Medieval Francophonia: the Western Edge

Much interest has been shown in recent years in language and literature in ‘Medieval Francophonia’, particularly in works composed and manuscripts copied in French in Italy, and further to the East in the Crusader states (‘Le français d’Outremer’). In this brief contribution, I will look at the other side of the map. Anglo-Norman was both a spoken and written vernacular in the centuries after 1066 in England, where the first literary texts begin to appear in the early twelfth century. The Normans quickly moved into Wales, and on May 1, 1169, a small group of mainly Welsh Normans (Cambro-Normans) led by Robert FitzStephen crossed the Irish Sea and landed in Bannow Bay, Co. Wexford, on the southeast coast of Ireland. They were the first of several contingents of French-speakers, assembled by Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, in response to a request by Diarmait Mac Murchada, dispossessed king of Leinster, for help in regaining his throne. Richard is better known to history as Strongbow, and shortly after his own arrival in Ireland, he married Diarmait’s daughter, Aoife, in Waterford on August 25, 1170. Support for Diarmait quickly turned into colonisation and much of Ireland was soon granted to the invaders by Henry II, the first English king to visit Ireland in 1171.

A number of literary texts were written in Hiberno-Norman French, such as the Geste des Engleis en Yrlande (c. 1190), formerly known as The Song of Dermot and the Earl, and The Walling of New Ross (1265). The first is a pseudo-chronicle in the form of a chanson de geste relating the story of the invasion and was probably written for one of the newly-established colonial households, while the second is an urban poem which celebrates the construction of defenses around the town of New Ross. Both are anchored in different ways in Old French literary traditions, belying any notion of Irish Francophonia as a cultural outlier. The new residents of Ireland had apparently brought their literary culture with them. There is evidence of French being spoken in Ireland well into the fourteenth century, for example during the trial of Alice Kyteler, accused of witchcraft in Kilkenny in 1324, and of French songs being sung on the streets of the town around the same time. French inscriptions are found on gravestones in New Ross, Kilkenny, Youghal, and elsewhere in the region between c. 1275 and c. 1325. The use of French in Irish towns declines during the second half of the fourteenth century, to be replaced by English and a resurgent Irish. French made few inroads in rural areas, although the existence of interpreters confirms that there was frequent contact between Irish and French speakers from the very beginning.

The conquest of Ireland met with some resistance from the native Irish aristocracy, but French-speaking communities were established from Dublin southwards to just north of Cork, including the towns of Waterford, New Ross (Co. Wexford), Wexford, Kilkenny, and Youghal (Co. Cork). Francophones soon moved further north and west into all parts of the island, although most surviving examples of the language are from the Southeast. French had been spoken earlier in the first Cistercian monasteries established in Ireland, starting in Mellifont, Co. Louth (1146), where many of the first brothers were either from houses in France or England where French was the principal vernacular. As in England, Scotland, and Wales, French-speakers remained a small minority of the total population throughout the Middle Ages.

At the end of the Secret, Jofroi names his collaborator on the three texts, Servais Copale, who seems to have been his scribe; Servais had already been identified in 1946 as coming from the town of Huy, near Liège. The language of BnF, fr. 1822, is not surprisingly a strongly marked Walloon dialect with underlying Anglo- or Hiberno-Norman features, confirming both Servais’ origin and Jofroi’s insular idiom. Mention of ‘les exemplaires de Paris’ as the sources of the Secret had long led scholars to assume that Jofroi and Servais had met and worked together in Paris, but my recent identification of Servais as a customs official and merchant in Waterford locates the composition of the texts securely to the city in about 1300. ‘Les exemplaires de Paris’ most likely means ‘the copies from Paris’. Jofroi’s use of the three Latin originals and numerous other sources used in the Secret shows that he had a considerable library available to him, which may, of course, have included books acquired from Paris. The attribution of Jofroi’s works to Ireland increases many times over the corpus of Hiberno-Norman literature and is a reminder that peripheries can be culturally more central than they appear. Waterford at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was not a backwater. It was a thriving international port with a sizeable population of foreigners, particularly from England, France, and Italy. Its various religious houses guaranteed a degree of literacy and access to books. Sister houses on the Continent could easily have been a source of books in St Saviour’s library, known to have been housed in a separate building.