The use of the French definite article (mostly the forms le, les, lez, and la) in multilingual records produced in Medieval Latin across England has been extensively researched. 1 The functions of the French definite article closely align with those expected in monolingual French texts [in expressions like ‘construccionem de le ale’ (Durham Account Rolls (henceforth, DAR) Rott. Terrar. 1419–20)] 2 at least until the mid-fifteenth century, when it seemed to have started to function as a textual marker to indicate a switch into the vernacular in syntactically unpredictable contexts: for instance, it was combined with the partitive despite the indefinite nature of the referent (e.g. ‘purgacione del...