41
Tino Oudesluijs DOI: 10.4312/linguistica.63.1-2.41-62
University of Manchester
tino.oudesluijs@manchester.ac.uk
SCRIBAL NETWORKS AND THE LANGUAGE OF URBAN AD-
MINISTRATION: VARIATION AND CHANGE IN SIXTEENTH-
CENTURY COVENTRY*
1 INTRODUCTION
Research on Early Modern English (1500–1700) often highlights the importance of the 
printing press, increased education, the Reformation, and the Revolution in relation to 
language change during this period, in particular related to processes of supralocalisa-
tion1 and standardisation (Nevalainen 2000, Nevalainen/Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006, 
Nevalainen/Raumolin-Brunberg 2017: 30–43). Besides these important developments 
and events, however, England also saw the continued expansion of pragmatic lay litera-
cy in the form of increased urban administration, which had started in the late medieval 
period (Rees Jones 2014). The need for trained lay literates in the form of scriveners, 
town clerks, etc. grew, evidenced by the fact that we observe a significant increase in 
text production related to record keeping and general administration on both local and 
national level in sixteenth-century England (Bishop 2016: 114). This undoubtedly had 
an effect on the English language, but, in contrast to the Late Middle English period 
(see e.g. Alcolado Carnicero 2017, Stenroos/Thengs 2020), local administration from 
the Early Modern English period has thus far not received much attention. Instead, re-
searchers have focused more on ego-documents (chiefly letters and diaries) and printed 
material, which both witnessed an exponential increase after 1500. Furthermore, the few 
existing studies on comparable text types from the early modern period only consider 
printed works from the London area, most notably the Statutes of the Realm (Rissanen 
1999a, 2000).2 Two of the main reasons for this are that 1) most local administration was 
not printed (and as such is now more difficult to access), and 2) it (arguably) carries less 
value from a socio-historical viewpoint compared to for example private correspond-
ence, as little is often known about the scribes involved (Gordon 2017: 188, 310).
* I would like to the thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper, as well as the editor Dr. Oliver Currie, for their 
incredibly helpful feedback and comments on an earlier version of this paper.
1 In this paper I follow Britain (2010: 193) in his definition of supralocalisation, namely “the process by which, 
as a result of mobility and dialect contact, linguistic variants with a wider socio-spatial currency become more 
widespread at the expense of more localised forms”.
2 As discussed in more detail by Baker (1999), in the early modern period statutes were only printed, and “no 
manuscript statute-books were made after 1500 (Baker 1999: 422; see also the first volume of Dawsons of Pall 
Mall edition from 1963: xxi–xxviii). Moreover, for his studies on the Statutes of the Realm, Rissanen (1999a; 
2000) uses later editions from the nineteenth century (reprinted in 1963 by Dawsons of Pall Mall), which had 
been included in the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.
42
However, when scrutinising early modern urban administration in its proper local 
socio-historic context, much can still be learned from how English was used in different 
places across the country during a time in which a more supralocal/standardised variety 
became increasingly discernible (cf. Gordon et al. 2020). On the one hand, urban ad-
ministration was chiefly meant for a local audience, and can thus reflect local linguistic 
characteristics (cf. Stenroos 2020), whereas on the other hand scribes – who were often 
part of a larger network of scribes, scriveners, and clerks (Cuenca 2018, see also Sec-
tions 2 and 3 below) – also picked up new forms and phrases from elsewhere as this 
text type evolved (Oudesluijs 2019: 301–310), making urban administration a highly 
interesting source from a supralocalisation/standardisation perspective. Furthermore, 
administrative texts are official, often concern legislation, and their language favours 
invariance, lacks affect, and, in the early modern period, were considered more pres-
tigious than many other text types (Rissanen 1999a: 191). As such, when appropriately 
contextualised, local urban administration constitutes an invaluable resource when it 
comes to better understanding how a more supralocal form of English developed dur-
ing the early modern period.
As mentioned above, investigating early modern administration in its proper socio-
historical context can be difficult due to the anonymity of most scribes working on this 
text type. One method that has proven successful for scrutinising comparable data from 
the Late Middle English period concerns social network theory (Alcolado Carnicero 
2017; cf. Hartrich 2017). Although this model is usually applied to data written by 
known authors (e.g. Bergs 2005), its principles and mechanisms can still be successful-
ly applied to communities of largely anonymous writers, especially when they form a 
so-called community of practice. This concerns “a collection of people who engage on 
an on-going basis in some common endeavour” (Eckert 2006: 683), such as members 
of a specific society, a study group, or – in this case – a group of professional scribes. 
Members of such communities often have shared repertoires, including linguistic el-
ements, as a result of active participation (Eckert/McConnell-Ginet 1999: 185). As 
such, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, to highlight and substantiate the potential of 
early modern local administration with regard to better understanding the supralocali-
sation and development of (Standard) English in the sixteenth century, and second, to 
demonstrate the benefits of applying the principles of social network theory to mostly 
anonymous scribal communities and networks in relation to language change in the 
early modern period.3 To achieve this, I closely scrutinise the use and development 
of periphrastic DO – a well-researched feature for this period (see e.g. Denison 1985, 
Nevalainen 1991, Rissanen 2000, Söderlund 2017) that has already been discussed in 
relation to standardisation (e.g. Stein 1990, Stein/Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1994) – in a 
collection of 35 indentures from sixteenth-century Coventry, both in the relevant local 
urban and scribal contexts, as well as in light of the developing supralocal variety (see 
also Oudesluijs et al. 2022).
3 This paper concerns a case study based on work I carried out for my doctoral dissertation (Oudesluijs 2019) 
within the framework of the Emerging Standards project. See https://wp.unil.ch/emst/home/project-description/ 
for more information.
43
First, I discuss urban administration and scribal networks in early modern England 
(Section 2), followed by an overview of the situation in Coventry (Section 3). I then 
consider the language of administration (Section 4) before presenting the data (Section 
5) and the case study on periphrastic DO (Section 6). In Section 7, I conclude this paper 
by returning to the aims set out in the introduction and providing some final thoughts.
