The french domination was probably

Description:As Freeman rernarks Norman Conquest, II, , the royal family at this time is frequently the least English in England and is not to be used as a norm for judging the diffusion of the two languages. When we remember that on many of the occasions when the king and his nobles crossed the Channel they were engaged in military operations and were accompanied by military forces, that the business of ecclesiastics and merchants constantly took them abroad, we can readily see how this constant going and coming across the narrow seas made the continued use of French by those concerned not only natural but inevitable. At Southampton at the time of the Domesday survey the number of those who settled in the borough "after King William came into England" was sixty-five French born and thirty-one English born. The evidence on which we can base a conclusion is scattered, must be carefully appraised, and is not always easy to harmonize. William of Newburgh, Bk. But the Normans made a stand and the battle was renewed on more even terms. The chronicler adds that "the third one of them did not so much as know how to speak French.

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