Introduction

This chapter looks at the language of 46 documents written in English in the county of Norfolk in the winter of 1388/9, and places them in the larger context of Norfolk and Suffolk documents to which they are related. The 46 documents are a subset of 484 documents known as ‘guild certificates’, which were sent to the Chancery by church and trade guilds from around the country as a response to a parliamentary inquiry. Of the 484 certificates (also referred to in the literature as ‘guild returns’) only 56 (46 from Norfolk, 10 from London) were written in English. I suggest below that two previously-unattributed certificates should also be attributed to Norfolk. Because the guild certificates are often precisely dated and located, they provide interesting evidence for linguistic purposes.

The certificates vary considerably in appearance, from tiny thin strips of parchment, to small booklets, to huge membranes sewn together, over a yard in length. The contents of the certificates mostly mention religious practices the holdings, fees and duties of guild members, which amount to looking after each other financially in times of trouble and attending and voting at meetings and dinners. Some give tremendous detail about the guilds’ activities and customs, others provide the bare minimum of information – adeclarationof no financial assets. The guildswere fundamentally religious foundations, and most of the returns stipulate members’ duties at mass attendance, festivals, and burials.

The first section identifies which scribes wrote which of the Norfolk certificates by comparing the handwriting of the Norfolk certificates written in English with the handwriting of the Norfolk and Suffolk certificates written in Latin and French. The second section looks at some morphological variables, to see just how Norfolk scribes formed their morphology in the winter of 1388/9. Realisations for eleven morphemes are compared with the London certificates’ variants to provide a dialectal contrast. The third section looks at individual scribes’ morphological habits, to see whether the variation found in Norfolk as a whole is reflected in the text of each individual, or whether individuals have a smaller repertoire. Thus the chapter has two main aims, one empirical and the other more theoretical.