One English language

Out of the Norman Conquest came a new language. The king and his noblemen had spoken Norman French, while the peasants carried on speaking Anglo-Saxon, and for two centuries the two hardly mixed. Slowly they did: the English language grew out of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon, which gradually combined into one, leaving pairs of words with the same meaning side by side, one from each root, such as 'ask' and 'demand'.

That language soon had a means of spreading further than any scribe could copy out by hand. William Caxton became known for being the first person in England to print books using a printing press, and The Canterbury Tales was among the first books he printed.

England's trade brought skilled people in from abroad to work as well as to sell. The engineers who came to work in England in the Middle Ages came from Germany, weavers arrived from France, glass makers came from Italy, and the canal builders who came to work in England in the Middle Ages came from Holland, each bringing a trade the country needed.