2 EARLY MODERN ENGLISH URBAN ADMINISTRATION AND SCRIBAL 
NETWORKS
Besides the development of schools and education across the country in the first half of 
the sixteenth century (cf. Orme 2006), the early modern period in England also saw the 
continued expansion of pragmatic lay literacy in the form of increased administration 
in towns and cities, which had started in the late medieval period. This involved the 
“production, uses, and preservation of records for the purposes of municipal adminis-
tration” (Mostert and Adamska 2014: 4). These activities are also sometimes grouped 
under the term ‘institutional literacy’ or ‘civic literacy’ as they were primarily exer-
cised by municipal institutions. The latter term was proposed by Rees Jones (2014: 
220), who defines civic literacy as the capacity of urban governments to generate both 
records and archives as part of their processes of self-government, and also the uses 
of that writing in creating a sense of identity and purpose within a civic community. 
As pointed out by Mostert and Adamska (2014: 4), the ‘legal setting’ of an urban com-
munity played an important role in this development, as a growing amount of legal re-
cords were required for municipal administration. In contrast to merchants who became 
increasingly familiar with reading and writing skills (cf. Stenroos 2017), civic literacy 
concerns pragmatic literacy associated with trained professionals like town clerks and 
scriveners, who were employed by civic institutions such as guilds and city councils 
(Cuenca 2018: 3).
Town clerks were civic administrators familiar with local customs and law, and 
they often copied, compiled, changed, and sometimes even authored different kinds of 
texts (Cuenca 2018: 3–4). They often had a background as scrivener,4 and as such they 
“read and wrote and performed secretarial and administrative duties that traditionally 
included composing legal instruments” (Bevan 2013: 30). Town clerks often had mul-
tiple roles within city councils, meaning that they not only narrated many events that 
took place, but also often played a role in those events (Bishop 2016: 129). Since town 
clerks were almost completely in charge of the collections of documents in their respec-
tive archives, they “were able to shape and control the narrative that was told through 
4 The term ‘scrivener’ refers to the profession under which many town clerks, recorders (see Section 3), and 
secretaries would have fallen. Scriveners have been called many things by historians up to this point, including 
scribe, notary, copyist, secretary, and clerk, which reflects the different offices that scriveners frequently took 
from the thirteenth century onward (Bevan 2013: 29–30). Besides being apprenticed to a scrivener, some (town) 
clerks would have been trained at university level, although the available evidence to back this up is patchy 
(Cuenca 2018: 9). Other means of education included business schools in Oxford, where scriveners trained boys 
in legal administration, accounting, letter writing, etc. (Bevan 2013: 201). Before becoming a town clerk, many 
scriveners often worked as a so-called underclerk (Cuenca 2018: 8), i.e. clerks working for other (town) clerks, 
where they could become acquainted with local customs and writing practices.
44
their archives” (Bishop 2016: 119–120). As a result, town clerks, as well as their teams 
of scribes and scriveners, can increasingly be considered literary agents and political 
actors in early modern England (Bishop 2016: 113–114).5
Like many merchants and various town officials, town clerks did not work in a 
social vacuum, but in a network spanning multiple cities and towns wherein they com-
piled “their town’s histories, customs and traditions” (Cuenca 2018: 22). Many pro-
vincial towns interacted with each other on a civic level, and town clerks would have 
been very active members of such networks. Related to this, Rees Jones (2014: 222) 
points out that, despite the general tendency towards centralisation in late medieval 
England, there were still widely disparate regional cultures in the language, form, and 
use of civic writing. Rees Jones (2014: 223) also observes “regional groupings in the 
cultures of English towns” as many provincial towns interacted with each other on a 
civic level. Recent research by Hartrich (2017) on charters and inter-urban networks, 
as well as by Cuenca (2018) on town clerks and the authorship of custumals, confirms 
this. These studies show that “borough customary law was not always a reflection of ur-
ban practice rooted in specific places, but could be a copy of traditions from older, more 
prominent towns” (Cuenca 2018: 15), and that “urban elites were frequently in contact 
with wealthy merchants and civic officers from other towns” (Hartrich 2017: 224). 
Considering that the urban elite was often in charge of a town’s government (Dobson 
2000: 280), as well as responsible for its administration, English towns became part of 
inter-urban networks. London was of course often a prominent part of such networks, 
and clerks working in other towns frequently based new registers and compilations on 
writings from London, e.g. in King’s Lynn, Bristol, and Exeter (Cuenca 2018: 15–16).
As with the language of individuals and speech communities in a social network, 
the language used by people in different urban centres would have undergone change 
in an inter-urban network, i.e. through contact with individuals from other towns. In 
brief, social network theory tells us that linguistic innovations often flow from one 
community to another by means of accommodation and through what are usually called 
‘weak’ network ties or links (Milroy/Milroy 1985, Nevalainen 2000, Bergs 2005). Such 
ties exemplify the relation that people commonly have with their acquaintances – who 
tend to come and go during one’s lifetime – rather than with their friends and fami-
lies – who are exemplified by strong ties and tend to form more close-knit networks. 
Individuals who belong to or move between multiple social networks (and tend to act 
as weak ties between them) can act as bridges and linguistic innovators, “channelling 
new or required information between different networks” (Alcolado Carnicero 2017: 
43). Generally speaking, individuals who maintain stronger social ties in more close-
knit networks tend to resist language change, whereas those who maintain weaker ties 
can induce it (Nevalainen 2000: 255). Despite having been developed for investigating 
5 Bishop’s 2016 study on the London Goldsmith’s company in the sixteenth century is an excellent example of 
the influence and power of clerks within companies, and she emphasises that, rather than the straightforward 
compilation of factual events, “record-keeping was always a creative process, involving the construction of 
narrative and storytelling” (Bishop 2016: 127). For other studies on the increasingly important role of town 
clerks in the late medieval and early modern periods, see Clanchy (2013 [1979]), Bevan (2013), Rees Jones 
(2014) and Cuenca (2018).
