The familiar story is that an English peasant raised the cow while a Norman lord ate the beef. The animal kept its English name; the meat acquired a French one. It is a memorable explanation of the language, helped along by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. It is also much tidier than the history.
The French words entered English gradually, and the distinction between the animal and the meat didn't become fixed immediately. The words tell us something about contact and status after the conquest. They don't provide a transcript of who ate what in 1066.
I still think the pattern is interesting once we stop asking it to prove the whole story.
Where the borrowed words are
English borrowed extensively from French, including much of the vocabulary of law and administration: judge, jury, court, justice, government and parliament. Familiar words for home and daily life, such as bread, house and work, retained older Germanic roots.
That is consistent with the status of French among people involved in ruling and administering post-conquest England. Languages borrow in the settings where their speakers meet, and social power affects which language has prestige.
But a list selected to make a point isn't a complete linguistic analysis. "Law" itself comes through Old Norse. French influence wasn't confined to coercion, and English words weren't confined to virtuous everyday work. The history is mixed, as the language is.
What a word can preserve
"Lord" developed from an Old English term meaning the keeper of the loaf. "Lady" is associated with the kneading of bread. Those origins preserve something about the household relationships from which the titles developed.
They don't establish that native authority was benevolent while imported authority was harsh. Anglo-Saxon society had hierarchy and slavery. A kindly-sounding etymology can't turn it into an egalitarian community.
What I find worth keeping is the connection between language and the circumstances in which people used it. Words can retain traces of work, status and contact long after speakers stop noticing where they came from.
The animal-and-meat story is a useful invitation to look more closely. It becomes less useful when a pleasing explanation is treated as proof of a complete history. We can appreciate what the language preserves without making it say more than it does.