THE RESULTS of this investigation into the legal diction of Spenser's poetry are surprising in their breadth and extent. In all, over a thousand words of legal or quasi-legal semantic valence can be identified in The Faerie Queene, touching on topics as diverse as land tenure, piracy, and debt, and ranging from the earliest cantos of Book I to the final stanzas of the Cantos of Mutabilitie. In the shorter poems, Spenser's preoccupation with legal ideas and language is no less marked: from the early translations of A Theatre for Worldlings, through the experiments in complaint in Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruines of Time, and Daphnaida, to the final sonorous lays of Prothalamion, Spenser's diction returns almost compulsively to topics of contract, debt, appeal, tenure, and slander. While the mere existence of this diction within the poetry is intriguing enough, it is in the patterns of Spenser's use that we perceive his poet's hand. Spenser deploys this diction in a variety of ways: low-level but sustained semantic innuendo within particular episodes, recurring association of certain technical terms and ideas with particular characters and narrative elements, contained metaphors and similes recruiting legal diction and ideas, and explicitly legal narrative. In the shorter poems – of Amoretti, for example – legal terms are often recruited as a kind of language for argument and debate.