When the Vernaculars (Anglo-Norman and Middle English) and Medieval Latin Fuse into a Functional Variety: Evidence from the Administrative Realm

ABSTRACT

For a long time, some of the most revealing testimonies to medieval multilingual societies and their communicative practices have been neglected for their purportedly faulty nature. I am referring to the so-called mixed-language texts, those which combine several languages in the same communicative event (communicative event herein exclusively understood as a written text). This article takes two case studies from the administrative world in late medieval England as its basis, namely the Building Accounts of King Henry III (1216–1272) and the Inventory and Account Rolls of the Benedictine House or Cell of Jarrow (1303–1537). Its aims are threefold: (a) to describe the use of vernacular descriptors in these hitherto unexplored medieval accounts; (b) to examine what kinds of lexemes are particularly susceptible to be introduced by le(s) as a marker indicating a switch to the vernacular; and, finally, (c) to show how the multilingual system at work in the accounts challenges any contemporary taxonomical distinctions grounded in the notion of languages as clearly distinguishable entities.

KEYWORDS:

• Late medieval England
• lexis
• multilingualism
• Medieval Latin
• Middle English
• Anglo-Norman

Notes

¹ The situation has changed across time, and nowadays the online MED and, to a lesser extent, the OED and the AND quote not only monolingual sources but also multilingual texts whose base language is Medieval Latin.

² Even much more complex is the interplay between Anglo-Norman and the different dialects of Middle English: did scribes exhibit any dialectal features which could potentially be transferred to or interact with French-origin lexis? This question is beyond the scope of the present article, but it is at the core of my ongoing research and will be addressed in due course.

³ Conventional abbreviations (e.g. OE for Old English, OF for Old French, AN for Anglo-Norman, ME for Middle English, or ON for Old Norse) will be used within the parenthetical information provided.

⁴ For the sake of consistency, in this article, I will use the term descriptors throughout, although they are often merged with the category of surnames.

⁵ The oscillation in the use of capital letters is present in the edited texts. No reference to the original manuscripts is made therein.

⁶ Only direct translations – not word-for-word glosses – will be provided henceforth because the purpose of the following examples is to illustrate lexis rather than structural phenomena. In addition, the syntax of Medieval Latin is sufficiently transparent to be followed with running translations.