Charter diplomatics and norms of landholding and lordship between the Humber and Forth, c.1066-c.1250
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Address and Delivery in Anglo-Norman Royal Charters
The writ is now widely recognized as an innovative diplomatic instrument, created in Anglo-Saxon England, developed by Anglo-Norman rulers, and by the end of the twelfth-century influential elsewhere. Its essence is that it was delivered to a particular person or body responsible for the appropriate aspect of the administration of the realm or the doing of royal justice. In diplomatic terms, this is expressed in the address clause which is generally the vital clue to the way a document would be used and therefore to what it was meant to accomplish. There was an inherent linkage between the nature of the transaction, the person or body to whom it would be delivered, and the address clause. Who actually delivered the document would vary according to the nature of the business too, but the documents themselves do not spell out this step in the process: that must be inferred from understanding the relationship between address and function.
Corpus Linguistics in Legal Discourse
There are many different ways in which modern Corpus Linguistics can be used to enrich and broaden our understanding of legal discourse. Based on the central principle of co-occurrence and co-selection in language construction, this paper reviews current applications of Corpus Linguistics in the area of legal discourse focusing on issues ranging from phraseology, variation in legal discourse, legal translation, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse, legal discourse in forensic contexts to evaluative language in judicial settings. It revisits the notion of ‘corpus’ and it highlights the relevance of various types of legal corpora and computer tools in legal linguistic research.