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Trilingualism in the Medieval English Bureaucracy: The Use—and Disuse—of Languages in the Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal Office

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Gwilym Dodd
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 253 - 283
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2012

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References

1 For example, see Laura Wright, “Bills, Accounts, Inventories: Everyday Trilingual Activities in the Business World of Later Medieval England,” and Jefferson, Lisa, “The Language and Vocabulary of the Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Records of the Goldsmiths’ Company,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. Trotter, D. A. (Woodbridge, 2000), 149–56 and 175–211Google Scholar; and Britnell, Richard, “Uses of French Language in Medieval English Towns,” in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn et al. (Woodbridge, 2009), 81–89Google Scholar.

2 A starting point is Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Watson, Nicholas, Taylor, Andrew, and Evans, Ruth, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (Exeter, 1999)Google Scholar.

3 Pearsall, Derek, “The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century,” in Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Cooney, Helen (Scarborough, 2001), 15–27, esp. 17Google Scholar. Pearsall does, however, acknowledge that Henry’s apparent fostering of the English language should be seen alongside his continued employment of French in personal letters to family members (19). See also Patterson, Lee, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Cox, Jeffrey N. and Reynolds, Larry J. (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 69–107Google Scholar.

4 Dodd, Gwilym, “The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c. 1420–1450,” Speculum 86, no. 1 (January 2011): 117–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Spread of English in the Records of Central Government, 1400–1430,” in Vernacularity in England and Wales, c. 1300–1550, ed. Salter, Elisabeth and Wicker, Helen (Turnhout, 2011), 225–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 In relation to chancery, this assertion rests on a key distinction being made between records produced within chancery, by the clerks working there (e.g., original writs, letters patent, letters close), and those produced outside the writing office that were sent there for action and safekeeping (e.g., chancery bills, parliamentary petitions, privy seal writs, signet letters). The former were mostly written in Latin; the latter were written in French until the early fifteenth century but were then increasingly written in English. This important point was first properly elucidated by Benskin, Michael, “Chancery Standard,” in New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from 12 ICEHL, Glasgow, 21–26 August 2002, 2, Lexis and Transmission, ed. Kay, Christian, Hough, Carole, and Wotherspoon, Irené (Glasgow, 2004), 1–39Google Scholar.

6 Between January and June 1437, more than twice as many signet letters were written in French than in English. See The National Archives (TNA), PSO 1/5/230–54. For further discussion, see Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” 129–30 and n. 41. All further manuscript references are to documents kept in TNA, Kew.

7 On the linguistic phenomenon in general, see Romaine, Suzanne, Bilingualism, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1995), 180Google Scholar. For discussion of the medieval context, see Voights, Linda Ehrsam, “What’s the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England,” Speculum 71, no. 4 (October 1996): 813–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 818–23.

8 See Tony Hunt, “Code-Switching in Medical Texts,” and Wright, “Bills, Accounts, Inventories,” in Trotter, Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 131–47 and 149–56. See also Wright, Laura, “Macaronic Writing in a London Archive, 1380–1480,” in History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, ed. Rissanen, Matti, Ihalainen, Ossi, Nevalainen, Terttu, and Taavitsainen, Irma (Berlin, 1992), 762–70Google Scholar, and “Mixed-Language Business Writing: Five Hundred Years of Code-Switching,” in Language Change: Advances in Historical Sociolingusitics; Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs, ed. Jahr, Ernst Håkon (Berlin, 1998), 99–117Google Scholar.

9 Ad Putter, “The French of English Letters: Two Trilingual Verse Epistles in Context,” in Wogan-Browne et al., Language and Culture, 397–408.

10 For example, the pledges to Parliament made by Henry IV in 1399 that the clerks recorded on the parliament roll, apparently word for word in English, within a block of text that was predominantly written in French; Given-Wilson, Chris et al. , eds., Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (Leicester, 2005), CD-ROM, Parliament of 1399, items 53 and 56Google Scholar.

11 For example, TNA, SC 8/83/4111; 83/4112; 148/1425; 148/1422; 148/7415; 193/9633.

12 I draw a distinction here between code mixing, where scribes consciously drew on a different language to supplement the vocabulary of another, and language merging, where words and phrases from one language were absorbed into another and became part of its accepted lexicon. See Rothwell, W., “The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-French,” Medium Ævum 60, no. 2 (1991): 173–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “The Legacy of Anglo-French: Faux amis in French and English,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 109, nos. 1–2 (1993): 16–46Google Scholar, and “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 45–67, esp. 59–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See, most recently, the collected essays in Schaefer, Ursula, ed., The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England (Frankfurt am Main, 2006)Google Scholar.

