A Book About Lawyers

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

CHAPTER XXXV.

LAW-FRENCH AND LAW-LATIN.

No circumstances of the Norman Conquest more forcibly illustrate the humiliation of the conquered people, than the measures by which the invaders imposed their language on the public courts of the country, and endeavored to make it permanently usurp the place of the mother-tongue of the despised multitude; and no fact more signally displays our conservative temper than the general reluctance of English society to relinquish the use of the French words and phrases which still tincture the language of parliament, and the procedures of Westminster Hall, recalling to our minds the insolent domination of a few powerful families who occupied our country by force, and ruled our forefathers with vigorous injustice.

Frenchmen by birth, education, sympathy, William's barons did their utmost to make England a new France: and for several generations the descendants of the successful invaders were no less eager to abolish every usage which could remind the vanquished race of their lost supremacy. French became the language of parliament and the council-chamber. It was spoken by the judges who dispensed justice in the name of a French king, and by the lawyers who followed the royal court in the train of the French-speaking judges. In the hunting-field and the lists no gentleman entitled to bear coat-armour deigned to utter a word of English: it was the same in Fives' Court and at the gambling-table. Schoolmasters were ordered to teach their pupils to construe from Latin into French, instead of into English; and young men of Anglo-Saxon extraction, bent on rising in the world by native talent and Norman patronage, labored to acquire the language of the ruling class and forget the accents of their ancestors. The language and usages of modern England abound with traces of the French of this period. To every act that obtained the royal assent during last session of parliament, the queen said "La reyne le veult." Every bill which is sent up from the Commons to the Lords, an officer of the lower house endorses with "Soit bailé aux Seigneurs;" and no bill is ever sent down from the Lords to the Commons until a corresponding officer of the upper house has written on its back, "Soit bailé aux Communes."

In like manner our parochial usages, local sports, and domestic games continually remind us of the obstinate tenacity with which the Anglo-Saxon race has preserved, and still preserves, the vestiges of its ancient subjection to a foreign yoke. The crier of a country town, in any of England's fertile provinces, never proclaims the loss of a yeoman's sporting-dog, the auction of a bankrupt dealer's stock-in-trade, or the impounding of a strayed cow, until he has commanded, in Norman-French, the attention of the sleepy rustics. The language of the stable and the kennel is rich in traces of Norman influence; and in backgammon, as played by orthodox players, we have a suggestive memorial of those Norman nobles, of whom Fortescue, in the 'De Laudibus' observes: "Neither had they delyght to hunt, and to exercise other sportes and pastimes, as dyce-play and the hand-ball, but in their own proper tongue."

In behalf of the Norman noblesse it should be borne in mind that their policy in this matter was less intentionally vexatious and insolent than it has appeared to superficial observers. In the great majority of causes the suitors were Frenchmen; and it was just as reasonable that they should like to understand the arguments of their counsel and judges, as it is reasonable for suitors in the present day to require the proceedings in Westminster Hall to be clothed in the language most familiar to the majority of persons seeking justice in its courts. If the use of French pleadings was hard on the one Anglo-Saxon suitor who demanded justice in Henry I.'s time, the use of English pleadings would have been equally annoying to the nine French gentlemen who appeared for the same purpose in the king's court. It was greatly to be desired that the two races should have one common language; and common sense ordained that the tongue of the one or the other race should be adopted as the national language. Which side therefore was to be at the pains to learn a new tongue? Should the conquerors labor to acquire Anglo-Saxon? or should the conquered be required to learn French? In these days the cultivated Englishmen who hold India by military force, even as the Norman invaders held England, by the right of might, settle a similar question by taking upon themselves the trouble of learning as much of the Asiatic dialects as is necessary for purposes of business. But the Norman barons were not cultivated; and for many generations ignorance was with them an affair of pride no less than of constitutional inclination.

Soon ambitious Englishmen acquired the new language, in order to use it as an instrument for personal advancement. The Saxon stripling who could keep accounts in Norman fashion, and speak French as fluently as his mother tongue, might hope to sell his knowledge in a good market. As the steward of a Norman baron he might negotiate between my lord and my lord's tenants, letting my lord know as much of his tenant's wishes, and revealing to the tenants as much of their lord's intentions as suited his purpose. Uniting in his own person the powers of interpreter, arbitrator, and steward, he possessed enviable opportunities and facilities for acquiring wealth. Not seldom, when he had grown rich, or whilst his fortunes were in the ascendant, he assumed a French name as well as a French accent; and having persuaded himself and his younger neighbors that he was a Frenchman, he in some cases bequeathed to his children an ample estate and a Norman pedigree. In certain causes in the law courts the agent (by whatever title known) who was a perfect master of the three languages (French, Latin, and English) had greatly the advantage over an opposing agent who could speak only French and Latin.

From the Conquest till the latter half of the fourteenth century the pleadings in courts of justice were in Norman-French; but in the 36 Ed. III., it was ordained by the king "that all plees, which be to be pleded in any of his courts, before any of his justices; or in his other places; or before any of his other ministers; or in the courts and places of any other lords within the realm, shall be pleded, shewed, and defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English tongue, and that they be entred and enrolled in Latine. And that the laws and customs of the same realm, termes, and processes, be holden and kept as they be, and have been before this time; and that by the antient termes and forms of the declarations no man be prejudiced; so that the matter of the action be fully shewed in the demonstration and in the writ." Long before this wise measure of reform was obtained by the urgent wishes of the nation, the French of the law courts had become so corrupt and unlike the language of the invaders, that it was scarcely more intelligible to educated natives of France than to most Englishmen of the highest rank. A jargon compounded of French and Latin, none save professional lawyers could translate it with readiness or accuracy; and whilst it unquestionably kept suitors in ignorance of their own affairs, there is reason to believe that it often perplexed the most skilful of those official interpreters who were never weary of extolling his lucidity and precision.

But though English lawyers were thus expressly forbidden in 1362 to plead in Law-French, they persisted in using the hybrid jargon for reports and treatises so late as George II.'s reign; and for an equal length of time they seized every occasion to introduce scraps of Law-French into their speeches at the bars of the different courts. It should be observed that these antiquarian advocates were enabled thus to display their useless erudition by the provisions of King Edward's act, which, while it forbade French pleadings, specially ordained the retention of French terms.

Roger North's essay 'On the study of the Laws' contains amusing testimony to the affection with which the lawyers of his day regarded their Law-French, and also shows how largely it was used till the close of the seventeenth century by the orators of Westminster Hall. "Here I must stay to observe," says the author, enthusiastically, "the necessity of a student's early application to learn the old Law-French, for these books, and most others of considerable authority, are delivered in it. Some may think that because the Law-French is no better than the old Norman corrupted, and now a deformed hotch-potch of the English and Latin mixed together, it is not fit for a polite spark to foul himself with; but this nicety is so desperate a mistake, that lawyer and Law-French are coincident; one will not stand without the other." So enamored was he of the grace and excellence of law-reporters' French, that he regarded it as a delightful study for a man of fashion, and maintained that no barrister would do justice to the law and the interests of his clients who did not season his sentences with Norman verbiage. "The law," he held, "is scarcely expressible properly in English, and when it is done, it must be Françoise, or very uncouth."