“…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.…”