Coming to the French of England from the standpoint of the literature of Anglo-Saxon England provides a space in which to step away from the narrative of loss that so powerfully shapes the Anglo-Saxonist's view of the literary cultures of England across the eleventh and twelfth centuries. According to this narrative, somewhere in the eleventh century, the world of Beowulf, the Exeter Book and Ælfric disappeared. Although the Norman Conquest is seen as the death knell of Anglo-Saxon literature in this narrative, scholars generally lose interest well before 1066. In many ways, 1023 and the death of the famous homilist and legal-writer Wulfstan, archbishop of York, marks the end of what has traditionally been seen as Anglo-Saxon literature. This narrative of loss has left a blank space between the early eleventh century and the explosion of Latin and French writing in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman realm.

This blank space impacts on the understanding of the emergence of written French in post-Conquest England because it masks the remarkable overlap between late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman literary cultures. If Beowulf and Ælfric are taken as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon literature, there seems little link between Old English and Anglo-Norman, as well as Old French more broadly. However, when we begin to see how open Anglo-Saxon England was to new learning from the end of the tenth century onwards and how the relationship between English and Latin began to shift well before 1066, England's participation in the ‘making of Europe’ comes into focus.