Wikipedia
Old French (, , ; Modern French ) was the Gallo-Romance dialect continuum spoken from the 9th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langue d'oc or Occitan language in the south of France. The mid-14th century is taken as the transitional period to Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance, specifically based on the dialect of the Île-de-France region.
The territory where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the historical Kingdom of France and its vassals (including parts of the Angevin Empire, which during the 12th century remained under Anglo-Norman rule), and Burgundy, Lorraine and Savoy to the east (corresponding to modern north-central France, Belgian Wallonia, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy), but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England, Sicily and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and of commerce (the term lingua franca indeed derives from the name of the French language, even though the Romance-based pidgin so identified was substantially based on Occitan and Italian).
Usage examples of "old french".
A mob of women, urged on by an old French guardsman, come and pillage under the nose of the escort a load of faggots confiscated for the benefit of a hospital.
That I am not alone in seeing things this way I noted in an interview with the 79 year old French author Michel Dé.
Among the accused had been a teenage Indian slave, a teenage African slave, a French sergeant, a Swiss soldier, and a twenty-seven-year old French woman sent to Louisiana against her will in a forced marriage.
He approached a knot of people roughly, and first of all grabbed the arm of a four-year-old French girl.
None was in uniform, though a few wore scraps of old French equipment.
They sang (when they were not too drunk) all the old French revolutionary songs of nearly a decade ago.
Harper said of nothing in particular, then he stooped and shoved at the coals with a poker made from an old French bayonet.
With 200 frontiersmen, he set out in flatboats down the Ohio River for Kaskaskia, an old French settlement ruled by the English with 250 houses and a stone fort, reached the town on July 4 and took it without firing a shot.