The use of english: language, law, and political culture in fourteenth-century England

Speculum

Volumn 78, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 750-787

  Ormrod, W M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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EID: 60950738794     PISSN: 00387134     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0038713400131537     Document Type: Article

References (346)

1. Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (hereafter SR; London, 1810-28), 1:375-76. The ecclesiastical courts were not, of course, under royal jurisdiction and were not made subject to the legislation; seignorial courts held by churchmen were, however, included within the range of the statute.
2. E.g., Basil Cottle, The Triumph of English, 1350-1400 (London, 1969), pp. 17-18 and 91;
3. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971), p. 13;
4. Janet Coleman, English Literature in History, 1350-1400: Medieval Readers and Writers (London, 1981), p. 52;
5. Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580 (Chicago, 1984), pp. 8-9 and 40-161;
6. David Burnley, "Lexis and Semantics," in The Cambridge History of the English Language, 2: 1066-1476, ed. Norman Blake (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 409-99 (p. 428);
7. Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 4th ed. (London, 1993), pp. 144-46;
8. and John H. Fisher, The Emergence of Standard English (Lexington, Ky., 1996), pp. 18-19.
9. For a recent note of caution, see Glending Olson, "Geoffrey Chaucer," in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), pp. 566-88 (p. 580).
10. Conversely and ironically, the assumption that the statute remained unenforced means that it is also sometimes cited as evidence of the enduring influence of French: see, e.g., Jean Devaux, "From the Court of Hainault to the Court of England: The Example of Jean Froissart," in War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France, ed. Christopher Allmand (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 1-20 (p. 8).
11. Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols. (hereafter RP; London, 1783), 2:268. See below, Part 4.
12. RP 3:422-23; and Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397-1400: The Reign of Richard II, trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester, Eng., 1993), pp. 185-86.
13. Kew, National Archives: Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), SC 8/192/9580, printed in R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, eds., A Book of London English, 1384-1425 (Oxford, 1931), p. 272;
14. and PRO SC 8/20/997, printed in RP 3:225 (though not, it should be noted, transcribed onto the Parliament roll) and in Chambers and Daunt, eds., Book of London English, pp. 33-37.
15. H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Medieval England (London, 1919), pp. 137-238;
16. English Guilds, ed. Toulmin Smith, EETS OS 40 (Oxford, 1870);
17. and Book of London English, p. 275.
18. Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, ed. Churchill Babington and J. R. Lumby, 9 vols., Rolls Series 41 (London, 1865-86), 2:161.
19. For the context, see Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford, Calif., 1953), pp. 3-67;
20. Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973), pp. 71-75;
21. Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, 1340-1548: Learning, Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 43;
22. and Ronald Waldron, "John Trevisa and the Use of English," Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), 171-202 (pp. 172-73).
23. P. R. Coss, "Aspects of Cultural Diffusion in Medieval England: The Early Romances, Local Society and Robin Hood," Past and Present 108 (1985), 35-79.
24. Thomas Frederick Tout, "Literature and Learning in the English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century," Speculum 4 (1929), 365-89;
25. A. L. Brown, "The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century," in The Study of Medieval Legal Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford, 1971), pp. 260-81;
26. A. Compton Reeves, "Thomas Hoccleve, Bureaucrat," Medievalia et humanistica 5 (1974), 20-21;
27. A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, "The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century," in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 163-210;
28. Malcolm Richardson, "Hoccleve in His Social Context," Chaucer Review 20 (1986), 313-22;
29. J. G. Richter, "Education and Association: The Bureaucrat in the Reign of Henry VI," Journal of Medieval History 12 (1986), 81-96;
30. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, "Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380-1427," New Medieval Literatures 1 (1998), 59-83;
31. Ethan Knapp, "Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve's Formulary and La male regle," Speculum 74 (1999), 357-76;
32. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, "Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman," in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 103-31;
33. Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, Pa., 2001);
34. and Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, "Introduction," in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), pp. 1-11 (pp. 8-11).
35. Calendar of the Letter Books of the City of London, ed. R. R. Sharpe, 11 vols. (London, 1899-1907), Letter Book G, p. 73;
36. and Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants' Revolt (Manchester, Eng., 2001), pp. 208-9.
37. R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000-1500 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), pp. 24-28, 90-97, and 171-78;
38. Sarah Rees Jones, "Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labour: The Regulation of Labour in Medieval English Towns," in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 133-53 (pp. 138-40, 147-48, and n. 73);
39. and David M. Palliser, "Towns and the English State, 1066-1500," in The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell, ed. J. R. Maddicott and David M. Palliser (London, 2000), pp. 127-45 (p. 142).
40. See below, Part 2.
41. J. H. Baker, Manual of Law French, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, Eng., 1990), pp. 9-14;
42. and J. H. Baker, The Common Law Tradition: Lawyers, Books and the Law (London, 2000), pp. 225-46.
43. For more general histories of legal language, see David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law (Boston, 1963);
44. and Peter Tiersma, Legal Language (Chicago, 1999).
45. Paul Brand, "The Languages of the Law in Later Medieval England," in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D. A. Trotter (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 63-76, is of considerable importance but does not consider the period beyond the early fourteenth century and therefore omits discussion of the Statute of Pleading.
46. See, e.g., M. Dominica Legge, "Anglo-Norman and the Historian," History 26 (1941-42), 163-75 (p. 167);
47. Fisher, Emergence of Standard English, pp. 18-19;
48. and Tim William Machan, "Language Contact in Piers Plowman," Speculum 69 (1994), 359-85 (p. 383).
49. Cf. below, Part 4.
50. Without the evidence adduced by Baker (above, n. 13), the statute could be seen as another example of the notably selective nature of the Crown's approach to the enforcement of parliamentary legislation in the fourteenth century: for other examples of this phenomenon, see W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327-1377 (New Haven, Conn., 1990), pp. 63, 79, and 80.
