‘Diversity in setting of words makes diversity in understanding’: Bureaucratic and Political Language in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love

The language of Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love is profoundly influenced by his professional linguistic environments, notably his work for John Northampton’s political party and as scribe for the Goldsmiths’ guild. Usk uses technical terms and stylistic features which are typically relegated to political and bureaucratic Anglo-Norman French texts. Gathering these examples and contextualizing them within the Goldsmiths’ Minute Books and Usk’s Appeal Against John Northampton, this essay shows that Usk’s creative use of language is an important strategy for his aims in writing the Testament, and that it is a provocative tool for the construction of identity and authority in London at the end of the fourteenth century. That the ‘vernacular’ language of the Testament includes the Anglo-French terminology of Usk’s professional background should prompt us to reconsider the significance of technical bureaucratic and political registers for the communication of experience.