45
language change in speech communities, social network theory has successfully been 
applied to historical – i.e. written – data (e.g. Bergs 2005). However, in the case of 
town clerks and scribes basing their writings on documents from other towns, it be-
comes more difficult to point to an individual and/or weak tie to help explain attested 
change. Instead, the lasting quality and portability of physical texts become the means 
by which language (including potential innovations) spreads from town to town, rather 
than through an individual’s speech, which, due to its ephemeral nature, requires their 
physical presence in a particular place and time. There are still linguistic agents in-
volved of course, namely the writers of the texts that are being copied, the copying 
scribes, and (indirectly) those who transport the texts from town to town. Additionally, 
town clerks and recorders (see Section 3) often travelled around after their education, 
and ended up working for various institutions across the country. They therefore would 
have acted as weak ties between different communities of scribes as their linguistic and 
writing practices travelled with them. 
All the above-described elements would have, over time, encouraged uniformity 
across the different written varieties, and by sharing and adopting different writing 
practices, the language used in administrative texts and civic records can be expected 
to become more identical over time, potentially fostering supralocalisation processes 
(cf. Oudesluijs et al. 2022). Unfortunately, at present there is not enough data available 
to confirm such developments, especially for the early modern period, though projects 
such as the Emerging Standards project6 are working towards filling this gap. By creat-
ing more (specialised) corpora for individual towns it is likely that such patterns will 
become increasingly apparent, and the development of urban literacy, in particular the 
establishment of inter-urban networks, may prove to be of great importance to bet-
ter understand the underlying supralocalisation and standardisation processes of Early 
Modern English.
3 URBAN ADMINISTRATION AND SCRIBAL NETWORKS IN SIXTEENTH 
CENTURY COVENTRY
The effects of religious reform in sixteenth-century England – including the Dissolution 
of the Monasteries and the subsequent suppression of guilds and chantries – on cities and 
towns was substantial, especially regarding administration. As pointed out by Stephens 
(1969: 264) when discussing Coventry’s local government in the sixteenth century:
in 1574 the mayor’s council was strengthened […] by the city’s acquisition of 
much of the property of the dissolved religious houses and all the property of 
the dissolved guilds and chantries. The later development of local government 
in Coventry was largely determined by these events which brought wider powers 
and greater revenue. The council had to handle many more lands, tenements, and 
rents than before, and had to administer the rectories of St. Michael and Holy 
Trinity together with a number of charities. The activities of the mayor and his 
council thus became numerous.
6 See https://wp.unil.ch/emst/home/project-description/ for more information.
46
As a result of such developments, which took place across England (Tittler 1998: 
59–73), the need for trained lay literates in the form of scriveners, scribes, town clerks, 
company clerks etc. increased, evidenced by the fact that we observe an increase in 
text production relating to record keeping at both local and national level in sixteenth-
century England (Bishop 2016: 114).
In Coventry, the effects of the Reformation on its local government and administra-
tion were significant. When Edward VI continued England’s religious reform in 1547 
with an act of Parliament ordering the suppression of guilds and chantries (Stephens 
1969: 217), many more buildings and lands were confiscated, sold, and demolished. 
Coventry’s city council managed to acquire many of these lands and properties (Ste-
phens 1969: 264, 275, 398, 403), which were subsequently let and as a result provided 
a yearly income. The council also sold some of the lands, allowing for investments in 
other properties, including the old guildhall, which became the new Council House. 
Such investments in lands helped the city through difficult times (McGrory 2003: 125), 
but also added to the local government’s workload as the council had to handle many 
more lands, tenements, and rents than before.
As in many other English urban centres, in Coventry the local town clerk and a 
team of scriveners and scribes worked on the increased administration during this time. 
Coventry’s town clerks working between 1400 and 1700 are for the most part known 
by name (Harris 1913: xvi; see also Oudesluijs 2019: 183), and we know of their tasks 
and responsibilities, but less is known about their private lives.7 From 1481 onward, 
the office also included that of steward of the city (Templeman 1944: 15), which carried 
the “responsibility for the recording of apprentices’ names, renewal of feoffments, and 
care of records” (Stephens 1969: 266). Coventry’s town clerks were thus expected to 
take on more duties as time went on, including those of clerk of the peace (Templeman 
1944: 15), for which increased legal knowledge was required. As mentioned in Section 
2, town clerks often had a background as scrivener, but some of Coventry’s town clerks 
had (additional) experience in other positions before becoming the town clerk, such as 
John Boteler and Thomas and Arthur Gregory, who had been trained as lawyers before 
their appointments in 1481, c.1550, and 1573 respectively (Templeman 1944: 15, Cart-
er 2011: 12). As town clerk, Boteler had his routine duties such as keeping the mayor’s 
register and acting as clerk of the peace, but he also did much to increase the relevance 
of this office, e.g. by representing the town in Briscowe’s case in London (1481) and 
in Ludlow (1482), probably due to his legal training. In 1496, Boteler was nominated 
to be one of the corporation’s proctors in the dispute with Laurence Saunders that took 
place in London, and in 1498 he was there again on the matter of the prior’s murage 
(Templeman 1944: 16).
The town clerk frequently worked together with the recorder, a position that most 
likely evolved out of the office of town clerk (Bevan 2013: 61). The recorder acted as 
7 Thomas Gregory and his son Arthur are notable exceptions here. Together they held various offices within 
Coventry’s local government from the 1530s until c.1580, including that of town clerk, and over time they 
accumulated both business and personal letters in their own hands. As a result, much documentation on their 
lives and business survives to this day. See for more information Carter (2011: Ch. 1).