14 For detailed discussion, see Dodd, “Spread of English,” 253–62; see also Curry, Anne, “‘A Game of Two Halves’: Parliament 1422–1454,” in Parchment and People: Parliament in the Middle Ages, ed. Clark, Linda (Edinburgh, 2004), 98–100Google Scholar.

15 See Rothwell, “Trilingual England”; Catto, Jeremy, “Written English: The Making of the Language, 1370–1400,” Past and Present 179, no. 1 (May 2003): 24–59, esp. 38–45, 54–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Machan, Tim William, “Medieval Multilingualism and Gower’s Literary Practice,” Studies in Philology 103, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Rothwell, W., “Language and Government in Medieval England,” in Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur, ed. Stimm, Helmut and Noyer-Weidner, Alfred (Wiesbaden, 1983), 258–70Google Scholar, esp. 262–65.

17 On the use of paper in the later Middle Ages, see Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (repr., London, 1976), 30–44Google Scholar; Lyall, R. J., “Materials: The Paper Revolution,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Griffiths, Jeremy and Pearsall, Derek (Cambridge, 1989), 11–29, esp. 11–12Google Scholar.

18 Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” 124–25 (figs. 1 and 2). For a discussion of who drafted petitions, see Dodd, Gwilym, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), 302–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Dodd, Gwilym, “Writing Wrongs: The Drafting of Supplications to the Crown in Later Fourteenth-Century England,” Medium Ævum 80 (2011): 217–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The most detailed account of the work of the privy seal office remains Tout, T. F., Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33), vol. 5, chaps. 16–17Google Scholar. Morris, W. A., “The Chancery and the Privy Seal,” in The English Government at Work, 1327–1336, vol. 1, ed. Willard, J. F. and Morris, W. A. (Cambridge, MA, 1940), 52–77Google Scholar, is also worth consulting. For the best recent discussion, see Brown, A. L., “The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. Bullough, D. A. and Story, R. L. (Oxford, 1971), 260–81Google Scholar. For the workings of late medieval English government in general, see Brown, A. L., The Governance of Late Medieval England, 1272–1461 (London, 1989), chap. 3Google Scholar.

20 For discussion of the place of privy seal writs in late medieval English government, see Maxwell-Lyte, H. C., Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal of England (London, 1926), 31–38, 49–53Google Scholar; Baldwin, James Fosdick, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913), 255–61Google Scholar; and Brown, A. L., “The Authorization of Letters under the Great Seal,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 37, no. 96 (November 1964): 125–55, esp. 131–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, 35.

22 The formulary is printed in its entirety in Bentley, Elna-Jean Young, “The Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve” (PhD thesis, Emory University, 1965)Google Scholar.

23 TNA, C 81/706/3691.

24 TNA, E 404/52/126.

25 Otway-Ruthven, J., The King’s Secretary and the Signet Office in the XVth Century (Cambridge, 1939), app. AGoogle Scholar.

26 Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” 122–26, 138–39.

27 Dodd, “Spread of English,” n. 102.

28 Exactly what was meant by the locations specified on privy seal writs is not a straightforward matter. In the early fourteenth century, when the privy seal office accompanied the king, they provide an accurate guide to the king’s movements, as well as the location of the privy seal office itself, which stayed with the king on his travels in this period. But once the privy seal office went “out of court” and settled, more or less permanently, at Westminster, the significance of the place names becomes unclear. There is ambiguity in scholarship on this matter, and specifically whether a writ specifying a place other than Westminster indicated that some privy seal office staff, and even the keeper himself, were in the presence of the king: Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, 71–72; Brown, “Authorization of Letters,” 140. This scenario underpins Linne Mooney’s recent consideration of Thomas Hoccleve, in which she concludes that he led a rather more stationary existence at Westminster in comparison to his more peripatetic privy seal office colleagues (“Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 [2007]: 293–340, at 303 n. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar). That the privy seal office moved around is suggested by the diplomatic of the writs themselves, which usually ended with the following stock phrase (this one is an English-language example dating to 1441): “Yeven under oure prive seal at oure manoir of Shene þe vij day of Juyn þe yere of oure regne xix” (TNA, C 81/729/5973). However, it would be surprising to find the privy seal office moving around to the extent suggested by the writs of the late 1430s and early 1440s I have examined, and it may be that they really bore the date and place of the originating warrant (i.e., a signet letter or endorsed petition). This system is suggested by the fact that occasional examples can be found of pairs of writs that were signed off by the same clerk on the same day, but apparently in different locations (e.g., TNA, C 81/706/3660 and 3662; C 81/729/5979 and 5980; C 81/730/6009 and 6010; C 81/730/6016, 6017, and 6018). More work is needed on this subject before an accurate picture can be formed.

