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Scribal Networks and the Language of Urban Administration

Paper · 2023 · Tino Oudesluijs

Summary

Studies of Early Modern English (1500–1700) have mostly relied on private letters, diaries and printed books. Local manuscript administration has been largely ignored, partly because its scribes are usually anonymous. Oudesluijs argues that this text type is a valuable window on how a supralocal, later standard, variety of English emerged. Urban records were written for local readers but by professionals who belonged to wider inter-town networks of clerks and scriveners. The study examines 35 indentures produced in Coventry between 1499 and 1600 and tracks one well-documented feature, periphrastic DO. It interprets the results against two backgrounds: the town's civic history, including its town clerk and his team of scribes, and the known general trajectory of DO in other genres. To get around scribal anonymity, it treats the scribes as a community of practice within a social network, rather than as known individuals. The main finding is that DO started slowly in these documents and then, unlike in other text types, did not decline in the later sixteenth century. The author tentatively links this to Coventry events around the 1570s and calls for comparable data from other towns.

Key points

  • The corpus is 35 indentures from Coventry dated 1499–1600, drawn from the author's 2019 doctoral work within the Emerging Standards project.
  • The feature studied is periphrastic DO. It was chosen because its Early Modern English development and its link to standardisation are already well described.
  • Earlier work on comparable official texts mostly covered printed London material, notably Rissanen's studies of the Statutes of the Realm. Those studies drew on nineteenth-century editions that form part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.
  • The theoretical frame combines social network theory with the idea of a community of practice:
    • Innovations travel through weak ties between networks.
    • Close-knit groups with strong ties tend to resist change.
  • The key result is that use of DO in the Coventry indentures did not fall in the second half of the 1500s, which departs from patterns reported for other genres. The explanation offered through local events around the 1570s is explicitly tentative.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper treats a set of anonymous writers as one community of practice with a shared repertoire, so variation can be explained at group level even when individual authors are unknown.
  • I2. It reads one niche genre against a known baseline trend for the same feature, and treats a mismatch as evidence of genre-specific behaviour rather than noise.
  • I3. Administrative and legal language is described as favouring invariance and lacking affect, and it often copied formulas from more prominent towns such as London.
  • I4. The paper notes that customary texts may copy older traditions from elsewhere rather than reflect local practice.
  • I5. The author deliberately marks conclusions from a single site as tentative until other towns are checked.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Silver data from unattributed web or scanned sources could be grouped by shared production context, such as a template family or register, so the reliability of each group can be measured and weighted as a unit.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation could compare how often key constructions occur per register against a reference corpus, flagging registers where tagger or parser behaviour diverges and so needs targeted checking.
  • I3 (frames): Recurring legal formulas could be compiled once as fixed frames with pre-assigned roles, so they are not reanalysed from scratch, while each step stays explainable.
  • I4 (world): Facts extracted from a text could carry provenance, marking whether a statement looks like inherited boilerplate or a claim specific to that situation, before it is added to the world of the text.
  • I5 (learn): Self-induced repair rules could be accepted only after they hold on an independent corpus, not just the one they were induced from, which acts as a guard against overfitting.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of ManchesterManchester · United Kingdom87 works · 44,938 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

Cite

Cite as Tino Oudesluijs. 2023. Scribal Networks and the Language of Urban Administration. Linguistica 63.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4312/linguistica.63.1-2.41-62

@inproceedings{oudesluijs2023scribal,
  title = {{Scribal Networks and the Language of Urban Administration}},
  author = {Tino Oudesluijs},
  booktitle = {Linguistica 63},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.4312/linguistica.63.1-2.41-62},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.63.1-2.41-62}
}

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