51. See below, Part 5.
52. Baker, Manual of Law French, pp. 4-5.
53. For recent comment on the status of law French vis-à-vis "vernacular," see Bruce Holsinger, "Vernacular Legality: The English Jurisdictions of The Owl and the Nightingale," in The Letter of the Law, ed. Steiner and Barrington, pp. 154-84 (p. 161).
54. For the status of "French" as a language of prestige and privilege, see Burnley, "Lexis and Semantics," pp. 426-27 and 457-58.
55. See below, Part 4, which sets the statute in the context of Anglo-French military and diplomatic rivalry. Some distinction must clearly be drawn here between spoken and written language, with the shift toward standardization being slower in the former than in the latter: James Milroy, "Middle English Dialectology," in Cambridge History of the English Language, 2:156-206 (pp. 156-59);
56. and Norman Blake, "The Literary Language," ibid., pp. 500-541 (pp. 517-19).
57. For the effects of writing on the standardization of medieval vernaculars in general, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1983), pp. 19-30.
58. Much of the notion of a standard literary English in the later Middle Ages was, in any case, imagined. Steiner and Barrington, "Introduction, " p. 10, state: "[L]ater medieval writers invoked the supposed universality or commonness of English to justify writing in Middle English. But in doing so they were reacting to an older Anglo-Norman tradition in which dialect designates a social and discursive realm, a realm that retains within its purview both the legal and the imaginative while at the same time marginalizing other available dialects."
59. See the comments of Ruth Harvey, "Languages, Lyrics and the Knightly Classes," in Medieval Knighthood, 5: Papers from the Sixth Strawberry Hill Conference 1994, ed. Stephen Church and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, Eng., 1995), pp. 197-220 (esp. p. 220).
60. John Barnie, War in Medieval Society: Social Values and the Hundred Years War, 1337-99 (London, 1974), pp. 98-100;
61. W. Rothwell, "The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994), 45-67;
62. and W. Rothwell, "Chaucer and Stratford atte Bowe," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 74 (1992), 3-28.
63. For the general context, see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980), pp. 149-61;
64. Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), pp. 1-100;
65. and William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto, 1994).
66. Recently, both Alastair Minnis, Magister amoris: The "Roman de la Rose" and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), pp. 257-319
67. and Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270-1380 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 282-94, have, in different comparative contexts, highlighted the lateness of the English court's shift from Latin and French to English.
68. For the patronage of French texts at the courts of Edward III and Richard II, see Green, Poets and Princepleasers, pp. 152-53;
69. Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and Its Contexts, 1270-1350 (Woodbridge, Eng., 1982), pp. 45-52;
70. and Patricia J. Eberle, "Richard II and the Literary Arts," in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), pp. 231-53;
71. and for the greater prestige of French as against English texts circulating at court at the end of the fourteenth century, see V. J. Scattergood, "Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II," in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 29-43 (esp. p. 36).
72. For evidence that the aristocracy had relatively little knowledge of the French of France, see M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford, 1963), p. 6;
73. Barnie, War in Medieval Society, pp. 98-100;
74. Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), pp. 5-6;
75. and W. Rothwell, "The 'Faus Franceis d'Angleterre': Later Anglo-Norman," in Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. Ian Short (London, 1993), pp. 309-26. Given that certain members of the senior judiciary were actively involved in diplomacy and were thus presumably able to communicate in the "French of Paris," they have a special claim to being competent in all three forms of French.
76. See E. L. G. Stones, "Sir Geoffrey Scrope (c. 1285-1340), Chief Justice of King's Bench," English Historical Review 69 (1954), 1-17;
77. and David Higgins, "Justices and Parliament in the Early Fourteenth Century," Parliamentary History 12 (1993), 1-18 (p. 11).
78. William Rothwell, "The Role of French in Thirteenth-Century England," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1975-76), 445-66;
79. Ian Short, "On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England," Romance Philology 33 (1979-80), 467-79;
80. Coss, "Aspects of Cultural Diffusion," pp. 35-79;
81. Nicholas Watson, "The Politics of Writing Middle English," in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (Exeter, Eng., 1999), pp. 331-53 (p. 333 n. 3);
82. and Nick Havely, "Literature in Italian, French and English: Uses and Misuses of the Vernacular," in The New Cambridge Medieval History, 6: C. 1300-c. 1415, ed. Michael Jones (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 257-70.
83. See also the discussion of Froissart's comments on the learning of French by this group: below, Part 4.
84. Mellinkoff, Language of the Law, pp. 95-135. See also below, Part 4.
85. RP 2:273 (translation mine, with the assistance of Lisa Liddy).
86. Theodore F. T. Plucknett, Statutes and Their Interpretation in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1922);
87. and Helen Maud Cam, Law-Finders and Law-Makers in Medieval England (London, 1962), pp. 132-58.
88. SR 1:375-76 (translation modified). I am especially grateful to an anonymous reader for clarifying the translation and meaning of the statement rendered here as "that no person is to be prejudiced by the ancient terms and forms of the count, provided the substance of the action is fully stated in the declaration and in the writ." The form of the translation of this passage in SR is particularly garbled.
89. See below, Part 4.
90. For the politics of petitioning and legislation during the mid-fourteenth century, see Doris Rayner, "The Forms and Machinery of the 'Commune Petition' in the Fourteenth Century," English Historical Review 51 (1941), 198-233 and 549-70;
91. G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 356-75;
92. G. L. Harriss, "War and the Emergence of the English Parliament, 1297-1360," Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976), 35-56;
93. W. M. Ormrod, "Agenda for Legislation, 1322-c. 1340," English Historical Review 105 (1990), 1-33;
94. and Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 60-68.