29 Maxwell-Lyte suggests that it was done at the behest of two clerks then serving, Henry Benet and Thomas Frank (Historical Notes, 34). The practice does not appear to have become routine until the 1440s—the earliest privy seal writs drafted in English (see n. 23 and n. 24 above) bear no signatures. There were short-lived precedents in the fourteenth century: between 1352 and 1354, clerks’ signatures were applied to writs sent into chancery; see Ormrod, W. Mark, “Accountability and Collegiality: The English Royal Secretariat in the Mid-Fourteenth Century,” in Écrit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries médiévales: Espace Français, espace Anglais (Louvain–La Neuve, 1997), 55–86, at 70–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Between 1360 and 1362, the same procedure was applied to a number of privy seal writs and bills sent to the exchequer; see Tout, Chapters in Administrative History, 6:114 n. 1. For evidence of checking in the privy seal office earlier in the fourteenth century, see Chaplais, Pierre, “Privy Seal Drafts, Rolls and Registers (Edward I–Edward II),” English Historical Review 73, no. 287 (April 1958): 270–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Chaplais, , Essays in Medieval Diplomacy and Administration (London, 1981), chap. 20Google Scholar. Signatures began to appear on signet letters in 1437; see Otway-Ruthven, King’s Secretary, 26–27.

30 Tout, Chapters in Administrative History, 5:110–12.

31 Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, 34.

32 See, e.g., TNA, C 88 (records upon outlawries); C 242 (de coronato eligendo); C 249 (replevin); and C 254 (dedimus potestatem). For discussion, see Wilkinson, B., “The Authorisation of Chancery Writs under Edward III,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 8 (1924): 107–39, esp. 134–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 In chancery, clerks of the first grade traditionally acted as examiners of writs for work produced by clerks of the second grade, but from the mid-fourteenth century, the system of checking and signing also became the responsibility of the clerks of the second grade and even the cursitors. It was also at this time that the process of applying the signatures of clerks extended to include a wider range of returnable and nonreturnable writs; see Wilkinson, B., The Chancery under Edward III (Manchester, 1929), 75–77Google Scholar; and Ormrod, “Accountability and Collegiality,” 66.

34 TNA, E 101/409/12, fols. 79, 79d, and 80.

35 See, e.g., TNA, C 81/751 (April–July 1446), which contains writs signed by Frank, Langeport, Alberton, Priour, Brewster, Foston, Benet, and Hamond.

36 Brown, “Privy Seal Clerks,” 262.

37 Mooney, “Some New Light,” 299–300, 314. Mooney notes that seniority gave clerks the opportunity to “cherry-pick” the drafting of those writs that promised the most lucrative fees: those that concerned the business of rich and powerful men.

38 Important work has recently been done by Helen Killick on the stylistic characteristics of privy seal writs, and the similarities that existed in the writing styles of senior clerks and their apprentices (“Thomas Hoccleve as Poet and Clerk” [PhD thesis, University of York, 2010], 37Google Scholar). I would like to thank Dr. Killick and Professor Linne Mooney for the fruitful discussions we have had on this issue.

39 Burrow, J. A., Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot, 1994)Google Scholar. Mooney (“Some New Light”) sheds more light on the profile of Hoccleve’s career in the privy seal office using paleographical techniques, as does the recent research of Killick (“Hoccleve as Poet and Clerk,” esp. 98).

40 Scanlon, Larry, “The King’s Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Patterson, Lee (Berkeley, 1990), 216–47, esp. 240–42Google Scholar.

41 See n. 22.

42 Dodd, “Spread of English,” 246–47.

43 See esp. Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn and Justice, Steve, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 59–83Google Scholar.

44 Pearsall, Derek, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,” Speculum 69, no. 2 (April 1994): 386–410, esp. 397–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Ibid., 393–403; Mooney, “Some New Light,” 312.

46 Hoccleve, Thomas, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Blyth, Charles R. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), line 1854Google Scholar.

47 Other than Bentley, “Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve,” the only other detailed consideration of the formulary is Knapp, Ethan, “Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve’s Formulary and La male regle,” Speculum 74, no. 2 (April 1999): 357–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Bentley, “Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve,” viii.

49 Dodd, “Spread of English,” 253–62.

50 Hoccleve’s contribution to the emergence of an English vernacular literary tradition is summed up by Nicholas Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 347–48. For more recent discussion, see Tolmie, Sarah, “The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 341–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity,” 364.

52 Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” 126–27.