47
the town’s lawyer and foremost legal advisor (Musson 2001: 66–67), whereas the town 
clerk would handle the “secretarial aspect of scrivening” (Bevan 2013: 61 fn. 146), and 
the two would often work together (Cuenca 2018: 10). Recorders often held other of-
ficial offices elsewhere in the country, most notably in parliament (Whitley 1894; see 
also a list of Coventry’s coroners between 1423 and 1541 in Templeman 1944: 170–
171), and whereas little is known about most of Coventry’s town clerks, more is known 
about its recorders, chiefly as a result of their presence in Parliament. For example, 
we know that many of Coventry’s recorders came from outside the city, like Anthony 
Fitzherbert (c. 1470–1538), a judge and legal writer from Norbury, Derbyshire (Baker 
2015), William Shelley (c. 1478–1549), who came from a family of London mercers 
and aldermen (Whittick 2013), and Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), who had been a re-
corder in Norwich, London, Orford (Suffolk) and Harwich before taking up the office in 
Coventry (Thrush/Ferris 2010). Most of these recorders held the office in Coventry for 
a period between 7 and 15 years (Templeman 1944: 170), with the exception of Henry 
Boteler, who held the office for 35 years, and a few others who held it only for one, two 
or three years. This was most likely because they often also occupied official positions 
elsewhere at the same time, and the recorder of Coventry was required to live in the city 
(Templeman 1944: 12, 14).
Even though we can mostly speculate about the professional networks of Coventry’s 
town clerks, we know that they often worked with high-ranking officials within local 
governments, some of whom, such as the town recorder, often travelled and worked in 
other parts of the country. As mentioned above, town clerks did so as well on occasion 
(e.g. John Boteler). We also know that many of Coventry’s town clerks and recorders 
had ties to the local guilds, most notably the Trinity Guild, of which the recorders John 
Weston, Henry Boteler, and Edmund Knyghteley, as well as the town clerk John Bo-
teler were members (Templeman 1944: 15, 170). Coventry’s town clerks were further-
more almost always housed within the Trinity guild (Templeman 1944: 15), and since 
most, if not all, city officials were members of a local guild, it seems likely that the 
anonymous scribes and scriveners working for the town clerk were as well. As such, it 
appears that a professional network of town clerks, recorders, and their team of scribes 
and scriveners had strong ties within Coventry’s local community on the one hand, and 
weak ties with officials from other towns and cities on the other. As discussed in Sec-
tion 2, the latter can be expected to lead to the adoption of different writing practices 
– including linguistic innovations – from elsewhere, and in this process the language of 
civic records can be expected to become more invariable over time, potentially foster-
ing supralocalisation (and in turn standardisation) processes.
4 THE LANGUAGE OF ADMINISTRATION
Different realisations of language are often considered to lie on a cline with a highly 
formal register at one end and a highly informal register at the other (see e.g. Koch/Oes-
terreicher 2012, Elspaß 2015). Private correspondence between friends, for example, 
can then be placed more towards the informal end of this spectrum, with urban admin-
istration more towards the formal end, much like laws. These last two text types are, 
48
of course, different in some ways – most notably regarding their audience8 – but they 
also share many characteristics, chiefly the fact that both were legally binding.9 With 
an increasing amount of legally binding records required for municipal administration 
(cf. Cuenca 2018: 3–4), laws and administration could potentially be called upon by 
any official with regard to various matters. Moreover, regardless of the exact composi-
tion of the contemporary audience for certain laws and administration in early modern 
England, both text types were also written for a future audience as they were registering 
official procedures that should also be followed by individuals at a later point in time or 
otherwise expanded on by future officials.
Scholars frequently point out the conservative nature and compliance with tradition 
of both the people working in law and the language they use (Mattila 2006: 90, Gotti 
2012: 52–53). In this regard, the objectives of legal language have changed very little 
over time, and can be described as to “transmit legal messages with absolute clarity 
and without ambiguity” (Mattila 2006: 66; see also Gotti 2012: 52, Hiltunen 2012: 39, 
Kopaczyk 2013: 21) in order to provide legal certainty with the intention “to have an 
effect on the understanding, rather than the feelings, of the reader or listener” (Mattila 
2006: 74). As pointed out by Kopaczyk (2013: 21), the way in which laws and regula-
tions were and are communicated should not only be clear, unambiguous, authorita-
tive, and transparent, but also solemn and formal. As such, accuracy and precision are 
of fundamental importance in legal texts, and this is often achieved by using certain 
linguistic features as well as being consistent regarding their structural organisation. 
This in turn often results in the use of fixed formulae on the sentence and phrase level, 
and legal texts frequently contain “ready-made sentences and petrified phrases” (Mat-
tila 2006: 81–82), instead of more recently coined words or phrases (Gotti 2012: 52).10
One of the most well-known linguistic characteristics of legal texts concerns vocab-
ulary, chiefly the use of legal jargon and specific terminology (Mattila 2006: 4–5, Mat-
tila 2012). Legal language also tends to contain more compound nouns, archaic words, 
and foreign (i.e. Latin and French) phrases (Mattila 2012: 31–34). On the syntactic 
level we often find longer sentences and more textual complexity (Gotti 2012: 53), 
which is chiefly acquired through the organisation of clauses in patterns of parataxis 
(coordination) and hypotaxis (subordination) (Hiltunen 2012: 41). Legal texts also tend 
8 (Legislative) administration is generally meant for those who work in a particular professional environment that 
at some point in the future might warrant some degree of examination as to what exactly happened in the past, 
whereas laws are generally intended for a much larger audience. For example, many of the regulations written 
down in the Coventry Leet Books (Harris 1907–1913) applied to everyone living within the city walls, whereas 
an indentured lease only concerned the parties involved.
9 See Bhatia (1987) and Moessner (2018) for more on models and classifications of legal documents and their 
language.
10 Aiming for clarity and avoidance of ambiguity often leads to repetition and verbosity in legal texts, particularly 
when the reference relations of the texts are made as explicit as possible. However, it is not only due to the desired 
clarity and unambiguousness of legal texts that repetition and verbosity are some of its key characteristics. 
Another reason for this lies in its oral origins (Kopaczyk 2013: 15–20), as oral cultures valued formulaic 
language use because repetition was key in not losing (i.e. forgetting) important information. To a large extent, 
“writing meant fixing what used to be rather fluid” (Kopaczyk 2013: 18), and over time an increasing amount 
of legal and administrative texts were put into writing.
