The relationship between literacy and the law has historically had profound implications for access to justice. Today, Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights gives everyone charged with a criminal offence the right “to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him,” and “to have the free assistance of an interpreter if he cannot understand or speak the language used in court.”¹ Unbeknownst to many, this modern law actually addresses historic issues of access to justice and legal literacy, or an understanding of the law, that are as applicable to contemporary European society as they once were to people in medieval England. That is because accessing justice in many parts of medieval Europe was just as much a written and oral process then as it is today. Consequently, literacy was an absolutely essential skill for the legal intermediaries, such as scriveners, who interpreted the law and languages for their clients.

This term “literacy” is a complex one as it covers a range of experiences and interactions in both textual and oral cultures.² As representative of a wide scope of understanding, certain literacies are outside of one’s literate experience, regardless of one’s ability to read or write.³ This means that even those who are capable of reading and writing can still be, rather paradoxically, “illiterate” in other contexts. Certain eighteenth-century scholars made influential, if exaggerated, statements on literacy rates in the medieval period. Most notably, William Robertson portrayed medieval society as being composed of “rude, illiterate people.”⁴ Of his early medieval subjects, Robertson wrote: “Persons of the highest rank, and in the most eminent stations, could not read or write. Many of the clergy did not understand the breviary which they were obliged daily to recite; some of them could scarcely read it.”⁵ His scathing criticism of literacy in the sense of reading, writing, and comprehension extended from the church and religious texts to include the law and literature, stating that “the arts of reading and writing were such uncommon attainments, that to be master of either, entitled a person to the appellation of a clerk or a learned man.”⁶

Literacy is a necessary precursor to accessing justice and there is a duality within the very nature of literacy as it applies to the law. Today, literacy is considered the basic ability to read and write, although the term can also be applied to all manner of “literacies,” including “emotional literacy,” “cultural literacy,” “computer literacy,” and more. In the medieval world, “literacy” was a term used more straightforwardly to indicate the ability to read and write. More importantly, literacy was limited to the ability to read and write in the Latin language—vernacular literacy was considered an inferior sort of ability. A linguistic-based literacy is of course different from “legal literacy,” which addresses issues related not only to basic literacy skills, but also extends its scope to consider a person’s ability to derive meaning, understanding, and context from a legal document.⁷ Robertson’s interpretation of the legal literacy of medieval European society acknowledged that progress was eventually made through the professionalisation of the law and the development of a knowledgeable “order of men, to whom their fellow-citizens had daily recourse for advice.”⁸ It was this intermediary that was capable of translating the meaning of the law into a more accessible language—both literally and figuratively—in order to facilitate the otherwise illiterate litigant’s understanding.

The question is, how did these legal intermediaries gain the skills that were required to become literate in the law? Moreover, who comprised this order of men who performed the role of a legal intermediary? The role of the “legal intermediary” is now fulfilled by professional legal actors that are specially trained and highly skilled, such as solicitors and barristers. To a degree, the same requirements were necessary in the medieval period; however, there was another type of legally literate person who acted as a legal intermediary but who was not considered a lawyer.⁹ This person was known as the scrivener, and he existed on the periphery of what was typically recognised as the legal “profession”: it is his legal education that will be the focus of this chapter, and he will help us to understand what it meant to be legally literate in late medieval England.¹⁰

It is fair to say that in general, historians are imperfectly informed about how the people who worked at the lower reaches of the English legal profession, such as scriveners, learned their trade in the premodern period. This becomes especially apparent when we reflect on the relative lack of current scholarship on the provision of legal education for those who practised law away from the City of London and its courts. Using a variety of collections of legal texts and manuscripts, including wills, treatises, and guild records, I will discuss and analyse some of the various avenues for acquiring legal literacy for laymen, like scriveners, who worked outside of London doing all manner of legal work. In order to shed light on one of the darkest corners of research in this area, I will cover what were essentially the three main avenues for acquiring legal literacy in this period: (1) attending semi-formal academic settings such as schools; (2) undertaking apprenticeships and other practical, on-the-job-style training; and (3) pursuing self-tuition, or self-directed private study.

Since England’s early legal profession was largely unregulated, its practitioners exhibited variable levels of skill in both languages and the law as a result.¹¹ Scriveners formed an amorphous group of legal practitioners that has been largely overlooked in the history of the legal profession; they are difficult to define, simply because they were all so different, and, apart from the research referred to above, they have not attracted much scholarly attention. Although “scrivener” as a job title may be unfamiliar to most, every researcher who has ever looked at a legal instrument like a will , a deed or a charter, a recognisance of debt , a court roll, a manor roll, a receiver’s account, or a petition has likely held the work of a scrivener in their hands. These manuscripts represent the all-too-often invisible pre...