Parliament switched from French to English in the 1400s. Statutes were published in Latin until about 1300, then in French until 1485. In that year, they started to appear in both French and English with the French disappearing in 1489.
As far as the royal court, Henry V (1413-1422) wrote letters in English and apparently encouraged the use of the language in writing.
(Source for the above: A History of the English Language by Baugh and Cable.)
As for Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, don’t take anything from there as gospel. While it has lots of interesting facts and is an entertaining read, there’s a fair number of errors in it as well.
You’re all quite wrong. The reason English spelling is so weird is because pronunciation has changed, and spelling has stayed the same. Most other languages have had spelling reforms every now and then. Your only such reform was 500 years ago and even that was a half-measure.
(Of course the things mentioned above were contributing factors.)
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short). In the first year, “s” will be used instead of the soft “c”. Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard “c” will be replaced with “k.” Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced by “f”. This will make words like “fotograf” 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” by “z” and “W” by “V”. During ze fifz year, ze
unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou”, and similar changes vud of kors; be aplid to ozer kombinations of
leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil b no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
So basically the Germans, annoyed at being thwarted, manage to get everyone to speak English with a really bad German accent. The English speakers don’t notice until it’s too late, and the Germans laugh their asses off back home.
Although not necessarily completely related to this subject, you may be interested in Hou tu pranownse Inglish. I haven’t read much of it, so for all I know it’s a bunch of useless stuff. It’s long, though, so it can’t be that bad. Check it out, though. Might be interesting.