49
to avoid “grammatical ties across sentence boundaries” (Hiltunen 2012: 41) and as 
such include more anaphoric references preceding a noun such as ‘the said [NAME]’ 
rather than using a personal pronoun, as well as conjunctions (Rissanen 1999a: 192, 
Mattila 2006: 66, Gotti 2012: 54–56). Furthermore, legal language places less empha-
sis on verbs than ordinary language (Mattila 2006: 91), which is partly explained by 
the notion that nouns can give more objective impressions than verbs, notably in cases 
involving findings of fact. As a result, legal language often contains many fixed noun 
phrases as well as compound nouns.11 Considering verbs, legal language frequently 
contains passive constructions, which “brings the object of the action into the fore-
ground” (Mattila 2006: 73; cf. Hiltunen 2012: 41).
During the early modern period, according to Rissanen (2000: 120), who investi-
gated the Statutes of the Realm,12 neutrality and generality remain key characteristics 
of legal language, as are avoiding subjective and personal attitudes, and strong regional 
marking. He furthermore states that to “ensure correct and unambiguous transmission 
of information, it must be conservative in its choice of structure and lexis and hos-
tile to stylistic variation. It aims at maximum disambiguation in its text and discourse 
structure” (Rissanen 2000: 120). This makes the language of legal texts repetitive and 
complex on the one hand, but also “innovative in some aspects of syntactic and lexical 
usage” on the other (Rissanen 2000: 120–121). Concerning spelling, Rissanen (2000: 
121) notes that “it seems that in spelling the standardising model offered by documents 
[i.e. administrative texts] and statutes had a strong influence on other genres of writ-
ing”, indicating that legal records played a part in the ongoing supralocalisation of 
certain spelling forms. Concerning syntax and lexis, Rissanen (2000: 121) argues that 
legal texts seemed to have adopted forms from other genres and subsequently decon-
textualised and deregionalised them, thus marking them as part of a more supralocal 
written variety. Rissanen (1999b) also hints at this role of legal language in relation 
to standardisation processes by means of its invariance, lack of affect, generality, and 
prestige (Table 1).
Table 1. Genres and features important in the development of the standard (Rissanen 1999a: 191).
Invariance Lack of affect Generality Prestige
Documentary and statutory texts + + + +
Scientific texts - + + +
Religious texts - - +/- +
Fictitious texts - - - +/-
11 Also alluded to by Mattila’s (2006: 96) use of the term ‘noun sickness’.
12 Rissanen used the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (Rissanen et al. 1991) for his research, which includes 
sections from the Statutes of the Realm (Dawsons of Pall Mall 1963) from the following periods: 1488–1491, 
1509–1512, 1542–1543, 1598–1604 and 1695–1699.
50
The overview provided in Table 1 does not represent a fixed or exact framework, 
but instead Rissanen’s (1999b: 191) “attempt to illustrate the occurrences of features 
characterising standardisation in various genres of writing”. Related to this, Gotti 
(2012: 60) emphasises that “[t]extual standardization occurs in all disciplinary fields 
but it is stronger in legal genres, particularly when a text is not free-standing but is an 
adaptation of an earlier text, incorporating all data reflecting the new conditions”. Giv-
en these remarks, as well as the role of legislative texts with regard to standardisation 
processes in the Late Middle English period (Schaefer 2012: 530), Rissanen’s overview 
provides an interesting framework for similar texts from the early modern period. As 
his research was based on small case studies that only considered selected entries from 
the Statutes of the Realm (Rissanen 1999a, 2000), it will be interesting to investigate 
legal records from other urban centres in that period and compare the attested language 
variation and change to the developing supralocal variety.
5 DATA
For this paper I investigate a collection of 35 indentures (28.517 words) written in Cov-
entry between 1499 and 1600.13 An indenture (or chirograph as they were known in the 
medieval period, see Clanchy 2013 [1979]: 66, 89–90) concerns an agreement between 
multiple parties that has been indented, i.e. cut in a wavy or indented way, to prevent 
potential forgery and falsification (Streutker 2016: 6).14 Different kinds of agreements 
could be indented, including various types of leases,15 feoffments, bargains, sales, or 
mortgages. Given this variety, it can be argued that ‘indentures’ cannot be considered 
to be a specific text type. However, besides the fact that they all concern administrative 
and/or legislative agreements of some sort between multiple parties, the collection from 
Coventry comprises only leases that all concern land and property transactions (both 
regarding ownership as well as letting) between multiple parties. Moreover, they were 
created and kept by Coventry’s local urban administrative bodies, and as such lend 
themselves well for the purposes of this paper.
As regards the chronological distribution of the texts, they are unfortunately not 
evenly distributed across the sixteenth century, with the majority of the data being from 
13 This collection is part of the Emerging Standards Project Corpus, Coventry sub-corpus, accessed August 
2022. Compiled by Anita Auer, Moragh Gordon, Femke van Hilten, Mike Olsen and Tino Oudesluijs. Utrecht 
University, NL and Université de Lausanne, CH. https://wp.unil.ch/emst.
14 The text was written twice (or sometimes three or four times) on the same piece of parchment and subsequently 
cut in the middle so that each party had a copy of the text (with each copy being authenticated with the seal of 
the other party). Initially the cuts were straight and divided up the word chirographum, which would be used 
to verify whether the copies were indeed once written on the same sheet by aligning the cut letters, but as the 
practice grew more common across late medieval England chirographs became more intricate and an increasing 
amount of security measures were taken (e.g. personal signatures and more detailed personal seals). As a result, 
the inclusion of the word chirographum on the indented cut was no longer customary by the start of the sixteenth 
century (Streutker 2016: 8).
15 The catalogue descriptions are not helpful in this instance. They mention 31 leases, three demises and one grant, 
but these all denote the same type of document; a lease, sometimes referred to as a demise, concerns a grant of 
property. This is further confirmed in the language used in the documents, which all include the verbs demise 
and grant in their opening statements.
51
the period 1540–1580 and the 1590s (see Figure 1). This uneven distribution is primar-
ily due to 1) a general increase in the production of indented texts in Coventry from 
the middle of the sixteenth century onward (see also Section 3), and 2) the fact that the 
indented texts from the first half of the sixteenth century were mostly written in Latin.
