y where the vernacular was not Latin-based. The contrasts that come immediately to mind, France and Italy, concern communities where the vernaculars were for the most part Romance tongues. What was French in the eleventh century but Latin badly spoken? In other non-Latin European communities, Celtic and Scandinavian, the vernaculars were used or came to be used in much the same way. What is remarkable is the early nature of the written record that has survived. In the tenth and eleventh centuries it was clearly customary and commonplace that an English king and his advisers should spend much time framing rules and procedures, guidelines for coping with offences and penalties, and that these should be committed to writing and permanence in English, intelligible to all.
Statements of law, framing of general legal rules, are all well and good, but carrying out the mandates is quite another matter, the province of the administrator. There is plentiful evidence of active administrative life in late Anglo- Saxon England on the part of earldormen, thegns, reeves and tax-collectors in the name of the king or of great lords, ecclesiastical and lay (see Glossary at end of article). One feature deserves special mention, the evolution of the sealed writ, the master-product of the Old English secretariat. The writ, as it survives from the end of the period, consists of a government order in the vernacular, sent from the royal court to the local shire courts, stamped and authenticated by the king's great seal. It was often short and to the point, articulating royal government and making the royal will known to the men who counted in the locality, the earls, bishops and thegns assembled in the shire court; and it was in English. A dispute over the discharge of obligations on the Manor of Chew that belonged to the Bishopric of Wells was resolved by Edward the Confessor by a curt order to Earl Harold and 'all my thegns in Somerset' that the King was not going to permit any wrong to be done to the bishop. The range of royal activity was extensive. Edward the Confessor issued the following writ in favour of the great church of St. Peter, the cathedral church, at York, referring to lands and rights in Devonshire.
King Edward sends friendly greetings to bishop Leofric and earl Harold and Wada and all my thegns in Devonshire. And I inform you that I have granted to Ealdred the deacon of archbishop Ealdred, the minster at Axminster, and all things lawfully pertaining thereto, with sake and soke, as fully and completely as ever any priest before him had it, as a pious benefaction for St. Peter's minster at York.
Writs in the vernacular help us to understand England as a community accustomed to some sophistication in government from royal courts through shires and hundreds; and this view is supported by ancillary evidence, private fragments of abstracts of law relating to the conditions and ranks of men, the payment of wergelds, the pledges given at marriage ceremonies and guild regulations. Practical administrative rules were framed as a matter of course in the native tongue. Again it might be asked what is so remarkable about this: there is not much point in issuing orders in a language which cannot be understood. What is remarkable is the framing of such regulations, general and particular, on such a wide scale; and also of course the survival of such records.
We come then to the third field, the use of the vernacular in written ecclesiastical record other than law. There is also the practical side of the business, the teaching, the preaching, the framing of guides to doctrine and godly instruction. In relation to language the great Benedictine revival of the tenth century, the work of Saints Dunstan, Ethelwold and Oswald, supported by King Edgar, had unusual results. The continuous history of English monasticism might indeed be held to start with Glastonbury under Dunstan; but the cultural results were distinctive and odd. It was during the second half of the tenth century that Old English, so to speak, came of age in the linguistic sense as