This essay approaches the vernacular style of Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum (c. 1379) through his Dominican order’s preoccupation with a properly calibrated preacher’s style. Good preachers must strike a balance to communicate their learning, but never obscurely; to speak plainly but not without grace. Thomas Waleys called this mode a grossus stilus, a simple style, and this is an aptly gross name for Daniel’s way with Middle English, as he instructs his readers in the medieval art of inspecting urine for medical diagnosis. I contextualise Daniel’s own stylistic programme (as articulated in theory in his prologue and then proved in practice in the rest of the Liber) within a long tradition of literary theorising around jargon and plain speech found across the rhetorical manuals and guides to preaching of the Dominican curriculum. While they expressed their arguments in Latin, these texts offered a theory of vernacular eloquence that – as the Liber would prove – could circulate amongst the apparently disparate fields of preaching and Middle English medicine.

The Dominicans arrived in England in 1221 and established their first community in Oxford, followed in quick succession by houses in towns and cities across England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, which together formed the English Province of the Order. The first part of this chapter charts the spread of the Dominican Order in medieval Britain and Ireland and then surveys the extant liturgical books from the region. While only a handful survive, many supply the Gospel lections read at Mass; thus, the final part of this chapter explores the liturgical identity of the Dominican Order through a study of its Gospel lections. This reveals that the Dominican choice of Gospel lections in Britain and Ireland was largely in line with that of their Continental counterparts; nonetheless, local sanctoral feasts were added to the margins of books used for the public recitation of the Gospels, showing some adaptation for local needs.

The Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, established themselves in the Holy Land because it represented an opportunity to fulfil two of the aims of the Order: missionary activity and aiding in parochial ministry. Most of the evidence for Dominican activity in the Crusader States comes from the former, where the Order was particularly active in trying to negotiate the acceptance of the primacy of the papacy among eastern Christians. In Cyprus, where the Order also founded houses after the Latin Conquest of the 1190s, the Dominicans also fulfilled their role as monitors of Christian doctrine through acting as inquisitors, notably in relation to the Greek Orthodox Church.