Figure 1. Distribution of the collection of indentures by number of words over time.
It is almost impossible to be completely sure of the authorship of the documents 
as the signatures do not match the main body of text in terms of handwriting, indicat-
ing that a trained scribe most likely wrote the documents and subsequently had them 
signed by the parties in question. There is a high chance that the town clerk and/or 
recorder were involved given their legal expertise (see Section 3), although the texts 
seem to indicate that more than a few different hands worked on them over the sixteenth 
century. As pointed out earlier, Coventry’s town clerk and recorder were very likely 
working with a larger team of scribes and scriveners to distribute the workload, similar 
to what seems to have been the case for other administrative and legislative texts that 
they created and kept in this period (Oudesluijs 2019: 172–173). As for the possibility 
of potentially dealing with later copies rather than originals (see Oudesluijs 2018 for 
an example of this from Coventry’s urban administration), there is no reason to as-
sume that the indentures were written in years different from those mentioned in their 
opening statements. They were furthermore written on separate pieces of parchment 
or paper, which is in contrast to books wherein multiple texts (originally written on 
separate pieces of parchment or paper) were accumulated over time by copying them 
(Oudesluijs 2018). Multiple versions of the same indented text can thus only be found 
on multiple pieces of parchment or paper when they were written on the same page 
before it was cut in order to provide each party with an official copy of the text, which 
is the case with only four indentures in this collection that contain different versions of 
two different texts.
52
6 LINGUISTIC CASE STUDY: PERIPHRASTIC DO
The main reasons for scrutinising periphrastic DO in this paper are that its general 
development in the sixteenth century has both been well-documented and is largely 
agreed upon in the literature (Denison 1985, Nevalainen 1991, Rissanen 2000, Söder-
lund 2017), and that it is a well-known and widely studied feature that has previously 
been discussed in relation to the standardisation of English (Stein 1990, Stein/Tieken-
Boon van Ostade 1994). It therefore allows me to situate my findings in the appropri-
ate linguistic context relatively easily and focus on the external factors under scrutiny 
in this paper, i.e. text type and scribal networks. Furthermore, after first occurring in 
the late medieval period, periphrastic DO spread at an increased rate in the sixteenth 
century whilst still showing much variation in use, making it more susceptible to the 
above-mentioned external factors. In contrast, the seventeenth century marks the begin-
ning of the regulation process that would result in the present-day use of periphrastic 
DO in Standard English (Nurmi 1999: 15). Below I first provide a brief overview of the 
development of periphrastic DO in Early Modern English (Section 6.1), followed by 
my case study (Section 6.2).
6.1 Periphrastic DO in Early Modern English16
In present-day Standard English, DO-support (or ’dummy do’) can be used as the 
‘(empty) operator’ in various verbal constructions that lack one (Denison 1993: 255, 
Nurmi 1999: 15). It is used in finite clauses showing negation (she did not go vs. she 
went not), inversion (does he run? vs. runs he?), post-verbal ellipsis, also known as 
code (she wrote a book and he did too vs. she wrote a book and he wrote a book too), 
and emphasis (he did see it vs. he saw it).17 Three of these constructions are periphrastic 
since DO takes a full lexical verb: negation, inversion, and emphasis. Between 1500 
and 1900, however, periphrastic DO was used in four constructions: affirmative de-
claratives and imperatives (nowadays mostly connected to emphasis), questions (inver-
sion), and negative sentences (Rissanen 1999b: 240–248).
The use of periphrastic DO only began to spread during the fifteenth century in af-
firmative declaratives, with the most significant increase between 1460 and 1500 in ser-
mons and mystery plays (Rissanen 1991: 332, based on the Helsinki Corpus of English 
Texts). The spread of periphrastic DO continued at a higher rate in the sixteenth cen-
tury, including a noticeable increase in negative declaratives and inversion/questions 
(Nurmi 1999: 23). Rissanen (1985: 165, 177) notes that periphrastic DO seems to have 
had two main uses in this period: a structural function in texts closer to written lan-
guage (e.g. legal texts) and a more emotional one in texts closer to speech (e.g. private 
correspondence). The former could be used to create a sense of textual cohesion, and 
the latter to emphasise particular actions or strengthen arguments (Nurmi 1999: 16). 
The relatively high frequency of periphrastic DO in affirmative declaratives in trials 
16 This brief overview serves to highlight the general development of periphrastic DO in Early Modern English, 
and as such is by no means exhaustive. For more extensive overviews I refer to Denison (1985, 1993), Nurmi 
(1999) and Rissanen (1999b).
17 These constructions together are often called the NICE qualities (Negation, Inversion, Code, and Emphasis).
53
between 1500 and 1570 seems to further confirm this difference in function (Table 2). 
Other text types in which periphrastic DO was increasingly used during the sixteenth 
century include diaries, educational writing, and scientific works.
Table 2. Frequency of periphrastic DO per 1,000 words in affirmative declaratives between 1500 
and 1700, based on the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (modified from DO per 10,000 words 
from Rissanen 1991: 325).
Text type 1500–1570 1570–1640 1640–1710 
Trials 8.8 2.3 2.8
Science 3.4 5.3 1.1
Education 3.1 4.6 1.1
Diaries 2.8 4.2 4.2
Sermons 2.5 4.3 1.0
Comedies 2.3 0.8 0.2
Handbooks 1.1 3.0 0.4
Letters, off. 1.1 4.8 2.6
Fiction 1.1 1.0 0.9
Laws 0.8 1.3 1.2
Biographies 0.6 4.6 1.1
The Bible 0.6 1.2 (no sample)
Letters, priv. 0.4 3.3 1.3
Travelogues 0.4 3.7 0.3
History 0.1 1.5 0.3
Philosophy (no sample) 3.2 (no sample)
The seventeenth century marks the beginning of the regulation process that would 
result in the present-day use of periphrastic DO in Standard English, i.e. in questions, 
negated sentences, and affirmative declaratives for emphasis (Rissanen 1999b: 243). Its 
use in unemphasised affirmative declaratives decreased and was eventually considered 
non-standard (cf. Klemola 1996). The moment when periphrastic DO in this context 
started to decrease differs per text type (similar to its initial spread and subsequent 
use, see also Table 2), and dates ranging between 1570 and 1650 have been argued 
for by different scholars working with different datasets (e.g. Ellegård 1953, Rissanen 
1991, Nurmi 1999, Söderlund 2017). When considering the Helsinki Corpus of English 
Texts, a general decrease in use can be observed in most text types between the periods 
1570–1640 and 1640–1710 (Table 2), although its use in trials, diaries, fiction, and laws 
appears to have been relatively stable during this period.
