Description
Meet the Levellers who carried a copy of An Agreement of the Free People of England tucked into their hat-bands, demanding (amongst other things) that neither Latin nor French—only English—should be the language of the law. In the version which was circulated in May 1649, when the Leveller leaders were imprisoned in the Tower of London, the Levellers proposed that their Representatives in future parliaments should neither ‘continue the Laws or proceedings therein in any other Language than English, nor to hinder any person or persons from pleading their own Causes, or of making use of whom they please to plead for them’.
Item 14 of Certain Articles for the Good of the Commonwealth went even further and demanded that the entire body of laws be translated into the Englishman’s native tongue, that ‘all laws of the land (locked up from common capacities in the Latin or French tongues) may be translated into the English tongue. And that all records, orders, processes, writs, and other proceedings whatsoever, may be all entered and issued forth in the English tongue, and that in the most plain and common character used in the land, …that so the meanest English commoner that can but read written hand in his own tongue, may fully understand his own proceedings in the law.’
William the Conqueror had ordered some laws to be rewritten in French, but Latin had been and remained the usual language in which judicial discourse was conducted, long after the bible was translated. In the world of the early 17th century, capital punishment was practised on a terrifying scale. More than seventy individuals could be hanged in Exeter in a single year for crimes such as petty theft. The injustice of the effective silencing of defendants by trying them in a language they could neither read nor speak is painfully obvious.
The Levellers’ cause failed, but many of their individual demands did take root. Between 1651 and 1660, court proceedings were all recorded in English. It was only with the return of monarchy, with Charles II in 1660, that Latin and French became the languages of the law in England once again.
