Ranulf Higden

"It is clear that there are as many different languages as peoples in this island. The Scots, however, and the Welsh, in so far as they have not intermixed with other nations, have retained the purity of their native speech, unless perhaps the Scots took something in speech from living together with the Picts, with whom they once dwelt as allies. The Flemish who live in the west of Wales have abandoned their barbarous speech, and speak Saxon well enough. Likewise the English although in the beginning they had a language of three branches, namely southern, midland, and northern, as coming from three Germanic peoples, nevertheless as a result of mixture, first with the Danes and then Normans, by a corruption of their language in many respects, they now incorporate strange bleatings and babblings. There are two main causes for their present debasement of the native language, one, that children in the schools against the practice of other nations are compelled since the coming of the Normans to abandon their own tongue and to construe into French, and, secondly, that children of the nobility are taught French from the cradle and rattle."