54
6.2 Periphrastic DO in urban administration from sixteenth-century Coventry
In administrative sources from sixteenth-century Coventry,18 periphrastic DO was 
mostly used in affirmative declaratives, with only four instances in negated sentences 
(Oudesluijs et al. 2022).19 Compared to most text types (see Table 2), its frequency 
in affirmatives was relatively low in the early modern sections of the first Leet Book 
(1500–1554) – only 0.19 per 1000 words – and comparable to law texts in the collection 
of indentures up until 1572: 0.81 per 1000 words (Oudesluijs et al. 2022). From 1573–4 
onward, however, a significant increase can be observed in the indentures (see Figure 
2), and the second Leet Book, which starts in 1588, seems to follow suit (Oudesluijs 
et al. 2022). To help explain the sudden increase in the use of periphrastic DO in the 
indenture collection, I identified five sub-periods (see Figure 2), based on the chang-
ing practices related to verbal inflections and the inclusion of new fixed phrases in the 
documents (Oudesluijs 2019: 269).
Figure 2. Frequency of periphrastic DO per 1,000 words in affirmative declaratives in the col-
lection of indentures (1499–1600).
From this, it becomes clear that one text, dated 1573–4 and written in a single hand, 
is responsible for the sudden increase in use of periphrastic DO in affirmatives.20 After 
this document, periphrastic DO was used significantly more in the indentures created 
18 These include sections from the first and second Leet Books (Harris 1907–1913) and the aforementioned 
indenture collection (Oudesluijs 2019: Ch. 6).
19 As such, as well as for comparability purposes with previous research (see Table 2), I will not consider 
periphrastic DO in negations for this paper.
20 DR429/93a and its counterpart DR429/93b. See their entries on the National Archives for more details: https://
discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. The text is dated 1573-4 because the year is described as ‘the Syxtenethe 
yeare of the raingne of oure Soueraingne Ladye Elizabethe’, which is technically 1573 but could well mean 
1574 as she became Queen relatively late in the year, i.e. 17 November 1558. As such, 1559 could have been 
considered her ‘first year’ as Queen.
55
by city officials, as the frequency went up from 2.75 per 1000 words in 1573–4 to 4.16 
per 1000 words in the period 1577–1600.
Taking into account the changes in urban administration that happened in Coventry 
during the second half of the sixteenth century, particularly in the 1570s (see Section 3), 
it seems that one of three things happened: 1) new writing practices were introduced by 
officials such as the town clerk or recorder, or by the local scribes/scriveners working 
for them, 2) there was a change in city officials and/or their team of scribes/scriveners, 
potentially including new people from outside Coventry’s government to deal with the 
growing administration during this time, which introduced new writing practices, or 
3) a combination of both. Regarding a change in city officials, we know that the office 
of recorder saw no change at this point,21 but around the time of the 1573–4 document 
Coventry’s town clerk Thomas Gregory died (1573), and his son Arthur Gregory took 
over. Both this change and the city’s acquisition of much of the property previously 
held by various religious houses, guilds, and chantries in 1574, seems to have had an 
effect on the language of the indentures. Unfortunately, no direct connection between 
these developments and the observed change in language can be made as the authorship 
of the texts cannot be verified at this point, but given the context in which the sudden 
increase in use of periphrastic DO occurred, it seems likely that either a weak link in, or 
change to Coventry’s scribal network resulted in the increased use of periphrastic DO. 
In a comparable case study for the late medieval period, Alcolado Carnicero (2017) 
links instances of language shift from French to English in publications of the Mer-
cers’ Company to changes in personnel, with members with weak ties acting as bridges 
between mercantile communities. Similarly, when Arthur Gregory took over from his 
father in 1573, it may have influenced the language of Coventry’s indentures, including 
the use of periphrastic DO, be it as a result of his personal writing practices or a change 
in the scribal community working for him.
Regarding why periphrastic DO in particular underwent a change during this time, 
this can tentatively be linked to an increase in formulaic language use and fixed phrases 
(cf. Nurmi 1999: 92–93), many of which include coordinating verb constructions such as 
DO covenant and grant, DO demise, grant, set and let farm, and DO appear.22 As men-
tioned above in relation to the five sub-periods, there were various changes with regard 
to verbal inflections and the inclusion of new fixed phrases in the indentures over the 
course of the sixteenth century, and it seems likely that, over time, the scribes involved 
changed their preferences in how to account for all possible (legal) scenarios that often 
needed to be addressed in legislative texts, be it because a new local town clerk instruct-
ed them to, or as a result of new scribes introducing new practices. Denison (1985: 57) 
also notes that “a number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of periphrastic 
DO are also followed by coordinated verbs”, and points out that, even though periphras-
tic constructions comprise more words, there would be fewer inflections.
21 John Throckmorton I held the office of recorder from 1553 until his death in 1580.
22 These examples account for 30%, 20%, and 13% respectively of all occurrences of periphrastic DO in affirmative 
verbal phrases in the indenture collection (Oudesluijs 2019: 302–303).