95. For further discussion, see below, especially Parts 2 and 4.
96. For the role of royal justices in the making of legislation, see Bertha Haven Putnam, The Place in Legal History of Sir William Shareshull, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, 1350-1361: A Study of Judicial and Administrative Methods in the Reign of Edward III (Cambridge, Eng., 1950);
97. Stones, "Sir Geoffrey le Scrope," pp. 1-17;
98. Cam, Law-Finders and Law-Makers, pp. 132-58;
99. and Higgins, "Justices and Parliament," pp. 12-14.
100. For the importance of language as a marker of professional identity among the elite group of common lawyers, see Paul Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London, 1992), p. 18;
101. and below, Part 3.
102. and Baker, The Common Law Tradition, pp. 242-43.
103. The Hilary term 1363 began on 23 January; the first return date, the octave of Hilary, covered the period 20-26 January, with the quindene of Hilary covering the dates 27 January-2 February. For details, see C. R. Cheney, A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History, new ed., rev. Michael Jones, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 4 (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 99-101 and 115;
104. and Paul Brand, "Lawyers' Time in England in the Later Middle Ages," in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Eng., 2001), pp. 73-104 (p. 74). I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the suggestion about the proclamation of the statute in court.
105. See especially Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance, pp. 466-508.
106. and C. Given-Wilson, "Purveyance for the Royal Household, 1362-1413," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 56 (1983), 145-63.
107. For the significance (and the government's failure always to abide by this statute), see J. G. Edwards, " 'Justice' in Early English Parliaments," in Historical Studies of the English Parliament, ed. E. B. Fryde and Edward Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), 1:279-97.
108. Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III-Henry VI, 34 vols. (London, 1891-1916), 1361-4, pp. 291-93;
109. See Bertha Haven Putnam, "Maximum Wage-Laws for Priests after the Black Death," American Historical Review 21 (1915-16), 12-32;
110. Bertha Haven Putnam, "The Transformation of the Keepers of the Peace into the Justices of the Peace, 1327-1380," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 12 (1929), 19-48 (p. 46);
111. and W. M. Ormrod, "The Politics of Pestilence: Government in England after the Black Death," in The Black Death in England, ed. W. M. Ormrod and P. G. Lindley (Stamford, Eng., 1996), pp. 147-81 (p. 157 and n. 29).
112. RP 2:273: Thomas Walsingham simply assumed that the Statute of Pleading had been prompted by the commons: Thomas of Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols., Rolls Series 28/ 1 (London, 1863-64), 1:297-98;
113. and Chronicon Angliae, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, Rolls Series 64 (London, 1874), p. 52.
114. and G. Dodd, "Crown, Magnates and Gentry: The English Parliament, 1369-1421," University of York D.Phil, thesis (1998), pp. 38-40 and 184.
115. Rotuli Parliamentorum Angliae hactenus inediti, ed. H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, Camden Third Series 51 (London, 1935), p. xxxii;
116. and H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, "The Parliaments of Edward III," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 8 (1930), 65-82 (pp. 80-81).
117. For the London initiative, see above, p. 752.
118. For the long-standing parliamentary debate on purveyance, see W. R. Jones, "Purveyance for War and the Community of the Realm," Albion 7 (1975), 300-316.
119. For the ability of successive parliaments to pursue consistent political programs, sometimes over extended periods, see Ormrod, "Agenda for Legislation," pp. 19-24.
120. Plucknett, Statutes and Their Interpretation, pp. 134-36.
121. Compare the roll for 1366: RP 2:290.
122. Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, 1:297-98;
123. Chronicon Angliae, p. 52;
124. and John Capgrave, The Chronicle of England, ed. Francis Charles Hingeston, Rolls Series 1 (London, 1858), p. 222.
125. Calendar of Charter Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Henry III-Henry VIII, 6 vols. (London, 1903-27), 1341-1417, p. 174.
126. Prince Lionel was absent from Parliament, despatched by his father to take up the lieutenancy of Ireland, but the other two princes were present and were symbolically girded with lances by their father.
127. W. M. Ormrod, "Fifty Glorious Years: Edward III and the First English Royal Jubilee," Medieval History, n.s., 1 (2002), 13-20.
128. Edward Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989), pp. 229-46.
129. For the Roman jubilees, see Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London, 1975), pp. 231-42;
130. Diana Wood, Clement VI: The Pontificate and Ideas of an Avignon Pope, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 13 (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), pp. 90-93;
131. and Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias, Rome, 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven, Conn., 2000).
132. This has been construed as indicating that the whole of the Statute of Purveyors was made as a unilateral concession by the Crown, awarded by dispensation of the royal grace (Harriss, King, Par liament and Public Finance, pp. 379 and 506).
133. The decision to retract from a position adopted in the previous parliament, of 1361, that the right of purveyance was restricted to the king, queen, and their eldest son (SR 1:365), which was actually the position recommended by the commons in 1362, and to confine the privilege to the king and his consort may have been a matter of opportunism: the absence of Prince Edward from the parliament of 1362, occupied as he was with his plans for departure to Gascony to take up his new title of prince of Aquitaine, gave the king an unexpected chance to give away the rights of his son in return for political popularity and fiscal advantage.
134. PRO C 49/8/5 and SC 8/79/3947.
135. For overviews of royal justice in the later Middle Ages, see Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society;
136. and Anthony Musson and W. M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (Basingstoke, Eng., 1999).
137. J. H. Baker, The Order of Serjeants at Law, Selden Society Supplementary Series 5 (London, 1984);
138. and Musson and Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice, pp. 28-36.
