Book Review: Records of Real People: Linguistic Variation in Middle English Local Documents

Abstract

is, like the book, an invaluable addition to the field. It contains over 5000 documentary texts such as accounts, conveyances, and ordinances, in or containing English, composed between 1399 and 1525. These texts have been sourced from archives across England and are freely available online in four different versions: base, concordance, readable, and diplomatic. The base version includes the editors' coding and commentary, the concordance version contains files which are compatible with concordance software, the readable version is more similar to a conventional edition, and the diplomatic version reproduces symbols and abbreviations in the texts graphically. 1 The book's eleven chapters, divided into three parts, explore the data presented in this new corpus. The first part outlines the book's theoretical and methodological approach to Middle English local documents. As documents which relate to such universal concerns as land holdings, money, and legal disputes, they provide insight