The linguistic repertoire of late medieval England was complex, unstable, and socially charged. If the languages an individual used – Latin, French, English, or any of the indigenous Celtic languages – were in part functions of birth and upbringing, their use in particular domains helped sustain the dynamics of society. Like individual speech acts, moreover, languages had meaning in relation to one another. The meaning of French within England's repertoire, for example, evolved from not only its uses but also its status in relation to the other languages of the repertoire, individually as well as collectively. And like linguistic history, language dynamics can raise some challenging questions. What did French mean to Anglophones? What did English mean to Francophones? How did these meanings change over time? These are the kinds of questions I want to address here. Specifically, I want to examine how the meaning of French within the English linguistic repertoire changed from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the early modern period. And to do so, in view of the fact that such issues are systemic, I want to consider not just the relations of French and English to one another but also each language's relations to other languages and traditions.