England keeps most of its French possessions
- Thread starter Eivind
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If England keeps its French possessions, they're not going to be Kings of England, they're going to be French kings who happen to rule England.
Even if they just control parts of France (the western half)? In OTL the French king kept his title even though the English king for long time had direct control over a much larger territory.
Their title would probably still be King of England, but they would focus more on their wealthier, more populated, and more prestigious French holdings. This means they would continue to speak French, act French, and use the French language for all official purposes.
But those territories were still officially part of France. In his French domains, the king of England was theoretically a vassal of the French king.
And that is why the English king could not become king of France even though he controlled a larger area and were more powerful than the French king.
I think the problem is outside of Brittany and Burgundy, anyone who controlled french territory would be seen as a foreign power and destined to be forcefully removed when France got its act together.
Not necessarily. Before the 15th century there'd be no such thing as a foreign power (unless they weren't Catholic or something) in France. France existed only as the title, not as an identity French people were beholden to. It's not totally impossible for the Kingdom to become fractured and either for the title to fall into disuse (like the Kingdom of Arles) or for it to be partitioned into smaller Kingdoms.
Actually it could end up being the other way around
.Anyway if Henry V hadn't died from the bloody-flux at 33 and ruled for, say, another 20 years England would likely have held onto France as Henry was, in addition to being the king of England, the king of France.
You probably get a French speaking elite class, while the common people speak the local language. The middle class will try to emulate the upper class and speak French, at least until nationalism kicks in and the growing middle classes will want to speak their own language (and eventualy the local upper classes too).
England is too big (and unconnected) to be assimilated into the French speaking part. Personaly I think Belgium is linguistically the place to look at and we see that the language border very slowly moved north, something that can not happen in England, since it isn't connected to France, and Brussels turned from a Dutch speaking city into a French speaking city. This, theoretically could happen to London too, but somehow I doubt it.
Basicly England will remain English speaking, although there will probably more French words in the English language.
This is assuming the French part will be more important than the english part, which I think is likely (although it depends on how big the French part is). I always considered the 100-year war a French civil war in which two French nobles were fighting each other for the crown of France, one of which happened to be king of England.
Within about 50 years of William the Bastard's conquest of England you had the situation were Norman nobles were hiring French tutors to teach their children French as English was already their mother-tongue and Anglo-Norman was regarded as uncouth, backward and uncultured by the Parisian-French speaking elite in France and the Anglo-Norman nobles got sick and tired of this so they abandoned it eventually for English.
Not the same sort of French as the Parisian dialect that only really took off with the French Revolution crushing autonomy and mass conscripting the country's youth. It is still likely that Norman dialects are around, perhaps mixed with those of the Occitan, Brittany, Artois, etc. Depending on how the land is reclaimed by the Kingdom of England though (and I imagine they will use the title King of England much like those in the HRE used the titles of Kingdoms outside of it). Would have an interesting effect on the Norman leaning royalty of Scotland. That might come later, though. Anyways, England as a kingdom would stand as a good seat for centralized power. It's potential for ship building would also hopefully help keep their coastal empire together. Potentially this leads to some Norman Trans-Channel identity.
Perhaps the Normans in Normandy would eventually become anglicised and speak a variant of English.
Unlikely, in my opinion, at least if you're talking about a wholesale replacement. Bear in mind that IOTL the Channel Islanders retained their Norman-French dialects in fairly widespread use, despite their populations being so much smaller relative to that of England than the population of Normandy as a whole would have been, well into the 20th century... and that a POD this far back means that the factors resulting in that eventual change might then never have occurred.
No for the same reasons as England would not turn into a French speaking country*. Actualy nearby France, which will still be rather influential would make it even less likely that Normandy switches languages. I used belgium as an example earlier and can do the same here. Even though Wallonia (only Flandres was French) was part of the Holy Roman Empire, it still retained its Romance language, for a large part because of the influence of France. So the best case situation for an English Normandy would be an Anglophone elite and a Francophone population until nationalism arises. Although, I think in this case france's cultural influence is powerful enough for the elite of Normandy to remain Francophone.
*BTW I want to make clear I was not talking about an England whose king still owns Normandy, I was talking about the Angevin Empire or something similar, in which the king of England controls a large part of France. In that case the centre of power would be in the more wealthy French provinces (for example Richard Lionheart barely visited England and prefered France) . If he would only control Normandy the centre of power would be England.