53 Bentley, “Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve,” xii–xiii.

54 The key discussion is Storey, R. L., “Gentleman-Bureaucrats,” in Profession, Vocation, and Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. Clough, Cecil H. (Liverpool, 1982), 90–129Google Scholar. The process of secularization did not extend to the keepers of the privy seal who continued to be appointed from among the ranks of the clergy throughout the fifteenth century. The keeper of the privy seal in the period when English appeared in privy seal writs was William Lyndwood, a prominent ecclesiastical lawyer and Oxford academic who became bishop of St. David’s in 1442. However, as A. L. Brown points out, there appears to have been quite a separation between the political duties of the keeper, who was usually ex officio one of the king’s trusted councillors, and the day-to-day running and supervision of the privy seal office, which would probably not have fallen within his remit; see “Privy Seal Clerks,” 277. The personnel of the signet office appear to have become fully laicized by the late 1430s; see Otway-Ruthin, King’s Secretary, 129–31.

55 Gordon-Kelter, Janice, “The Lay Presence: Chancery and Privy Seal Personnel in the Bureaucracy of Henry VI,” Medieval Prosopography 10, no. 1 (1989): 53–74Google Scholar.

56 Knapp, Ethan, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (State College, PA, 2001), 6, 71–73Google Scholar.

57 Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” 399–403, 403–6; and Perkins, Nicholas, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001), 10–12Google Scholar. Michelle Warren points out that in his Remonstrance against Oldcastle, Hoccleve recommended a reading list comprising almost exclusively texts translated from Latin into French, including the Old French Bible. She makes the observation that French prose translation, in contrast to English, was “associated with truth-telling [and resisted] in its very form the dangers of interpretation.” Warren, , “Translation,” in Middle English, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Strohm, Paul (Oxford, 2007), 51–67Google Scholar, quote at 63. See also Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 53–54. Other scholars have pointed to the ambiguities surrounding Hoccleve’s clerical/secular status; see Watson, Nicholas, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70, no. 4 (October 1995): 822–64, esp. 848–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity,” 361–62, 366–67. Stokes, Charity Scott, “Sir John Oldcastle, the Office of the Privy Seal, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle of 1415,” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 118, no. 4 (2000): 556–70, esp. 562–69Google Scholar, casts some doubt on Hoccelve’s orthodoxy, suggesting that his Remonstrance contains a strong strand of irony in its praise of conventional religiosity.

58 Smith, Charles W., “Some Trends in the English Royal Chancery: 1377–1483,” Medieval Prosopography 6, no. 1 (1985): 69–94Google Scholar.

59 All four of our master clerks of 1441 were laymen. It may be significant that evidence exists to indicate that only Frank and Benet, the most frequent users of English in their writs, were married; see Gordon-Kelter, “Lay Presence,” 57, 59, 61–62, 64.

60 Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, chap. 3.

61 That is, from TNA series E 28 (see fig. 1).

62 Smith, Charles W., “A Conflict of Interest? Chancery Clerks in Private Service,” in People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Rosenthal, Joel and Richmond, Colin (Gloucester, 1987), 176–91Google Scholar; Mooney, Linne R., “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81, no. 1 (January 2006): 97–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity,” 362 n. 23, succinctly summarizes the changing nature of privy seal clerks’ income across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

63 TNA, E 28/69 (4 November 1441); C 81/731/6127.

64 Prestwich, Michael, “English Government Records, 1250–1330,” in Pragmatic Literacy East and West, 1200–1330, ed. Britnell, Richard (Woodbridge, 1997), 94–106, 97–98Google Scholar.

65 Bentley, “Formulary of Thomas Hoccleve,” e.g., nos. 21, 24, 28, 29, 42, 43. Bentley notes that Latin was mostly reserved at this time for documents sent to ecclesiastics and for foreign correspondence (xxv).

66 Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, 53–56; Brown, “Authorization of Letters,” 128–31; Ormrod, “Accountability and Collegiality,” 71–72.

67 Of the twelve writs in this period that conveyed instructions asking the chancellor to issue pardons by letters patent, nine were written in Latin: TNA, C 81/729/5909, 5924, 5925a, 5931, 5961, 5963, 5977, 5992, 5997. A further three pardons were issued as Latin schedules, accompanied by English- or French-language introductions: TNA, C 81/729/5915–16, 5935a–b, 5965–66.

68 Watts, J. L., “When Did Henry VI’s Minority End?” in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. Clayton, Dorothy J., Davies, Richard G., and McNiven, Peter (Stroud, 1994), 116–39, at 138 n. 85Google Scholar; and Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” n. 42.