139. One consequence was that the assize and jail delivery sessions now tended to be held in the vacations between the legal terms observed in king's bench and common pleas, when the senior common lawyers had the opportunity to visit the shires: by the 1340s the assizes (and, by association, the jail delivery commissions) had come to be organized into an established series of "circuits," with groups of contiguous counties being visited (even in somewhat erratic fashion) by single teams of judges. See Putnam, Shareshull (above, n. 29), pp. 24-26;
140. and Anthony Musson, Public Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Justice, 1294-1350 (Woodbridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 85-122.
141. For the longer-term association of serjeants-at-law with the assizes, see E. W. Ives, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England.
142. Thomas Kebell: A Case Study (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), pp. 74-76.
143. For the broader thesis, see Putnam, "Transformation of the Keepers of the Peace," pp. 19-48;
144. and Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), pp. 134-83.
145. For what follows, see E. W. Ives, "The Common Lawyers," in Profession, Vocation and Culture in Later Medieval England: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of A. R. Myers, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Liverpool, 1982), pp. 181-217 (pp. 197-208);
146. Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Samuel E. Thorne and J. H. Baker, 2 vols., Selden Society 71 and 105 (London, 1954-90), 2:xviii-xxxiii;
147. J. H. Baker, The Third University of England: The Inns of Court and the Common-Law Tradition, Selden Society Lecture for 1990 (London, 1990);
148. Brand, Making of the Common Law, pp. 57-75;
149. and Paul Brand, The Origins of the English Legal Profession (Oxford, 1992), pp. 106-19. See also below, Part 4.
150. R. C. Palmer, "County Year Book Reports: The Professional Lawyer in the Medieval County Court," English Historical Review 91 (1976), 776-801;
151. J. Bennett, "Provincial Gentlefolk and Legal Education in the Reign of Edward II," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57 ( 1984), 203-8;
152. Nigel Ramsey, "Retained Legal Counsel, c. 1275-c. 1475," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 95-112;
153. and Musson, Medieval Law in Context (above, n. 10), pp. 68-69 and 84-134.
154. See also below, Part 4.
155. For the special importance attached to oral pleading in medieval courts, see Jesse M. Gellrich, Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry (Princeton, N.J., 1995), pp. 28-29.
156. George E. Woodbine, "The Language of English Law," Speculum 8 (1943), 395-436;
157. and Brand, "Languages of the Law" (above, n. 13), pp. 65-66.
158. and Paul Brand, "Inside the Courtroom: Lawyers, Litigants and Justices in England in the Later Middle Ages," in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Peter Coss (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 91-112 (pp. 107-11).
159. For early law reporting and the origins of the year books, see Paul Brand, "The Beginnings of English Law Reporting," in Law Reporting in Britain, ed. Chantal Stebbings (London, 1995), pp. 1-14;
160. and The Earliest English Law Reports, ed. Paul Brand, 2 vols., Selden Society 111-12 (London, 1996).
161. For the language of oral pleading and of the year books, see Year Books of Edward II, 1: 1 & 2 Edward II, ed. F. W. Maitland, Selden Society 17 (London, 1904), pp. xxxiii-xxxvi;
162. For a discussion of the relationship between plea rolls and year books, see Year Books of Edward II, 14/2: 6 Edward II, A.D. 1313, ed. William Craddock Bolland, Selden Society 43 (London, 1926), pp. ix-xvi.
163. Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third, Year XVIII, ed. Luke Owen Pike, Rolls Series 31b/11 (London, 1904), pp. xxxi-xxxiv.
164. For an analysis of the contents of the Liber assisarum, a compilation of cases from the time of Edward III which includes a rather larger number of assizes (and criminal acts) than is typical in the regular series of year books, see Bertha Haven Putnam, "Chief Justice Shareshull and the Economic and Legal Codes of 1351-1352," University of Toronto Law Journal 5 (1943-44), 251-81 (pp. 269-80).
165. Brand, Origins of the English Legal Profession, p. 67.
166. For the ad hoc commissions, and a general survey of the system, see Richard W. Kaeuper, "Law and Order in Fourteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer," Speculum 54 (1979), 734-84.
167. Musson, Public Order, pp. 85-122.
168. Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, pp. 50-72;
169. and Edward Powell, "The Administration of Criminal Justice in Late-Medieval England: Peace Sessions and Assizes," in The Political Context of Law, ed. Richard Eales and David Sullivan (London, 1987), pp. 49-59 (pp. 50-53).
170. Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Bertha Haven Putnam (London, 1938), pp. xxiv-xxvi;
171. and Powell, "Administration of Criminal Justice," pp. 53-54.
172. Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace, pp. li-liii;
173. The impact can be seen in the heavy reliance of the fifteenth-century peace sessions on the presence of the local lawyers appointed to the quorum: see, e.g., Simon Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford, 1991), pp. 175-80.
174. In practice, it must be stressed that the increasing habit of referring serious cases from the peace sessions to the king's bench maintained a close sense of coordination between the shire-based commissions and the central courts: see Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society (above, n. 54), pp. 54-56.
175. Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1361-4, p. 291.
176. The relationship of the new powers of the peace commissions to the military and diplomatic situation has been especially emphasized by A. J. Verduyn, "The Attitude of the Parliamentary Commons to Law and Order under Edward III," University of Oxford D.Phil, thesis (1991), pp. 135-36.
177. Above, Part 2.
178. Ormrod, "Politics of Pestilence" (above, n. 43), p. 157.
179. For the scale of work arising from the inclusion of economic offenses in the jurisdiction of the justices of the peace in 1361 and 1362, see Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace, pp. cxxii-cxxiii and 379;
180. Yorkshire Sessions of the Peace, 1361-1364, ed. Bertha Haven Putnam, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 100 (Wakefield, Eng., 1939), pp. xxix-xxxiii;
181. and Records of Some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire, 1360-1375, ed. Rosamond Sillem, Lincoln Record Society 30 (Hereford, Eng., 1937), pp. xl-xlvii.
