Introduction
The language of legal record in late medieval urban cultures was multilingual at its core. Latin was still the main written language but the local languages were being incorporated into legal discourse all over Europe.
Some authors interpret that linguistic situation as diglossia, with Latin acting as the more prestigious �high’ language and the local language having a lower status.1 Some others talk about a competition between languages, as if they were in a struggle to dominate the written record.2 I would like to argue that the interactions and hierarchies of linguistic ingredients are more nuanced and stem from the choices made by the multilingual scribe who wrote in a specific local context. Such simultaneous employment of multiple languages should be analysed in a systematic way in order to understand its impact on the overall tenor of the documents. This chapter offers a structural framework designed to pinpoint switches between languages on all levels of linguistic complexity in a communicative event, and illustrates this complexity with examples from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents. To showcase the interplay of Latin and the local language in a broader European perspective, the discussion draws on two geographically distant legal cultures of medieval Europe: Scotland and Poland.3 Illustrative examples come from two roughly contemporary sources: the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (1380–1500) (henceforth LAOS),4 whose underlying database comprises diplomatic transcripts of legal and administrative texts from medieval Scotland, and the Electronic Repository of Greater Poland Oaths (1386–1448) (henceforth eROThA), which contains diplomatic transcripts of Old Polish oaths – the earliest extant record of that language outside the religious context – embedded in Latin land court books.5 I start by introducing the notion of code as applied to human communication and ask how this term relates to situations involving more than one language, with emphasis on historical contexts. After summarising the current research on historical multilingualism, the discussion moves on to consider why legal register can be treated as a single code composed of more than one linguistic resource. The core of this argument rests on the roles of the writers and audiences involved, their cognitive abilities and engagement with the text. Against this background, I present a detailed illustration of the interplay between Latin and the vernaculars – Scots6 and Polish7 – and (sub)code-switching on various levels of linguistic structure: from macrogenres to the level of spelling units. I also point out the significance of the presence – or absence – of visual cues for the switch. The multilingual code of medieval administrative record is then showcased in a single mid-fifteenth century text from the protocol book of the notary James Young, where the roles and forms of Latin and Scots are observed and related to the framework introduced earlier. The chapter closes with overall reflections on the cultural implications of multilingualism in the medieval northern European legal context.
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