Conclusions
Legal discourse in northern European urban contexts was at least bilingual, so by extension, multilingual. Latin and the vernacular were present in the record to different degrees and their functional relationship changed over time: from more clearly separated functions characteristic of each language – Latin for the formulaic record and the local language for local reference – to overlapping and ultimately competing competencies.
At the point when both could carry the same functions and meanings, their relationship can no longer be seen as a hierarchical diglossic situation. If anything, the prestigious and authoritative legal code is multilingual in its own right; it is expected and interpretable by the community of practice by which it is constructed, and by the text community which it, in turn, creates. As Armstrong and Mackillop point out in the context of Scottish towns, medieval urban centres functioned as �hubs for the mixing of legal (and political) cultures and vocabularies’,66 and were engaged in and defined by multilingual repertoires and practices of their administrators.The structural framework presented in this chapter helps to unpack the intricate interplay of Latin and the vernacular within the complex multilingual code in a systematic manner, and allows for the reflection on the material characteristics of historical multilingual communication. The analytical tools work in various contexts; here we have presented similar code-switching strategies in legal and administrative records composed in medieval Scotland and Poland. The proportions of linguistic ingredients in the code may fluctuate over time due to external cultural pressures which differ from place to place. Indeed, the Polish oaths gradually disappear from the land court books,67 while the Scots vernacular takes over from Latin to a great degree,68 on the wave of administrative vernacularisation happening across Europe during the early modern period. The language of medieval legal and administrative texts, however, is still very much multilingual, looking back to the European Latinitas and the common cultural, religious and educational Latin benchmark, but at the same time bearing a testimony to the growing functional capacity of local forms of communication. The scribes and notaries across northern European urban cultures navigated both worlds and both codes, and constructed the record in a robust multilingual manner.