While the idea that Henry V made English a state language cannot survive close inspection, English became an established language of culture and (to some extent) a language of record in Britain in the fifteenth century. But francophone continuities persisted in culturally specific ways in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland alongside shifts in the relations between French and English. Some of these are seen in the pioneering teaching of French in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when manuals for French (first seen in thirteenth-century England) began to conceptualize French less as a language of England and more as an adjunct of external relations. French texts continued to circulate, and were printed in greater numbers than English-language works. English was a regional language throughout the Middle Ages and French and Latin remained important vectors of communication for Britain’s external relations well into the early modern period. The medieval history of Britain’s French helps challenge any sense of English as ‘naturally’ attaining its current prevalence.