Friđ and fredom: royal forests and the English jurisprudence of Laȝmon's Brut and its readers

The century and a half between the Norman Conquest and Magna Carta ushered in a period of enormous change in the legal culture of England, change that by most accounts went largely unrepresented in English vernacular writing. While Anglo-Saxon England possessed a well-developed legal vernacular, after the Conquest its loss of social and institutional authority to Latin and French seems to have placed restraints on new writing in English, legal or otherwise. When English reemerged as a common literary medium in the thirteenth century, its relationship with the vernacular legal language of the past was wholly changed.