Anglo-Norman in Exile: The Early Critical Reception of Piers Langtoft’s Chronicle

In the twenty-first century scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the multilingualism of Britain in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. This article further challenges long-held narratives of the ‘triumph’ of English by exploring the ‘making’ of Anglo-Norman and its subsequent marginalization within the academy. It focuses on the reception of the chronicle of Piers Langtoft (c. 1307), largely during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and analyses the processes by which the language in which it was written became culturally, historically, and geographically established - in order that it might be expelled.