Chancery

Abstract

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.