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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - English as a Language of Documentary Record

  • from Part II - The Affordances of English
  • Mark Faulkner, Trinity College Dublin
  • Book:
    A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century
    Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    28 July 2022, pp 102-148

  • Summary

    This chapter examines ten or so English language or bilingual documents obtained, produced, copied, adapted and forged at Christ Church Canterbury between the 1090s and the mid 1150s. Beginning with a remarkable series of bilingual writs issued by Henry I and his successors, it also analyses a purported bilingual notification of Cnut, apparently confected around 1100, and a remarkable English-language version of a diploma of Cnut, relating to the port of Sandwich, produced at approximately the same time, as well as a document of Æthelred contrived from it fifty years later. Consideration of the documents suggests this activity involved monks, both English and French, who felt the use of English made their contentious claims more plausible. In the hundred years after the Norman Conquest, these men continued, and even expanded, the range of ways in which English could be used as a language of documentary record.