182. For details of the legal terms in king's bench and common pleas, see Cheney, Handbook of Dates, pp. 98-99.
183. Records of Some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire, 1360-1375, pp. xxviii-xxix;
184. Sessions of the Peace for Bedfordshire, 1355-1359, 1363-1364, ed. Elisabeth G. Kimball, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 48 and Historical Manuscripts Commission Joint Publication 16 (London, 1969), pp. 13-15;
185. Philippa C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422-1442 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 54-61;
186. For Chief Justice Shareshull's part in the statute of 1361, see Putnam, Shareshull (above, n. 29), p. 143.
187. Shareshull resigned in April 1361, but his successor, Sir Henry Green, might be seen to have continued to support the idea of disengaging the assize justices from the peace commissions: see Verduyn, "Attitude of the Parliamentary Commons," p. 142.
188. David J. Seipp, "Crime in the Year Books," in Law Reporting in Britain, ed. Stebbings, pp. 15-34, has revised the notion that criminal proceedings did not involve pleading, but it is clear that the year-book evidence on which he relies is linked to difficult cases referred up to king's bench and that Seipp's findings do not therefore relate to practice in the peace sessions.
189. Theodore F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5th ed. (London, 1956), pp. 399-418.
190. For what follows, see Baker, Common Law Tradition, pp. 225-46, esp. pp. 242-44.
191. Mellinkoff, Language of the Law, pp. 111-12.
192. Baker, Manual of Law French, p. 10 n. 8.
193. For evidence of a more general change in the character and quality of the composition and transcription of the year books by the end of the fourteenth century, suggestive of the abandonment of oral French and its increasing artificiality as a language of "verbatim" reporting, see Year Books of the Reign of King Edward III, Years XVII and XVIII, ed. Luke Owen Pike, Rolls Series 31b/10 (London, 1903), pp. xix-xx;
194. and M. Dominica Legge and Sir William Holdsworth, eds., Year Books of Edward II, 21:10 Edward II A.D. 1316-1317, Selden Society 54 (London, 1935), p. xliii.
195. For the attempt of Chaucer to evoke courtroom pleading (in the vernacular) see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 203-4.
196. Sir John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Angliae, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, Eng., 1949), p. 115.
197. Above, p. 752.
198. Margaret Hastings, The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth Century England: A Study of Legal Administration and Procedure (Ithaca, N. Y., 1947), pp. 30-31, commented that the declaration tended to be made in French;
199. her references indicate her assumption that the statute of 1362 remained a dead letter and that the rest of the proceedings were therefore also in French (p. 31 n. 16).
200. Year Books of Edward II, 1:xxxv-xxxvi;
201. Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third, Year XX (Part 2), ed. Luke Owen Pike, Rolls Series 31b/15 (London, 1911), pp. lxxviii-lxxix;
202. Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 2, 4th ed. (London, 1936), pp. 479-82;
203. Dominica Legge and Sir William Holdsworth, eds., Year Books of Edward II, 20: 10 Edward II, A.D. 1316-1317, Selden Society 52 (London, 1934), p. xxx;
204. Sir H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal of England (London, 1926), p. 239;
205. For the parallel development of a myth of origin that located the (re-)birth of English in the age of Chaucer, see Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer's English: A Study of Words, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 39 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), pp. 10-21 and 183-95.
206. This phase in the history of diplomatic has not been especially well charted, but see Eugène Déprez, Etudes de diplomatique anglaise de l'avènement d'Edouard Ier àcelui de Henri VII (Paris, 1908), pp. 11 and 99-100;
207. Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1911), 1:83 and 86;
208. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, pp. 51-53 and 103;
209. T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, 6 vols. (Manchester, Eng., 1920-33), 5:116;
210. H. Suggett, "The Use of French in England in the Later Middle Ages," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 28 (1946), 61-83 (pp. 61-63);
211. and Pierre Chaplais, "Privy Seal Drafts, Rolls and Registers (Edward I-Edward II)," English Historical Review 73 (1958), 270-73 (p. 273).
212. For a comparative context (which rather underrates developments in England), see Richard Britnell, "Pragmatic Literacy in Latin Christendom," in Pragmatic Literacy East and West, 1200-1330, ed. R. H. Britnell (Woodbridge, Eng., 1997), pp. 3-24 (pp. 18-23).
213. The fact that the statute rolls were one of the few central records that continued to be kept consistently in French until the end of the Middle Ages merely reinforces the point about the professional exclusiveness of the senior common lawyers, who, as I have already noted (above, Part 1), were in large part the authors of the legislation recorded there.
214. and John H. Fisher, Malcolm Richardson, and Jane L. Fisher, An Anthology of Chancery English (Knoxville, Tenn., 1984), pp. xvi and 55-56.
215. J. C. Holt, "A Vernacular-French Text of Magna Carta," English Historical Review 89 (1974), 346-64;
216. A. Carpenter, "English Peasants in Politics, 1258-1267," Past and Present 136 (1992), 3-42 (p. 22);
217. Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993), p. 219;
218. Some care is needed with the 1258 material, since the French and English texts of the Provisions of Oxford and the Ordinance of Sheriffs were not in fact proclamations in the strict sense but letters patent intended for preservation in the shires; the substantive legal changes included in these acts that required formal proclamation were, significantly, communicated in Latin. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 222-23.
219. For the processes of proclamation and associated issues of translation, see William Alfred Morris, The Early English County Court (Berkeley, Calif., 1926), p. 173;
220. J. R. Maddicott, "The County Community and the Making of Public Opinion in Fourteenth-Century England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 28 (1978), 27-43 (p. 36);
221. Baugh and Cable, History of the English Language (above, n. 2), pp. 135-36;
222. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), pp. 70-71;
223. and James A. Doig, "Political Propaganda and Royal Proclamations in Late Medieval England," Historical Research 71 (1998), 253-80 (pp. 264-65).
