Owain Glyndwr (died c. 1416) was the last Welshman to hold the title of Prince of Wales. In 1400 he led a rebellion against king Henry IV and English rule in Wales. In 1406 he addressed a letter, now known as the Pennal Letter, to king Charles VI of France asking for support in persuading the schismatic pope Benedict XIII to help Wales to exist as an independent state with a Church and universities of its own.

Duke Humfrey, a younger son of king Henry IV and younger brother of king Henry V, is famous for the library he donated to the University of Oxford and whose name was given to the room above the Divinity School built to house his books. In this everyday document, another CLose Roll, one finds a list of the furniture granted to him by his father when as a young man he was moving to Hadleigh Castle in Essex. This list of armour and domestic items is fascinating for the richly multilingual vocabulary with classical words mixing with late Latin, and with terms derived from Greek and French and English. Some of these words are morphologically integrated into Latin, others are left unintegrated giving a feel of code-switching.