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In 1362 the government of Edward III issued a statute that is one of the bestknown, but least-understood, statements on the use of the vernacular in medieval England. The legislation required that English, rather than French, should be the compulsory language of oral communication in all royal and seignorial courts in the land. 1 Studies of the history of English have traditionally cited the statute as evidence that the second half of the fourteenth century marked a particularly eventful and interesting stage in the reemergence of the vernacular as the spoken language of the aristocracy and, thus, as an acceptable written language of literature. In numerous surveys of the "triumph of English," the Statute of Pleading forms part of an established list of examples of the apparently novel use of English as a valid language in the operations of the central government. 2 Other items on this list include the first explicit reference in the official records of state to the delivery in English of the opening speech to Parliament, also in 1362; 3 the first reference to, and transcription of, a formal oral declaration made by a king in English, in Henry IV's acceptance of the throne in 1399; 4 the earliest petitions toThe author is grateful to courts were not, of course, under royal jurisdiction and were not made subject to the legislation; seignorial courts held by churchmen were, however, included within the range of the statute.The Use of English 751 the Crown to be written in English, dating from 1344 and 1386; 5 and the first English-language responses to royal writs of inquiry, among the well-known guild returns of 1389. 6 This material, in conjunction with John Trevisa's often-cited statement that, by the 1380s, English had replaced French as the language of oral instruction in grammar schools, 7 has come to form the essential historical context for the revival of English as a literary language during the fourteenth century: the phenomenon that produced the vernacular "greats" of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and their successors is thus conventionally explained in terms of a great linguistic shift among the secular elites (whether gentle or bourgeois) that provided the market and audience for Middle English literature. 8 The mobilization of the 1362 statute, and of other associated legal and administrative sources, to advance an understanding of the new and expanding use of the vernacular in late-medieval oral communication and literary culture has certainly done much to contextualize the workings of the administrative, fiscal, and judicial apparatus of royal government in which writers such as Thomas Hoccleve operated and were employed. 9 But while the statute on the use of English in the 5 Kew, National Archives: Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), SC 8/192/9580, printed in R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, eds.,
Scarcely any turbulence, quarrels or disturbance ever occur there, but delinquents are punished with no other punishment than expulsion from communion with their society, which is a penalty they fear more than criminals elsewhere fear imprisonment and fetters. For a man once expelled from one of these societies is never received into the fellowship of any other of those societies. Hence the peace is unbroken and the conversation of all of them is as the friendship of united folk. 1 This was Sir John Fortescue's idealised account to the exiled prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster, of the peace-loving nature of London's Inns of Court and Chancery in the mid-fifteenth century. Fortescue was not concerned with the reality, which, as he knew all too well, was different. He was concerned to impress upon his young pupil the perfection of the English law and of the education of its practitioners, rather than the imperfections that existed in a society that the Prince, as he explicitly told him, would never experience. Few who were familiar with the legal quarter that surrounded the Inns would have recognised the Arcadia Fortescue described. Far from being the peaceful and well-ordered district the former chief justice invoked, in the period when he wrote the area to the west of London's Temple Bar was a liminal space, populated by--among others--large numbers of young trainee lawyers, in which the kind of unruly behaviour otherwise also associated with the early universities, not least the western suburb's Paris counterpart, the quartier latin to the south of the river This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Cambridge University Press in Law and History Review, available online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248017000372 It is not the copy of record. Copyright © 2017, Cambridge University Press.Hannes Kleineke and James Ross 2 Seine, was endemic. 2 Among the factors that made it so, the very existence of the established and to some extent tribal all-male societies of the Inns of Court and of Chancery, at close quarters with the royal law-courts and their heady mix of disputants and their hired legal counsellors in permanent competiton with each other, was of the first importance.Contemporaries were less than anxious to describe this state of affairs. In the day of London's earliest apologist, the twelfth-century cleric William FitzStephen, the western suburb had not yet become the home of the legal community, but even FitzStephen's fourteenth-century copyist, the London embroiderer Thomas Carleton, considered them insufficiently important to include them among his updates to the Description. 3 The fifteenth-century satyrical poem, the London Lickpenny, mercilessly mocked the venality of the men of law, and marked out Westminster Hall as a haunt of cutpurses, but otherwise had nothing to say about the district to the west of the city that housed the targets of the author's acerbic wit. 4 Nor did outsiders who visited London in the medieval period take much notice of the district through which they ...
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