224. James Masschaele, "The Public Space of the Marketplace in Medieval England," Speculum 77 (2002), 383-421 (p. 393), points to an interesting example from 1312 in which the king is reported to have dictated (presumably in French) the contents of a writ of proclamation issued in Latin. Transcripts of the statutes were circulated by the chancery to the other government offices as well as to the sheriffs, and a number of originals survive: see, e.g., the series sent to the Exchequer during the reign of Edward III in PRO E 175/2/14, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 28.
225. For the parallel system whereby the Crown issued writs (in Latin) requesting that bishops order sermons to be delivered in support of the king's wars and other public enterprises, and for indications that such sermons were delivered in English, see H. J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III (Manchester, Eng., 1966), p. 163;
226. and A. K. McHardy, "Some Reflections on Edward III's Use of Propaganda," in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. S. Bothwell (Woodbridge, Eng., 2001), pp. 171-89 (pp. 175-76 and 180-81).
227. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, pp. 238-39;
228. Suggett, "Use of French," pp. 62-64;
229. Elna-Jean Young Bentley, "The Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve," Emory University Ph.D. thesis (1965), pp. xxv-xxvi;
230. and Pierre Chaplais, "Master John de Branketre and the Office of Notary in Chancery, 1355-1375," Journal of the Society of Archivists 4 (1971), 169-202.
231. Tout, Chapters in Administrative History, 5:1-110.
232. For the ability of medieval lay administrators to deal with the languages of written government, see R. V. Turner, "The Miles litteratus in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: How Rare a Phenomenon?" American Historical Review 83 (1978), 928-45;
233. Helen M. Jewell, "The Cultural Interests and Achievements of the Secular Personnel of the Local Administration," in Profession, Vocation and Culture, ed. Clough (above, n. 62), pp. 130-54 (pp. 132-34);
234. The role of the clerk as intermediary between the text and its intended recipient is nicely articulated in Trevisa's preface to his translation of the Polychronicon: Waldron, "John Trevisa" (above, n. 7), pp. 174-78;
235. Ronald Waldron, "Trevisa's Original Prefaces on Translation: A Critical Edition," in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. E. D. Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and J. S. Wittig (Woodbridge, Eng., 1988), pp. 285-99;
236. Green, Poets and Princepleasers (above, n. 20), p. 152;
237. and Ralph Hanna III, "Sir Thomas Berkeley and His Patronage," Speculum 64 (1989), 878-916 (pp. 895-96).
238. Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford, 1988), pp. 162-63, provides an interesting anthropological example of the discreet use of languages (and scripts) for different areas of activity and forms of record in bi- and trilingual cultures.
239. Cf. Fisher, Richardson, and Fisher, Anthology of Chancery English, p. xv.
240. The common notion that the Parliament rolls shifted from French to English in the fifteenth century is to be resisted. Virtually all the English sections of the Parliament rolls from the first instance in 1397 to the end of the printed sequence in 1503 are transcriptions of documents submitted to the clerk of Parliament in English. It was only from 1423 that the clerk of the commons began to submit some of the common petitions in English and that the clerk of Parliament preserved the original language of these in the transcription made onto the Parliament roll. And from precisely the same time, it is to be noted that certain of the narrative sections of the Parliament rolls shift from French to Latin. The matter deserves further attention. For the present see the example of the summaries of the parliamentary sermons on the rolls discussed by Jean-Philippe Genet, "New Politics or New Language? The Words of Politics in Yorkist and Early Tudor England," in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. John L. Watts (Stroud, Eng., 1998), pp. 23-64 (pp. 30-33).
241. In this respect compare ecclesiastical practice whereby sermons delivered orally in the vernacular were generally written up as texts in Latin: see G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge, Eng., 1926), pp. 223-27;
242. David L. D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Delivered from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), p. 95;
243. and T. P. Dolan, "English and Latin Versions of FitzRalph's Sermons," in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis, York Manuscripts Conferences 1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), pp. 27-37 (p. 30).
244. Legge, "Anglo-Norman and the Historian" (above, n. 14), p. 169;
245. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 65;
246. Michael J. Bennett, "The Court of Richard II and the Promotion of Literature," in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 4 (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 3-20 (pp. 10-11);
247. and Derek Pearsall, "Chaucer and English-ness," Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998), 77-99 (p. 90).
248. For this Anglophone culture, see above, pp. 753-55.
249. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. H. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 25 vols. (Brussels, 1867-77), 2:326 and 419.
250. The story of the ordinance for the teaching of French is still often taken at face value: see, e.g., Sophia Menache, The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1990), p. 36.
251. For comment on the March 1337 episode, see Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, in progress (London, 1990-), 1:292-93.
252. Froissart's comments could conceivably have been framed within the context of the ideas set out by Trevisa cited above at n. 7.
253. In the last decade of the thirteenth century, by contrast, it was assumed that the aristocracy (broadly defined) needed to learn French as well as English: Vale, Princely Court (above, n. 20), pp. 287-88.
254. If we are right in assuming that this announcement was itself made in French, then one wonders how many of the parliamentary commons absented themselves from Westminster Palace to hear the same text subsequently rendered (presumably in English) to an excited crowd of Londoners outside St. Paul's Cathedral: Chronica Adae Murimuth et Roberti de Avesbury, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, Rolls Series 93 (London, 1889), pp. 259-61.
255. see also the case of 1381 in RP 3:98.
256. R. Butt, A History of Parliament: The Middle Ages (London, 1989), p. 325, incorrectly treats the Parliament roll for 1363 as providing the first instance of the use of English in this respect: the error has been fairly common. It needs to be emphasized that the records of all these entries on the Parliament rolls were made in French.
