Epistolary Formulae in Late Middle English Commercial Correspondence: the Cely Letters

The extant collection of the Cely letters consists of 251 items written by members of the Cely family and other correspondents between the years 1472 and 1488. They concern mainly commercial matters connected with their positions as wool merchants at the Staples of London and Calais. Linguistically speaking, this collection of letters may be considered of great interest because of the mixed character of both their external apparatus, with a mixture of formulaic and free discourse, and their semantic content, mixing commercial affairs and domestic matters. It is with the first of these two issues that this paper is concerned. The editor of the Cely letters, Alison Hanham (1985:14) comments that “epistolary formulae persisted well into the next century, but correspondents of the Celys’ class gradually became more skilful in the use of the written language, experimented more freely, expressed themselves more easily, and drew more readily on richer resources of vocabulary.” It is my hypothesis that by isolating the formulaic language from the free discourse, that new and easier syntax and lexis can be identified. Current work on commercial language includes the compilation of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which is being carried out at present at the University of Helsinki, and which includes the Cely letters among many other collections. The researchers on the project have already published some material based on the work in progress, particularly in the area of historical socio-linguistics. The team agrees that the language represented in the letters has generally been assumed to represent informal or everyday M.E. but they consider my idea of excluding formulaic expressions a valid one because such expressions tend to cause problems in quantitative studies bearing in mind that they do not necessarily represent that kind of informal language. Thus, recognition of formulae within these letters seems to be a valid exercise.