A Nottinghamshire Dispute: English Documents of 1438–42

The Middleton Collection at Nottingham University includes a considerable number of fifteenth-century records in English which offer prime evidence of dated and localized documentary English. This article focuses on four such documents, plus one in TNA, concerning a dispute between John Broxtowe and David Preston over the inheritance of Broxtowe Hall in Nottinghamshire. These documents demonstrate the wide variety of English used in Nottingham between 1438 and 1442 and the epistolary skill with which such accounts were written.