257. For what follows see "The Ransom of John II, King of France, 1360-1370," ed. Dorothy M. Broome, Camden Miscellany XIV, Camden Third Series 37 (London, 1926);
258. John Le Patourel, "The Treaty of Brétigny, 1360," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th sen, 10 (1960), 19-39;
259. "Some Documents regarding the Fulfilment and Interpretation of the Treaty of Brétigny (1361-1369)," ed. Pierre Chaplais, Camden Miscellany XIX, Camden Third Series 80 (London, 1952);
260. G. P. Cuttino, English Medieval Diplomacy (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), pp. 91-94;
261. and Sumption, Hundred Years War, 2:195-503.
262. Resulting in the so-called Treaty of Fleur-de-Lys (21 November 1362): Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literae et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed. Adam Clarke, J. Cayley, J. Baley, F. Holbrooke, and J. W. Clarke, 4 vols, in 7 parts (London, 1816-69), 3/2:681.
263. Ormrod, Reign of Edward III (above, n. 14), p. 217 n. 21.
264. Public opinion was not necessarily so positive: see David Green, The Black Prince (Stroud, Eng., 2001), p. 71.
265. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance (above, n. 27), pp. 314-20;
266. and W. M. Ormrod, "A Problem of Precedence: Edward III, the Double Monarchy, and the Royal Style," in Age of Edward III, ed. Bothwell, pp. 133-69.
267. More generally, see V. H. Galbraith, "Nationality and Language in Medieval England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 23 (1941), 113-28.
268. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry (above, n. 20), pp. 65 and 81, draws attention to the fact that Edward III used English mottoes in all known cases except that of the Order of the Garter. While this says something about the culture of his court, it does not denote that he spoke English; and it is worth commenting that the only motto to have lasting impact and general circulation was, of course, the French "Honi soit qui mal y pense" of the Garter itself.
269. In 1344, 1346, and 1377: RP 2:150, 158, and 362.
270. The precedent was that of 1295: Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, ed. William Stubbs, 9th ed., rev. H. W. C. Davis (Oxford, 1913), p. 480.
271. Such official prompts presumably contributed in part to the periodic demands for the expulsion of aliens from England during the later fourteenth century: see A. K. McHardy, "The Alien Priories and the Expulsion of Aliens from England in 1378," Studies in Church History 12 (1975), 133-41.
272. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford, 1996), has argued that a sense of nationhood was already clearly established in English literate culture in the half century before the outbreak of the Hundred Years War; but he also stresses that the use of English as the language of communication did not, in this period, necessarily represent a conscious political choice on the part of the writer and that Latin, French, and English were still understood to support each other in symbiotic relationship (p. 181).
273. See also the comments of Pearsall, "Chaucer and Englishness," pp. 88-89;
274. and Hans-Jürgen Diller, " 'For Engelondes sake': Richard II and Henry of Lancaster as Intended Readers of Gower's Confessio Amantis," in Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Ulrich Broich, Theo Stemmler, and Gerd Stratmann (Tübingen, 1984), pp. 39-53 (pp. 42-45).
275. Insofar as the debates around the Statute of Pleading reveal a new position reached by the early 1360s, it may be that the experience of a quarter century of major war with France really had now generated a sense of instability, and even tension, in a previously harmonious trilingualism. For the revival of national sentiment in the fourteenth century, see Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford, 1985), pp. 49-65;
276. Menache, Vox Dei, pp. 191-209 (esp. p. 195);
277. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, Eng. 1997), pp. 35-65;
278. and Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1997), pp. 250-331.
279. The link between 120 Suggett, "Use of French," pp. 74-76.
280. For parliamentary petitions in English, see Fisher, Emergence of Standard English (above, n. 2), pp. 45-46.
281. J. L. Barton, "The Medieval Use," Law Quarterly Review 81 (1965), 562-77;
282. Robert C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348-1381: A Transformation of Governance and Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), pp. 107-10;
283. Timothy S. Haskett, "The Medieval English Court of Chancery," Law and History Review 14 (1996), 245-313;
284. Select Cases in Chancery A.D. 1364 to 1471, ed. William Paley Baildon, Selden Society 10 (London, 1986), p. xiii;
285. W. J. Jones, The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford, 1967), p. 193 and n. 5;
286. For the development and importance of form in chancery bills, see Timothy S. Haskett, "Country Lawyers? The Composers of English Chancery Bills," in The Life of the Law, ed. P. Birks (London, 1993), pp. 9-23;
287. and Timothy S. Haskett, "Conscience, Justice and Authority in the Late-Medieval English Court of Chancery," in Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Anthony Musson (Woodbridge, Eng., 2001), pp. 151-63.
288. For the internal mechanisms of training and promotion and the powerful sense of identity within the central bureaucracy, see C. W. Smith, "Some Trends in the English Royal Chancery, 1377-1483," Medieval Prosopography 6 (1985), 69-94;
289. Richter, "Education and Association" (above, n. 9), pp. 81-96;
290. W. M. Ormrod, "Accountability and Collegiality: The English Royal Secretariat in the MidFourteenth Century," in Ecrit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries médiévales: Espace français, espace anglais, ed. Kouky Fianu and DeLloyd J. Guth, Textes et Etudes du Moyen Age 6 (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997), pp. 55-85 (pp. 76-84);
291. and Malcolm Richardson, The Medieval Chancery under Henry V, PRO List and Index Society, special ser., 30 (London, 1999), pp. 32-71.
292. A. H. Thomas and Philip E. Jones, eds., Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London, 1323-1482, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1926-61), 1413-37, pp. vii-xix.
