england-and-wales legal-history
Why was 36 Edward III c. 1 in French while 25 Edward I c. 1 was in Latin?
<p>These laws were only passed about 65 years apart. Was there a shift from Latin into French during this period?</p>

<p>According to <a href="http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/lawbod/2018/05/31/law-french-when-law-and-language-collide/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the Law Bod's Blog, Law French – When Law and Language Collide</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>... After 1066 French became the language of the elite. During the reign of Edward I the first statute was written in French and Law was professionalised<a href="http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/lawbod/2018/05/31/law-french-when-law-and-language-collide/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">1</a>. This led to the development of a weird little dialect called law French.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>As you can see from the image below law French is a bizarre mix of French, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and whatever other languages happened to be hanging around. ...</p>
<p>Continental French was originally being used in courts but during the reign of Henry III and Edward I Anglo-French was used to create an entirely new legal vocabulary ‘giving special meanings to ordinary words ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p><sup>Above from the second result returned from a web search for &quot;why was french used for English law&quot;. The first result, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French" rel="nofollow noreferrer">a Wikipedia article about law French</a>, is also informative.</sup></p>
