I

It is a rare thing for a single document to shed light on a large number of historical themes, but such a claim can be made with some justification for the request presented by Thomas Paunfield in the Parliament of November 1414. The special characteristics of this complaint have not passed unnoticed by modern scholars: the petition was one of a selection chosen by John and Jane Fisher and Malcolm Richardson in their Anthology of Chancery English; and more recently, Matthew Giancarlo has offered a penetrating analysis of its linguistic forms in his monograph on Parliament and literature. The document merits such attention because of the way its unconventionality throws into sharp relief the linguistic and cultural conventions that normally determined the way in which parliamentary petitions were drafted. It is, in fact, a remarkable exception that proves the rule. But it also holds a fascination in its own right as nothing less than a tour de force in the deployment of rhetoric as a means of inculcating sympathy in the minds of its audience. The central strand of enquiry running through this discussion is the use of language. There are two aspects to consider. First, there is the use of language for rhetorical purposes: as a means of persuasion, or as a way for petitioners to communicate their circumstances to the crown in the most favourable way possible. I am particularly interested, in this regard, in the choice of vocabulary and the extent to which the language of petitioning conformed to a set of linguistic norms that limited the scope for expression on the part of the petitioner. Second, there is the question of the choice of language itself, and the fact that Paunfield's complaint was written in English at a time in the early fifteenth century when French remained the language of choice of petitioners. Most of the scholarship that has explored the relationship between the French and English languages in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries has tended to approach the subject in terms of explaining how and why English came to supersede French in official and non-official documentation. In this discussion, my focus will instead lie with French, to explain why it continued to be used for writing petitions long after English had become universally accepted as the principal language of oral communication.