Changes in regional scribal practice: degrees of standardization in 15th-century English legal copies from the county of Durham (original) (raw)
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International journal for the semiotics of law, 2015
One of the most striking experiences of my early days as a postgraduate student of medieval Scots law was an encounter with a twelfth-century charter which, apart from being written in Latin, might have served as a model or template for the land transfer documents ('dispositions') which I had learned how to draft the previous year in the undergraduate class called Conveyancing. Alliterative thoughts came into my head-conveyancing, conservatism, consistency, continuity-but also the question of when this seeming stability was first achieved, and how it crossed from Latin into the formal Scots-law English of my own day. Joanna Kopaczyk's fascinating study of legal language in Scottish towns from the late middle ages to the Reformation in Scotland does not address the conveyancing question but it raises similar issues about legal and administrative record-keeping, addressing them from the perspective of historical linguistics. She is interested in the tendency of both law and language towards standardization-'a set of norms which reduces the range of options and variety, and whose aim is to construct a reliable and authoritative point of reference' (p 1). She also wants 'to explore how the language of the law responded to the external conditions in which it was produced' (p 3). The book is thus a contribution to 'pragmaphilology', the study of the contextual aspects of historical texts. The basis for Dr Kopaczyk's investigation is three electronic or digital corpora: the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, and a transcript of the Wigtown Burgh Court Book 1512-1534 (Wigtown being a small county town in the rural southwest of Scotland). The Edinburgh and Helsinki
Royal chancery after 1066: Lexical choice, change and negotiation (2022)
2022
This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration between English and Norman administrators in the decades following the Norman Conquest. First, a community of royal and episcopal chancellors and scribes is reconstructed from historical and documentary sources and their ties and networks are described. In the second step, two subcorpora are used to illustrate the processes of lexical selection and focusing in their common professional language, Latin: royal writs of William I and circuit returns of the Domesday inquest for the SouthWest. Both parts of the study demonstrate high involvement of Norman actors in the leading bureaucratic positions but, at the same time, point to their wide collaboration with the local administrative and scribal personnel. As a result, the two vernaculars are mutually enriched with new professional vocabulary, while in the written Latin standard, common to both, compromise lexical features emerge.
Latin for specific purposes and Latinized English in 15th-century vernacular deeds
Revista de lenguas para fines específicos 3, 1996
Although English began to be used as language ofdocuments, records continued being the realm of Latín. Latín legal formulae andphrasing were adopted in English or translated literally leadíng to a Latinized English. Material taken directly from documents* has been selected to illustrate relevant grammatical points and idioms.
Abstract This article comprises a sociolinguistic analysis of the distribution of northern features in two sixteenth-century collections of wills of urban and rural provenance (York Clergy Wills and Swaledale Wills and Inventories, respectively). It is suggested that there is a correlation between dialect features such as the Northern Subject Rule, the uninflected genitive, and the third person plural pronouns and the urban or rural provenance of the wills as well as, to some extent, the social rank of the testators. This sheds light on how social factors might condition the resilience of dialect features in sixteenth-century northern English.
Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2019
This study analyses two Old English formulae _gret freodlice_ 'greets in a friendly manner' and _ic cyðe eow þaet_ 'I make it known to you that', which form a salutation-notification template in a document type called writs. It connects the emergence of this formulaic set to previous oral traditions of delivering news and messages and to their reflection in dictation practices from at least the time of King Alfred. Their later routinisation and standardisation is seen as a factor brought about by the centralised production of royal writs and their subsequent adoption as templates in monastic scriptoria across the country. These templates continue to be recycled in the early Middle English period both in English and in Latin writs, ultimately shifting to Latin-only documents during the reign of William the Conqueror. Although this shift does not hinder the continuity of the selected bureaucratic template into the later Middle Ages, it affects the structure of the discourse community associated with the chancery norms, consolidating its core (those literate in Latin who are involved in production and preservation of writs) and marginalising its periphery (English-speakers who used to make up the informed audience for writs in local courts).
On variation and change in London medieval mixed-language business documents
Language Contact and Development around the North Sea, 2012
This paper considers evidence for diachronic change in medieval mixed-language business writing produced in London in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The relevant languages were Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Medieval Latin, and the mixed-language system is briefly described, consisting of function words in either Medieval Latin or Anglo-Norman (depending on which was chosen as the matrix), and an amount of lexical items in English. The changes discussed concentrate around the end of the fourteenth century, which is when English resurfaced as a written language