Flemish and the Children's Story of Fornum Saint Martin

If fornum saint martin was only eight miles from wolpit, you wouldn't expect the dialect to shift so much in that distance that it wouldn't be understandable by the locals. But there were other languages being spoken in england at the time. The language of the royal court was french, because the normans had conquered england around a century earlier. So if the children were from the upper class, they might have known french, but not the middle english that the natives spoke. They could have been the children of some other kind of foreigner. And there was a near by community of foreigners, because fornum saintmartin was the home of a group flemish em