rest of the language used reverted to English? It would make a bit of sense if there had been no terms available in English to refer to e.g. corporate bodies prior to the Normans' arrivals, but that doesn't seem terribly plausible.</p>

<h2>Because the Normans spoke French.</h2>
<p>The English Nobility didn't speak English till the 14th century at all. Why? Because <a href="https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4178/why-did-england-not-maintain-french-as-a-spoken-language">the Norman Nobility spoke <strong>French</strong></a> till the whole debacle of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Years%27_War" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Hundred Years' War</a> was halfway through.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Bastard" rel="nofollow noreferrer">William The Bastard</a> left only <strong>very</strong> few nobles from before in power when he landed in 1066 and delivered a smackdown on the previous rulers. He established a whole new nobility and based on his orders (<strong>in French</strong>), this also formalized most of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/common-law" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Common law between 1066 and the 100 years war</a>. It was <em>the Norman nobility</em> talking, and they had the text written in French and Latin, the <em>civilized</em> languages, not the gibberish <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Old English/Anglo-Saxon</a></em> and <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Norse</a></em> that was used by the peasants. Any English you and me would understand wouldn't even exist for another <strong>200-300 years</strong>. Or to cite the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/common-law" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Britannica</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>The Normans spoke French</strong> and had developed a customary law in Normandy. They had no professional lawyers or judges; instead, literate clergymen acted as administrators. Some of the clergy were familiar with Roman law and the canon law of the Christian church, which was developed in the universities of the 12th century. Canon law was applied in the English church courts, but the revived Roman law was less influential in England than elsewhere, despite Norman dominance in government. This was due largely to the early sophistication of the Anglo-Norman system. <strong>Norman custom was not simply transplanted to England; upon its arrival, a new body of rules, based on local conditions, emerged.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<h2>English changed.</h2>
<p>Would you understand Beowulf from about 700-1000 AD, which is Old English?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Between this and modern English is a very heavily French-influenced English called &quot;Middle English&quot;. This still is mostly illegible to a modern reader, but you find this from about 1066 to the 15th century. Only after the Hundred Years war ended, active steps were taken to remove French from the courts and language, which would result in modern English - yet the influence was extreme in the legal world then.</p>
<p>To come back to the example above: I bet you do understand the <a href="https://FRANCIS%20B.%20GUMMERE" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Francis B Gummere</a> (died 1919) translation into modern English, even if it feels a little archaic to us in 2023:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!</p>
</blockquote>

<p>At the beginning of the Norman occupation, regardless of how the noble may have talked casually (in French), the language of law and government was Latin. It was not until the movement to centralized &quot;common law&quot; and the onset of French-language statutes around 1300 that French gained a place in the English legal scene. An example is the
<a href="http://www.languageandlaw.org/TEXTS/STATS/PLEADING.HTM" rel="noreferrer">Pleading in English Act 1362</a>, written in English and French, where it is decreed that pleadings (the stuff that happens in court) shall be in English because that is what the people understand, but records shall be in Latin. English became the official language of government during the reign of Henry V at the beginning of the 15th century. The point to be noticed here is that there has long been an accepted split between the language of the rulers and the language of the masses. Amongst the rulers, the two dominant languages were Latin and French, but French was &quot;how people talked&quot;, and did not have the majestic status of Latin.</p>
<p>During this period, important legal doctrine were developed. Essential to any effective doctrine is a name. Legal doctrines were of course created by upper-class folks who spoke French, English and Latin, with a decline in knowledge of Latin and French over the years. Once a legal concept is named, it is difficult though not impossible to change the name, and thus &quot;fee simple&quot; survives to this day because no Germanic expression was developed to exactly identify this legal concept.</p>
<p>The practice of copying standard forms was a major contributor to the preservation of French in legal language. The underlying idea is that if you can write a legal document that works for a certain purpose in court, you would be well-advised to re-use the expressions of those documents the next time (befitting the status of &quot;precedent&quot; in English law – follow the law as previously identified). These documents would contain French expressions because &quot;tort&quot; and &quot;guarantee&quot;, for instance, were well understood concepts, as identified in earlier legal writings (which might be in French – there are also plenty of Latin terms do preserved in legal language). These word were etymologically derived from French, but became part of English, just as many other terms (war, cabbage, pork, poultry) are etymologically from French but they are simple ordinary English words now.</p>
<p>There were no corporations in the modern legal sense in Anglo-Saxon England, so there was no Old English term for &quot;articles of incorporation&quot;. The legal concept has to first exist, then we can worry about the name for it, and which language we use to refer to it.</p>

england-and-wales legal-history france