I knew about the radical change from olde to middle english, and I knew too that the language of the court was French and highbrow, so a lot of the formal words in English (detest, indictment, implicate... the list goes on and on) have almost mirror images in french, which also makes having a large english vocabulary a powerful asset in learning French.

Although, in spite of it's germanic roots, English still has remarkably few distinctly german root words (like kindergarten).