56
Looking at the bigger picture, the increase in use of periphrastic DO in sixteenth-
century administration from Coventry aligns with the general trend in most other text 
types (e.g. official letters, laws, history; see Table 2), indicating that this text type con-
tributed to the supralocalisation of this feature in Early Modern English. However, it is 
often argued that the decline of periphrastic DO in unemphasised affirmatives started 
in the period 1570–1640 (Section 6.1), but in Coventry’s administration the increase 
in use seen in the collection of indentures continues well into the seventeenth century 
in the second Leet Book (1588–1700) (Oudesluijs et al. 2022), which does not occur 
in any other text type, including laws (see Table 2). In this case the more conservative 
nature of urban administration seems to have slowed down the general trend of a more 
supralocal/standardised variety of English in which periphrastic DO in affirmatives be-
came increasingly restricted to emphasis.
7 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Coming back to the aims of this paper (Section 1), the above case study indicates that, 
much like for the late medieval period (cf. Stenroos and Thengs 2020), early modern 
urban administration can be a valuable source for linguistic investigation. Moreover, 
due to the nature of scribal communities and inter-urban networks (Section 2), the prin-
ciples of social network theory can be applied to better understand how certain features 
spread in this text type, which in turn informs us how a more supralocal/standardised 
form of English developed in the early modern period. In the above case study, the 
increase in use of periphrastic DO in affirmative declaratives is in line with its devel-
opment in many other text types across the country. Both this result and the nature of 
legislative texts in this period as described by Rissanen (1999a: 191, 2000:121; see 
also Section 4) strengthen the latter’s claim that legal texts seemed to have adopted 
forms from other genres and subsequently decontextualised and deregionalised them – 
thus marking them as part of a more supralocal written variety. However, as shown in 
Oudesluijs et al. (2022), the increased use of periphrastic DO in unemphasised declara-
tives in Coventry’s administration continued well into the seventeenth century, going 
against the general trend in other text types. This is perhaps due to the more conserva-
tive nature of administration (Section 4), and scribes may have only adopted supralo-
cal features that contributed to ensuring the “correct and unambiguous transmission 
of information” whilst aiming at “maximum disambiguation in its text and discourse 
structure” in this text type (Rissanen 2000: 120). The more restricted use of periphras-
tic DO in affirmatives for emphasis may have compromised the neutrality, clarity, and 
generality of legal language. As such, urban administration may have both contributed 
to and hampered the developing supralocal/standardised variety of English in the early 
modern period, though more research into different variables and from different urban 
centres is needed. A first look into the use of periphrastic DO in the local administration 
from early modern Bristol reveals a different development altogether, as it initially de-
clined in the sixteenth century before slightly increasing again in the seventeenth cen-
tury (Oudesluijs et al. 2022: 18; cf. Gordon 2017). Regarding different variables, initial 
research into the third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural) 
57
reveals that different urban centres – in this case Bristol, Coventry, and York – each re-
veal a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal -(V)s singular and plural 
zero form between 1500 and 1700 (Gordon et al. 2020), indicating that the develop-
ment of a supralocal variety of English was anything but straightforward.
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Abstract
SCRIBAL NETWORKS AND THE LANGUAGE OF URBAN ADMINISTRA-
TION: VARIATION AND CHANGE IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY COVENTRY
This paper considers Early Modern English urban administration in light of the de-
veloping supralocal/standard variety. Previously, research scrutinising the language 
of administration has focused on Middle English rather than on Early Modern Eng-
lish, where studies have thus far mostly focused on private correspondence and printed 
texts. To shed more light on the language of this under-investigated text type for this 
period, in this paper I investigate a collection of indentured texts written in Coventry 
between 1499 and 1600 and explore its language. More specifically, I analyse the use 
of periphrastic DO, which I subsequently contextualise both in Coventry’s local civic 
history – focusing on the people involved in creating the documents, e.g. the town clerk 
and his team of scribes – as well as in the general development of periphrastic DO with 
regard to the emerging supralocal/standard variety of English. The analysis reveals that 
periphrastic DO was used to a different extent compared to other text types from the 
period, most notably that it did not show a decline in the second half of the sixteenth 
century after what can be described as a ‘slow start’ in the first half. This change in 
use can be tentatively attributed to a variety of factors in Coventry’s civic history, 
particularly in the 1570s, but more data from other urban centres is needed to better 
contextualise this.
Keywords: Early Modern English, urban administration, Standard English, Coventry, 
legal language
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Povzetek
ZGODNJA MODERNA ANGLEŠČINA KOT JEZIK MESTNE UPRAVE:  
RAZNOLIKOST IN SPREMINJANJE V COVENTRYJU V 16. STOLETJU
Prispevek obravnava zgodnjo modern angleščino v mestni upravi v luči razvoja nadre-
gionalne/standardne različice. Doslej so se raziskave o upravnem jeziku osredotočale 
predvsem na srednjo, ne na zgodnjo modern angeščino in se zato v veliko večji meri 
nanašale na zasebno korespondenco in na tiskana besedila. Pričujoči članek, ki pred-
stavlja poskus osvetlitve te v obravnavanem obdobju slabše raziskane besedilne zvrsti, 
se ukvarja z jezikovnimi značilnostmi zbirke kirografov, napisanih v Coventryju med 
1499 in 1600. Analizirana je raba perifrastičnega glagola DO, ki je nato obravnavana 
tako z ozirom na krajevno zgodovino mesta Coventry – upoštevaje, kdo so bili tisti, 
ki so dokumente pripravili, se pravi mestni uradnik in njegovi pisarji – kot z ozirom 
na splošni razvoj perifrastičnega DO glede na nastajajočo nadregionalno/standardno 
različico angleščine. Analiza je pokazala, da se je perifrastični DO v obravnavani 
besedilni zvrsti uporabljal v drugačnem obsegu kot v drugih besedilnih zvrsteh iz 
tega obdobja, predvsem pa, da njegova raba po “počasnem začetku” v drugi polovici 
16. stoletja ni upadla. To spremembo bi morda lahko pripisali raznim dejavnikom v 
zgodovini mesta Coventry, predvsem v 70. letih 16. stoletja, čeprav za boljšo razlago 
potrebujemo več podatkov.
Ključne besede: zgodnja moderna angleščina, mestna uprava, standardna angleščina, 
Coventry, pravni jezik