Changes in regional scribal practice: degrees of standardization in 15th-century English legal copies from the county of Durham (original) (raw)

During the Late Middle Ages it was quite usual in England to make copies of legal deeds which were compiled in cartularies or registers. These copies served the purpose of granting the preservation of title deeds, contracts, etc. in case of loss or destruction, as well as providing Chancery officials with documents which could be inspected to resolve, for example, land disputes. This paper intends to show how the scribes in charge of making these copies liable to Chancery inspection tried to eliminate regional dialectal features present in the original documents. It seems instead, that they adopted features dominant in Chancery English following thus the drift towards written standardization. In order to carry out this work we have used a corpus of documents produced in Durham, seat of an important chancery far away from the focus of influence of Chancery English.