The Spread of English in the Records of Central Government, 1400-1430

Dodd, Gwilym

doi:10.1484/m.usml-eb.3.4949

Cited by 23 publications

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“…Moreover, when royal clerks were engaged in professional activities, they may have been so in the general London-Westminster area as opposed to specifically at Westminster. Dodd's (2011bDodd's ( : 244, cf. 2011a distinction between "the clerks and scribes who inhabited the writing offices of Westminster" and "their freelance colleagues based in London" echoes older scholarship, whereas the newer view is that "[r]oyal clerks were ubiquitous in London" (Richardson 2011: 49).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One part of the evidence is that Chancery documents do not, in fact, show any unidirectional development toward the variety that has developed into present-day Standard English over time, let alone any sudden, categorical shift indicative of imposition of standardised spelling forms by a regulating body (Benskin 2004). This is to the extent that the clerks wrote in English in the first place, since Latin continued to dominate (Benskin 2004;Dodd 2011aDodd , 2011b, and it is to the extent that the language of a Chancery document is representative, for Chancery not only issued documents and dispatched them to recipients. The institution also received documents produced elsewhere for archiving purposes, which often entailed Chancery clerks copying them (cf.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham

Thaisen

2017

Folia Linguistica

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This paper applies quantitative methods in palaeography. It develops tree-structured regression models of the palaeographical variation found in a synchronic corpus of texts written in orthographically less standardised late Middle English and establishes their accuracy. There are sixteen models, each one relating to a letter-shape known to distinguish the Gothic cursive scripts Anglicana and Secretary. The models predict the presence of the individual letter-shape from one or more of the following variables, in no particular order: (1) localisation of texts’ orthographic variation; (2) text-type; and (3) in-word position. The discussion asks why several Secretary letter-shapes cluster in documents localisable to County Durham and the area further north, given the script’s association with (a) institutions of national administration in the London-Westminster area and (b) orthographic standardisation. It concludes that the linguistics and the palaeography do not co-vary during this period in the history of the English language and suggests that it may illuminate studies of the gradient between Anglicana and Secretary to pay attention to provincial centres, not least Durham.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham

Thaisen

2017

Folia Linguistica

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Chancery

Kendall

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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Chancery was the principal writing office of central government in medieval England. It was at the heart of a huge expansion of royal administrative and judicial bureaucracy in the thirteenth century and the related growth of documentary culture throughout England. Chancery had a foundational role in the development of vernacular literary culture in the late Middle Ages, not only because it trained legal writers who often also copied poetry, heard and read poetry, and sometimes authored poetry but because the petitions and writs which it drew up in abundance belonged to a mode of writing that deeply informed literary imaginations.

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Records of real people

2020

Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics

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English local documents – leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like – provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as relatively few documents have been available digitally or in print, they have been an underresearched resource. This volume shows the tremendous potential of late- and post-medieval English local documents: highly variable in language, often colourful, including developing formulae as well as glimpses of actual recorded speech. The volume contains eleven chapters relating to a new resource, A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The first four chapters outline a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of local documents. The remaining seven present studies of different aspects of the material, including supralocalization, local patterns of spelling and morphology, land terminology, punctuation, formulaicness and multilingualism.

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The Spread of English in the Records of Central Government, 1400-1430

Cited by 23 publications

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Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham

Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham

Chancery

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