Content introduction chapter I peculiar use of noun in middle english

2.2. Noun Borrowing in Middle English
The Latin component in the vocabulary of Old English was small, only amounting to a few per cent of the total of surviving Old English words, and many (but by no means all) of these words were doubtless of very rare occurrence, confined to very occasional use by scholars. The securely identified pre-Conquest borrowings from French amount to barely a handful, and even in very late, post-Conquest Old English not many more are recorded.¹⁰
In Middle English this picture changes radically. If we look at the vocabulary of Middle English as a whole, the evidence of dictionaries suggests that the number of words borrowed from French and/or Latin outstrips the number of words surviving from Old English by quite a margin. However, words surviving from Old English (as well as a few of the Scandinavian borrowings, especially they) continue to top the high frequency lists (as indeed mostly remains the case even in modern-day English).
The formulation ‘French and/or Latin’ is an important one in this period. Often we can tell that a word has come from French rather than Latin very clearly because of differences of word form: for instance, English peace is clearly a borrowing from Anglo-Norman and Old French pais, not from Latin pac-, pāx. Some other pretty clear examples are marble, mercy, prison, palfrey, to pay, poor, and rule. It is often much more difficult to be certain that a Middle English word has come solely from Latin and not partly also from French; this is because, in addition to the words it inherited from Latin (which typically showed centuries of change in word form), French also borrowed extensively from Latin (often re-borrowing words which already existed in a distinct form). Some typical examples are animal, imagination, to inform, patient, perfection, profession, religion, remedy.
Given these factors, any figures for the relative proportions of French and Latin borrowings in the Middle English period have to be hedged about with many provisos. However, the broad picture is clear. In Middle English, borrowing from French is at least as frequent as borrowing from Latin, and probably rather more frequent.
By 1500, over 40 per cent of all of the words that English has borrowed from French had made a first appearance in the language, including a very high proportion of those French words which have come to play a central part in the vocabulary of modern English. By contrast, the greatest peak of borrowing from Latin was still to come, in the early modern period; by 1500, under 20 per cent of the Latin borrowings found in modern English had yet entered the language.
The greatest peak of first examples of French borrowings in English comes in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This probably largely corresponds to the realities of linguistic change, since we know that this is the period in which ¹¹English was taking on many technical functions from Latin and, especially, French, at least so far as written records were concerned. However, this is precisely when our volume of surviving Middle English material also goes up dramatically, and so we cannot always rule out the possibility that words existed in English rather earlier. Certainly, some much earlier texts, such as the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, show considerable borrowing from French at an early date, and we cannot always be certain that an absence of earlier attestations necessarily means that a word did not exist in at least some varieties of English at an earlier date.
Mixed language texts pose many difficult challenges. One quite common pattern is for accounts, records, and other official documents to have Latin as the ‘matrix’ language, but to switch freely to a vernacular language to name particular things or concepts. Whether the vernacular language in question is French or English can be very difficult to tell, or in many cases plain impossible.
In fact, many scholars who have spent time working on such documents take the view that the writers themselves probably did not always distinguish very clearly between one clearly defined vocabulary as ‘English’ and another as ‘French’; the considerable overlap, of words belonging to both languages (as a result of earlier borrowing), in a context in which new words were being borrowed all of the time, would indeed have made it almost impossible to make such a clear distinction, especially in many areas of technical vocabulary. For some examples of some of the implications for OED data see the entries for oillet n., pane n.¹, pastern n., pullen n., rack v.², russet n. and adj.