English language of England in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with the Old Norman language, a Romance language closely related to Modern French. The Norman language in England eventually developed into Anglo-Norman. Because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking Anglo-Saxon, the influence of Norman consisted of introducing a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains. Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction
Anglo-Norman language and French have led to many "faux amis" (words having similar form but different meanings) in Modern English and Modern French. Since although a Romance language, Norman contains a significant amount of lexical material from Norse, some of the words introduced into England as part of Anglo-Norman were of Germanic origin. Indeed, sometimes one can identify cognates such as "flock" (Germanic in English existing prior to the Conquest) and "floquet" (Germanic in Norman). The case of the word "mug" demonstrates that in instances, Anglo-Norman may have reinforced certain Scandinavian elements already present in English. "Mug" had been introduced into northern