This is a pretty rubbish post. For a start, it doesn’t cite any primary sources or legislation. 1066 was obviously the year of the invasion, but 1362 is princip

This is a pretty rubbish post. For a start, it doesn’t cite any primary sources or legislation. 1066 was obviously the year of the invasion, but 1362 is principally notable in English linguistic history for the Statute of Pleading. The Statute of Pleading did not deprecate French as an official language. (Indeed, the concept of a sole official language as applied is pretty anachronistic: the administration used, in a somewhat regular pattern, all three of English, French, and Latin; choice of language was more a matter of convention, habit, and fashion than official diktat.) It merely permitted the use of English in one area of government; but English was already used as an administrative language by the Normans as early as at the time of the writing of the Domesday Book. It makes very little sense (see parenthetical) to regard French as ‘the’ official language of England before the Statute; it makes even less sense to regard it as having lost that status, to the extent that such a claim means anything, after the passage of the Statute. The decline of French in English public and administrative life was a rather lengthy process, and French in fact held out longest in the field the Statute regulated, viz., the law; thus we find the famous passage from Sir Edward Coke as late as 1688: > Richardson Chief Justice de Common Banc al assises de Salisbury in Summer 1631 fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony, que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice, que narrowly mist, et pur ceo immediately fuit indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner et son dexter manus ampute et fix al gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court. By this time it would have made sense to regard English as the (de facto) language of state, but law French still lived; even the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730, which mandated the use of English in court proceedings, would not have obviated the habits of those accustomed to law French in the taking of personal notes and so on.