293. A similar point can be made about the records of the London companies: Lisa Jefferson, "The Language and Vocabulary of the Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Records of the Goldsmiths' Company," in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. Trotter (above, n. 13), pp. 175-211 (pp. 175-86).
294. Margaret Aston, "Lollardy and Literacy," History 62 (1977), 347-71;
295. Anne Hudson, Lollards and Their Books (London, 1985), pp. 67-84;
296. Anne Hudson; The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), pp. 30-33;
297. Ralph Hanna III, "The Difficulty of Ricardian Prose Translation: The Case of the Lollards," Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990), 319-40;
298. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 30;
299. Nicholas Watson, "Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409," Speculum 70 (1995), 822-64;
300. Gellrich, Discourse and Dominion (above, n. 64), pp. 156-58 and 166-68;
301. and Minnis, Magister amoris (above, n. 25), pp. 314-15.
302. For more general shifts and uncertainties in the relative authority of Latin and English during the later fourteenth century, see Derek Pearsall, "Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis," in Latin and Vernacular, ed. Minnis, pp. 13-25;
303. Machan, "Language Contact in Piers Plowman" (above, n. 14), pp. 359-85;
304. and Matthew Boyd Goldie, "Audiences for Language-Play in Middle English Drama," in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove, and A. Compton Reeves, The Northern World 2 (Leiden, 2002), pp. 177-216.
305. For the situation in London, see Sheila Lindenbaum, "London Texts and Literate Practice," in Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. Wallace (above, n. 2), pp. 284-309 (pp. 286-93).
306. For the context of these cases, see, respectively, Richard G. Davies, "Alexander Neville, Archbishop of York, 1374-1388," Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 47 (1975), 87-101;
307. J. G. Bellamy, "The Northern Rebellions of the Later Years of Richard II," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 47 (1964-65), 254-74;
308. and J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), pp. 145-46.
309. and for context, Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000-1485 (London, 1995), pp. 263-317.
310. For the quality of "authenticity" associated with writing in English, see Lindenbaum, "London Texts," pp. 289-90.
311. As implied, for example, by Bennett, "Court of Richard II," pp. 7-8;
312. and McHardy, "Reflections on Edward III's Use of Propaganda," pp. 188-89.
313. Andrew Cole, "Chaucer's English Lesson," Speculum 77 (2002), 1128-67, notes that it was the writers themselves, both in England (Chaucer) and on the Continent (Nicole Oresme, Christine de Pizan), who felt the need to imagine some form of "special regal warrant" for their use of the vernacular (p. 1135).
314. Derek Pearsall, "The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer's Audience," Yearbook of English Studies 7 (1977), 68-74;
315. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 26 (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 109-222;
316. and Lillian M. Bisson, Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (New York, 1998), pp. 24-25.
317. and Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397-1400, trans. Given-Wilson (above, n. 4), pp. 172 and 185-86.
318. Henry IV was, in general, more inclined to speak in Parliament than his predecessor, though his other speeches are recorded in French: Dodd, "Crown, Magnates and Gentry"
319. (above, n. 45), p. 66 and n. 258.
320. translation slightly modified from the version provided in Fisher, Richardson, and Fisher, Anthology of Chancery English, p. xvi.
321. Malcolm Richardson, "Henry V, the English Chancery, and Chancery English," Speculum 55 (1980), 726-50;
322. Mueller, Native Tongue (above, n. 2), pp. 11-12;
323. J. D. Burnley, "Curial Prose in England," Speculum 61 (1986), 593-614;
324. Christopher Allmand, Henry V (London, 1992), pp. 421-25;
325. Derek Pearsall, "Hoccleve's Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation," Speculum 69 (1994), 386-410 (p. 398);
326. N. F. Blake, A History of the English Language (Basingstoke, Eng., 1996), pp. 173-77;
327. Above, Part 4.
328. It is worth remembering that the huge formulary of privy seal forms written by Thomas Hoccleve in the mid-1420s contains not a single document in English: Bentley, "Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve," pp. xxv-xxvi.
329. Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 37 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), pp. 3-21.
330. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, N.J., 1993), p. 49;
331. Paul Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (London, 1998), pp. 173-95;
332. Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of London, 1413-37, pp. viii and xv-xvi;
333. T. Allmand, "Henry V the Soldier, and the War in France," in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford, 1985), pp. 117-35 (pp. 123-24);
334. and Strohm, England's Empty Throne, p. xiii.
335. Note in particular the city's compilation of English texts of the royal legislation on purveyance in response to the specification of the statute of 1422 that these be proclaimed: SR 2:213;
336. Calendar of Letter Books of London, Letter Book I, pp. 288-98;
337. Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literae et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed. George Holmes, 10 vols. (The Hague, 1739-45), 4/3:179-80;
338. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III-Henry VI, 33 vols. (London, 1896-1947), 1419-22, pp. 118-20;
339. Calendar of Letter Books of London, Letter Book I, p. 244 and n. 2;
340. and Doig, "Political Propaganda," pp. 264-65.
341. The text of the proclamation is to be distinguished from the king's signet letter of 22 May to the duke of Gloucester ordering its circulation: Rymer, Foedera, ed. Holmes, 4/3:175;
342. Calendar of Close Rolls, 1419-22, pp. 108-9;
343. Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399-1422), ed. J. L. Kirby (London, 1978), pp. 182-83 (no. 894);
344. Charles Ross, "Rumour, Propaganda and Popular Opinion during the Wars of the Roses," in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England, ed. Ralph A. Griffiths (Gloucester, Eng., 1981), pp. 15-32;
345. and Alison Allen, "Royal Propaganda and the Proclamations of Edward IV," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 59 (1986), 146-54.
346. For the possible role of the written vernacular in the development of a discourse of "new politics" at the end of the fifteenth century, see Genet, "New Politics or New Language?" (above, n. 108), p. 58.