On the Latin-Romance continuum in the Durham Account Rolls

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the Romance-Latin continuum, inherent to the Durham Account Rolls (DAR), and contextualises the learning and teaching of French and Latin in medieval England: an understanding of the socio-historical context and the underlying pedagogical framework enables us to better assess the data presented in this article. In line with a detriment to the learning of French in the late 14th century and a progressive loss of linguistic competence, the definite article in these multilingual texts started to develop an independent course from its French model which is herein discussed. The parameters for identifying lexis as coming only from French, Latin, or both are also revisited. The occurrences in the DAR usually encompass a whole spectrum of possible morphological manifestations ranging from Latin to French. This article concludes with some notes on the main semantic domains to which Anglo-French contributed in the DAR.