The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380–1350 by Joanna Kopaczyk (review)

Historians have tended to ignore formulaic phrases in medieval documents, focusing on the rest of the text. Kopaczyk’s book provides a timely reminder that such formulae can shed light on the historical period in which they were used. Bringing together linguistics, law, and history, she suggests new avenues of research into medieval society. Although the book’s focus is the vernacular legal language of medieval Scottish towns, the methodology is intended as a model for similar studies elsewhere that make use of electronic corpus materials. It will be of interest not only to linguists but also to historians and legal scholars.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I discusses Kopaczyk’s methodology, the extraction of the most frequently appearing lexical bundles (repetitive groups of words in a body of material) from three electronic corpora of medieval Scots. These bundles cover the period from 1380, when vernacular legal texts began to appear, to 1565, just after the Protestant Reformation when anglicizing tendencies began to influence the Scots language. Similar investigations using English corpus collections are discussed, although no exact parallel collection of medieval English legal texts has yet been undertaken. Kopaczyk’s sources are the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots, and the Wigtown Burgh Court Book, which together provide 600,000 words from charters, burgh court records, and notaries’ registers. This is the largest corpus collection analyzed in this way to date. She sets out to identify the standardizing patterns, to examine the structure and function of these chunks of text, and to see how the language of the law responded to external conditions.

Part II provides the historical context by discussing the origins of the Scottish burghs, the conditions of town life, and the role of local courts in urban society. The political history relies heavily on an older general text, resulting in some dated interpretations, but in other respects this part includes a viable discussion of Scottish medieval towns. Particularly interesting is her exploration of a linguistic “community of practice” among notaries and scribes, a sub-group in the wider community of the burgh. Part III presents Kopaczyk’s analysis of the lexical bundles with separate chapters on binomials (for example, liberte and fredom), multinomials (maner, forme, and effect), short bundles of three to five words, and long bundles of six to eight words.

Kopaczyk’s work illustrates that legal language reflects the conditions under which it evolved. Scots legal language contains elements of both indigenous law and external influences, including English common law, Scandinavian law, and continental Roman law and canon law. Binomials and multinomials sometimes include both Latin-derived terms and their vernacular equivalents (for example, proportis and beris). The written text reflects the traditional oral and performative nature of law, as illustrated by the formula for land transactions—“by the delivery of earth and stone”—by frequent references to witnessing, and by alliterative binomials. The very use of formulae illustrates the importance of words as mnemonic devices to ensure the preservation and underscore the authority of the exact words that enact the law.

Tracing patterns of usage over time, Kopaczyk suggests reasons for change. For example, references to the bailies, council, and community became increasingly common during the fifteenth century, implying a crystallization of burgh structures of authority. She also proposes other reasons for changes, including legal reforms by James I in the early fifteenth century. She examines geographical differences, finding that the mid-east region, centering on Edinburgh, tended to be the first to standardize much legal language. Intriguingly, her evidence suggests that the southwest may have had its own legal traditions and usage, although this conclusion may be shaped by the nature of the corpus and requires further investigation.

In raising questions about factors promoting change in legal usage, the book suggests new areas for historians to investigate. Most importantly, Kopaczyk shows that language is...