35% done with A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

It’s funny how French never really became the global language like English or Spanish. Every court in Europe spoke French from medieval days right up into the days of Tolstoy in Russia. But this class based language meant it never trickled down to regular people and here Tuchman points to another interesting twist of linguistics: the Black Death itself. Teachers in French outside of France died; the vernacular lived