69 For this phenomenon in parliamentary petitions, see Dodd, Justice and Grace, 304–5.

70 TNA E 28/68 (14 May 1441). The change was noted by Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, 155.

71 For example, TNA, E 28/89 (20 November 1461; 22 April 1462); E 28/90 (5 August 1467; 15 August 1467). Note, however, that by this point, some draft letters patent were written in English, presumably on the assumption that they would be translated into Latin if chancery issued the letter formally: TNA, E 28/89 (6 November 1461; 10 April 1462); E 28/90 (25 October 1468; 10 November 1469).

72 The following signet letters (dating to the 1460s) have been linked with their resulting privy seal writs (both written in Latin): TNA, PSO 1/25/1326: C 81/796/1321; PSO 1/25/1331: C 81/796/1322; PSO 1/25/1332: C 81/796/1323. Dating to 1441, the following petitions (with Latin schedules) and Latin writs have been identified: E 28/66 (13 February 1441): C 81/727/5790; E 28/66 (19 February 1441): C 81/728/5811; E 28/66 (22 February 1441): C 81/728/5818; E 28/67 (7 March 1441): C 81/728/5831; E 28/67 (16 March 1441): C 81/728/58; E 28/68 (4 May 1441): C 81/728/5917; E 28/68 (5 May 1441): C 81/728/5918; E 28/69 (13 October 1441): C 81/730/6097; E 28/69 (14 October 1441): C 81/730/6088; E 28/69 (27 October 1441): C 81/731/6104.

73 TNA, C 81/848/3903.

74 TNA, C 81/848/3905.

75 As noted by Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, 73.

76 TNA, C 81/848/3908.

77 The phenomenon was not unique to the records of central administration. Of the early fifteenth-century records of the London Goldsmiths’ Company, Lisa Jefferson writes, “The same scribes are equally able to write in Latin and French and it remains a mystery why and how they chose to record the case against one errant goldsmith in Latin and that against another in French. … The ledger … shows a bewildering mixture of languages” (“Language and Vocabulary,” 182).

78 Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, line 1013.

79 Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” 138–39, and “Spread of English,” n. 102.

80 Brown, Alfred L., The Early History of the Clerkship of the Council (Glasgow, 1969), 35Google Scholar.

81 Ibid., 28–29.

82 Dodd, “Rise of English, Decline of French,” esp. 129–30, 142–46.

83 Nicolas, Harris, ed., Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 7 vols. (London, 1834–37), 6:316–20Google Scholar. For discussion (and dating), see Griffiths, R. A., The Reign of King Henry VI (London, 1981), 282–84Google Scholar; and Watts, John, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996), 255–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Butterfield, Ardis, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), 321CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Ingham, Richard, “The Transmission of Later Anglo-Norman: Some Syntactic Evidence,” in The Anglo-Norman Language and Its Contexts (York, 2010), 227–51Google Scholar.

86 Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, line 1871.

87 Hoccleve’s competency in the use of the French language would have derived as much from his knowledge of French literature as from his administrative duties, for which, see n. 57 above, and Burrow, John, “Hoccleve and the Middle English Poets,” in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Cooper, Helen and Mapstone, Sally (Oxford, 1997), 35–49Google Scholar.

88 Machan, “Medieval Multilingualism,” 10–11.

89 On the link between written and oral French, see Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 319–23. In other specialized contexts, notably in law and business, French continued to be spoken throughout the fifteenth century; see Ormrod, W. M., “The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 78, no. 3 (July 2003): 750–87, at 773CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jefferson, “Language and Vocabulary,” 184.

90 Clark, James G., A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and His Circle, c. 1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004), esp. chap. 6Google Scholar.

91 Lytle, Guy Fitch, “The Careers of Oxford Students in the Later Middle Ages,” in Rebirth, Reform and Resilience: Universities in Transition, 1300–1700, ed. Kittelson, James M. and Transue, Pamela J. (Columbus, OH, 1984), 213–53, esp. 222 and 225–29Google Scholar.

92 Brown, “Privy Seal Clerks,” 263.

93 Brown, Early History of the Clerkship, 29–30; and Smith, Bill, “Moleyns, Adam (d. 1450),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar, http://www.oxforddnb.com. Examples of minutes and endorsements written in English by Moleyns can be found in Nicolas, Proceedings and Ordinances, 5:117, 138–39, 139–40, 146–47, and 183.

94 For example, Wright, “Macaronic Writing,” 763–64; see also the introductory remarks in Jefferson, Lisa, ed., Wardens’ Accounts and Court Minute Books of the Goldsmiths’ Mistery of London, 1334–1446 (Woodbridge, 2003), xxviii–xxixGoogle Scholar.