On legal sources in the dictionaries of John Joscelyn and sir Simonds D'Ewes

The paper will deal with legal sources in two main dictionaries - still unpublished - dated the second half of 16th century and the first half of the 17th century. They are the Dictionarium Saxonico-Latinum by John Joscelyn (BL. Mss Cotton Titus A.XV and A.XVI) and the Dictionarium Citeriorum Saeculorum by Sir Simonds D'Ewes ( BL. Mss Harley 8 and Harley). Joscelyn's Dictionarium represents a paramount contribution to the development of Anglo-Saxon lexicography and his work later inspires antiquarians like Sir Simonds D'Ewes and William Dugdale. Sir Simonds D'Ewes's starting point is, in fact, Joscelyn's dictionary. Thanks to the collaboration of other major antiquarians like Junius and Somner, D'Ewes anticipates methods and principles of modern lexicography. Though deriving from Joscelyn, D'Ewes includes a remarkable amount of new lexical material, thus completing and enriching his predecessor's work: there are in fact some new sources, which do not occur in Joscelyn. As is well known, the antiquarians' interest in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts was mainly due to religious and political reasons. The struggle against Papacy was caused by the need to assert the independence of political power from the religious, which brought about the birth of a new nationalistic feeling that found its utmost expression in the sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty. The in-depth study of the laws enacted by Anglo-Saxon kings before the Norman Conquest becomes fundamental because those laws witness the grandeur and the antiquity of the Anglo-Saxon civilisation and its institutions. The analysis will focus on some alphabetical letters which are particularly interesting as far as legal sources are concerned. The entries of both lexicons will be checked and compared with the forms occurring in the sources whose details are indicated after each of the entries themselves: the aim is to reconstruct the heritage of manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon laws and other legal documents these antiquarians had at their disposal.