English legal culture and the languages of the law: Rethinking the Statute of Pleading (1362)

Abstract

This thesis re-evaluates the impact of the Statute of Pleading and its legislation of the languages of the law on the legal actors who worked in England's royal courts in the fourteenth century. In order to broaden the scope of existing research on the subject, this project puts forth a new interpretation of the Statute by proposing a different hypothesis for why the law exists in two linguistically variable forms on the records of the Parliament and statute rolls. By studying the legal professionals who worked in England's legal realm and their use of languages, this thesis argues that the Statute of Pleading---in each of its versions---is indicative of the legal training and education received by these individuals in the later medieval period, and also as an expression of their resistance to changing the written languages of the law.