Medieval English

Aline writes: We went and saw a fascinating talk at the Museum of London on the English language in London in medieval times. The lecturer was from Cambridge, and she talked about documents written in the 1300 and 1400's, and how they combined English and Norman French, or English and Latin. Documents were actually written in this combination language, where the nouns might be English, but the word order, prepositions, and gender might be Norman French. This was apparently done so the widest number of people could understand these commercial documents. English wasn't used in a standard way until the late 1500's/1600's, and wasn’t widely understood either. So the documents are almost primers for the language, where in one line the clerk might use the French word for "stone" and the next line might use the English word for "stone". Who knew?