1. Speculum Vitae, cited in Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’ in Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (Pennsylvania, 1999) p. 336.
2. ‘Speak with the people, think with the wise’.
3. The Advancement of Learning, ed. G.W. Kitchin (London, 1915) p. 134.
4. William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England (1897; repr. New York, 1967) vol. 1, pp. 379–80; M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford, 1993) p. 214, notes ‘the remark of Richard Fitz Neal that English and Normans were so intermarried by his time (c.1179) that they were indistinguishable, has often and rightly been cited … It was not primarily the Norman Conquest but the advance of French as an international literary and cultural language, particularly in the thirteenth century, which caused its increased use as a written language for English records.’
5. Stubbs, Constitutional History, pp. 479, 587, 590; Jeremy Catto, ‘Written English: The Making of the Language, 1370–1400’, Past & Present (October 2003) p. 33, writes that ‘the vernacular, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was a spoken language … no trace of the use of written English as a first step in learning letters has survived in extant early Middle English books.’