The new Norman kings, queens, and barons of the "Angle's Land" were often illiterate, but they were far more cosmopolitan than their predecessors.

Their grandchildren travelled back and forth to Europe a great deal. They held lands in France. They made pilgrimage to Rome. They loved to vandalize the Middle East.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of Richard the Lion-hearted and a brood of viciously contending princes, rode to the Crusades, dressed in practical, manly clothes and brought the music, poetry, rhythm, and seasonings of Southern France and the East back to England - and into the language.

These ruling families continued to speak French and have their scribes write edicts and proclamations in Latin, including the Magna Carta, signed by Eleanor's son John in 1215. But not long after the enchanting Eleanor, popular languages began to invade art.

Dante in Italian, Chaucer in English, and Cervantes in Spanish were all writers who walked through a door that people like Eleanor had opened. They began to write poetry and stories in the common, vulgar, tongue, rather than the language of the Church or the Law.

I had never connected my own struggle for plain language to these great early writers until a light went on for me one sunny morning in November 2000, when PLAIN's Chair, Christine Mowat, sat down at her computer with what must have been a darned good cup of coffee, and wrote to the PLAIN ListServ about the language people used on Chaucer's famous pilgrimage to Canterbury.

Christine reminded us that Geoffrey Chaucer was a member of the rising London middle class of the 1300s. In the spoken dialect of the England he knew, Chaucer has his host call on the Clerke of Oxenforde to tell his tale, not in the "heigh style" that clerics used to write for kings, but rather to...

"Speketh so pleyn at this time, I yow preye,
that we may understonde what ye seye."