In Spencer’s copy, red and blue initials and paragraph marks embellish the text. The writs served as models for different legal actions and are accompanied by notes and rules for their use. Its main text is the Latin Registrum brevium, a standard manuscript collection of legal writs providing the forms of English Common Law. This composite manuscript volume suggests the multi-lingual environment of late-medieval Britain for it contains information in Latin, French, Law French, and Middle English. Between roughly 14 there was a series of shifts in the pronunciation of English’s long vowels, and between 15 foreign loan words flooded into the language as English’s vocabulary expanded to meet its increasingly varied needs. The periods covered in this case are times of significant linguistic change. The arrival of printing in England in 1476 also fueled the beginnings of the standardization of the written language. Early Modern English emerges in the late fifteenth century as the language began to take on more national political and cultural functions. As a result, there was no shared national Middle English dialect, but rather great regional diversity in both speech and writing. For much of the Middle English period (circa 1100 to the late 1400s), communication in English was essentially local, with first French and then Latin used for government and law. It emerged not only through the linguistic influence of Norman French, but also of Old Norse from the Viking populations that had settled in northern Britain. Middle English developed gradually in the decades following the Norman Conquest of 1066.
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