In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, insular French texts become rarer in comparison with the continental French texts circulating in England, but copies of historiographical and other texts continue to be produced, and new prayers, hymns, psalters, letters, accounts, wills, petitions, and other documents and records continue to be composed. The Frenches of England remain as working languages in the different registers of various occupational communities and for particular social rituals. Beyond the fifteenth century, French is a much less substantial presence in England, though the idea of French continues to play a role in English understanding of insular cultural and linguistic history.

Although this final section looks at areas and subjects in some cases familiar from Anglo-French literary studies, the co-presence of Section I above provides a context in which such areas can be seen among many Frenches of England, rather than as the French or the English tradition. The opening essay of Section IV, Tim Machan's study of late medieval linguistic repertoires, takes this linguistic perspective further, up to the early modern period. Machan analyses the diverging roles of insular and northern French in English's (largely unreciprocated) engagement with French in the late medieval period and England's developing involvement with the languages of its early modern colonies. His essay also serves to reminds us once again that the subsequent separations of French and English should not retrospectively shape our perception of the status of late medieval languages and their uses.