The English Language of the Ordinances

English orthography was not easy for foreigners and some of the mistakes which they were prone to making can be seen in the writing of a Dutch scribe who was active in England in the second half of the fifteenth century, Theodoric Werken.1 On this scribe, see David Rundle, The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 124–42. Born in Abbenbroek, near Rotterdam, he mostly copied Latin texts, which caused him no trouble, but in one of the manuscripts (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 142, fol. 60v) he wrote, in addition to a set of Latin prayers, a colophon in English. This colophon immediately reveals his Dutch origin: at one point he wrote d instead of th or thorn (perhaps a reflection also of how this Dutchman pronounced a sound alien to Dutch), and instead of ‘he’ Werken wrote the equivalent Dutch pronoun ‘hi’.2 The colophon is reproduced and discussed in Sjoerd Levelt and Ad Putter, North Sea Crossings: The Literary Heritage of Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1066–1688 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2021), p. 99. Such spelling errors due to interference from Dutch are absent in the English ordinances. There is one possible case of d/th confusion, this time not <d> for <th>, but <th> for <d>, and that is in article 19: ‘without he by lerneth in the same fraternite’. It is clear from the context that this means ‘unless he is instructed in the same fraternity’, and so ‘lerneth’ is lerned. However, this is more probably to be explained as a dialect feature than as a mistake: <th> for <d> is known to be a regional characteristic associated with Middle English texts written in and around Surrey.3 See M. Benskin et al., An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Edinburgh: Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, 2013), dot map for item 399. The spelling could well reflect the scribe’s local dialect.

The various anomalous spellings in this document do not suggest foreignness either. Below is a list of notable spellings:

From spellings, we move to lexis, and what is striking here is the precocious modernity of the diction. A number of words occur in the Ordinances before the earliest attestations recorded in MED and OED. ‘Reception’ is recorded in OED in a technical astrological sense, but not in the sense ‘admittance’ until 1525. That, however, is clearly the sense in which the word is used in the Ordinances – ‘before ther admission and recepcion’ (art. 1).5 There is an even earlier attestation in Caxton’s Blanchardyn and Eglantine (c. 1489): ‘the fayr welcome and honourable recepcion’. See William Caxton, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, ed. Leon Kellner, EETS, extra series 58 (London: Trübner, 1890), p. 194. The adverb ‘inobediently’ (art. 6) is also novel. OED gives the earliest attestation as 1536, while MED (s.v. ‘inobedientlie’) has only one attestation, from the Chester Plays, extant in a very late copy (1607). But ‘inobediently’ occurs twice in article 6 of the Ordinances and once more in article 11, this time in the otherwise unrecorded spelling ‘inobedientli’.

The noun ‘hat-making’ is not recorded in MED and the earliest attestation in OED is from 1547 (‘Act 1 Edward VI c. 6 §3 in Statutes of Realm (1963) IV. i. 12: Yarne … wrought in hattes or employed to hatte-making’). It is, however, frequently used in our Ordinances, once in an article that is only in English (art. 25), but otherwise as the equivalent of Dutch hoed(en)making, as in ‘the seid crafte of hatmakynge’ (art. 21), corresponding with Dutch ‘denseluen ambocht van hoitmakyng’. Perhaps the English word was calqued on the Dutch, but in Dutch the word appears to be even more precocious: the historical Dutch dictionaries do not record it, and we have not found any trace of it before the 1800s.6 ‘Hoedenmaking’ is in S. J. M. van Moock, Nieuw Fransch-Nederduitsch en Nederduitsch-Fransch Woordenboek (Gouda: G. B. van Goor, 1849), and ‘hoedmaking’ in Arnhemsche Courant (Arnhem, 20 November 1821).

Another word that occurs in the Ordinances before the earliest dictionary attestations is the noun ‘multe’ (art. 4), Modern English ‘mulct’ (penalty, fine). This is not in MED, while OED gives the earliest attestation as 1586. The word is ultimately derived from Latin mulcta, but the Dutch hatmakers would have known it from their mother tongue, where it had been in use since at least the fifteenth century.7 K. Stallaert, Glossarium van verouderde rechtstermen, kunstwoorden en andere uitdrukkingen uit Vlaamsche, Brabantsche en Limburgsche oorkonden, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1886–1891), II, s.v. ‘mulcte’. Also new in English is ‘draw’ in the sense of ‘to draw a weapon’. OED (s.v. draw, sense 33b) credits the first usage to Shakespeare (1599), ‘Draw if you be men’ (Romeo & Juliet, I.i.59), but the absolute use is already present in the Ordinances: ‘And he that drawith … shall pay to the seid fraternite iiij lb. of wexe’ (art. 12).

A couple of English words are not in the dictionaries at all, though they look plausible enough. ‘Finiall’ (art. 8) is nowhere else found as an adverb, but it was common enough as an adjective (see OED s.v. finial), and there is the mystery verb flosh. Article 23 stipulates ‘that no maister nor brother of this same fraternitie shall put no hattes for to be flosshede, nor cause no hattes to be flosshede, nor put no feltes to be made withoute his house’. What ‘floshing a hat’ means is obscure. Neither MED nor OED has this word, and while the Dutch says something very similar – ‘dat gheen meester noch broeder van derseluer broederscyp gheen felten en sal doen maken noch hoden doen floschen buten synen huyse’ – the problem is that ‘floschen’ is not attested in Dutch either. It is true that the verb ‘vloschen’ can be found as a technical term in salt production (see MNW), but this particular verb, modern Dutch vlossen (also flossen, florsen), perhaps related to ‘vlos’ (an implement for scooping solid substances out of water), is unlikely to be relevant here. The word is probably related to the French floche (tuft, tassel), attested in Anglo-Norman as a past participle floché (tassled, fringed), with reference to textiles. The so-called ‘thrum hats’ of this period were adorned with ends of yarn or silk,8 See John S. Lee, ‘Thrums’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles, online edition, ed. Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Maria Hayward (Leiden, 2021), <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2213–2139_emdt_SIM_001171>. and ‘floshing’ a hat may be the same as what was later called ‘thrumming’ (see OED under the verb ‘thrum’, with the first attestation of 1525, ‘Hattes thrommyd with silke of diuerse collours’).

We have mentioned apropos of ‘multe’ the possibility of Dutch influence and there are some other cases where this seems likely. Middle English guild ordinances use the term prentis for ‘apprentice’, but the Hatmakers called a trainee a ‘lerner’, perhaps influenced by the Dutch word leerknecht (art. 21). Another example of possible Dutch influence is the expression ‘fall into the payne’ (art. 4), meaning ‘to incur a penalty’. The normal Middle English idiom, a loan translation of Latin incurrere, was to renne in the pain,9 See MED, s.v. peine, 1b, rennen in the peine, and ‘The Statutes of the Craft of Dyers (1439)’, from The Little Red Book of Bristol, ed. Francis B. Bickley, 2 vols (Bristol: W. C. Hemmons, 1900), II, pp. 170–76 (172), and see Little Red Book of Bristol, p. 181. but the expression in the Ordinances follows the Dutch idiom in de boete vallen (‘vallen in de bote’, art. 4) and appears to be Dutch-inspired.